Status and civilization, part 2
In a game-theoretical formulation of Roissy’s model of the sexual norms of a society, there are three players: alpha males, beta males, and women. All three derive benefit from the existence and maintenance of civilization, which Roissy believes requires monogamy for reasons that need not be given here; however, civilizational decline is slow, so concern for its prevention demands long time-preference. As for other benefits, beta males derive benefit both short- and long-term from the institution of monogamous marriage; alpha males derive benefit from its absence; and women derive short-term benefit from its absence, but are harmed by it long-term: they hit the wall, and then their biological clock runs out, likely before they’ve reproduced.
What this adds up to is something vaguely similar to massively-multiplayer Prisoner’s Dilemma with time factored in. In a simple form of the model, each player derives long-term benefit from others’ cooperation (i.e. maintenance of norms toward monogamous marriage), but two of the three factions derive short-term benefit from defecting—and each defection adds short-term benefit to future defection, short-term penalty to cooperation, and amplifies the overall long-term penalty that results from the erosion of the norms that underlie the maintenance of civilization.
Roissy believes this—and yet he defects. Why?
One complicating factor of the model is that time-preference is not distributed evenly across agents in the game. It is by now well-known that some people just have longer time-preference than others; and in the model, the interests of civilization (and therefore the long-term interests of most currently-existing agents and the short-term interests of agents born sufficiently far in the future) are best served by increases in time-preference. (Civilization, of course, can select for long time-preference… or short.)
Another factor (and I’m not sure whether or not the model above succeeds in capturing this) is that the payoff matrix itself is in play: shifts in societal norms can ‘buy off’ low-time-preference groups, as was pointed out in the comments of my last post. For example, under the old marriage-norms, monogamy was practiced and divorce was discouraged much more strongly than today, but affairs happened—and thus women and alpha males were bought off. (One did not, of course, openly admit to one’s sins; nor did one acknowledge in the abstract their existence. To do so would serve to normalize them.)
(A hypothesis: did the rise of romantic love as the underlying motivator for marriage result in increased disapproval and avoidance of affairs, removing the mechanism by which the majority faction was bought off? Another hypothesis: did the rise of clerical work in the cities and similar lead to an increase in sex outside marriage (workplace affairs / ‘dating’ [which used to be a lot more euphemistic than it is now] within the company), amplifying demand for rationalization of defection from monogamy-norms in order to assuage the increased [and more widely distributed] aggregate level of guilt?)
A possible third factor is that it’s easier to promote defection than cooperation here: or rather, that there are avenues by which defection can be promoted more easily than cooperation, and that those are more powerful than the avenues for which the opposite is true. Enthymemes taking progressivism as the unstated axiom can easily promote defection, and progressivism is the common belief-system of today; but how can cooperation be argued for? Open explanation/investigation of the functioning of society is low-status, since it signals social incompetence; these things are supposed to be intuitively understood, and just as it’s easier to explain the rules of a language you learned in adulthood than it is to explain the rules of your native language, explicit explanation of social rules implies lack of implicit knowledge, which is, of course, low-status.
The first rule of status: don’t talk about the rules of status.
[…] By nydwracu […]
Status and civilization, part 2 | Reaction Times
May 17, 2014 at 23:13
The primary problem with with you are attempting to accomplish here, can be made apparent pretty easily. First off without a doubt this is probably as far from political philosophy as you can get, but more to the point; There’s a reason the social sciences particularly when they were first instituted starting with Auguste Comte, and working around with some of the founder’s of the institutionalization of the discipline: Marx, Emile Durkheim, etc… made a very serious and this was exemplified in the landmark book of Durkeim’s, “Suicide” that there is a clear separation between quantitative sociological examination, and qualitative examination within the social sciences. And there are two very serious charges to be made within the forms that your arguments take, even if you first discount the immediate deficiencies of the methodology that you as an abstract group or whatever you are clearly are proponent of.
It seems to me, from what I’ve read across several categories that you can reduce(reductionism this can be both applied to Hard sciences and other’s) the irrational behavior of the individuals and then construct data which can then draw conclusions about what can be learnt.(Philosophy of science isn’t my specialty)
Firs there are no models, unless there’s something that can be said for this that can predict either the, outcome or the reaction of large groups generally speaking.
So for instance there are people who have now made the point that China’s rising GDP is partially related to the fact that it’s falling into the role that Britain did during the industrial revolution with respect to the global economy. Okay let’s take that as a testable posit for the current economic shifts, you still can’t make a statistical development based on retrospective changes(either based on older philosophical idea’s especially if you aren’t trained in sed thought system or statistical reference) because we have no way of determining the outcome, no field of study, (one of the reasons philosophy airs on the side of speculative activity) So, for instance there’s a youth bulge, in the united states and also and several other countries, this same kind of youth bulge beneath the theocracies of the 90’s during the settling of globalization and awareness of liberal democracy caused an entire generation of middle Eastern youth who resented the regimes they lived under, which more recently due to constant disrespect of the public opinion gave rise to the Arab spring. Was there some way of predicting that? Not really. If you apply these same kinds of constructs to more rigid structures like economic models and political systems you’re just as at a lost, and perhaps even more so.
The second indictment that can be made, Other then the poor understanding of the political tenets that you are writing at length on, (and there are legitimate overlaps between the fields of philosophical system building and other concrete disciplines, for instances Realpolitik, practically being synonymous with International Realism which is the foundational tenet or one of the primary ones used in Political science International relations theory and Geopolitics. And Neoliberalism which can be understood in principle both by philosophers and economists) There are legitimate interpretations of the phenomena that some of the principles of your reasoning are based on, So for instance very poor faulty assumptions about values, correlations between crime and urbanization etc…
There are clear and established definitions for how these situations propagate themselves though they are non-empirical, for instance there’s a very clear relation between more fluid dimension of intellectual capital due to globalization, and the development of political economies based on what’s known as a technocratic structure, These are pretty much one of the primary forms of very serious economic development today.
But see the problem is making sense of these situations as; rather than idea’s representing or serving an ideological function are rather, “A empirical phenomena unresisting statical analysis” very seriously hamper’s your ability to make any good judgments about what these phenomena mean rather than, what they are doing.
So, your models are not predictive, atleast as far as from what I’ve seen, and that being said, there’s also the problem that there are alot of false premises in the methodology that have already been covered by tools you’re reluctant to use, mostly because of some kind’ve centric idea’s in your thinking, “intellectualism is commons-sense taken a step further.”
So the heart of the matter can probably be boiled down to this, and it’s very similar to a point Chomsky made about how to make sense of what the purpose of language is. Perhaps reading some philosopher’s of science like Kuhn, or Popper,(This really isn’t my field) or others would help in understanding this, but the object of science isn’t to understand, (i.e. the old Adage it’s better to wonder than it is to know) I mean the development of neuroscience; what we know so far, or even quantum mechanics, can’t close the debate on the possibilities of Free-will (Most say compatibalism if you push them philosopher’s that is not scientists) but in the same way science’s primary goal is to catalogue facts so for instance Steven Pinker and Noam chomsky’s clash about the origins of language are well placed, because you have the latest developments of science pointing to a particular direction while chomsky is imposing non-empirical idea about the way language functions also shedding light on it’s possible origins which conflict with testable findings.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hot-thought/201011/is-philosophy-dead
http://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy
“If you do not shed your philosophical baggage you usually become a slave to some defunct philosopher.”
Also, just a thought, but you might want to read travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco. He makes a convincing case and presents a clear description of the Wests fascination and attempts to maintain a “realistic perspective” when dealing with idea’s and phenomena they are handling.
menckenhitchens
May 19, 2014 at 19:02
Well that was amusing. Here is my counterpoint:
Dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Alrenous
May 20, 2014 at 05:56
I agree. I got as far as “The second indictment that can be made” in that wall of text, then looked back to see if I had missed the first one, and couldn’t find one.
menckenhitchens says there are two very serious charges to be made, after which one might expect charges, or at least the groundwork for charges. But instead we get “It seems to me…” “There are no models, unless there are…” “There are people talking about China…” and some waffle about a youth bulge in the theocracies of the 90s.
Erik
May 21, 2014 at 09:32
I think what he’s doing is pushing a naively Popperian epistemology for historical analysis, and then escaping the inability to draw any conclusions that that would imply by saying that it should all be qualitative and ‘philosophical’. Which strikes me as epistemologically even worse than the lazy Bayesian approach I’ve been using — which certainly has its problems (overreliance on priors increasing inferential distance, counterintuitive ripple effects [if the Allies killed Forrestal, update toward the Allies having killed Long]*) but which is still better than either a naively philosophical we-don’-need-no-steenking-data approach (philosophers complain about scientists overreaching and encroaching on their domain, but they do the exact opposite — questions like HBD cannot be resolved without reference to data — and one of the many reasons I left philosophy was that I didn’t see the point of remaining totally detached from data) or the scientistic journalist-says-paper-says-X-therefore-X approach.
What that misses is that I haven’t gotten to the point of arguing for this yet; I’m just pointing out a difference between the worldview of progressivism and that of neoreaction. (But does it even need to be argued for to have a persuasive effect? If the contradictions between progressivism and modernism are pointed out, won’t modernist progressives resolve the dialectic for themselves…? And one would expect that modernism would be stronger than progressivism there.)
nydwracu
May 21, 2014 at 09:47
“Roissy believes this—and yet he defects. Why?”
His answer could be, “I wouldn’t have defected under the old, stable equilibrium of a century ago, but the current long and decadent transition to a new, worse equilibrium of sexual Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes does not give me the same environment of incentives, even if one takes the view of enlightened self-interest with very long time preferences.”
In short, what causes the collapse is the moment when even the best actors have nothing to gain from their cooperation and small personal sacrifice for large collective gains (from which they personally benefit). There are no collective gains from which to benefit, so any sacrifice is foolishness. Entropy is the normal state of nature. Maintaining a coordinated order is very hard, but restoring it from a state of degradation is another matter entirely.
In a good equilibrium, everyone is living a noble lie. In a bad equilibrium, everyone is living an ugly truth. In the transition, half the people are pushing an ugly lie: that we can retain the civilizational benefits of the noble lie, while living the lifestyle of the ugly truth.
Handle
May 18, 2014 at 09:01
“Roissy supports disarmament in principle, but refuses to unilaterally disarm.”
Is that an accurate summary?
Erik
May 18, 2014 at 11:00
Not quite; that’s more like the classic prisoner’s dilemma. A Norm-War situation also incorporates a tragedy of the commons.
Let’s say there are two equilbria. There are four families of farmers (A, B, C, and D) on an ungoverned, isolated island with a common 200-acre plot, but because of the tragic overgrazing, they are only able to sustain an average of 160 cows. If they split up the commons into four private 50-acre plots, they could each have 50 cows. But there is no option for either state or private violence enforcement of private property.
Long ago, the families simply spontaneously settled into a norm whereby each family stayed on its own quarter of the commons. The descendants don’t understand and/or no longer remember why they do things that way, and they’ve been living that way for so long they don’t remember what it was like in the bad old days of overgrazing-derived scarcity. Instead, they’ve ‘sacralized’ the norm.
There were no fences, but if a family was caught grazing its livestock on another’s quarter, all the other families would shun then and not invite them to parties. The families don’t comprehend the benefit of their optimal equilibrium, but the cost is very salient. Sometimes their own flock has produced many calves while another flock has been halved, and they wonder why they can’t use their neighbors pastures, which they are anyway always tempted to do, and now especially so.
And then over a sequence of years, when the circumstances present a temptation which is overwhelmingly strong, family B has had enough and calls an island meeting and asks, “This year I have 100 cows and C has only 10. Why do we obey these norms? They are ridiculous and archaic superstitions that serve no purpose. This year, I should be allowed to use C’s quarter, and if the situation is reversed, C should be able to use my quarter. We can all just trust each other to be reasonable and fair with the collective resource and continue managing it for maximum efficiency.”
C nods his head in agreement. D is a traditionalist conservative and screams, “Sacrilege! Blasphemy! This is how we have always done it, surely there is a good reason, even if we cannot understand it!” But D does not actually know that good reason, and his argument in general is not persuasive since it applies equally to any change and does not allow one to evaluate a proposal and differentiate between progress and regress. If the old religion fades – as it would under sustained economic pressure – the power of D’s exhortations will evaporate.
A is different because he understands the game-theoretic reason for the norm. He concurs in D’s conclusion but not in his reasoning. He tries to explain to his neighbors the nature of the tragedy of the commons, but they think he is a Chicken Little because they’ve never overgrazed before, and can’t imagine the relations of their descendants would ever degrade to the point of rivalrous conflicts of interest.
They hold a vote and B and C win, and A and D lose, because even D doesn’t really believe in the norm religiously anymore, and once that commitment faded, and without being able to comprehend A’s logic, he was set adrift and thus just went with the crowd.
A generation later, things are starting to fall apart, with unjustified ventures into neighborly plots occurring on an increasingly routine basis. No one wants to hurt anyone else’s feelings, so the party-shunning mechanism has long been extinct, and everybody just raises as many cows as possible and shepherds them whereever he pleases, and they cannot understand why there is never as much milk as they used to be, and blame it on something ridiculous.
Meanwhile, A’s descendant sees what is going on and understands where it is all headed. He tried to talk B, C, and D into returning to the old ways, but they do not accept his argument or hear his pleas, and so his advocacy is futile. He must now make a decision about how he will manage his own flock. It just so happens that A, being a bright fellow, is an exceptionally good farmer and always has more cows than his neighbors so long as he can feed them. The A’s have always been tempted to roam their flock all over the island, which would have always been to their benefit, but they understood their situation would be even better in a civilization with land norms like private property, and they didn’t want to miss the parties.
But now, because he is powerless to get all the other families to listen to reason, coordinate, and reestablish the norm, A’s best option is to fall back on his superiority and raise as many cows as he can and graze all over the island, even if that causes desertification in some areas in the long run.
Handle
May 18, 2014 at 14:00
You should rewrite this as a fable
Roi
May 21, 2014 at 09:16
Right. I left it implicit that Roissy defected because the payoff matrix was such that he stood to capture more benefit from defection than cooperation.
A further complication of the payoff-matrix analysis, which I wrote about here, is that, not only are agents’ relevant traits (time-preference, etc.) different, intrinsic benefits (internalized purity-norms and ideas of virtue and so on) must also be accounted for: it’s possible for some agents to have such strong norms toward cooperation that they would cooperate at the currently-existing payoff difference between cooperation and defection, or even a larger one.
So the payoff matrix isn’t just status, material goods, biological predisposition, and technological dynamics: it’s also imperium — i.e. mass intrinsic motivation correlation, and the structures by which imperium is produced and modified. This folds back onto itself, in a sense, since purity-norms are shaped partially by rationalization, internalized social pressure and thedish value-loading, and repeater structure — but it’s very difficult to totally account for.
(I can’t believe I didn’t notice that! But the fable does.)
nydwracu
May 21, 2014 at 16:34
Roissy’s stance is justified for two reasons:
1. You can’t control what the other players do. We all know folk activism is retarded. As popular as Cheateau Heartiste is, the impact on public policymaking and the structure of incentives in American society, should they start campaigning for reactionary traditionalism, would be minimal. If you can’t fix it, why not enjoy the decline?
In fact, Roissy may have done more to help the cause of reactionary traditionalism with his current mix of narcissism, cynicism and hedonism than a thousand Lawrence Austers.
2. Roissy believes that American Civilisation, in it’s current form, is currently unsavable. Consider civilisation-space as a surface in 3D space. The vertical dimension is ‘order’ — the most civilised societies are at the peaks of the mountain-tops of this surface. The slopes run down through the foothills of semi-civilisation to the valleys of anarchy. To build a civilisation, you must expend blood and gold to push your society ‘uphill’.
Suppose America were tumbling down a steep cliff. No amount of blood or gold can arrest it’s descent, let alone push it back up the hill, yet lower down the mountain are the foothills of ‘survivalist culture’, ‘federalism’, ‘traditional families’, ‘homesteader culture’ where the descent will stop, and from there, the civilisation-builders will push society up the circuitous mountain pass to one of the high peaks. Hopefully not bureaucratic democracy again, perhaps monarchy, or maybe even neocameralism. A man loses much and profits not at all trying to stand in the way of a boulder tumbling down a hill, why not enjoy the decline? If Roissy’s brand of hedonism is a little much for you, then join John Robb‘s Resilient Communities movement as they entrench amongst the foothills and plant the seeds of the Sixth Republic.
sconzey
May 18, 2014 at 15:15
This is a good metaphor. While I don’t personally believe that America is “tumbling down a steep cliff”, I do see that there are lots of people actively pushing it down the not-very-gentle slope it’s sliding down, and many of those who think they’re pushing uphill are, at best, pushing sideways.
Anthony
May 20, 2014 at 15:26
A hypothesis: did the rise of romantic love as the underlying motivator for marriage result in increased disapproval and avoidance of affairs
Tocqueville noted that in America, affairs were very uncommon, as the elimination of social distinction meant any man could marry any woman, and therefore there was no such thing as “forbidden love”; this enabled women to hold out for marriage from any single man, no matter how socially placed.
Even with strict religious rules against adultery and concubinage, affairs seem to be more commonly accepted in societies where there are strong social barriers to marriage. While there were small elites within American society even then (an Adams wouldn’t wed a farmer’s daughter, though he might wed a planter’s daughter), the equivalent of an upper-middle-class scion could marry a working-class girl, provided there were signs that her family were decent folk. In Latin America (and most of Europe), there were strong barriers to marriage outside one’s social class (and in Latin America, race made this even more obvious). In such a society, the only way for women to have high-status men’s children is to be a mistress, not a wife. Many will take that deal.
Anthony
May 20, 2014 at 15:23
Are there statistics? Cross-culturally or over time in America — and the latter seems like it’d be more interesting.
nydwracu
May 21, 2014 at 16:36
Statistics would be *hard*, and almost definitely didn’t exist when Tocqueville was writing. Divorce rates would give you something, but the acceptability of divorce did change as well, and there were probably a lot of “abandonment” cases that were really affairs.
You’d probably have to go for something more impressionistic like novels of the time, but novels and other fiction drastically increased in output in the first fifty years of the Republic, making the impressions of the early years more vague. (Also tastes in what people wanted to read would change; stories involving adultery might be more popular in some periods than others.)
The one “hard” line that couldn’t be crossed was the color line, so genetic history of the African-American population would tell you something, but it wouldn’t tell you who the men were (both in overall social standing, and whether they were married men looking for some strange on the side, or young unmarried men getting what they could).
Anthony
May 21, 2014 at 17:25
And it does. What’s the average, 20%?
(As for novels: it’s present even before novels. Chaucer.)
nydwracu
May 21, 2014 at 18:00
There are enough black people in the U.S. who’ve had their DNA sequenced by 23andme and others to do more detailed studies, and it should be possible to figure out how much admixture was going on when.
Though the color line wasn’t as hard in the 1770s through the 1820s or 30s as it was later – laws banning mixed-race marriages are from the end of that period. Clayton Cramer has done some work on that; it’s pretty clear that the color line became more rigid between independence and the Civil War. So some of that mixture wouldn’t be adulterous.
Anthony
May 21, 2014 at 18:15
[…] is contributing mightily to Menciist Theory with his series on Status and Civlization (parts one, two, and three). The finale, we are admonished, is delayed due to the difficulty of not invoking a […]
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