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, 


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