Status and civilization, part 3
The Warring States period of Chinese history ended with the beginning of the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC, when Qin Shi Huang unified China and became its first emperor. The institutional design of the Qin Dynasty was heavily influenced by legalism, especially the works of Han Feizi. Han Feizi said:
The means whereby the intelligent ruler controls his ministers are two handles only. The two handles are chastisement and commendation. What are meant by chastisement and commendation? To inflict death or torture upon culprits, is called chastisement; to bestow encouragements or rewards on men of merit, is called commendation.
Less than a year after Qin Shi Huang died, 900 farmers, led by the army officers Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, were drafted to defend the borderlands, but they were delayed by heavy storms. The Qin legal code disincentivized behavior by “inflicting death or torture upon culprits”—the penalty for lateness, no matter the cause, was death. Knowing this and having nothing to lose, the farmers revolted; thus began the Dazexiang Uprising.
The Qin Dynasty fell three years later.
In 1952, homosexuality was added to the DSM as a mental disorder. Federal policy classified homosexuals as national security risks; the FBI and USPS both kept lists of suspected homosexuals; and state and local governments cracked down on gay bars and arrested their attendees, whose names were subsequently published in newspapers. Many homosexuals moved to cities after the end of the First World War; but in the early 1960s, the mayor of New York City, which was to host the 1964 World’s Fair, became concerned with the city’s reputation, and ordered the NYPD to shut down the city’s gay bars (which were usually owned by crime syndicates) and entrap and arrest as many homosexuals as they could. This policy continued even after the Fair.
The Stonewall riots came in 1969.
In 1878, Otto von Bismarck instituted the Anti-Socialist Laws to attempt to curtail the possibility of a revolution similar to the one that had occurred in Paris seven years before, the financially-motivated mass emigration of Germans to America, and the growth of the Social Democratic Party, which, three years earlier, had codified its principles in the form of the Gotha Program.
In the existing society the instruments of labour are a monopoly of the capitalist class; the subjection of the working class thus arising is the cause of misery and servitude in every form.
The emancipation of the working class demands the transformation of the instruments of labour into the common property of society and the co-operative control of the total labour, with application of the product of labour to the common good, and just distribution of the same.
These laws proved counterproductive: the Party only grew in strength, forcing Bismarck to build a welfare state—the first of its kind—in order to draw off support for it and reduce the risk of revolution.
The Second Reich lasted until the end of World War I.
Traditional monogamous heterosexual marriage and other ‘civilizational’ sexual norms probably can absorb a certain level of defection and free-riding parasites, so long as those norms maintain a critical mass of support, and defection and deviancy is always discouraged and/or risky.
If we continue the method of analysis developed in the last two posts, we see that a norm is a (probabilistic for obvious reasons, but generally predictable) payoff matrix, which may be analyzed down to its component individual value-judgments. Performing this analysis, which we will call judgment-side, makes clear that the payoff matrix may always be adjusted through political or metapolitical action, technological advancement, etc.
Just as there is judgment-side analysis, there is actor-side analysis: each individual’s answer (that is, attempt at optimization) will differ based on not only their social context (i.e. which payoff matrix they’re operating under—Mormons and the inner-city underclass clearly have different sets of norms), but also based on their preferences and qualities: time-preference, concern for others’ opinion of them, strength of internalized norm-loaded disgust-reactions, and so on.
But—the payoff matrix may always be adjusted. To say that Chen Sheng had to choose between getting to the borderlands on time or accepting the consequences of not getting to the borderlands on time is to construct a false dilemma, as is obvious from the fact that he did neither.
(I can’t figure out how to write up the rest of the argument without introducing an instance of a category of failure mode I don’t yet have a name for, so I’m not going to yet; but this is relevant.)
Good points. Then thinking about it, it does seem like criticisms of old social conservatism by both pietists/purists and romantic ideologues looking for a perfect world were either in bad faith or naive. For instance, not making a huge deal about homosexuality while at the same time not ever officially endorsing it (and making it clear that it is thought ill of) is the exact kind of balance that would tend to keep such a tendency in check. On the one hand homosexuals are pretty much left alone, but on the other hand, they are socially marginalized to the extent that they exhibit homosexuality. In that system, some characters can pay the price for being homosexual if they really want to, but it is a price to be paid; they must count the cost. In that setup, the choice to live more or less as a celibate would have a better cost/benefit ratio.
In the buildup to the gayness, due to a host of factors homosexuality was being more violently marginalized (perhaps the rise of middle and lower class attitudes as ‘ideal’ helped this some) and this seems like it would inevitably provoke some kind of response. The fact is that though homosexuals may be in reality >1% of the population, one percent of 300 million is 3 million – a number that makes most armed forces look small. Also I think we can’t underestimate the failure of the Catholic church, a traditional protector of homosexuals (provided they didn’t cause too much trouble) to protect them. The only way the damage was contained for homosexuals was to marginalize the priests as pedophiles. This however I think merely fueled the ongoing reaction against ‘straight’ culture, organized / institutional religion being another important facet of it.
I would wonder though if there was not an uptick in abuse of young men by priests in the period prior, and what the cause of that was.
E. Antony Gray (@RiverC)
June 1, 2014 at 22:21
The devil is in the details. Given that nothing like the Stonewall riots had ever happened ever, nor did happen anywhere else, it’s hard to see it as a necessary fact of history akin to the Chen Sheng rebellion. What happened was that by 1969 the culture was hedonistic enough for homos to be able to push their point without adverse consequences.
Chinese political theory all took the lesson from the Qin fall that overly harsh laws are counterproductive. But that didn’t stop them from killing the entire clans of any scholar who chose the wrong side in any court intrigue during the next two thousand years.
If anything the lesson is that the government can’t go against the zeitgeist, and so you need prolonged intervention by the state in popular religion. That’s an old lesson really.
spandrell
June 1, 2014 at 23:13
The Stonewall riots wouldn’t have happened without the hedonism, sure. They also wouldn’t have happened without what came before the hedonism.
I remember reading an article somewhere about the only gay bar in Sochi. It’s legal, above-board, all that. Putin hasn’t curbstomped it. And the gays in Sochi don’t really care about politics.
Anglos have a problem that contributes to progressivism but existed long before the ’60s: they’re too damned literal. You tell them something is sinful, they’ll actually try to eliminate it. Russia says homosexuality is sinful, so it passes a few laws saying “don’t be gay”; America says homosexuality is sinful, so it pushes the gay bars underground, stops letting the crime syndicates buy the cops off, and raids the gay bars until the riots come around.
nydwracu
June 2, 2014 at 01:18
I can’t imagine the Russian gays staging a riot even if their bars were closed. They’d be ripped open by the myriad Russian thugs there are. Putin is probably more concerned about individual gays doing something stupid in public, which looks bad, so he gives them a break. Same in China.
Government overreaching is a real thing, but I don’t think Stonewall or Bismarck is a good example. The real issue is the relative power of the priesthood and the government. Whether the loyalty of the bureaucracy and the army depends on money, fear or faith.
spandrell
June 2, 2014 at 05:34
There was a linkbait here making the rounds about parents buying corrective rape for their 14 year old daughter. However, it feels to me like most SJW analogues in Russia are possessed of a more trollish mindset; their dream act of insurgency would probably be something like tricking a local judge into banning Frozen and gleefully watching the public backlash at this particular point.
Multiheaded
August 2, 2014 at 12:32
There was a linkbait here making the rounds about parents buying corrective rape for their 14 year old daughter. More substantial sociological inquiry is actually suppressed and (mostly) extralegally hounded; NGOs! polling! A reckoning cannot be postponed indefinitely.
In more immediate terms, however, it feels to me like most SJW analogues in Russia are possessed of a more trollish mindset; their dream act of insurgency would probably be something like tricking a local judge into banning Frozen and attempting to enforce that, and gleefully watching the public backlash at that particular point. (Unfortunately, at this point I just assume that heighten-the-contradictions is a pipe dream at best, suicidal at worst.)
Multiheaded
August 2, 2014 at 12:32
And why did the Stonewall Riots end up advancing the cause of transsexual marriage? Because homosexuals were mentally ill and deserving of our pity, not our scorn.
Whereas before, sodomites were corrupted by their perverted passions, probably had more fetishes than homosexuality, and at any rate deserved to be scornfully left in the closet.
Of course, the reason the gays were let out is syphillis and chlamydia were curable, the other diseases were assumed to become treatable soon, and AIDS only existed in Africa. Today the gays are resevoirs and incubators of AIDS and antibiotic-resistant bacterial STDs.
If AIDS had been on the radar in the ’60s, gay rights would never have happened. Instead, the Stonewall Riots would have been proof that gays are up to no good and caused the State to crack down harder.
Bismarck is the same story. A spectre was haunting Europe – the spectre of the chattering classes.
peppermint7889
June 1, 2014 at 23:53
A “basilisk” is a figure of LW religion, which we atheists and materialists are unfamiliar with. Needs explanation.
jamesd127
June 2, 2014 at 00:01
Say you’re in the People’s Democratic Republic of Puritopia. Obviously totalitarian. You’re not a dissenter; you don’t know anyone who is; you don’t hear about any except when a few of them get hauled off to gulags to be justly punished for their crimes. Eventually, you hear someone defending Puritopianism by saying that an important part of actually-existing Puritopianism is the divide between the public and the private face, and that Puritopianism is good because, on the one hand, there are beneficial effects to having everyone think everyone else except the target of the two-minutes’ hate thinks the same way, but on the other hand, people may not actually believe Puritopianism and can dissent enough to allow Puritopia to muddle through on the power of the unprincipled exceptions.
That argument is one that should not be made to a Puritopian: it says that it is good that Puritopians think no one dissents, but it also says that people regularly dissent. Even if it didn’t take it further than the public/private face distinction, it would still open the implication that there are others who dissent and don’t get caught.
That parable in the comment I linked to could have a similar problem: someone who thinks most other people don’t sin as much as they themselves do could hear that, realize that they have no direct evidence as to how much other people sin [as opposed to having the evidence that they don’t see people sin or hear them admit to sinning] and that the likelihood of such a parable existing is inversely proportional to the frequency/commonness of sin, and then recalibrate toward the belief that sin is frequent.
nydwracu
June 2, 2014 at 01:48
When a socially-coordinated agent is exposed to a basilisk, it can destroy their belief in the useful fiction of a noble lie by causing an epiphany whereby the the agent starts to think about the man behind the curtain, causing a reevaluation of the social payoff matrix, and a recalculation of a utility maximizing strategy, which usually results in selfish defection from the prevailing solution to the social coordination norm-discovery problem.
And the observation of many successful and unpunished defections itself serve as a kind of basilisk, as is the perception that old norms are under attack and new norms have the momentum in their popularity and support such that they will replace the old norms. Even the perception that people aren’t wiling to impose the same harsh punishments for defection can start the snowball rolling. This sets up the condition for a preference cascade and an equilibrium reset.
To defend social norms requires that one talks about the purpose, processes, and mechanisms of social norms. But once one talks about it, it starts making the audience about the man behind the curtain, which undermines the social norm itself, so it’s counterproductive. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So one has to tread carefully.
Handle
June 2, 2014 at 10:09
The Cathechism of the Catholic Church asserts that the first victim of sin is the sinner himself. Of course, this comes straight out of Cicero –
There is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil.
Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable.
God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man.
When a man is inspired by virtue such as this, what bribes can you offer him, what treasures, what thrones, what empires? He considers these but mortal goods and esteems his own divine. And if the ingratitude of the people, and the envy of his competitors, or the violence of powerful enemies despoil his virtue of its earthly recompense, he still enjoys a thousand consolations in the approbation of conscience, and sustains himself by contemplating the beauty of moral rectitude.
I trust Nydwracu that he is not just blustering that his argument will not fit in his margin. But I find this ‘basilisk’ idea that a good man can be convinced to sin through reason deeply heretical and blasphemous towards human nature and nature’s God.
We are not utilitarian robots. We are men.
peppermint7889
June 2, 2014 at 14:15
@peppermint:
You’d be amazed what you can tempt good and noble men – men who have never done anything wrong and plenty right – to do. I’ve seen it countless times, and though I shouldn’t be surprised anymore my instinct is always to be shocked; I never get used to it. All of these men would have gone on – I am absolutely confident – to continue to live good lives, mostly running on moral autopilot and without ever thinking too much about it, had not the wrong thing happened at the wrong time.
Moral autopilot is good enough for most men in most circumstances, and it’s all that most men know and rely upon in their lives. But it’s also fragile. It’s possible to get a guy to turn off his own moral autopilot and try to fly the plane himself consciously. All of a sudden the man finds he is adrift, that the rules were an illusion for the sleepwalking masses from which he now distinguishes himself, and that he might as well savor what time he’s given and enjoy his life and to hell with all the sheep and their moral brainwashing.
Our civilization has given up installing the same moral autopilot on all new men, the old one is besieged by a more adaptive rival, and our society is filling up with men who have turned theirs off.
Personally, I think there’s little danger of breaking some of these eggshells around these parts, but Nydwracu has a plausible case.
Handle
June 2, 2014 at 14:51
Peppermint, Handle, and Wes all make good points here. I wonder if the basilisk, which if I have this right is affecting/ruining the outcome of the game by revealing the rules of the game, is really such a concern.
The real problem may be that group cohesion is simply so broken down that people no longer care very much about the long-term group benefit. What areas of life are we more “moral” today than say 50 years ago? Right, stuff like recycling and inclusiveness. Areas that, with regard to personal long term outcomes are of null or negative effect, and regarding group outcomes have very little effect (recycling-ish stuff) or a strong net negative affect (inclusiveness).
So it could be that making it common knowledge that people are sacrificing individual large short term gains for mild individual longer term gains + huge long term group games is not much of an issue. Smart people have always known this. The Catechism pretty much says this (and adds God will also judge you). The key is getting people to care about their own groups potential huge long-term benefit.
How can we turn all that recycling and pathological altruism into real productive concern?
nickbsteves
June 4, 2014 at 11:56
You probably need the following three elements for the optimal end state.
1. An official Church (‘Ideal Social Organization and Norms’ Research, Development, Maintenance and Enforcement Institution – say, the Ministry of Morality)
2. A population of people who are homogeneously biologically predisposed to be compatible and easily adopt the cooperative and altruistic behavior patterns.
3. Discouraging the kinds of speech which tend to undermine the passive and unconscious acceptance and compliance with the Ministry’s edicts.
We live in a place that is doing the opposite of those three things, with perhaps the exception of the progressive orthodoxy quickly becoming its own corrupt form the Ministry of Morality.
So, how do you get there from here? Exit. Bubble Off and Isolate. Either in the midst of a hostile society, or in some new place with selective membership requirements.
Handle
June 4, 2014 at 13:22
[…] Source: nydwracu […]
Status and civilization, part 3 | Reaction Times
June 2, 2014 at 01:56
[…] Status, pay-off matrices, and civilization. […]
Lightning Round – 2014/06/04 | Free Northerner
June 4, 2014 at 01:01
[…] 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 basilisk (which […]
This Week in Reaction | The Reactivity Place
June 6, 2014 at 18:31