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Notes -
I will answer thusly.
My default moral intuitions aren't that different from modal American ones 50 or so years ago. Russia is a multiethnic society, clearly defined by one ethnos and culture (mine, to a first approximation), which does not possess the instinct or inclination for clannish diasporic behavior. We are more ethnocentric than modern Westerners but not by far. We assimilate easily in Western societies, find them an upgrade to our own, and generally agree with the way of the West, whereas the ways of The Rest are seen as unfair and backward, if demonstrably adaptive on the personal and sometimes collective level. Ethnocentrism specifically has been investigated in a toy model I like, by one Artem Kaznatcheev and friends, in Canada in 2013, and the conclusion was that it “…eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates”. Intellectually, then, it appears necessary to develop a system that can defend that superior humanitarian way, and the unpalatable conclusion is that in practice it amounts to something not unlike ethnocentrism – aggressive policing of defectors, attention to proxy metrics of defection, operational presumption of non-assimilation, and rejection of comforting lies about universality and natural attractiveness of preferred values. Western experiment with mass immigration and “race-blind meritocracy” is clearly a cheap hack motivated by Western cognitive biases, myopic financial considerations and such, not any concern for long-term preservation of the Way. Similar thoughts are common for sympathetic peoples on the periphery of Western civilization, which is why we see Slavs, assimilated Jews, Moldovans and so on disproportionately represented among the European right.
On a more philosophical level, I don't know. Ethnocentrism is a crude but effective means to preserve the intrinsic direction of a people, it increases the activation energy for changing course, and lets the direction be explored further. Moral intuitions aside, I'm not convinced that the Western direction is truly superior; it would be premature to say so.
I'm pretty open to the idea that diversity is good — real diversity, not this consumerist Western appreciation of cuisines, not the lukewarm respect for ethnic varieties of ideas the West already accepts. Why is diversity good? I consider great men of history to be scientists, and civilizations to be ongoing longitudinal natural experiments – about the limits of human nature, society, what kinds of minds should be incentivized to develop, what notions of goodness are viable and lead to more adaptive behavior, better instrumental outcomes and, in the limit, to greater collective and individual flourishing. Some experiments achieve negative results, invalidating the hypothesis for observers, but it's always a pity if this happens for contingent reasons like a natural disaster, or an opportunistic alliance, or luck of the draw in relative timing of access to some preexisting technology. I am distraught at being unable to know how failed civilizations could have developed to their “mature” stage, given a couple more millennia of literacy and a handful of extra IQ points, or passing a good reform, or contacting a powerful idea earlier; where would they have met their ceiling. When possible, one should run experiments in controlled conditions, after all.
The West is a beautiful experiment, plausibly the most successful that has ever been proposed. Its core thesis, stripped of the ever-changing scaffolding, is something like “human nature inherently has the spark of God's love and wisdom, therefore individual freedom is good and barriers to its realization are at worst prejudices, at best training wheels and must be systematically removed”. It's been working very well. But this near-genocidal desire to universalize the way smells less and less like sincere proselytism, and more like anxiety, fear of the hypothesis getting falsified. The truth is, the West has no clue as to what made or makes it work, beyond currently-commoditized pieces like capitalism (but whence capitalism? If “because freedom”, why does it port to societies that don't adopt the rest of the package?) Americans sometimes boast of “nation-building” Germany and Japan, developing “institutions”, and that reveals the hollowness and vulgarity of the doctrine. Germany and Japan, seriously? Japan got destroyed in the first place precisely because it got competitive, while remaining philosophically largely alien; Germany was actively advancing a divergent branch of the Western thesis. And today, both these nations are deeply troubled. Nation-building in less performant societies has a dismal track record. The West doesn't really know what to teach others so that it sticks. Really, what made the West into what it is, what was the generative function behind those generically adaptive innovations? Christendom (adopted Middle Eastern teaching, effectively dead now)? “HBD” in the sense of high IQ and conscientiousness – OK but why did it happen, just deep time migration patterns, cold winters, founder effects? What's the lesson here, pray to RNG? Galton-style Social Darwinism, Gregory Clark's Anglo class eugenics (grotesquely replaced with education-mediated assortative mating, also largely dead, and their practical implications made taboo in the resultant society)? “High trust” and non-kin cooperation by default (as covered here, a giant exploit for people who practice kin cooperation, and thus a mere bootstrap phase)? Science? Everyone above 95-ish median IQ can do science. The discovery was invaluable, but can “the West” come up with anything of that caliber ever again? Rather, can you even do what you used to do? We seem to be near the end of the session. Do you even know if you want to live? When you have full automation, will you put forward an argument for not just exercising your freedom to pass away replacing yourselves with machines, like you're currently doing with immigrants? Of what nature will that argument be?
China is another large old civilization. They've been running their own experiments. Their most enduring research program is Confucian. At the risk of butchering it, Confucianism says something like “humans aren't very good and are prone to self-interested behavior. Individual humans are not even human, they can only be elevated from monkeys via social context, and even then they default to barbarianism. But if compelled to cultivate “virtue”, starting on the mundane level of filial piety, hierarchical propriety and standardized ritual, escalating to mental discipline and scholarship, if rewarded with reproductive opportunity for utmost compliance, if the peace is maintained for many generations – they can build hierarchical societies of unbounded scale and splendor; and eventually, more of them become Superior Persons capable of and entitled to correct independent moral reasoning, and those will ennoble everyone else”.
It is debatable how seriously that has been pursued, but I'd say at least as seriously as the Christian/Western program. Both have undergone course corrections that arguably reflect growing out of their scaffolding and purify the original strategy. The West going from theism to deism to non-superstitious interest in the Universe, generalizing the validity of “love” and “freedom” beyond traditional norms. The East purging “thieves of virtue” along with ossified ritual and adopting a more common-sensical epistemology. To an extent this can be decried as trivialization and loss of function on both sides. There's been substantial convergence, but the divergent bits are what's at stake. Right now, I think the Eastern project is showing more promise, and the West is no longer in a position to lecture them on how to steer it. They're more ethnocentric? Less individualistic? They're authoritarian? Their society feels wrong? OK, I hear you. But they're solving social trust, they're solving – in their own way, less charismatic and more transactional – international relations, they're even solving creative expression, while having solved long-term large-scale coordination to a greater extent. And crucially, this isn't their first rodeo, they've had massive collapses and comebacks, they're the only major player that has a sophisticated applied discourse about civilizational recovery. Isn't it saying something that they've fallen behind, failed catastrophically, but have recovered, denied you the option of converting them, and are again pursuing their own program? Isn't it exciting that another solution can exist? Aren't you curious of where it will peak? Of course, they're doing well enough that another questions, for example “how much of the light cone will we be able to claim at this rate” are becoming salient for savvy observers. So it is necessary that they be treated as competitors, not just an interesting alternative path.
Jews, likewise, are a unique research program. They have an insular doctrine of their exceptionalism and special nature of themselves as “the people of God”, their moral obligation to biologically and culturally perpetuate themselves, a very long story of surviving and adapting, institutions built for venerating and reproductively rewarding exceptional individuals who have superior insight into God's will, they're punching so far above their weight that it's almost comical… and all of that hinges on extreme, almost naive ethnocentrism. They've mixed with Western peoples, experienced some assimilation, and now we're watching them return to a more traditional (indeed, exxageratedly traditional) form, with large Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox subpopulations having a vast fertility advantage over secular ones which, so long as they exist, provide a bridge to Western decisionmaking, invent spins like “Judeo-Christian liberal democratic values” and “our common Islamic/Communist/Han enemy”, and generally add confusion (partially their own). It doesn't take a genius to recognize that this research program, while fascinating on its own, can derail the Western one, and on top of your own dysfunction and anxious miscalculations it can create very ugly outcomes. We've seen trial runs in the Middle East, and the worst part is that you can barely articulate that it was mostly about them, not your “strategic interest” or oil or some other bullshit. So they, too, ought to be treated as competitors. It's okay, they can take it.
That's pretty much all relevant live players; smaller or less coherent players, who have a latent opportunity to expand their niche, are also more ethnocentric. The West is uniquely non-ethnocentric and has unique moral narcissism about this fact, largely owed to successes of the last several centuries. I think the jury is out on whether this system is sustainable or has the highest ceiling, and you're not entitled to try and “enlighten” others, but you're clearly valuable enough to think of how you can preserve and improve your program in a world of ethnocentrists, and that's what you should be doing now.
Spawn a great man or something, I don't know.
There's a lot here, thank you for the reply. Your analysis of the various 'peoples' is interesting. I find a lot of it compelling but, as a true believer in my people's experiment - and how lost I'd be if I weren't, I suppose this is how a practicing and believing christian must feel when they are baffled by how atheists can function without god - I do find things to disagree on. I'll have to digest it before that pushback can come up in some future engagement.
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