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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31044 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I think it points to a fundamental difference in how I see social issues and how people on the left see them. When discussing moral issues with left leaning people, they often focus on the individual and the utilitarian perspective of the individual in the situation. For example, a horny person meets someone at a bar and can choose between sex or sexual frustration. Forcing people to choose monogamy is therefore evil since it is the less beneficial outcome.

I don't really care too much about the individual enjoyment of the night, but look at the effects of family structure in society. Getting a well functioning family structure is an incomprehensibly complex problem and a balancing act which goes beyond human comprehension. Going from one man, one women to casual sex is fun can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. People today have less sex than ever, fewer children than they desire, and we have incels and feminists who both have legitimate grievances in a dysfunctional dating market. Tampering with an entire ecosystem can have disastrous effects. If there is something we should have learned in the past centuries it is that experts who want to redesign a city, reorganize agriculture, introduce a new species that eats pests etc is that these projects tend to end in catastrophes. Disrupting a delicate balance is dangerous, and science doesn't really provide answers for it. Science experiments run for short period of time with a limited sample size and measure few variables. Traditions last millennia and have sample sizes in the billion. Following tradition is less likely to end up in a situation in which a brilliant scientist concludes DDT is safe, or in which an urban planner wrecks a city because the best science in traffic planning said urban freeways are beneficial.

Chesterton was correct in realizing that traditions were solutions to problems solved for so long that people have forgotten what the problem was.

When trying to stop people who want to engage in a behaviour that creates a small but immediate utility, it is hard to use arguments based on unintended long term societal consequences. It was easy to look like a clown when claiming that giving antibiotics to farm animals is dangerous when it clearly reduces sickness and increases yields, now we have an antibiotic resistance crisis.

Traditional religion are methods of handling large complex systems condensed in mythological format. Historically, this format has worked well. Today appealing to bible texts or the man in the sky doesn't work, yet the evidence for the unintended consequences of short term utilitarianism often appears long after the debate has ended.

Sure, we could look at the Great Leap Forward, cite Chesterton, and conclude that abandoning tradition is dangerous. But the Green Revolution also involved abandoning many traditional agricultural methods, and:

Studies show that the Green Revolution contributed to widespread reduction of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.

This is just one of many cases where radical change produced outcomes that are almost universally regarded as beneficial. We have also, for instance, reduced deaths from infectious disease by more than 90%. One doesn't have to look at too many graphs like this or this to understand why "change," as an idea, has so much political clout at the present moment.

There's always a tendency among activists to suggest things are terrible and improvement is only possible through whatever radical program they're pushing right now. In that context, it doesn't do to admit how much better things have gotten without that program.

But more broadly, had change reliably lead to ruin over the last few centuries, surviving cultures would have strong norms against permitting it. Instead we have exactly the opposite — cultures that permitted change reliably outcompeted those that didn't, so successful cultures are primed to accept it.

How does making humans more likely to survive and granting them more resources, reduce GHG emissions?

More importantly, the beneficaries of Green Revolution, "Global South" now use their superior numbers, enabled, by GR to demand more power, as that Modi speech that was the subject of a recent top level post shows. So this shows that only The Thrird World gained, any possible benefits for the First aren't demonstrated by your comment.

The comment to which I was responding seemed to be about how open human societies in general should be to allowing change. This first world vs. third world angle wasn't present. The societies that adopted these new agricultural techniques benefited substantially from doing so. It would have been a serious mistake for them to reason that abandoning their traditional methods could have unanticipated negative consequences and so they shouldn't do this.

Anyway, the first world obviously adopted the same techniques earlier, also abandoning traditional agricultural methods. To a large extent these advances are the reason there is a first world, a set of large, rich nations where most of the population is not engaged in agricultural production.

I don't think appeals to the individual vs appeals to society are necessarily a left-wing right-wing split.

E.g, The American Right largely opposed covid restrictions on individual grounds; "I shouldn't have to wear a mask", "I shouldn't have to get the vaccine, I'm young", etc. Whilst the American left doubled down on appealing to collective/net good. You were supposed to wear a mask for others because they don't protect you anyways, children were to take the vaccine for their grandparents, etc.

A better albeit more cynical model is... Everyone engages in motivated reasoning. What you want is predetermined, you will argue for the individual/collective or the deontology/utility or the long-term/short-term depending on which framing supports what you ultimately want.

I think the strength of the Blue/Red tribe framing is that it's implicit that policy positions are by and large aesthetic choices. To a young urban person who hangs out with other young urban persons who find hookups at bars, it's deeply "uncool" to suggest anything about hookups otherwise. Suggesting otherwise is what old people who live in the countryside do. And those countryside people are seriously so uncool, they don't even watch French movies or eat at Ethiopian restaurants.

It’s thrive/survive, not individualism/collectivism. You’ll note that when the left goes into survive mode- like with Covid- they go hard. Conversely when the right goes into thrive mode- like with Covid- they behave totally different from how they normally do.

I don't think appeals to the individual vs appeals to society are necessarily a left-wing right-wing split.

Johnathan Chait argues that the left-right split contains such contradictions because both sides are interested in being moral about different things.

It's values all the way down. Values shape what we want, what we need. They shape what we're willing to accept, and what we're willing to do about the unacceptable. The normie thesis everything runs on is that our system should be able to handle values conflict of any possible scale, because it assumes the possible differences aren't actually all that large, that everyone really wants the same things at the end of the day.

A better albeit more cynical model is... Everyone engages in motivated reasoning.

I think 'holistic' is a better term than cynical. People tend to pick arguments that support their public beliefs but also tend to extrapolate their current perspective to all scenarios. A cynical claim would be hypocrisy between public beliefs and personal habits.

The main problem is that people exist in a superstate in which we are both members of a community and individuals. Sometimes we think as individuals and sometimes we think as members of a community depending on the scenario.

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