This is a truly remarkable essay. Astonishing, even. I'm sure I'll still be thinking about this argument years from now. There have only been a few times in the past where I read something that instantly illuminated some hitherto dark corner of our collective psychology, and this was one of them. Thanks so much for writing it, Ruxandra.
The internal/external locus of control has been picked up before as being a part of the psychology of leftism, along with several psychological disorders. Believing that your life is just a sequence of events managed by the gods is surely comforting for the weak, but it also neutralizes those who could have been strong and creates a lot of dysfunctional behaviors (in the limit, it creates things like child sacrifice). Even basic things like personal hygiene don't make sense if you view epidemics as a random dice roll from the heavens. And I doubt you can mount the kind of intensity and long term planning capacity we see in men like Elon Musk if your culture thinks outcomes are already decided by fate. It's surely not a coincidence that after millennia of stagnation capital-p Progress kicked off only once people became secular.
I don't cover the equality drive (which is a weakness of the essay), but do argue that a lot of modern far left behavior that looks irrational would have been rational in the tribal world we evolved in. For example, tribal gods aren't concerned with honesty at all. It isn't until the start of proper trade networks around ancient Egyptian times that we begin to see gods who punish dishonesty in the afterlife. Tribal gods are however very concerned with the accurate following of ritual. This makes sense: ancient tribes are at the mercy of many forces they don't understand and can't control like weather, tectonic activity, volcanoes, the luck of the hunt. A very external locus of control is just realistic and probably required for keeping morale up, but that forces them to encode learned knowledge as rituals supplied by the gods. It can't be, "I figured out how to make manioc edible, follow my instructions and you will survive", it has to be "the holy ritual has these steps and the gods will punish you if you don't follow their instructions". As civilization and consciousness develop we start to see human knowledge become more important, and the gods start penalizing low-agency behaviors like child sacrifice.
So many big questions posed by this. The biggest being, what to do about it?
It's possible that there is just no solution here. Reassuring the weak / benefiting from the efforts of the strong seem to be fundamentally in tension. The more your culture validates being a loser, the less motivation there is to become a winner. E.g. fat shaming is a healthy social behavior because being fat is bad for people; if such people view their condition as outside their control (it's the evil food corporations that did it to me!) then they can't take the necessary steps to become healthier.
So perhaps the best way to view it is that the healthiest society is one that creates enough opportunities for everyone to 'win' on their own terms, to win social status via activities that are hard to lose at. Our society has many such mechanisms already. The huge praise given to jobs for which there's unlimited demand, like entertainers, is just one of those. The prevalence of "fake email jobs" might be another. It becomes an optimization problem. Can society generate so many roles at which it's impossible to lose that everyone can feel self respect and like they have a place in the world, without diverting too many resources away from the strong who genuinely push things forward?
Thank you, that's very kind! (I also found it funny how you said it's not my usual fare).
Regarding the Elon Musk observation. I wanted to include in the essay that the modern world is variance maximizing. The flip side to responsibility for failure is attribution of success also to the individual. And a sense that there's nobody above the individual? Maybe that's why we seek to bring down powerful individuals. It's unwise to defer to one human in all things and in the absence of a metaphysics that places something higher above man, we are left uncovered and unable to articulate why we should not listen to this uber succesfull human being in all matters?
Most don't try and bring down successful individuals. I'd guess only about 25% of the population have this kind of equalitarian quasi-tribal instinct, and the rest don't think about "captains of industry" much at all. And when they do they have respect for their achievements.
This becomes clearer when we look at the targets. A lot of the hate towards successful individuals is restricted to merchants, which is probably a result of zero sum thinking (something adaptive in tribal societies and which I _do_ address in my essay). If you look at highly successful individuals who aren't traders or industrialists then the disrespect vanishes even on the left, and their success is celebrated by all. A good example would be Taylor Swift. People have an easier time understanding why she's successful, and so she doesn't get ideological hatred in the same way rich CEOs do. Even people who are really down on their luck don't feel resentment towards rich actors or pop stars.
The left don't pick on Buffett often because he's careful to kowtow, by saying things they like even though he knows he's lying. See the year he declared derivatives to be "financial weapons of mass destruction" and then shortly after took out $37bn of puts. Or how he claimed taxes should be higher on the super wealthy, but he didn't donate all his wealth to the Treasury (something they'd accept).
There aren't any good reasons to hate Elon. He's just a businessman. The left hate him because he is one of the only rich people who proved immune to their emotional blackmail and pressure tactics, but that's not a _good_ reason. It's just their cries of frustration at discovering limits to their own powers.
> So perhaps the best way to view it is that the healthiest society is one that creates enough opportunities for everyone to 'win' on their own terms, to win social status via activities that are hard to lose at.
Great comment, but haven't you just pointed out that there's tension here?
You don't get status for things that are "hard to lose at." Things anyone can do aren't admirable, full stop.
Nobody is getting admired for having a "fake email job," or winning the same trophy the entire fourth grade class won.
I feel like you might be conflating social status and economics - you allude to having a robust floor while still having enough of a meritocracy that the strong will be rewarded for pushing things forward for everybody, which I wholeheartedly agree with. This works because economics is NOT zero sum - when the strong push things forward, with inventions or foundings or scientific advances, they grow the pie for everbody, and everyone is better off.
But that's economics, and most of your comment is about social status; "self respect" and having a place in the world. But the problem here is social status really IS zero sum. You're not going to get social status for doing stuff anyone can do, social status is apportioned to people for rarer attribute and accomplishments, definitionally, because it's zero sum and worse than that, apportioned according to power laws, and those power laws mean there's Taylor Swifts and Buffets and Musks, and "everbody elses," and that it's ever harder for average people to show up on any consensus social status radar anyone actually cares about.
Eh, I won't pretend it was a deeply thought out argument.
> You're not going to get social status for doing stuff anyone can do
It happens all the time. Think about why your local HR department endlessly organizes celebrations of random things. They're doing work anyone could do but (within their world) they obtain social status anyway via other mechanisms. Taylor Swift is a good singer and songwriter but lots of people can sing and write songs.
The idea social status is apportioned by the rarity of your accomplishments is a very masculine perspective, really. That's how men often judge each other, but women and feminized men will happily consider someone who achieved nothing but who is friendly/inoffensive to be higher status than someone who is being constantly proven right about unpopular takes. The hate the left dish out to Elon Musk is an extreme example of that but you see it all the time at a smaller scale too. Our world and especially the leftist world apportions social status to whoever engages in the most ostentatious displays of tribal loyalty, achievement has nothing to do with it.
> The idea social status is apportioned by the rarity of your accomplishments is a very masculine perspective, really.
Huh - yeah, I guess I spend nearly all my time in 90% male circles, both for work back when I worked, and in my hobbies and social life, and that's my default lens. I hadn't really thought about female social circle status, or to the extent I had, I was thinking of social media and Taylor Swift and things like that, which definitely run on rare attributes (hotness) and accomplishments (singing etc).
But you can't tell me those frames don't matter - for one thing, male status is what determines dating and mating outcomes, and both genders care a lot about those. This goes back to "consensus social radars" - it has to be true for a broad swath of people of both genders. Hotness? Works. Wealth? Yup. Occupational prestige? Yes. Rare level of talent? As long as they see it demonstrated or the worldly trappings, absolutely.
But basic niceness? No, you don't get consensus status for that. People might like you, but they're not going to in aggregate give you more of their attention or deference, and you're not certainly going to get the best mates just for being nice and average.
Your tribal loyalty point is an interesting one, and certainly it's important enough to be eating the world and polarizing our societies and politics more than ever (I personally think this is driven by power laws again, this time in the interaction of media and the omnipresent war for attention amongst all the over-optimized eyeball-time harvesters out there), but I don't think it's actually a source of consensus status again. It can only ever work in your tribe, and it's not even a particularly important one. Let's think among either side there - when it comes to who women want to date or marry, is it the firebrand loudmouths always protesting or ranting about stuff on podcasts, or is it the tall attractive guys with money and good jobs? It's pretty obviously the second, as long as they're in the tribe.
I think women care about status too? It's not adjudicated in the same way as for men, but I think it's a mistake to think women are egalitarian with each other.
as for Elon Musk. I think he has great achievements, but he's also objectively speaking not truth seeking and not great in many other ways and it's fair to say that.
> As civilization and consciousness develop we start to see human knowledge become more important, and the gods start penalizing low-agency behaviors like child sacrifice.
The buildup to this sounds a lot like René Girard but this conclusion does not and sounds new to me. I’m interested to hear more.
I gotta be honest I’ll take my equality as my consolation prize. I like my personal freedom, and I like crazy modern ideas like “women shouldn’t be violently subjugated because religious texts from thousands of years ago said its natural and divine.” Its scary to reckon with the fact that our social world and very reality is so changeable. But it is the truth, and the sheer number of different cultures and religions and languages that humans have developed over history prove it.
Anyone who needs structure and a grand cosmological moral narrative can turn to religion, and they often do. I am happy for them! And I’m happy that I’m not forced into it. Carrying the weight of the self can be a heavy burden, and there are plenty of places to put it down. Religion is a great place, but if its the only organizing force in society, it tends to forsake a lot of people in the process.
That being said, I don’t think its accurate to say the tradeoff for a meaningless secular world is equality. Plenty of religious cultures had some sort of belief in equality or adjacent ideas. Even the big dominating religions of today demand tithing as a leveling mechanism to help others.
I also don’t think secularism leads to meaninglessness. I am the counterexample - my life is full of meaning and beauty and I don’t desire a grand narrative or fate or place within the universe. Just a life of earthly pleasures like observing the seasons, swimming in a cold lake, laughing with my loved ones, sleeping easily after a day of labor. Dignity - whether that comes from secular morality or religion - is what I demand. And dignity does not feel like relegating someone to a low social class and then telling them it’s meaningful after death.
Anyway, thanks for the essay - its given me a lot to think about and I’m not even close to putting down these ideas.
The essay was not meant to be prescriptive. I am not sure myself what should be done about all this. Its goal was that of transmitting to others the "feelings" that I have regarding this in a way that was as compelling as I could.
> I also don’t think secularism leads to meaninglessness. I am the counterexample - my life is full of meaning and beauty and I don’t desire a grand narrative or fate or place within the universe. Just a life of earthly pleasures like observing the seasons, swimming in a cold lake, laughing with my loved ones, sleeping easily after a day of labor.
I am not sure what you do, but in the essay I "allow" for the fact that some people, especially those with meaningful jobs, can experience meaning in the modern world.
“The cosmos was not neutral or inert, but constantly impinging upon humans. Human beings were vulnerable to forces beyond them, open to both corruption and elevation by powers that exceeded their control. The boundaries between self and world were permeable.”
I think all of this remains true but we are blinded to it by what I call a socially maintained cosmic obliviousness that willfully draws our attention to the mundane and trivial from the cosmic mystery we still inhabit. What we need perhaps is for culture to catch up to our scientific understandings with something like a modern Stoicism that doesn’t draw a border between humans, the cosmos and the rest of nature — there you will find acknowledgments of our continuing brevity and smallness, a deterministic universe and virtue as the highest good (available to anyone including us losers).
All of this is facilitated by the Waking Up app which is a bit of irony (modern tech that re-enchants the world).
> Perhaps not coincidentally, the most intentionally mass-scale genocidal regimes took shape once the world had largely lost its confidence in God.
Well... the very same cultural developments (i.e., science and the Enlightenment) that precipitated secularism also enabled the industrial means of mass genocide. They share a common cause, rather than one begetting the other. In fact, my understanding is that the ancient DNA evidence paints a picture of widespread and frequent genocidal collisions between ethnic groups in Europe, stretching back before the Bronze Age, often in the form of eradicating the enemy males and abducting/absorbing their females. I don't think you can pin the impulse itself on the loss of confidence in God; perhaps, at most, our expanded means.
Maybe. I need to study this more (which is why I said perhaps) but I think I’ve read arguments suggesting that the regimes of the 20th century were uniquely intentional and different in nature from previous war efforts. I guess it's very hard to say how much of it was “ideological” versus “we can do this now”
Tribal legends are full of mass exterminations. The native American oral histories are overflowing with these, for example. Tribal societies were just mindblowingly violent and genocidal by modern standards.
At first it may appear that modern genocides have different scale and purpose. But scale is probably just a function of industrialization + a bigger population, I don't think it's that important or interesting. And the purpose only looks different initially.
Tribal genocides were driven by either the desire to capture all the resources, or vengeance in blood feuds. Warfare often had to end in genocide because there was no realistic way to control defeated tribe members who were left over, beyond slavery, and of course it's risky to use slaves who will be hellbent on revenge for the rest of their lives. So it defaulted to "kill all the men".
It seems that 20th century genocides were driven by far left ideology, which sounds different. But it's not really different. You can view them as tribal warfare but it takes a bit of squinting. The most obvious case is the Holocaust, which can be viewed as warfare against the Jewish tribe for blood feud reasons. De-kulakization was genocidal warfare against the fake made up tribe of kulaks in order to steal their farms. Etc.
In the 13th century, someone like Gengjhis Khan has to be charismatic enough to inspire tens of thousands of people to embark on wars of genocidal consequence that murdered hundreds of thousands.
In 2026, with nuclear weapons, all you would need is a madman and a few individuals who are simply willing to follow the chain of command to murder hundreds of millions.
Not sure inhabitants of what is now Latin America in the 16th-19th centuries would agree with you (spare a thought for the Tainos?). Or the Cathars in the 13th century? Going further back, I think Jehovah was definitely in favour of exterminating the Amalekites and Caananites.
Thought-provoking but I'd flip it: "enchantment" was a consolation prize for people living under unspeakable privation. Furthermore, it wasn't true: the world isn't enchanted, it never was, *and that matters*.
It wasn’t clear to me how much you think externalizing control is rational versus how much you see to believe in a sort of radical libertarianism where everyone is fully responsible for their station in life. At times you write as if it’s merely cope on the part of the “losers”, yet in truth they’re often correct to externalize control.
Successful people are usually smart and hardworking, but they’re not typically much smarter or harder working than many others who aren’t as successful. Luck, circumstance, and social structures do in fact play a large role in success. Being obsessed with the right things at the right time, or being embedded in the right social context, can be the difference between being “mediocre” and being “successful”. Even with limitations like mental illness or poverty, it’s easy to imagine a world where society does a better job helping people with these limitations and then some of them become capable of so much more than they are in this world.
Also, the egalitarian, externalizing of control mindset has obviously been good on net. Labor rights, the welfare state, the rule of law, and so on all emerge from this. We shouldn’t want to bring back the medieval mindset where people put up with being treated like shit because they felt it was parting some sacred plan.
It's a very subjective thing. Also, how much luck is self-made luck has changed a lot over the centuries.
Before the 17th century the world's richest people were basically always monarchs. They argued they had the mandate of God. It's pure good luck to be born a king and so it was reasonable for people to feel that success was cosmic.
By the 19th century the world's richest people are industrialists. They explicitly argued that they owed their position to being smarter and working harder, although perhaps in some cases it was debatable e.g. the rich factory owner who set up the factory using inherited money. You see a lot of drama during this time about "old money" vs "new money", driven by the social upheaval of this transition.
By 2000 the world's richest people and organizations were all industrial. But you could just about argue there was still an element of good luck. They were banks, oil companies, telco monopolies. Obviously these firms took a ton of hard work to create and run and obviously they delivered a lot of real value, but you could argue they were all somehow natural monopolies in which more or less anyone who owned the underlying asset could get rich. It took work but not necessarily being smart, or doing huge amounts of work. If you own an oil field even being kinda lazy will still result in a ton of money.
But post 2010 it's no longer possible to argue this at all. The world's richest companies and people are all technologists who started with zero natural assets and who did not have a natural monopoly. In a few cases it was a temporary self made monopoly due to network effects, but it was one anyone could have created. It is VERY HARD to argue that companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc did not reach the top by being the smartest and hardest working people. If that were not the case then why those guys and not someone else? Why did they all insist on intellectually challenging job interviews? Why do people so often identify the EU's culture of short hours as a cause for its lack of tech industry?
I think some people are still catching up to this new reality.
[Edit: deleted a section that doesn't make sense now I re-read what you wrote].
I think this ties in a lot with the IQism debate: when the smartest people overwhelmingly come from certain groups, is it fair to just laud them for their superior "market skills", or is it more fair to say that the fact they have the advantage of smartness to acquire those market skills is an unfair advantage? Many people still find it very hard to even accept IQ as a concept, despite much evidence that makes it very highly likely to be relevant to social status. But I think this debate will come more to the forefront, as opposed to the "just work hard" ideal
Bah, I am a secular progressive materialist and I have see many of the issues you touch on here being debated amongst my peer (indeed, you even cite Yglesias). This is indeed a valid critique of the most milquetoast versions of secular liberalism.
However, your entire argument is contingent upon an error, namely: you mistake secular liberalism for atheism (or even anti-theism). This conflation makes sense in the context of the terminally online, but step outside the narrow confines of social media and you'll see that the moral universe of the left is much more diverse than it appears.
Secular Liberalism is more concerned with the relationship between church and state than the existence of churches themselves. So many people forget that "the separation of church and state" protects religion from politics as much as the other way around. Religion (especially Christianity) is dirtied and corrupted when it becomes the basis for worldly rule (since the latter involves compromises that are corrosive to spiritual health).
There are no cosmological claims inherent in secular liberalism. It is merely the organizing principle that allows people of diffrent creeds and faiths to work together.
There is a large extent to which "providing meaning" is simply not the job of politics. I want people to have affordable Healtcare, so that someone on dialysis can spend that time thinking about these deeper questions (or talking with friends and family) rather than stressing out about how they'll afford to pay for their treatments.
It is NOT the job of the State to tell this dialysis patient whether she should seek her meaning from Buddhism, or if she should seek it from Christianity, or from Hinduism. That should be her own decision.
I am not really being prescriptive in this essay. As said in another comment, "I am not sure myself what should be done about all this. Its goal was that of transmitting to others the "feelings" that I have regarding this in a way that was as compelling as I could."
PS: To the extent that I agree with your argument here, I highly suspect we'll see at least a minor spiritual revival on the left at some point in the next decade or two. There's just something about how Talarico has resonated so strongly which suggests to me that there is an unaddressed appetite for this sort of stuff on the left.
I'm not sure if I simply disagree with this post or if I am just unclear about what exactly it is criticizing or trying to say.
"Equality" can mean many different things, but when I hear it discussed as a moral goal among modern progressives, it is usually in reference to correcting some group level inequality: racial inequalities, sex inequalities, class and wealth inequalities, and so on. Racial inequalities and sex inequalities are often framed as products of historic (and ongoing) oppressions, as you describe. I assume then that when you complain about the focus on equality in modern secular circles, this is what you're criticizing.
You seem to be arguing that correcting those inequalities is a pathetic and to some degree contemptible goal, one that exists to give meaning to the "losers" of society, those who, as you put it, may actually just "contribute less, matter less, and [be] less necessary" to society. In the past, those losers might have found meaning through some spiritual framework, but in our secular age that framework has been dismantled. So the losers need to find meaning somewhere else, and attacking inequality becomes a culture-wide moral goal, even though in your view this is actually a weak and pathetic consolation prize relative to the spiritual goods those losers might have had in a pre-modern past.
Now, I agree with some aspects of this view. 500 years ago, for example, if you were born in an "untouchable" caste in India, you might have internalized the idea that this was the will of the Gods and not worth fighting. You might have understood your social position as stemming from some grand theological plan, and you would have accepted that you had a lowly role in that plan.
Nowadays, of course, most observers would say that Hinduism is false. There is no God-given design of society that means that Brahmins in India should get all the wealth and untouchables should do all the dirty work. That means that the inequality between Brahmins and untouchables reflects a historic injustice, not a Godly design. Correcting that inequality then becomes an important goal, as with all the other inequalities I've mentioned.
Where I disagree with you is in the notion that this is somehow an impoverished or pathetic goal, or that the "losers" of society (the people affected by such inequalities) actually had a more rewarding life when they still believed in these religious/spiritual frameworks. The idea that people were in some sense better off when they believed some nonsensical religious framework that told them their own oppressed state was actually their proper role is incomprehensible to me. That strikes me as far less dignified than the modern state of affairs, where at least people have the potential to see clearly about their situation.
Correcting historic injustice also seems like one of the most important moral goals in any framework. What are some better ones supposed to be? You might be arguing that modern inequalities have nothing to do with those historic oppressions, and that modern inequalities are really the result of some people's intrinsic inferiority, which ought not be corrected. If this is the case, though, it seems like you see the focus on equality as simply the product of a mistaken empirical beliefs about the origins of inequalities, not as a misplaced moral goal in and of itself.
I think the moral frameworks of the 21st century have "equality" almost as an obsession. I also think we are somewhat past the point where we have ensured equality is ensured via law/ equal rights and we have gone into "equalizing outcomes" territory. Even if I do believe that there are still ways certain groups are disfavored even with equal rights (for example women in very high end professions), the "blunt" instruments that are employed today of social engineering reveal a deep obsession that imo is born out of this existential fear the loss of religion creates.
What do you think is a good example of this? Leftists are very concerned with things like racial inequalities in educational outcomes. But the idea that this is an an insignificant issue or a misplaced obsession doesn't make sense to me. Only about 10-20% of Black high school students are currently meeting or exceeding math proficiency standards, for instance. This is a really serious issue, and while I agree that leftists have often proposed unhelpful or counterproductive solutions to address those types of inequalities, they are still really important things to address.
It seems to me that we have a long way to go until we’ve redistributed luck in a way that gives as many people as possible a life of dignity — mainly in the form of money but also wrt to housing and medical care and innovation.
This was an excellent post, Ruxandra. I agree with everything it says. I just feel... I don't know what we can do with this? Like, I feel equality as a societal goal and the be-all-end-all of morality is a terrible path which has shown time and again that it leads to bad outcomes, but I can see how a more liberal, 'freedom, agency and work/success' path really has little to offer to lots of people. Myself, I tend to find a lot of meaning in truth-seeking, intellectual and aesthetic self-cultivation and a level of aurea mediocritas well-being in work and personal relationships, so I don't fall into either the old or the new of these dichotomies. But I can imagine my own path is as unlikely to be satisfactory to most people as the secular liberal one.
Yes, I can see how you could model that, i.e., just as in the Roman Empire you had elites which were mostly atheistic, a dead, official religion that just required going through the motions and new religious movements, the Mystery Religions, expanding among the plebs and one of them eventually conquering the elite. But I just feel this isn't replicable any more. The world has become very deeply secularized. I just fail to see how religious dogma and any specific religion could do such a memetic and ideological recapture of most society (and it won't work if just the poor go for it).
There's potential perhaps to design a religion instead of hoping one will evolve. A few years ago I was quite into this idea and even made a few attempts but didn't get very far.
A general philosophy can be carved out of Buddhist teachings obviating the need for any mystical or enchanted religious narrative. An understanding that the ego and the endless stream of noise it produces in our heads is an illusory construct can help to eliminate the need for the need for a sense of individual worth - whether cosmic or earthly - and doesn't require denial of scientific fact. Getting there though does require a kind of "faith" even if it isn't of the mystical sort, as it does require practice and endurance to realize.
This was a great, thought provoking read. Thank you.
Beautiful essay, though an obsession with equality and opposition to hierarchy is conventionally thought to be common in small-scale, traditional (and presumably religious) societies.
Maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong, but smaller scale societies (bands and tribes) are thought to abjure significant differences in resources or status. (The existence of gender hierarchy is contested.)
you mean hunter gatherers? I think it's hard for me to go back that far, but here I'm tracing how people deal with these things now vs say medieval times?
Yes, hunter-gatherers, but the thought was that if equality mattered so much for 290,000+ years of human history, then maybe its prominence now isn't explained by disenchantment in a secular age.
Then again, maybe you're inviting us to think that Christianity suppressed the obsession with equality and now it's returning.
Oh, I totally believe that the instinct for Equality is innate in the human species (but so is "admiration for the strong" or "hierarchy").
I think the question is why in different eras these instincts seem to take different relative intensities and emerge in different formats. The way I model this is that it's a mix of individual psychology and background culture (e.g. even today conservatives, who are also likely to have certain psychological traits, are less likely to be pro-equality)
Claude Levi Strauss writes in Tristes Tropiques that even remote Brazilian Amerindian tribes had "big men" who had more wives and status because of their hunting, storytelling or leadership qualities. Inequality existed among hunter-gatherers, but is obviously magnified by the rise of technology that enables larger scale societies.
I don't think there was much equality in hunter/gatherer bands. There was always a tribal leader and frequent fights over status. The concept of the alpha male comes from this kind of world (and advanced animals like tribes of apes show the same behavior).
Thought provoking, excellent essay. Made me think of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor who tells Jesus that freedom, i.,e., individual agency, is unsupportable for Man.
Ha! I really like the Grand Inquisitor. But haven't thought abt it this way. To me it was mostly about materialist & safe (bread) versus risky & spiritual. I guess there's a safe and spiritual vision I'm painting here and maybe the Grand Inquisitor included that
I thought of it because the GI blames Jesus for rejecting mystery and authority as well as bread. Turn the other cheek, etc. is a hard, perhaps impossible ethic to follow as an individual without authority.
Good essay. I would recommend Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the psychological and spiritual impacts of modernity.
I usually agree with your writing but this does not seem plausible. Apologies if this is a repetition. Two points:
(a) How do we explain the passion for equality amongst cultural elites (or, more accurately, hatred of inequality), and the seemingly 'problematic' views of non-elites in comparison?
(b) Relatedly: everyday ‘losers’ do not seem emotionally attached to abstract equality but prefer local forms of excellence - best in the village/online sub-community, nationalism, faith, and so on (‘higher purpose’, Scott Alexander: sane people want to provide some marginal value to the cosmos)
Why have Equality, Utility, and Vitality thrived? Perhaps because they can be quantified, which makes them appear objective, scaleable, and optimisable. In the same manner, they presuppose the thinnest of shared values.
Exactly why competing thick moral concepts, like Truth, Beauty, God, Virtue, Honesty, Courage &c, are disappearing is the real question, one we seem to have been circling around for over a century.
> Exactly why competing thick moral concepts, like Truth, Beauty, God, Virtue, Honesty, Courage &c, are disappearing is the real question, one we seem to have been circling around for over a century.
I've always thought that this was because we live in pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies that need to coordinate the actions of large and diverse groups of people, so you need the lowest common denominator of "law" and the 3 measurable ones, because anything else is too much of an inferential gap for everyone to get there.
Yes, the Romans. They accomplished this, along with keeping coherent notions of Truth Beauty, Virtus, etc. But you're not going to like how they did it - they did it because the Roman elite was <1k families with ancient and enduring roots that all educated their kids in the same schools, intermarried, had the same mores, etc. Because the ones running the Senate and being elected consul and later Emperor all had the same cultural background, they were able to maintain a consensus agreed-on definition of these thick concepts, and actually expected less adherence to them the broader you went in social circle, from patrician to "roman citizen" to non-citizens in Rome, to outlying provincials.
Broadly, you can't have a consensus moral / aesthetic compass with thick values unless you're a smaller homogenous group with common mores and shared familial and upbringing experiences. It's never going to work in a melting pot, and so here we are - at "law" and the 3 measurables.
I used to believe this as it is, more or less, what we are taught in high school geography where I come from.
However, historically pluralism and multi-ethnicity are neither sufficient nor necessary for the decline of thick values (although still causally relevant). The 'crisis of values' in the west can be seen clearly in the 1890s-1940s, well before large immigrant populations. E.g., secularisation, moral relativism, and the breakdown of traditional authority. Likewise, these trends can also be seen in societies with a single ethnic group enjoying hegemony (Scotland, New Zealand, Australia in the 1960s-1980s).
Equally, large multi-ethnic countries can maintain shared values - America prior to the 1960s is the obvious example, or Singapore and Switzerland today, although arguably they both conform to your Rome example.
What is doing the real work is your term 'melting pot' which is normative rather than descriptive. Your statement:
>I've always thought that this was because we (A) live in pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies that (B) need to coordinate the actions of large and diverse groups of people
Seems like a statement of neutral fact. (A) therefore (B) therefore No Thick Values. But really, it should be (P): pluralism and a multi-ethnic population are desirable and necessary -> (A) -> (B). Without (P), ethnic diversity will be limited (Denmark, Iceland, Japan, US pre-1960s); w/o (P), diversity, if present, will not be pluralistic (1920s America, modern Singapore, Ancient Rome).
I suspect 'pluralism' (in ethnic, class, or individual values), is not the inevitable, 'natural' result of modernity, but a specific policy decision of Anglo-American elites c. 1900-1960. But this is a tentative claim and needs more investigation.
> The 'crisis of values' in the west can be seen clearly in the 1890s-1940s, well before large immigrant populations. E.g., secularisation, moral relativism, and the breakdown of traditional authority.
Oh, interesting. Do you have a particular book or article you'd recommend here? I've actually never heard this argued.
1890's to 1940's is a loooooonngg way from what we consider the "breakdown of traditional authority" in the USA, which would be the sixties. 1940 was as "company man" and trad-conservative as possible. The working man with a stay at home wife and 2.5 kids and a car, and everyone was happy, or so goes the hagiography.
That's basically "the denouement of the industrial revolution," right? When all the changes in daily lives and jobs are really baked in, and right about when major time saving devices (vacuums, iceboxes, washing machines, etc) started getting adopted. It sounds like you're saying as life got easier, people lost moral meaning?
Something like "suffering really does build character?"
> But really, it should be (P): pluralism and a multi-ethnic population are desirable and necessary -> (A) -> (B).
I guess I'm not following your argument here on why pluralism and ethnic diversity are desirable and necessary?
Like what's the problem with Japan? It seems amazingly nice and well run, every time I've visited, which is many times at this point. Yes, they're going extinct, but so is every developed country, they're just hitting that train station a little sooner than everyone else.
And what's the problem with Singapore? How is it not pluralist? 4 major ethnic groups, 5 languages in the metro and everywhere public, used to have race riots but has been peaceful on that front for many decades. I guess you mean the government is dominated by ethnic Chinese? Well, they're 75% Chinese. Singapore has one of the most meritocratic and least corrupt political systems on earth, and also balance that with diversity, they have a Tamil president right now, and several Indian / Tamil / Malay ministers.
I'm personally not a big fan of normative, top-down mandates on how things should be, I'd honestly much prefer if more countries looked out at the world at what worked and move towards that. It's always "but the magnificent people of Uzbekistan / USA / Italy couldn't possibly, we're all unique snowflakes with completely different motivations and makeups," but no, everyone is basically the same and wants the same stuff, and it's politics' job to balance competing interest groups *but also* keep thinking about the future and what matters for preserving the factors that lead to a better future, which is where 98% of current politics falls down, it's all 100% short term thinking and elbow throwing to get that 1% edge, often in a way that impairs the future for everyone.
Here are a few - they only cover Britain though so I leave open America.
- The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–1960 — S. J. D. Green
- Periodizing Secularization: Religious Allegiance and Attendance in Britain, 1880–1945 — Clive D. Field
- The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880–1914 — Simon Heffer
I supplemented my reading of these with some histories of modernism in the arts (i.e., the crisis of representational and sincere artistic forms between the 1900s-1930s), and histories of particular 'outrider' groups whose secular, relativistic morality eventually became mainstream (Weimar sets, Bloomsbury).
I might also add that cultural relativism was pioneered by anthropologists between 1906-1930 referring primarily to foreign cultures rather than domestic minorities, with the culmination of their relativising efforts appearing in the American Anthropological Association AAA statement on Universal Human Rights in 1947.
All of this notwithstanding, I do see your point that the 1960s (and really the 1970s) saw these ideas go 'mainstream.' This is true both in Britain and America, with the 1950s and early 60s demonstrating high social trust and shared social (national) consensus a la Switzerland or Norway today. I would qualify this, however, by noting that in American and Britain, this consensus was fragile and the seeds planted in the interwar period were already showing signs of destabilising national consensus in the 50s. You could say the 1960s and 70s was simply bringing the gospel of relativism and pluralism to the masses.
>I guess I'm not following your argument here on why pluralism and ethnic diversity are desirable and necessary?
I see your confusion - I am not arguing they are. My point is descriptive. If one sees them as desirable and necessary then other consequences follow - but I do not see them as such myself.
> everyone is basically the same and wants the same stuff, and it's politics' job to balance competing interest groups
Note this is probably the main argument of the AAA 1947 statement as to why moral values are relative. In a line: 'biologically, man is one'; and the plethora of cultural forms we see in human culture therefore suggests there is no 'true' moral code for you: you could have believed anything if born elsewhere or in another time.
(In)famously, belief in biological oneness is not a view held by the Japanese, nor the Chinese, nor Lee Kuan Yew (and I suspect most Chinese Singaporeans). Scratch the surface and I think you'd find the same scepticism of racial equality in Norway and Switzerland.
Although this may appear an empirical question, it isn't. As the AAA note, believing in racial or cultural superiority is what led to colonialism, the crusades, and ethnic extermination. Given these extreme consequences, we cannot believe otherwise: humanity must be equal biologically, else Hitler will return.
>I'm personally not a big fan of normative, top-down mandates on how things should be
Me neither, although it is important not to conflate scepticism of social planning with cultural/moral relativism. A cultural conservative, for instance, might prefer more localistic, bottom-up politics whilst also adhering to thick notions of what is morally right/what the good life entails. The Swiss cantons are a good example given their extensive subsidiarity paired with ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
I'm 100% confident that all modern problems are downstream of the media environment. For a long time, it was the Printing Press. Which incentivized rationality, individuality, egalitarianism, and progress. I.e. Whiggism. The printing press quite literally "democratized" knowledge.
Though in recent decades, the virtue of "equality" was coopted by TV, which panders specifically to victimhood-flavored equality because it's universal and abstract and rhetorically defensible. Also, radio drove fascism and communism, because it panders to emotional volatility. When you're mad on the radio, you sound enthralling, like Hitler. When you're mad on TV, you look sweaty, like Nixon.
Hegel had the Zeitgeist of Print Culture, Antonio Gramsci had the Cultural Hegemony of Radio, David Foster Wallace had the Cult of Personality of TV, and now Zoomers have the Brainrot of The Algo. It's easy to transmit thick values through meatspace, but hard to transmit them through inkspace or cyberspace.
The Cultural Elites are the earliest adopters of technology, including communication mediums. They're elite, and therefore the literati, and therefore are the most desperate to virtue signal their compliance with the zeitgeist of the medium.
Okay, if that is so, how do you explain the wildly different use of media by populations of different countries. E.g., Switzerland, Norway, Japan, and so on.
Sorry, I don't know enough about Switzerland/Norway/Japan to immediately know what you're gesturing at. Is there a specific phenomenon you're referring to? Or just a broad difference in cultural norms.
Assuming it's the latter: I do tend to think that there's inertial effects. E.g. I'm under the impression that Mormons have resisted the effects of secularization, though it was a buffering effect rather than an immunizing effect. And Catholics largely resisted Protestantization until Vatican II in the 1960's. The effects of media represent a consistent pressure on Brownian Motion. And institutions instill a ratcheting effect.
> in Canudos, each person occupies a place, and that place, however lowly, is intelligible within a sacred whole.
Frank Herbert in Dune, describing the social order of the Imperium, nicely sums this kind of arrangement in a single motto: "A place for every man and every man in his place."
Equality is not only a sterile and pathetic consolation prize; it is an empty one to boot! See Peter Westen's famous article from the 1980s on "The Empty Idea of Equality": https://www.jstor.org/stable/1340593
This is a truly remarkable essay. Astonishing, even. I'm sure I'll still be thinking about this argument years from now. There have only been a few times in the past where I read something that instantly illuminated some hitherto dark corner of our collective psychology, and this was one of them. Thanks so much for writing it, Ruxandra.
The internal/external locus of control has been picked up before as being a part of the psychology of leftism, along with several psychological disorders. Believing that your life is just a sequence of events managed by the gods is surely comforting for the weak, but it also neutralizes those who could have been strong and creates a lot of dysfunctional behaviors (in the limit, it creates things like child sacrifice). Even basic things like personal hygiene don't make sense if you view epidemics as a random dice roll from the heavens. And I doubt you can mount the kind of intensity and long term planning capacity we see in men like Elon Musk if your culture thinks outcomes are already decided by fate. It's surely not a coincidence that after millennia of stagnation capital-p Progress kicked off only once people became secular.
There are some connections here to my own most recent essay, "Leftism is just ancient instincts". https://penbroke.substack.com/p/leftist-behavior-is-just-ancient
I don't cover the equality drive (which is a weakness of the essay), but do argue that a lot of modern far left behavior that looks irrational would have been rational in the tribal world we evolved in. For example, tribal gods aren't concerned with honesty at all. It isn't until the start of proper trade networks around ancient Egyptian times that we begin to see gods who punish dishonesty in the afterlife. Tribal gods are however very concerned with the accurate following of ritual. This makes sense: ancient tribes are at the mercy of many forces they don't understand and can't control like weather, tectonic activity, volcanoes, the luck of the hunt. A very external locus of control is just realistic and probably required for keeping morale up, but that forces them to encode learned knowledge as rituals supplied by the gods. It can't be, "I figured out how to make manioc edible, follow my instructions and you will survive", it has to be "the holy ritual has these steps and the gods will punish you if you don't follow their instructions". As civilization and consciousness develop we start to see human knowledge become more important, and the gods start penalizing low-agency behaviors like child sacrifice.
So many big questions posed by this. The biggest being, what to do about it?
It's possible that there is just no solution here. Reassuring the weak / benefiting from the efforts of the strong seem to be fundamentally in tension. The more your culture validates being a loser, the less motivation there is to become a winner. E.g. fat shaming is a healthy social behavior because being fat is bad for people; if such people view their condition as outside their control (it's the evil food corporations that did it to me!) then they can't take the necessary steps to become healthier.
So perhaps the best way to view it is that the healthiest society is one that creates enough opportunities for everyone to 'win' on their own terms, to win social status via activities that are hard to lose at. Our society has many such mechanisms already. The huge praise given to jobs for which there's unlimited demand, like entertainers, is just one of those. The prevalence of "fake email jobs" might be another. It becomes an optimization problem. Can society generate so many roles at which it's impossible to lose that everyone can feel self respect and like they have a place in the world, without diverting too many resources away from the strong who genuinely push things forward?
Thank you, that's very kind! (I also found it funny how you said it's not my usual fare).
Regarding the Elon Musk observation. I wanted to include in the essay that the modern world is variance maximizing. The flip side to responsibility for failure is attribution of success also to the individual. And a sense that there's nobody above the individual? Maybe that's why we seek to bring down powerful individuals. It's unwise to defer to one human in all things and in the absence of a metaphysics that places something higher above man, we are left uncovered and unable to articulate why we should not listen to this uber succesfull human being in all matters?
Most don't try and bring down successful individuals. I'd guess only about 25% of the population have this kind of equalitarian quasi-tribal instinct, and the rest don't think about "captains of industry" much at all. And when they do they have respect for their achievements.
This becomes clearer when we look at the targets. A lot of the hate towards successful individuals is restricted to merchants, which is probably a result of zero sum thinking (something adaptive in tribal societies and which I _do_ address in my essay). If you look at highly successful individuals who aren't traders or industrialists then the disrespect vanishes even on the left, and their success is celebrated by all. A good example would be Taylor Swift. People have an easier time understanding why she's successful, and so she doesn't get ideological hatred in the same way rich CEOs do. Even people who are really down on their luck don't feel resentment towards rich actors or pop stars.
I don't see too much hatred towards Warren Buffett. There are good reasons for directing animus towards people like Elon.
It's out there.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/03/berkshire-hathaway-general-meeting-warren-buffet-wisdom
"There's no doubt Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger are great investors, but they can also make you queasy"
And that was written by a Berkshire shareholder no less!
But hate against Buffett is normally in the background noise of hate against all capitalists.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/feb/23/privateequity1
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/feb/11/workandcareers.politics
The left don't pick on Buffett often because he's careful to kowtow, by saying things they like even though he knows he's lying. See the year he declared derivatives to be "financial weapons of mass destruction" and then shortly after took out $37bn of puts. Or how he claimed taxes should be higher on the super wealthy, but he didn't donate all his wealth to the Treasury (something they'd accept).
There aren't any good reasons to hate Elon. He's just a businessman. The left hate him because he is one of the only rich people who proved immune to their emotional blackmail and pressure tactics, but that's not a _good_ reason. It's just their cries of frustration at discovering limits to their own powers.
> So perhaps the best way to view it is that the healthiest society is one that creates enough opportunities for everyone to 'win' on their own terms, to win social status via activities that are hard to lose at.
Great comment, but haven't you just pointed out that there's tension here?
You don't get status for things that are "hard to lose at." Things anyone can do aren't admirable, full stop.
Nobody is getting admired for having a "fake email job," or winning the same trophy the entire fourth grade class won.
I feel like you might be conflating social status and economics - you allude to having a robust floor while still having enough of a meritocracy that the strong will be rewarded for pushing things forward for everybody, which I wholeheartedly agree with. This works because economics is NOT zero sum - when the strong push things forward, with inventions or foundings or scientific advances, they grow the pie for everbody, and everyone is better off.
But that's economics, and most of your comment is about social status; "self respect" and having a place in the world. But the problem here is social status really IS zero sum. You're not going to get social status for doing stuff anyone can do, social status is apportioned to people for rarer attribute and accomplishments, definitionally, because it's zero sum and worse than that, apportioned according to power laws, and those power laws mean there's Taylor Swifts and Buffets and Musks, and "everbody elses," and that it's ever harder for average people to show up on any consensus social status radar anyone actually cares about.
Eh, I won't pretend it was a deeply thought out argument.
> You're not going to get social status for doing stuff anyone can do
It happens all the time. Think about why your local HR department endlessly organizes celebrations of random things. They're doing work anyone could do but (within their world) they obtain social status anyway via other mechanisms. Taylor Swift is a good singer and songwriter but lots of people can sing and write songs.
The idea social status is apportioned by the rarity of your accomplishments is a very masculine perspective, really. That's how men often judge each other, but women and feminized men will happily consider someone who achieved nothing but who is friendly/inoffensive to be higher status than someone who is being constantly proven right about unpopular takes. The hate the left dish out to Elon Musk is an extreme example of that but you see it all the time at a smaller scale too. Our world and especially the leftist world apportions social status to whoever engages in the most ostentatious displays of tribal loyalty, achievement has nothing to do with it.
> The idea social status is apportioned by the rarity of your accomplishments is a very masculine perspective, really.
Huh - yeah, I guess I spend nearly all my time in 90% male circles, both for work back when I worked, and in my hobbies and social life, and that's my default lens. I hadn't really thought about female social circle status, or to the extent I had, I was thinking of social media and Taylor Swift and things like that, which definitely run on rare attributes (hotness) and accomplishments (singing etc).
But you can't tell me those frames don't matter - for one thing, male status is what determines dating and mating outcomes, and both genders care a lot about those. This goes back to "consensus social radars" - it has to be true for a broad swath of people of both genders. Hotness? Works. Wealth? Yup. Occupational prestige? Yes. Rare level of talent? As long as they see it demonstrated or the worldly trappings, absolutely.
But basic niceness? No, you don't get consensus status for that. People might like you, but they're not going to in aggregate give you more of their attention or deference, and you're not certainly going to get the best mates just for being nice and average.
Your tribal loyalty point is an interesting one, and certainly it's important enough to be eating the world and polarizing our societies and politics more than ever (I personally think this is driven by power laws again, this time in the interaction of media and the omnipresent war for attention amongst all the over-optimized eyeball-time harvesters out there), but I don't think it's actually a source of consensus status again. It can only ever work in your tribe, and it's not even a particularly important one. Let's think among either side there - when it comes to who women want to date or marry, is it the firebrand loudmouths always protesting or ranting about stuff on podcasts, or is it the tall attractive guys with money and good jobs? It's pretty obviously the second, as long as they're in the tribe.
I think women care about status too? It's not adjudicated in the same way as for men, but I think it's a mistake to think women are egalitarian with each other.
as for Elon Musk. I think he has great achievements, but he's also objectively speaking not truth seeking and not great in many other ways and it's fair to say that.
Have you written about this?
> As civilization and consciousness develop we start to see human knowledge become more important, and the gods start penalizing low-agency behaviors like child sacrifice.
The buildup to this sounds a lot like René Girard but this conclusion does not and sounds new to me. I’m interested to hear more.
The essay I link to discusses this in a bit more detail. Beyond that, I haven't written more.
I gotta be honest I’ll take my equality as my consolation prize. I like my personal freedom, and I like crazy modern ideas like “women shouldn’t be violently subjugated because religious texts from thousands of years ago said its natural and divine.” Its scary to reckon with the fact that our social world and very reality is so changeable. But it is the truth, and the sheer number of different cultures and religions and languages that humans have developed over history prove it.
Anyone who needs structure and a grand cosmological moral narrative can turn to religion, and they often do. I am happy for them! And I’m happy that I’m not forced into it. Carrying the weight of the self can be a heavy burden, and there are plenty of places to put it down. Religion is a great place, but if its the only organizing force in society, it tends to forsake a lot of people in the process.
That being said, I don’t think its accurate to say the tradeoff for a meaningless secular world is equality. Plenty of religious cultures had some sort of belief in equality or adjacent ideas. Even the big dominating religions of today demand tithing as a leveling mechanism to help others.
I also don’t think secularism leads to meaninglessness. I am the counterexample - my life is full of meaning and beauty and I don’t desire a grand narrative or fate or place within the universe. Just a life of earthly pleasures like observing the seasons, swimming in a cold lake, laughing with my loved ones, sleeping easily after a day of labor. Dignity - whether that comes from secular morality or religion - is what I demand. And dignity does not feel like relegating someone to a low social class and then telling them it’s meaningful after death.
Anyway, thanks for the essay - its given me a lot to think about and I’m not even close to putting down these ideas.
The essay was not meant to be prescriptive. I am not sure myself what should be done about all this. Its goal was that of transmitting to others the "feelings" that I have regarding this in a way that was as compelling as I could.
> I also don’t think secularism leads to meaninglessness. I am the counterexample - my life is full of meaning and beauty and I don’t desire a grand narrative or fate or place within the universe. Just a life of earthly pleasures like observing the seasons, swimming in a cold lake, laughing with my loved ones, sleeping easily after a day of labor.
I am not sure what you do, but in the essay I "allow" for the fact that some people, especially those with meaningful jobs, can experience meaning in the modern world.
“The cosmos was not neutral or inert, but constantly impinging upon humans. Human beings were vulnerable to forces beyond them, open to both corruption and elevation by powers that exceeded their control. The boundaries between self and world were permeable.”
I think all of this remains true but we are blinded to it by what I call a socially maintained cosmic obliviousness that willfully draws our attention to the mundane and trivial from the cosmic mystery we still inhabit. What we need perhaps is for culture to catch up to our scientific understandings with something like a modern Stoicism that doesn’t draw a border between humans, the cosmos and the rest of nature — there you will find acknowledgments of our continuing brevity and smallness, a deterministic universe and virtue as the highest good (available to anyone including us losers).
All of this is facilitated by the Waking Up app which is a bit of irony (modern tech that re-enchants the world).
> Perhaps not coincidentally, the most intentionally mass-scale genocidal regimes took shape once the world had largely lost its confidence in God.
Well... the very same cultural developments (i.e., science and the Enlightenment) that precipitated secularism also enabled the industrial means of mass genocide. They share a common cause, rather than one begetting the other. In fact, my understanding is that the ancient DNA evidence paints a picture of widespread and frequent genocidal collisions between ethnic groups in Europe, stretching back before the Bronze Age, often in the form of eradicating the enemy males and abducting/absorbing their females. I don't think you can pin the impulse itself on the loss of confidence in God; perhaps, at most, our expanded means.
Maybe. I need to study this more (which is why I said perhaps) but I think I’ve read arguments suggesting that the regimes of the 20th century were uniquely intentional and different in nature from previous war efforts. I guess it's very hard to say how much of it was “ideological” versus “we can do this now”
They were different yes but only on the surface.
Tribal legends are full of mass exterminations. The native American oral histories are overflowing with these, for example. Tribal societies were just mindblowingly violent and genocidal by modern standards.
At first it may appear that modern genocides have different scale and purpose. But scale is probably just a function of industrialization + a bigger population, I don't think it's that important or interesting. And the purpose only looks different initially.
Tribal genocides were driven by either the desire to capture all the resources, or vengeance in blood feuds. Warfare often had to end in genocide because there was no realistic way to control defeated tribe members who were left over, beyond slavery, and of course it's risky to use slaves who will be hellbent on revenge for the rest of their lives. So it defaulted to "kill all the men".
It seems that 20th century genocides were driven by far left ideology, which sounds different. But it's not really different. You can view them as tribal warfare but it takes a bit of squinting. The most obvious case is the Holocaust, which can be viewed as warfare against the Jewish tribe for blood feud reasons. De-kulakization was genocidal warfare against the fake made up tribe of kulaks in order to steal their farms. Etc.
I think the notion "we can do this now" is key.
In the 13th century, someone like Gengjhis Khan has to be charismatic enough to inspire tens of thousands of people to embark on wars of genocidal consequence that murdered hundreds of thousands.
In 2026, with nuclear weapons, all you would need is a madman and a few individuals who are simply willing to follow the chain of command to murder hundreds of millions.
Not sure inhabitants of what is now Latin America in the 16th-19th centuries would agree with you (spare a thought for the Tainos?). Or the Cathars in the 13th century? Going further back, I think Jehovah was definitely in favour of exterminating the Amalekites and Caananites.
Thought-provoking but I'd flip it: "enchantment" was a consolation prize for people living under unspeakable privation. Furthermore, it wasn't true: the world isn't enchanted, it never was, *and that matters*.
It wasn’t clear to me how much you think externalizing control is rational versus how much you see to believe in a sort of radical libertarianism where everyone is fully responsible for their station in life. At times you write as if it’s merely cope on the part of the “losers”, yet in truth they’re often correct to externalize control.
Successful people are usually smart and hardworking, but they’re not typically much smarter or harder working than many others who aren’t as successful. Luck, circumstance, and social structures do in fact play a large role in success. Being obsessed with the right things at the right time, or being embedded in the right social context, can be the difference between being “mediocre” and being “successful”. Even with limitations like mental illness or poverty, it’s easy to imagine a world where society does a better job helping people with these limitations and then some of them become capable of so much more than they are in this world.
Also, the egalitarian, externalizing of control mindset has obviously been good on net. Labor rights, the welfare state, the rule of law, and so on all emerge from this. We shouldn’t want to bring back the medieval mindset where people put up with being treated like shit because they felt it was parting some sacred plan.
It's a very subjective thing. Also, how much luck is self-made luck has changed a lot over the centuries.
Before the 17th century the world's richest people were basically always monarchs. They argued they had the mandate of God. It's pure good luck to be born a king and so it was reasonable for people to feel that success was cosmic.
By the 19th century the world's richest people are industrialists. They explicitly argued that they owed their position to being smarter and working harder, although perhaps in some cases it was debatable e.g. the rich factory owner who set up the factory using inherited money. You see a lot of drama during this time about "old money" vs "new money", driven by the social upheaval of this transition.
By 2000 the world's richest people and organizations were all industrial. But you could just about argue there was still an element of good luck. They were banks, oil companies, telco monopolies. Obviously these firms took a ton of hard work to create and run and obviously they delivered a lot of real value, but you could argue they were all somehow natural monopolies in which more or less anyone who owned the underlying asset could get rich. It took work but not necessarily being smart, or doing huge amounts of work. If you own an oil field even being kinda lazy will still result in a ton of money.
But post 2010 it's no longer possible to argue this at all. The world's richest companies and people are all technologists who started with zero natural assets and who did not have a natural monopoly. In a few cases it was a temporary self made monopoly due to network effects, but it was one anyone could have created. It is VERY HARD to argue that companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc did not reach the top by being the smartest and hardest working people. If that were not the case then why those guys and not someone else? Why did they all insist on intellectually challenging job interviews? Why do people so often identify the EU's culture of short hours as a cause for its lack of tech industry?
I think some people are still catching up to this new reality.
[Edit: deleted a section that doesn't make sense now I re-read what you wrote].
I think this ties in a lot with the IQism debate: when the smartest people overwhelmingly come from certain groups, is it fair to just laud them for their superior "market skills", or is it more fair to say that the fact they have the advantage of smartness to acquire those market skills is an unfair advantage? Many people still find it very hard to even accept IQ as a concept, despite much evidence that makes it very highly likely to be relevant to social status. But I think this debate will come more to the forefront, as opposed to the "just work hard" ideal
Nicely put.
Bah, I am a secular progressive materialist and I have see many of the issues you touch on here being debated amongst my peer (indeed, you even cite Yglesias). This is indeed a valid critique of the most milquetoast versions of secular liberalism.
However, your entire argument is contingent upon an error, namely: you mistake secular liberalism for atheism (or even anti-theism). This conflation makes sense in the context of the terminally online, but step outside the narrow confines of social media and you'll see that the moral universe of the left is much more diverse than it appears.
Secular Liberalism is more concerned with the relationship between church and state than the existence of churches themselves. So many people forget that "the separation of church and state" protects religion from politics as much as the other way around. Religion (especially Christianity) is dirtied and corrupted when it becomes the basis for worldly rule (since the latter involves compromises that are corrosive to spiritual health).
There are no cosmological claims inherent in secular liberalism. It is merely the organizing principle that allows people of diffrent creeds and faiths to work together.
There is a large extent to which "providing meaning" is simply not the job of politics. I want people to have affordable Healtcare, so that someone on dialysis can spend that time thinking about these deeper questions (or talking with friends and family) rather than stressing out about how they'll afford to pay for their treatments.
It is NOT the job of the State to tell this dialysis patient whether she should seek her meaning from Buddhism, or if she should seek it from Christianity, or from Hinduism. That should be her own decision.
I am not really being prescriptive in this essay. As said in another comment, "I am not sure myself what should be done about all this. Its goal was that of transmitting to others the "feelings" that I have regarding this in a way that was as compelling as I could."
PS: To the extent that I agree with your argument here, I highly suspect we'll see at least a minor spiritual revival on the left at some point in the next decade or two. There's just something about how Talarico has resonated so strongly which suggests to me that there is an unaddressed appetite for this sort of stuff on the left.
I'm not sure if I simply disagree with this post or if I am just unclear about what exactly it is criticizing or trying to say.
"Equality" can mean many different things, but when I hear it discussed as a moral goal among modern progressives, it is usually in reference to correcting some group level inequality: racial inequalities, sex inequalities, class and wealth inequalities, and so on. Racial inequalities and sex inequalities are often framed as products of historic (and ongoing) oppressions, as you describe. I assume then that when you complain about the focus on equality in modern secular circles, this is what you're criticizing.
You seem to be arguing that correcting those inequalities is a pathetic and to some degree contemptible goal, one that exists to give meaning to the "losers" of society, those who, as you put it, may actually just "contribute less, matter less, and [be] less necessary" to society. In the past, those losers might have found meaning through some spiritual framework, but in our secular age that framework has been dismantled. So the losers need to find meaning somewhere else, and attacking inequality becomes a culture-wide moral goal, even though in your view this is actually a weak and pathetic consolation prize relative to the spiritual goods those losers might have had in a pre-modern past.
Now, I agree with some aspects of this view. 500 years ago, for example, if you were born in an "untouchable" caste in India, you might have internalized the idea that this was the will of the Gods and not worth fighting. You might have understood your social position as stemming from some grand theological plan, and you would have accepted that you had a lowly role in that plan.
Nowadays, of course, most observers would say that Hinduism is false. There is no God-given design of society that means that Brahmins in India should get all the wealth and untouchables should do all the dirty work. That means that the inequality between Brahmins and untouchables reflects a historic injustice, not a Godly design. Correcting that inequality then becomes an important goal, as with all the other inequalities I've mentioned.
Where I disagree with you is in the notion that this is somehow an impoverished or pathetic goal, or that the "losers" of society (the people affected by such inequalities) actually had a more rewarding life when they still believed in these religious/spiritual frameworks. The idea that people were in some sense better off when they believed some nonsensical religious framework that told them their own oppressed state was actually their proper role is incomprehensible to me. That strikes me as far less dignified than the modern state of affairs, where at least people have the potential to see clearly about their situation.
Correcting historic injustice also seems like one of the most important moral goals in any framework. What are some better ones supposed to be? You might be arguing that modern inequalities have nothing to do with those historic oppressions, and that modern inequalities are really the result of some people's intrinsic inferiority, which ought not be corrected. If this is the case, though, it seems like you see the focus on equality as simply the product of a mistaken empirical beliefs about the origins of inequalities, not as a misplaced moral goal in and of itself.
I think the moral frameworks of the 21st century have "equality" almost as an obsession. I also think we are somewhat past the point where we have ensured equality is ensured via law/ equal rights and we have gone into "equalizing outcomes" territory. Even if I do believe that there are still ways certain groups are disfavored even with equal rights (for example women in very high end professions), the "blunt" instruments that are employed today of social engineering reveal a deep obsession that imo is born out of this existential fear the loss of religion creates.
What do you think is a good example of this? Leftists are very concerned with things like racial inequalities in educational outcomes. But the idea that this is an an insignificant issue or a misplaced obsession doesn't make sense to me. Only about 10-20% of Black high school students are currently meeting or exceeding math proficiency standards, for instance. This is a really serious issue, and while I agree that leftists have often proposed unhelpful or counterproductive solutions to address those types of inequalities, they are still really important things to address.
It seems to me that we have a long way to go until we’ve redistributed luck in a way that gives as many people as possible a life of dignity — mainly in the form of money but also wrt to housing and medical care and innovation.
This was an excellent post, Ruxandra. I agree with everything it says. I just feel... I don't know what we can do with this? Like, I feel equality as a societal goal and the be-all-end-all of morality is a terrible path which has shown time and again that it leads to bad outcomes, but I can see how a more liberal, 'freedom, agency and work/success' path really has little to offer to lots of people. Myself, I tend to find a lot of meaning in truth-seeking, intellectual and aesthetic self-cultivation and a level of aurea mediocritas well-being in work and personal relationships, so I don't fall into either the old or the new of these dichotomies. But I can imagine my own path is as unlikely to be satisfactory to most people as the secular liberal one.
Thank you!
Well, I don’t have a good answer myself, which is part of why I didn’t want to write this at first. Yet it does seem like it needs to be said?
To me it seems like maybe religion is the answer?
but this is very tentative
Yes, I can see how you could model that, i.e., just as in the Roman Empire you had elites which were mostly atheistic, a dead, official religion that just required going through the motions and new religious movements, the Mystery Religions, expanding among the plebs and one of them eventually conquering the elite. But I just feel this isn't replicable any more. The world has become very deeply secularized. I just fail to see how religious dogma and any specific religion could do such a memetic and ideological recapture of most society (and it won't work if just the poor go for it).
Yes I think you're probably right :( Not sure. I know it sounds cringe and sterile but... recreate community?
Sorry if I am being pedantic, but I thought quite a few Roman elites also went in for the mystery religions?
The "flaky rich woman who won't shut up about Isis" was not unknown, even then.
Well, I do not disagree. Where do you think there is a disagreement with what I am saying?
I was referring to Manuel Del Rio's comment concerning Roman religion and mystery cults.
There's potential perhaps to design a religion instead of hoping one will evolve. A few years ago I was quite into this idea and even made a few attempts but didn't get very far.
A general philosophy can be carved out of Buddhist teachings obviating the need for any mystical or enchanted religious narrative. An understanding that the ego and the endless stream of noise it produces in our heads is an illusory construct can help to eliminate the need for the need for a sense of individual worth - whether cosmic or earthly - and doesn't require denial of scientific fact. Getting there though does require a kind of "faith" even if it isn't of the mystical sort, as it does require practice and endurance to realize.
This was a great, thought provoking read. Thank you.
Beautiful essay, though an obsession with equality and opposition to hierarchy is conventionally thought to be common in small-scale, traditional (and presumably religious) societies.
my understanding is that it's more about fitting into one's place and not being out of step? Weren't traditional societies quite hierarchical?
Maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong, but smaller scale societies (bands and tribes) are thought to abjure significant differences in resources or status. (The existence of gender hierarchy is contested.)
you mean hunter gatherers? I think it's hard for me to go back that far, but here I'm tracing how people deal with these things now vs say medieval times?
I think in a medieval society, peasants were quite hierarchically structured?
Yes, hunter-gatherers, but the thought was that if equality mattered so much for 290,000+ years of human history, then maybe its prominence now isn't explained by disenchantment in a secular age.
Then again, maybe you're inviting us to think that Christianity suppressed the obsession with equality and now it's returning.
Oh, I totally believe that the instinct for Equality is innate in the human species (but so is "admiration for the strong" or "hierarchy").
I think the question is why in different eras these instincts seem to take different relative intensities and emerge in different formats. The way I model this is that it's a mix of individual psychology and background culture (e.g. even today conservatives, who are also likely to have certain psychological traits, are less likely to be pro-equality)
Claude Levi Strauss writes in Tristes Tropiques that even remote Brazilian Amerindian tribes had "big men" who had more wives and status because of their hunting, storytelling or leadership qualities. Inequality existed among hunter-gatherers, but is obviously magnified by the rise of technology that enables larger scale societies.
I don't think there was much equality in hunter/gatherer bands. There was always a tribal leader and frequent fights over status. The concept of the alpha male comes from this kind of world (and advanced animals like tribes of apes show the same behavior).
Thought provoking, excellent essay. Made me think of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor who tells Jesus that freedom, i.,e., individual agency, is unsupportable for Man.
Ha! I really like the Grand Inquisitor. But haven't thought abt it this way. To me it was mostly about materialist & safe (bread) versus risky & spiritual. I guess there's a safe and spiritual vision I'm painting here and maybe the Grand Inquisitor included that
I thought of it because the GI blames Jesus for rejecting mystery and authority as well as bread. Turn the other cheek, etc. is a hard, perhaps impossible ethic to follow as an individual without authority.
Good essay. I would recommend Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the psychological and spiritual impacts of modernity.
Thank you
I usually agree with your writing but this does not seem plausible. Apologies if this is a repetition. Two points:
(a) How do we explain the passion for equality amongst cultural elites (or, more accurately, hatred of inequality), and the seemingly 'problematic' views of non-elites in comparison?
(b) Relatedly: everyday ‘losers’ do not seem emotionally attached to abstract equality but prefer local forms of excellence - best in the village/online sub-community, nationalism, faith, and so on (‘higher purpose’, Scott Alexander: sane people want to provide some marginal value to the cosmos)
Why have Equality, Utility, and Vitality thrived? Perhaps because they can be quantified, which makes them appear objective, scaleable, and optimisable. In the same manner, they presuppose the thinnest of shared values.
Exactly why competing thick moral concepts, like Truth, Beauty, God, Virtue, Honesty, Courage &c, are disappearing is the real question, one we seem to have been circling around for over a century.
> Exactly why competing thick moral concepts, like Truth, Beauty, God, Virtue, Honesty, Courage &c, are disappearing is the real question, one we seem to have been circling around for over a century.
I've always thought that this was because we live in pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies that need to coordinate the actions of large and diverse groups of people, so you need the lowest common denominator of "law" and the 3 measurable ones, because anything else is too much of an inferential gap for everyone to get there.
Yes, the Romans. They accomplished this, along with keeping coherent notions of Truth Beauty, Virtus, etc. But you're not going to like how they did it - they did it because the Roman elite was <1k families with ancient and enduring roots that all educated their kids in the same schools, intermarried, had the same mores, etc. Because the ones running the Senate and being elected consul and later Emperor all had the same cultural background, they were able to maintain a consensus agreed-on definition of these thick concepts, and actually expected less adherence to them the broader you went in social circle, from patrician to "roman citizen" to non-citizens in Rome, to outlying provincials.
Broadly, you can't have a consensus moral / aesthetic compass with thick values unless you're a smaller homogenous group with common mores and shared familial and upbringing experiences. It's never going to work in a melting pot, and so here we are - at "law" and the 3 measurables.
I used to believe this as it is, more or less, what we are taught in high school geography where I come from.
However, historically pluralism and multi-ethnicity are neither sufficient nor necessary for the decline of thick values (although still causally relevant). The 'crisis of values' in the west can be seen clearly in the 1890s-1940s, well before large immigrant populations. E.g., secularisation, moral relativism, and the breakdown of traditional authority. Likewise, these trends can also be seen in societies with a single ethnic group enjoying hegemony (Scotland, New Zealand, Australia in the 1960s-1980s).
Equally, large multi-ethnic countries can maintain shared values - America prior to the 1960s is the obvious example, or Singapore and Switzerland today, although arguably they both conform to your Rome example.
What is doing the real work is your term 'melting pot' which is normative rather than descriptive. Your statement:
>I've always thought that this was because we (A) live in pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies that (B) need to coordinate the actions of large and diverse groups of people
Seems like a statement of neutral fact. (A) therefore (B) therefore No Thick Values. But really, it should be (P): pluralism and a multi-ethnic population are desirable and necessary -> (A) -> (B). Without (P), ethnic diversity will be limited (Denmark, Iceland, Japan, US pre-1960s); w/o (P), diversity, if present, will not be pluralistic (1920s America, modern Singapore, Ancient Rome).
I suspect 'pluralism' (in ethnic, class, or individual values), is not the inevitable, 'natural' result of modernity, but a specific policy decision of Anglo-American elites c. 1900-1960. But this is a tentative claim and needs more investigation.
> The 'crisis of values' in the west can be seen clearly in the 1890s-1940s, well before large immigrant populations. E.g., secularisation, moral relativism, and the breakdown of traditional authority.
Oh, interesting. Do you have a particular book or article you'd recommend here? I've actually never heard this argued.
1890's to 1940's is a loooooonngg way from what we consider the "breakdown of traditional authority" in the USA, which would be the sixties. 1940 was as "company man" and trad-conservative as possible. The working man with a stay at home wife and 2.5 kids and a car, and everyone was happy, or so goes the hagiography.
That's basically "the denouement of the industrial revolution," right? When all the changes in daily lives and jobs are really baked in, and right about when major time saving devices (vacuums, iceboxes, washing machines, etc) started getting adopted. It sounds like you're saying as life got easier, people lost moral meaning?
Something like "suffering really does build character?"
> But really, it should be (P): pluralism and a multi-ethnic population are desirable and necessary -> (A) -> (B).
I guess I'm not following your argument here on why pluralism and ethnic diversity are desirable and necessary?
Like what's the problem with Japan? It seems amazingly nice and well run, every time I've visited, which is many times at this point. Yes, they're going extinct, but so is every developed country, they're just hitting that train station a little sooner than everyone else.
And what's the problem with Singapore? How is it not pluralist? 4 major ethnic groups, 5 languages in the metro and everywhere public, used to have race riots but has been peaceful on that front for many decades. I guess you mean the government is dominated by ethnic Chinese? Well, they're 75% Chinese. Singapore has one of the most meritocratic and least corrupt political systems on earth, and also balance that with diversity, they have a Tamil president right now, and several Indian / Tamil / Malay ministers.
I'm personally not a big fan of normative, top-down mandates on how things should be, I'd honestly much prefer if more countries looked out at the world at what worked and move towards that. It's always "but the magnificent people of Uzbekistan / USA / Italy couldn't possibly, we're all unique snowflakes with completely different motivations and makeups," but no, everyone is basically the same and wants the same stuff, and it's politics' job to balance competing interest groups *but also* keep thinking about the future and what matters for preserving the factors that lead to a better future, which is where 98% of current politics falls down, it's all 100% short term thinking and elbow throwing to get that 1% edge, often in a way that impairs the future for everyone.
Here are a few - they only cover Britain though so I leave open America.
- The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–1960 — S. J. D. Green
- Periodizing Secularization: Religious Allegiance and Attendance in Britain, 1880–1945 — Clive D. Field
- The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880–1914 — Simon Heffer
I supplemented my reading of these with some histories of modernism in the arts (i.e., the crisis of representational and sincere artistic forms between the 1900s-1930s), and histories of particular 'outrider' groups whose secular, relativistic morality eventually became mainstream (Weimar sets, Bloomsbury).
I might also add that cultural relativism was pioneered by anthropologists between 1906-1930 referring primarily to foreign cultures rather than domestic minorities, with the culmination of their relativising efforts appearing in the American Anthropological Association AAA statement on Universal Human Rights in 1947.
All of this notwithstanding, I do see your point that the 1960s (and really the 1970s) saw these ideas go 'mainstream.' This is true both in Britain and America, with the 1950s and early 60s demonstrating high social trust and shared social (national) consensus a la Switzerland or Norway today. I would qualify this, however, by noting that in American and Britain, this consensus was fragile and the seeds planted in the interwar period were already showing signs of destabilising national consensus in the 50s. You could say the 1960s and 70s was simply bringing the gospel of relativism and pluralism to the masses.
>I guess I'm not following your argument here on why pluralism and ethnic diversity are desirable and necessary?
I see your confusion - I am not arguing they are. My point is descriptive. If one sees them as desirable and necessary then other consequences follow - but I do not see them as such myself.
> everyone is basically the same and wants the same stuff, and it's politics' job to balance competing interest groups
Note this is probably the main argument of the AAA 1947 statement as to why moral values are relative. In a line: 'biologically, man is one'; and the plethora of cultural forms we see in human culture therefore suggests there is no 'true' moral code for you: you could have believed anything if born elsewhere or in another time.
(In)famously, belief in biological oneness is not a view held by the Japanese, nor the Chinese, nor Lee Kuan Yew (and I suspect most Chinese Singaporeans). Scratch the surface and I think you'd find the same scepticism of racial equality in Norway and Switzerland.
Although this may appear an empirical question, it isn't. As the AAA note, believing in racial or cultural superiority is what led to colonialism, the crusades, and ethnic extermination. Given these extreme consequences, we cannot believe otherwise: humanity must be equal biologically, else Hitler will return.
>I'm personally not a big fan of normative, top-down mandates on how things should be
Me neither, although it is important not to conflate scepticism of social planning with cultural/moral relativism. A cultural conservative, for instance, might prefer more localistic, bottom-up politics whilst also adhering to thick notions of what is morally right/what the good life entails. The Swiss cantons are a good example given their extensive subsidiarity paired with ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
I'm 100% confident that all modern problems are downstream of the media environment. For a long time, it was the Printing Press. Which incentivized rationality, individuality, egalitarianism, and progress. I.e. Whiggism. The printing press quite literally "democratized" knowledge.
Though in recent decades, the virtue of "equality" was coopted by TV, which panders specifically to victimhood-flavored equality because it's universal and abstract and rhetorically defensible. Also, radio drove fascism and communism, because it panders to emotional volatility. When you're mad on the radio, you sound enthralling, like Hitler. When you're mad on TV, you look sweaty, like Nixon.
Hegel had the Zeitgeist of Print Culture, Antonio Gramsci had the Cultural Hegemony of Radio, David Foster Wallace had the Cult of Personality of TV, and now Zoomers have the Brainrot of The Algo. It's easy to transmit thick values through meatspace, but hard to transmit them through inkspace or cyberspace.
The Cultural Elites are the earliest adopters of technology, including communication mediums. They're elite, and therefore the literati, and therefore are the most desperate to virtue signal their compliance with the zeitgeist of the medium.
Okay, if that is so, how do you explain the wildly different use of media by populations of different countries. E.g., Switzerland, Norway, Japan, and so on.
Sorry, I don't know enough about Switzerland/Norway/Japan to immediately know what you're gesturing at. Is there a specific phenomenon you're referring to? Or just a broad difference in cultural norms.
Assuming it's the latter: I do tend to think that there's inertial effects. E.g. I'm under the impression that Mormons have resisted the effects of secularization, though it was a buffering effect rather than an immunizing effect. And Catholics largely resisted Protestantization until Vatican II in the 1960's. The effects of media represent a consistent pressure on Brownian Motion. And institutions instill a ratcheting effect.
> in Canudos, each person occupies a place, and that place, however lowly, is intelligible within a sacred whole.
Frank Herbert in Dune, describing the social order of the Imperium, nicely sums this kind of arrangement in a single motto: "A place for every man and every man in his place."
good quote
Equality is not only a sterile and pathetic consolation prize; it is an empty one to boot! See Peter Westen's famous article from the 1980s on "The Empty Idea of Equality": https://www.jstor.org/stable/1340593
This certainly got me thinking. Perceptive, interesting and challenging!
This was excellent!!
Thank you ☺️