Sunday, May 5, 2019

When Weak Empires Split

Lately I've been exploring the process of grievance sacralization at the state level. As usual, James Lindsay's tweets make for a great muse...


Do splits in weak empires really tend, over time, to bi-modality?

Off the top of my head, I'd say yes. For example, here's the case studies I looked at the other week, before this idea came up:

  1. Canadian Confederation - Canada should have been a three founding nation state (French, English, First Nations). But, in practice, it ended up being a 2 nation system.
  2. US Confederation - It stated out as a multi-state, multi-ethnic confederacy. Following the war of Independence, it had functionally settled down to a bi-polar arrangement (federalists, statists)
  3. US Great Religious Awakenings - Lots of different sects formed during these cycles. While a couple of radical sects stayed independent (Mormonism, Jehovah witnesses, etc.), most tended to a common Protestant confessional grouping. But Catholicism also represented another pole. You could even argue that Native religion maintained itself as yet another pole.  But, in general, it seems like most of the population was bifurcated between nouveau Protestantism, classic Protestantism, and Catholicism. This disproves the two-way schism model. But, its interesting to note that there was very little violence forcing polarization....
  4. US Civil Rights - This pretty much split the population into two camps. There may have been some moderates, but its doubtful that they really functioned as a cohesive group.
  5. European 16th century War of Religions - This was definitely a bi-modal split. You get lots of different permutations of Protestantism, but things were pretty bi-modal.

The possibility that during weak empire splits, sub-populations split into two and only two groups over time is very interesting.  Inspection suggests this only happens when selection pressure (violence) is significant and the empire is weak. This facilitates grievance sacralization.

But, the possibility of a set social fractal length of 2 is very, very, intriguing.


BRAINSTORMING

One possible post facto explanation of this potential fact is that binary division produces the largest possible sub-group size.

For, example, imagine a weak empire splits into 3 groups. Any of these sub-groups would radically increase it's chance of success if it had 1/3+n members.  Thus, over time, it makes sense that divisional gene-cultural practices should favour individuals who express this tendency. 1/2 + n is possible, but it immediately limited by intra-sub-group competition. Thus, 1/3+n solutions should stabilize at 1/2.

I don't think this process should be too hard to model.... I guess I'll have to add another "to do project" to my list...

It would also be very interesting to test this via a historical database.


IMPLICATION

This suggests a bimodal welled cultural-evolutionary landscape. This implies that people are, to some extent, hardwired for bimodal polarization. This fits common sense experience.

Overtime, oscillations between one hegemon and another increase polarization and select for bi-modality.  The main question is how much pressure and what time frames are required to produce bi-modality?

But what's even more interesting, is that this process may take a multi-moded, segmented weak grouping (divided rule based empire), and via over-reach into a higher level of selection, produce a bifurcated (bi-modal) stable state.

Thus you really can't say the process is clear fission...rather it is an odd sort of "poly-sexual" reproduction fission.  
  1. Multiple populations come together under semi-ordinated control,
  2. They percolate through lots of unifying options, none of which are stable enough for the population's traits (gene-culture co-evolution)
  3. Eventually a meme emerges which is innocuous enough to not immediately get suppressed (because it is hard for elite hegemons to really grasp, but is understandable-enough for the laity, and is amenable to hidden signalling), has sufficient memetic virility, and facilitates intractable conflict via grievance sacralization.
  4. The population splinters. While lots of offspring are produced, environmental processes (resonating around gene-cultural trait expression) produce a two welled landscape (at least over long periods of time in environments with sufficient selection pressure).
  5. Oscillations between old power and new power polarizes the population and, as per 4, selects for the largest sub-group size possible (roughly a 1/2n solution).  The more pressure is present, and the more polarizing the process, the closer things should get to a 1/2n split. Laissez faire moderates may obscure a true 1/2n, 1/2n fission.
  6. Either, A) pluralism emerges, B) two state solution emerges, c) one side or the other trounces the other to the ground.

Relevant quotes from Nexon (pp. 261-264)






Saturday, May 4, 2019

Grievance Sacralization

Looks like the process of how radical movements splinter groups is gaining a bit of interest as of late.


Last month I spent a lot of time looking at whether radical social justice is a religion and came away with the idea that it mainly mirror those dynamics when it is modularized, has a linked, but plausibly denied extremist group whose participation within it can be ritualized into a coming of age process.  Supernaturalism is much less important than transcendent value and the degree of group-to-individual feedback.

This month I decided to look at the dynamics of how these processes went in the past.

A couple of years ago I looked at this in terms of the rise of american religious pluralism in the 18th and 19th centuries via Chris Beneke's excellent book "Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism".  This all tied in with a couple of posts exploring the role of quasi-factual belief

Last year it looks like I even toyed with how progressivism might relate to levels of selection.


CURRENT DEBATE

James Lindsay's process is basically takes a self-adaptive complex systems perspective. This is reflected in the unstated assumption of zero-sum population / power: one group's development comes at the expense of others. New feature combinations can produce emergent behaviour/properties. These may increase capacity, but competition between groups remains zero-sum, even if zero-sum reasoning gets destabilized for short periods.


Not everyone is so nice...



COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

I think the difference between James' approach and my current approach is the grain of dynamics we're looking at.

From the little I can gleam from his process quote, James seems to be looking more at social psychology and individual actors (as normalized over a population).  This fits very well with a complex system's framing. In this tradition, you're normally looking at how individual actors aggregate into general system class behaviours and structures. I would guess that Lindsay would probably resonate with Kauffman's Santa Fe complexity framing more than he would Prigogine's (continental) dissipative frame.... But I could be wrong. Mathematicians usually like Prigogine's tradition.

Both complex systems based approaches have an idea of "lock in". Prigogine describes this as a series of bifurcations that eventually arrive at a landscape where old possibilities are now constrained.  Thus, I'd suggest Lindsay's logic probably leads to a frame where one is interested in critical agent numbers and irreversible group dogmas.  I could be wrong.

I've been less interesting in the cognitive science - social psychology interface, and more interested in the physics of multi-level selection.  Thus, I've been exploring things from the perspective of what actor tendencies, as expressed in group level scenarios are adaptive over moderate time periods (say hundreds of years - the approximate short-interval of significance for gene-culture co-evolution).  

I do wonder how well the individualistic side of social psychology meshes with meme-based lock-in evolution rates. Memes evolve very quickly. This means you have a hard time making a strong case for any particular core-belief lock-in. You basically have to say our cognitive architecture is such as to favour this class of belief. Alternatively you can say in our environment there are general classes of memes which are likely to remain foundational.  I just think this level of analysis is likely to miss out on the "why" of things.

In effect, by trying to explain why a certain social psych tendency is present, you have to explain it in terms of short time scales and immediate environmental conditions, rather than longer time scales. Longer time scales account for why the risk of genocidal backlash may still be adaptive.  In effect, as you stretch out the time scale of your analysis, the probably of success for any particular rebellion can drop quite low; What matters is general tendencies to higher levels of selection which history shows only need big pay offs every once in a while. For example, 


Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Grievance Politics: Testing the 1960's as a Possible Sacred Value Based Bifurcation into a Mid-level of Selection

Last post I made a fairly unorthodox speculation that grievance based sacred value creation in weak, divide and rule, weak empire networks function as a tool, less as a tool for between-group competition, and more as a process for mid level of selection stabilization.

This post I will continue the test of this idea's accuracy.  I have not idea what to expect. While the Canadian Confederacy test and US manifest-destiny test proved inconclusive, the US civil war seemed to support the theory.


This speculation emanated from my reading of Nixon's "Struggle For Power in Early Modern Europe" which analyzes the 16th and 17th century European war of religions through a relational network lens.


1960's CULTURE WAR TEST

The 1960's likely represents one iteration of people's regular 50 year moral/religious awakening cycles.  Other major "awakenings" are the ~1900's progressive movement, the 1860's Civil War, the 1820's great religious awakening, etc.

It is hard to consider most western countries during this era as weak empires.  Civil unity tended to be fairly high.  Therefore, there is little chance of accurately testing the grievance politics mid-sized polity stabilization theory. But, it may provide a chance to generalize it by finding out whether the theory is only applicable in weak empires.

Let's assume the civil right's era can largely be characterized by the emergence of equity sacralization. This certainly comes in lots of different forms, but in general, this label seems "right-enough".

The theory proposes that grievances around equity should start to become sacralized, and that:
  • the most successful memes should resonate around intractable grievances,
  • the grievances should polarize the population,
  • grievance dynamics should produce hegemonic concessions,
  • the process should produce groupings which stabilize at mid-levels of selection.
Hindsight tells us that strains of 60's era progressivism do in fact see the world as an irredeemable racist sexist patriarchy. 60's era equality movements left little space for fence sitters. Dividing lines were clear, and grew clearer through the early 70's.

Political conciliations during this time to grievance groups were fairly large. They may not have been as big as some people would have liked, but the benefits now awarded to the main griever classes are certainly bigger now than they were in 1950.


CONCLUSION

The civil right's era reshaped political party lines. One major change involved the position of Southern Dixie-crats.  But, the civil right's era produced no new polity units.  At best, you have the rise of a media and news-media conglomerate. While an adaptive group, this is no real "polity".  You do see certain inner-city dominated municipalities starting to work together. But, this again stretches the idea of polity.

Was the federal empire too strong to overcome? Is the lack of divide-based governance a deciding factor? Who knows.  Perhaps all that can be said is that grievance based sacred value creation increases the chance for adaptive pay off concessions from hegemons, provided those hegemons are worried about new alliance formation between hitherto disconnected groups.

I don't think there is anyway to say that the civil right's era created a new stable polity level as a result of grievance sacralization.  It appears that a weak empire is needed for this to occur.

TANGENTS

The civil right's era does suggest that vertical alignment between multiple layers of government (municipal, state, federal departments) may be the modern incarnation of the 16th century's isolated city-states.  In this sense, the alignment of California sanctuary city-states with California's sanctuary state status may be something to look at. Has the federal government conducted a de-facto divide and rule strategy by playing cities, states and regions off each other?  Has 



Grievance Politics: Testing Bifurcation into a Mid-Level of Selection via US Confederacies

Last post I made a fairly unorthodox speculation that grievance based sacred value creation in weak, divide and rule, weak empire networks function as a tool, less as a tool for between-group competition, and more as a process for mid level of selection stabilization.

This post I will continue the test of this idea's accuracy.  I have not idea what to expect. The Canadian Confederacy test proved inconclusive.


This idea emanated from my reading of Nixon's "Struggle For Power in Early Modern Europe" which analyzes the 16th and 17th century European war of religions through a relational network lens.


US CONFEDERACY TEST

Things in the late 1790's in US were a mess. Alan Taylor rightly considers the US war of Independence more akin to a civil war than a rebellion. I previously discussed how that era's moral-political divide dynamics are eerily similar to what we see happening in today's moral-socio-political culture wars.

United States after the war of Independence certainly counts as a weak empire. Special privileges to this state or that group were continually granted in order to stabilize federalization. However, the fed's didn't rule via a divide and conquer process, so the parallels with 16th century Europe are bound to be minimal again.

The civil war and government's push-and-pull of semi-legal westward expansion are probably the best foils.

Manifest Destiny

Manifest destiny might be one "sacred value" which emerged to bifurcate the US population with respect to the process of westward expansion. However, British loyalists, who were the most apt to favour a minimally colonial approach to expansion, were largely expunged during the war of Independence. Thus, manifest destiny didn't emerge in a landscape that was overly ripe for its function as a bifurcating value. Why didn't other, more bifurcatible memes, rise instead?

On this point, I think my mid-level of selection theory fails. It postulates that a dividing sacred value should emerge that would allow adherents to grieve its empire for concessions, and should threaten and facilitate broad based revolution between various separated polities. 

But, one could also argue that the formation of western territories represents the emergence of mid-level polities. Settlements did not develop as competitors to federation. The only exception was the Utah independence threat. This was met by a swift, if ill fated, federal military response. US territories may be a good doppleganger for 17th C German protestant city states...

Territories were able to extract fairly significant concessions from the federal government.  Non-territorialized regions had little influence.

But, I know of few cases of sub-groups whose position against manifest destiny provided them with significant federal concessions. Perhaps some southern slave states and southern slave state counties meet this condition?

Civil War

The civil war involved a combination of federalism vs. state's rights, hierarchy vs. equality (as represented via slavery and caste based governance systems).

If we assume that the federal empire sought popular equality via the minimization of state rights and prevention of caste based elite governance, then southern states are the one to look at for grievance dynamics.  From this lens, southern states wanted concessions that allowed their elite classes to operate with minimal constraints.  Such freedom was certainly inherit, to some degree, in the terms of confederation. Did southern elites expand what confederation envisioned? Probably, but I don't know for sure.

According to my speculative theory, a sacred value should have emerged among the Southern ruling class (extending into the population) which would have rallied around some type of irreconcilable grievance. The vehemence of this grievance's morality should have yielded a variety of concessions from the weak empire and should have gradually created an irreversible process to a mid-level of selection (polity).

A possible grievance may centre around the perceived uniqueness of Southern culture and southern industry.  A variety of sacred values seem to have developed in this regard:
  • radical individual freedom (provided of course you were of the right caste & skin colour)
  • honour culture
  • god given right for unrestricted financial advancement (off the back's of others)
  • the value of lineage (classical dynamism)
  • etc.
This can, of course, be seen as tantamount to Protestant theological permutations (such as Lutheranism, Calvinism, Zwinglianism, etc.). Although, I would question the relative similarity of the degree of group-to-individual feedback. Religion produces much stronger feedback than post rationalized narratives.

But it does seem like the south's entrenchment into sacred value grievances did provide them with a lot of federal concessions. This ticked off quite a few northerners.  Ultimately, it led to an inevitable conflict. Either southern states would become their own polity within a weak federal empire, or federalism would have to choose which side to align itself on. Either choice would result in weak federalism and the emergence of a de facto new mid-level of unity (slave states & abolitionist states). Even the south's defeat in the civil war has done little to diminish the unity and delineations on either side of the Mason-dixon line.  Inter-state immigration has probably been the most significant factor ameloriating here...


CONCLUSION

It looks as though US civil war supports the theory that grievance politics may ultimately serve as a tool to establish mid-levels of selection within weak empires.  If southern states had not rebelled against the federal empire via sacred value creation, they may well have been assimilated. It provided them lots of concessions prior to civil war. After civil war, southern states remained fairly unified as an adaptive socio-political block.

Ultimately, federalism has won. The south is largely assimilated. But, it is likely than southern sacred values have greatly decreased the rate of assimilation. US federalism's huge adaptive advantages have largely broken down the zero-sum reasoning which underpins the 17th century european religion wars (and likely most of human evolutionary history...)