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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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To be clear, my argument is not that small villages are inherently more harmonious; certainly I’m well aware of the staggering levels of interpersonal violence that occurred (and still occurs today) in hunter-gatherer societies. My argument is that if you’re a small, homogeneous village, tradcon Christianity is the optimal ideology to maximize your success, relative to other religions/worldviews.

Well, all those hunter-gatherer societies remained inegalitarian for tens of thousands of years, despite the potential selective gains from 'tradcon christianity'. And Christianity originated and spread initially among the Roman Empire, which was hardly a small, isolated village. Of course, evolution/optimization can just 'miss' good designs just by bad luck or a lack of a way to get from here to there smoothly, so that doesn't prove anything. But it is suggestive!

I also don't think the 'something like christianity is good in villages' is descriptively true - abilities aren't evenly distributed (consider what the effects of severe disease, like parasites, which disables as much as it kills, would do to ability distributions). And 'judging people on descent' is generally valuable, both in the form of "you want a wife with healthy parents and brothers" - but also because the children of people who commit transgressions may have genes that contribute to the same - maybe you don't want to marry your daughter off to the town rapist's son, lest you encourage more rape.

I don't think 'blood feuds' really distinguish Christianity/egalitarianism's applicability to small-scale societies from its applicability to large-scale societies - the decline in killings is, if you value it, as good in a big city as it is in a remote village. And its lack in modern societies, or large cities, is arguably related to our continued adherence to Christian morals/values even without the religion of Christianity, so if the comparison is 'pagan village, blood feuds' vs 'christian village, without blood feuds', vs 'post-christian city, without blood feuds', the Christianity / small village interaction isn't important. Although (hypothetical tangent) blood feuds maybe were adaptive, and maybe if your village is at X scale, dividing into groups that are as big as you can coordinate and having wars at that scale have helped to, medium-term, aggressively select for competence - if X region has lots of small-scale wars while Y region farms peacefully, maybe X region ends up being both slightly smarter and better war-prepared, and develops larger-scale coordination earlier?