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This thought experiment is perhaps "overfitting to a desired conclusion," (and is certainly an unsubtle allegory) but I want to see what other people think. Where else has this comparison been drawn?
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height, what might we expect?
Well one thing is it would be very rude to point out that people have different heights. To minimize cognitive dissonance, we would notice that rulers and yardsticks are banned, or at least tabooed. The taboo of course has justification:
I think they definitely would not go around saying "tall people are morally better." And if you tried to gently tell them "Well you certainly act like they are: tall people make more money and have better life outcomes! And you don't call it unjust!" they will probably get angry and call you evil for suggesting that people have different heights. They will say, the injustice is that life outcomes are inequal among the abled and disabled; between men and women; between supposed racial groups; and so many other axes.
They seem to be making a category error. How can a fact of height differences be evil? So you smuggle a ruler into the room. And you point out that Alice is in fact taller than Bob. "It is just an empirical fact" you say. Of course the reply will be something like, "You think your words are disentangled from context, but the social function of your sentence makes a moral claim." This response is inevitable, even if you bookend your remarks with the notice: "THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THIS CLAIM IS TO POINT OUT EMPIRICAL FACT"
At first you think, well its society's social context that is smuggling in the moral "oughts." The problem is certainly not with reality. But then you realize they are kind of right? The social function of this claim, indeed has moral content. In this society, height simply is the gauge of moral status. Stating otherwise doesn't make it go away, just like saying 2 + 2 = 5 doesn't make it true -- that's reality for you. It's at this point you realize your neck is getting a bit strained, because you're constantly looking up -- everyone else in this room is very, very tall. These arguments evolved in Tall Clubs around the nation and are handed down from the credentialed Tall to the less-credentialed mid-statures.
It makes you wonder why all of their interventions to the low-status involve treating symptoms and correlates, instead of identifying how to change the moral valuation, which is the root cause of it all.
So by now most of you are thoroughly short on patience, having realized immediately that "height = intelligence." But the real point: the academic and intellectual authorities that are loudest about the problem are the ones stringently enforcing the taboo holding it all up! Is that a coincidence?
This is why I am strongly against the laity getting too involved in anything intelligence adjacent, be it IQ head measuring or HBD "Race Realism":
At the end of the day, 50% of the population is going to be subaverage, and 70% of the population is going to get a failing grade, and 98% of the population will be locked out of the upper echelons of anything but lifting and dropping heavy rocks.
It doesn't matter if X race produces X% more of this or that measurement Goodhartism, because You Won't Be Him.
The purpose of society is to produce a stable living arrangement where as many people as possible feel that it is not worth it for them to for example, burn your shit down and then kill you, where you is every member of society. You can achieve this through force, but that is an unstable equilibrium. It is better to do this through consent.
If you implicitly tell people "Sorry, your worth was decided by a genetic factor that was inborn and can only be changed by small percentages", what they will hear is "I am placing myself above you, and everyone like you, and your children, forever. So, what you should do is fucking kill me".
It behoves us all to preserve the fiction: most stupid people end up away from the controls (except when a populist spasm makes one president), generally only rich people get to be truly stupid and then they lose all their shit and are replaced; it's only our historically permissive state that allows the idiots of the world their power at the moment, it will pass.
I'm not sure I buy that we need noble lies of this kind to hold society together.
Surely, we can acknowledge that different people have different natural endowments without setting up society for the masses to tear down the great and powerful? Why isn't the message, "You're almost certainly not going to be The Guy, but if you play by the rules, and work hard, you can enjoy a standard of living that is better than a medieval king, thanks to The Guy", not a winning message?
I just feel like we could cultivate the virtues of comparing down not up, of comparing to the past instead of the present, and cultivate civic virtue and trust within society.
Honestly, civic virtue is the thing I want in my fellow citizens far more than intelligence (though I like living in the country that brain drains all the other countries.) When I read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, the thing that struck me was just his agency and civic virtue. There's no lending library in your region? Why not create one? The streets in the neighborhood are dirty? Why not knock on your neighbors' doors and get everyone to pitch in for a street sweeper? That level of agency is almost unthinkable in today's society, partially because the low hanging fruit of civic virtue has all been picked, but partially because of a learned helplessness in much of the population.
I'm homeschooling my 2nd grade daughter this year due to her autism not being accommodated in the classroom in 1st grade.
Naturally a lot of curriculum is "conservative" and describes itself as "classical." One thing I notice is the emphasis on how little people in the past had. The capstone book of the year is "Little House in the Big Woods," which is basically a woman's memoirs of how she had to live as a little girl on a homestead where all the food had to be made, water brought in from far away every day, wild animals to contend with, etc. Before that was "The Courage of Sarah Noble," a story about a little girl who traveled with her father to cook for him while he build a house by hand on new land they bought from Indians.
Lots of the short stories cover living off the land, working hard, making gifts instead of buying them, being content with little.
If I compare myself with my parents I feel impoverished, but compared to my grandparents I'm ahead and compared to my great-grandparents I might as well be royalty.
There is a lot wrong with modernity but I don't have to haul water on a daily basis or make my own soap and that means I'm better off than so many people, both in the past and now.
I have the sense that conservatives are more aware of this than others (both liberals and moderates) though I don't have hard data.
Was Little House in the Big Woods the one where the neighbor woman tells a story about being almost eaten by a panther? At the time I read it I just thought it was an interesting story, but looking back at it it's a super-visible way to illustrate that these people lived like Indian peasants do today.
The whole series is very interesting because it covers a family going from being subsistence farmers where meat is a special, a few times a year, treat to being townsfolk who can do things like buy clothes(instead of handmaking them out of raw fiber) and ride trains, and they're... incredibly grateful in later books.
Yeah, Laura's aunt Eliza tells a story at Christmas:
Eliza was walking to the spring to get a pail of water. Her dog was with her and started growling and pulling on her skirt with his teeth when she got near the path. He tore her skirt and snarled. Frightened, Eliza ran back home and closed the door to her house, leaving the dog outside. All day she and her three young children were stuck inside, unable to leave the house. Every time they tried to open the door, the dog snarled at them. They had no water the whole day and were unable to cook or drink anything. In the afternoon the dog calmed down and acted like nothing happened. They walked to the spring together and in the ground Eliza saw large panther tracks.
The books are great because Laura realized that her life exemplified a lot of people's experiences, but also that the past was vanishing and very few in the future would understand what it was like. She's not the best writer, but her books have stayed in print for a good reason.
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