- In order to win, do we have to embrace “politics is the mindkiller” and “arguments are soldiers”?
- If politics is war, why not use bullets, both real and rhetorical?
- So why not use violence?
- Violence isn’t sustainable - neither side can annihilate the other
- So both sides agree to compromise and form a government
- Example: Good Friday Accords ending the conflict in Northern Ireland
- General case: civilization
- Unfortunately, this just moves the conflict, rather than ending it
- Both sides attempt to use the government against each other
- This runs into the same problem as above - neither side can control the government indefinitely, so neither side can use the government to permanently oppress the other
- Both sides then agree to certain restrictions in how they can use the government, such as the preservation of minority rights
- In the US, this is most notably seen in the 1st and 14th amendments
- The general case is liberalism
- But why are civilization and liberalism stable equlibria?
- Combination of reciprocal communitarianism and “divine grace”
- Reciprocal communitarianism
- Probably how altruism evolved
- Once you have a small community of individuals all cooperating with each other in a tit-for-tat manner, then others either have to join the community or be outcompeted
- “Divine grace”
- People successfully interact with others holding opposing values all the time
- Reading ancient and medieval texts, there is nothing but honor among foes
- Standards of honorable conduct for Greek and Roman warriors
- Codes of chivalry in the Middle Ages
- Even today, there are instances of groups at war cooperating, such as the Christmas Truce in World War 1
- Most useful social norms exist due to a combination of reciprocal communitarianism and divine grace
- As a result, groups with liberal values attract members and groups that are more hostile lose them
- Another advantage of liberalism is that it fails gracefully
- If it turns out that the group you’re fighting is not evil or immoral, liberalism at least allows you the consolation of having treated them with civility
- This is opposed to politics-as-war, where persecution of the outgroup just leads to the outgroup persecuting you when they gain power
- So why should we be worried when people claiming to value liberalism use illiberal tactics
- They’re undermining the basis of the community
- Making exceptions to your values for particular outgroups is a great way to ensure the collapse of your community
- Scott names the demiurge of liberalism Elua, after the god from Kushiel’s Avatar
- Banks, unlike other science fiction writers, considered how culture would evolve alongside technology
- Cultures are “functional” insofar as they help overcome collective action problems that stand in the way of the production of necessary goods and services
- Food, shelter, clothing
- Security, justice
- Banks considers what happens when technological advancements free culture from the constraints of having to contribute to the production of these essential goods and services
- When all cultures do equally well at providing essential goods and services, cultures compete on the basis of memetics
- The culture that becomes dominant will be the culture that spreads most easily by appealing to the tastes and sensibilities of sentient species
- That is The Culture in Banks’ novels
- This is why Horza, the protagonist of Consider Phlebas dislikes The Culture
- Horza is a member of the Idiran Empire
- Idirans are religious zealots, so why would anyone choose them over The Culture?
- Idirans have a certain depth and seriousness that The Culture lacks
- The problem with The Culture is that it provides no deeper meaning - nothing but constant partying, with unlimited sex and drugs
- However, this decadence should not be mistaken for weakness
- Historically cultures that became this decadent were weak
- Technology changes the equation
- The Culture is the ultimate choice-oriented society, and, as a result, it suffers from a crisis of meaning
- What happens when work disappears and everything becomes a hobby?
- What happens when you can choose all aspects of yourself
- Gender
- Knowledge
- Psychology
- How do you define your identity?
- Societies have two reactions to this crisis
- Re-embrace traditionalism
- Affirm freedom itself as the sole meaningful value and work to bring that value to others
- The latter is what defines The Culture
- The Culture has a branch called Contact, whose role it is to ensure that when new species are encountered, they adopt The Culture
- Accomplishes this by supporting “good” factions among the species and opposing “evil” ones
- Thus The Culture perpetuates itself by ensuring the “good guys” win
- The Culture, upon closer examination, is much like The Borg
- Banks’ great trick was, in essence, to make us sypathetic to The Borg and to suggest that modern liberal societies are fundamentally Borg-like
- Response to Bryan Caplan’s A Hardy Weed: How Traditionalists Underestimate Western Civilization
- Argues that so-called defenders of Western civilization don’t give it enough credit
- Western culture is successfully conquering other cultures, even in the face of determined opposition
- Spreads not through war and conquest but by persuasion and conversion
- The problem is that Caplan is eliding Western culture pre- and post-Industrial Revolution
- There’s nothing fundamentally Western about much of “Western” culture
- Example: Coca-Cola
- Combination of an Ethiopian nut, a Columbian leaf, along with lots of carbonated sugar water
- Would be equally delicious and would spread equally well if it had been discovered in Japan or Arabia
- Example: gender norms
- “Western” gender norms would be unrecognizable to e.g. Cicero or St. Augustine
- What we consider to be Western gender norms are actually the result of the Industrial Revolution, and are necessary for the successful function of an industrialized civilization
- As other countries industrialize, they adopt “Western” gender norms, not because they’re being conquered by the West but because those norms are more efficient
- As a result, what many people call “Western” culture is actually “universalist” culture
- As societies industrialize, they converge on the same cultural norms
- The rate at which places get inducted into universal culture depends on their connectedness to globalized trade
- Universal culture is the only culture that can survive without censorship, since it, by definition, outcompetes native cultures
- Universal culture is the only culture that can survive high levels of immigration
- Adapted to work in diverse multicultural environments
- Social atomization - allows people to have their own values while broader society provides a baseline of least-common-denominator functions
- People will increasingly default to universal culture norms in public whenever there are high levels of immigration
- It’s not that foreigners are assimilating into Western culture, it’s that both Westerners and foreigners are assimilating into a new universalist culture
- There is a certain level of hypocrisy in our embrace of universalist culture
- We lament when universalist culture takes over far-away and exotic traditionalist cultures
- We celebrate when universalist culture takes over traditionalist cultures that we consider to be the outgroup
- We should be consistent
- If we’re happy when universalist culture conquers Southern Baptists, we should also be happy when universalist culture conquers traditional African societies
- If we’re unhappy when universalist culture conquers traditional African societies, we should be unhappy when it conquers Southern Baptists
- The main thing though, is to get rid of this notion that Western culture and universalist culture are the same
- Elua (liberalism, universal culture, etc) is slowly consuming everything in its path
- That said, Elua appears to be good
- So why are people trying to hard to fight Elua?
- Elua can be reprogrammed
- Nationalism is what you get when the machinery of liberalism is “reprogrammed” with a different, more traditionalist value set