Monday, January 15, 2018

Religion & Societal Stability

Branches of the new atheist movement have matured enough to precipitate out some useful frames for the role of religion and quasi-religion with respect to societal stability.

The recent dialogue between Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro represents one easy to access avenue into this space.  The Rubin report debate between Dennis Prager and Michael Shermer is probably another (although I haven't watched that and probably won't - religion atheism debates tend to really bore me).  An older Harris - Weinstein conversation represents a bit more nuanced view of religion-as-a-useful-myth (30min onward).

Rates of Change
Most sane people know that you don't need religion to be moral and pro-social.  But it is also pretty obvious that large groups need commonly accepted moral norms (to the right degree of looseness) in order to cohere.  Here's my perspective summarizing where these debates settle. In general, I reference Atran's In God's we Trust for a good-enough summary of the major factors necessary for morally based group coherence.



Creativity's Muse
I must admit, I hadn't seen a formal presentation of this idea until Eric Weinstein's conversation with Sam Harris (from about 38:00 on...  It really hits it at about the hour mark).  Eric's idea (which certainly isn't unique) is that faith or the embrace of non-factual but mentally stimulating beliefs increases the ease with which people can probe beyond the confines of current knowledge and assumptions.  This frame is very similar to Stuart Kauffman's "Reinventing the Sacred".

The key is that you need to be able to switch into and out of these belief sets as needed.  You can't be a 24/7 conspiracy theorists, nor can you be a 24/7 hyper-rationalist.  Innovation requires the spark of creativity and fluidity that hyper-rationalism is poorly suited to provide.

If you are not a genius creative type though, much of the argument is likely to go over your head.  If, on the other hand you are used to tackling wicked, boundary breaking questions, his ideas are fairly reflective of how things actually go.

Harris rejoinder is that hyper-rationality can be just as much a muse as religion, albeit without all the necessary supernatural and a-factual baggage.  A slippery slope argument is employed in this regard (can you imagine a religion similar to yours, but with 1 less counter-factual.  Would it be less of a muse?).

While it is likely that hyper-hyepr-rationalism can function as a muse at the individual level, it is uncertainly to what extent this is true at the population level.  Will pervasive cold hard rationalism inspire the same levels of creativity as pervasive quasi-factualism (however it may be embodied)?  At a population level analysis, I think the answer is doubtful.

This doesn't mean we are at the right level of societal quasi-factualism.  We may need more or less for optimal creativity.  However, question of levels can't be adjudicated theoretically.  There is way too much going.  You have both short and long term feedback that makes everything wickedly complex or perhaps even chaotic.




Micro-morality to Macro-morality
Micro-macro morality aggregation is where Prager and Shermer apparently disagreed.  Prager assumes you need a fairly embodied Big Brother (real or quasi-real supernatural agent) to generate enough cohesive force at the societal level. Shermer obviously disagrees.  He seems to feel individual moralities (micro-morality) can scale up just fine into the societal level (macro-morality).  The assumption is that humans have enough in common to ensure we have a basic level of agreement upon what is right and wrong.  Sufficiently strong rule of law and rationality can make up the difference.

My Conclusion
I think Shermer has the better argument here.  But I think there are some caveats.

  • You need to ensure immigration is sufficiently low. Without this, you are likely to introduce enough new people possessing enough un-maleable cultural factors to swamp a given society's social contracts.  As we're seeing in Sweden, a strong rule of law may not be sufficient to prevent societal bifurcation.  Heavy handed pressure to see different morality purely in terms of criminal rather than existential threats don't appear to work all that well. You quickly develop strongly adaptive sub-groups. Societal decoherence results.
  •  I don't think there are any good reasons why micro-morality scales up into macro-morality. You can have a bunch of individuals who are pro-social to each other, but live in a group that is very anti-social to other groups. This is the essence of human evolutionary history. Shermer makes no case against the rise of competing sub-groups. As any complexity theorist can tell you, this is the crux of such logic. External pressure largely determine the degree of complexity faced by the system. Lots of existential pressure, like severe between group competition, challenges the adaptiveness of the large group, biasing the formation and momentum associated with the formation of sub-groups.  Thus, over short or stable periods, Shermer's argument rings true. Over long or unstable periods, Shermer's argument becomes more error prone.
  • You need lots of interaction and migration within your group in order to keep micro-moralities from tribalizing.  How much is totally unknown.  However, human tendencies for tribalization, especially during severe selection pressures, is pretty high.


Degree of (Utopian) Transformation
This is a point that Harris has hit on a lot.  My interpretation of his view is that he assumes much of our basic biology can be over ridden. While this is certainly possible.  It is equally as possible that it can't.  Future prediction here is uncertain.  All we can really say is we can probably do more than some people think and less than some people hope.

A bayesian analysis suggests progress occurs by having small groups of people try and fail.  Over time, the slight directional arrow humans have toward pro-sociality will result in increasingly stable transitions to higher levels of selection.  But large sized levels do not imply rationality must win over religion.  Look at the size of the Muslim world.  

Maybe belief systems have a size or diversity cap?  However, once you start allowing for substantial transformation toward hyper-rationality and the rule of law you also have to allow for it toward religious unification.  If we can cohere toward hyper-rationalism, why can't we cohere toward Islam?

My Conclusion
I'm utterly unconvinced by transformative change arguments. I've spent lots of time debunking their over-extension in education.  This doesn't mean transformation can't happen. It just means it can't be relied upon in civil discourse without a great deal of compensating pluralistic humility.  Unfortunately pluralistic humility and utopian zealotry rarely go hand in hand.  My conclusion - let people try everything under the sun. Just be very careful about how zealously they evangelize things.



Rates of Change
I think this line of thinking really sums up the entire Religion vs Secularism debate on social stability.  If you know the academic and scientific underpinnings of the issues, this is really all that is left to grapple over.  How much can we throttle or accelerate potential gene-cultural transformation rates while maintaining sufficient societal stability? And, secondarily, how far down the secular-rational road can things go before they destabilize? This latter point is mainly conjecture. No one really knows.  While postulating can be fun and can help elucidate hidden issues, the answer is, we really don't know.  Thus the only really question is the rate/scope of change issue.

The micro-macro morality question is well subsumed in terms of a rate of change question.  Can everyone appeal to their own individually deduced morality? Or do we need some "useful fictions" (like the rule of law really isn't capricious)?  That is a scope question.  A scope question necessarily implies a rate change issue. Can we move to 20% saturation right now, then to a 1% rate of change there after?

Most of the religious folk take the perspective that society, in general, is well cohered by letting pro-social pluralistically oriented religion run its course.  In stable countries, traditional religion is obviously no longer needed as a social glue.  Contrary to what some strident atheists may think, religion, even that which is based on sacred texts, has a decent rate of moral change.  Scriptures tend to moderate change rates, but not eliminate it. Successful world religions tend to have mechanisms to allow for re-interpretaion and revelation.  For instance, many Christians now believe Old Testament injunctions have been fully supplanted by New Testament ones. Religions are dynamic, albeit on generational rather than yearly time scales.

And so, the question is really how much loss of religious like dynamics can a society, under certain between-group competition stresses handle in terms of net gene-culture characteristics and social structures.

My Conclusion
Here is where I differ from Harris, Schermer and others.  I think we have good reason to believe characteristics associated with adaptive group formation and competition are very deep and robust.  We're not dealing with simple culture level factors.  I think how religiously many "nones" now treat politics is a testament to this.  I'd also cite the time lengths required for polity evolution.  How long did it take for Kingdom sized states to solidify?  For the idea of a Nation state to solidify?  We have  a few thousand years for the former and at least a few hundred years for the latter.  

Now religion may be very different from polity size issues.  Data from Norezayan and others who argue for alternating leading and pacing between religious evolution and state evolution probably suggest the two are tightly coupled.  Have they now decoupled? I see no arguments why they have nor why they should. In fact, people like me are tempted to see the rise of secular moral groups as just another iteration of religious innovation.  All that really has been done is to supplant overt supernatural Big Brother embodiment with concrete rule of law and an ephemeral humanistic-based Big Brother.  The degree of embodiment has changed.  And, while that is significant for some, it certainly isn't for me.  To me, cosmopolitan humanism and social justice are just new versions of aspiring world "religions".

Thus the rate of change question really boils down to how quickly can we and should we weaken the factors which resonate to produce adaptive moral based groups?  Again, I'd suggest a homeostasis view here is probably wisest.  If you toss out supernaturalism you need to compensate by strengthening another necessary factor for adaptive group stability.  As the external environment settles down, maybe you can weaken gene-culture sensitivities toward the necessary strength adaptive groups need to muster for between-group strength.  But, I would caution, between-group considerations are very deep seated propensities which probably evolve more on genetic rather than cultural time scales.


SUMMARY
I fully support groups pushing the value of non-religious based morality.  While many of these movements may very well be naively dogmatic, naively utopian and even naively religious, society can probably handle most anything which emerges from self-selected movements.  It is very likely that these forays pushing increased levels of rationality will result in, well, more rational less xenophobic, less conflict oriented societies.

What I do worry about though, is naive evangelization of these positions by those with way too much hubris and little to no connection to moral pluralism.  Even then, it is only state sponsorship or full media mono-cultural propagandizing that worries me.  This is because once a critical size is reached, there are going to be a lot of people who think their new moral discovery is the next best thing since sliced bread or the perfect Marxist recipe.  
My humble suggestion is to keep re-inforcing the value of and our connection to true pluralism.  Superficial phenotype diversity, in my mind, really takes aways from this.  It gives the illusion of diversity without much if any true moral-level pluralism.  It is sort of like living on candy and assuming calories are all you need....

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