Functionally, Modern Media are Priests, Preachers, & Shamans

My main interest is seeing what insights religion and religious dynamics can provide to moderately moral systems and institutions. Education is obviously moderately moral. Since the mid 90's, politics has become increasingly moralized. It had a major inflection point during the end of the Bush years when "everything is political" became widely accepted and operationalized as "and anything political is moral" as soon as it affects the right kind of minority.

The inflection point to "the political becoming moral" exposed interesting media dynamics. Exposure occurred due to a confluence of Trump's triggering of the media, twitter's transparency, and digital media's click-bait trap.

Rather than just dealing with something superficial like "fake news", I think the deeper question now hitting us is,  is the media now functioning as a priestly class within society?

I think the answer is yes, but let's see.

PRIESTLY CLASSES: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSES

Google scholar doesn't come up with many articles on the functional roles of priestly classes. The easiest reference is Encyclopedia Britannica's

The function of the priest as the mediator and maintainer of the equilibrium between the sacred and the profane in human society, and as the stabilizer of the social structures and the cultic organizations, determines the various criteria for holding the priestly office.

That's not too big a worry. Most intelligent, well read people not biased by new atheistic evangelism will probably come up with something similar to this.  Western priestly class societal roles include:

• communication of moral norms
• norm boundary maintenance
• norm adjustments to direct costly commitment increases so as to expose free-loaders and heighten in-group out-group distinctions
• the embodiment of and perceived control of existential concerns
• societal coherers 
• via maintenance of institutions which enable interaction,
• pro-social preaching,
• facilitation of common experiences via rituals and common meta-narratives
• communicating norms in explicit terms
• authority figure heads
• rule of law for less than quasi-criminal offences (i.e. judgement & mediation of social offences)
• maintenance of slow cultural change rates (via cultural conservatism and maintenance of moral code books & meta-narratives)

These ideas generally come from Scott Atran's In God's We Trust and my own readings over the years and life-experiences.

To generalize, it seems like you end up with the following major roles

1. Norm maintenance (especially making norms easy to understand and policing them)
2. Costly commitment display direction
3. Existential concern expression / embodiment (shamanism)
4. Public square hosting
5. Common experience & common narrative facilitation
6. Social change rate guardian

TEST

Now let's test how a couple of different institutional roles perform these functions. The hope is that they'll be some major distinctions between different institutional players.

	Police	Politician	Education	Old new media	Modern news media
Norm maintenance	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Costly commitment display direction		rarely (war)	sometimes	sometimes (war, heroes)	yes
Existential concerns			sometimes		yes
Public square		yes	yes	some what	yes
Common experiences & narratives		often	yes	some what	yes
Social change rate guardian		yes	yes	not since the 50's	yes

Yikes!!!

Let's look at the difference between the old media institution and modern media.

	Old news media	Modern news media	Change degree
Norm maintenance	yes Often concerned with patriotism and national cohesion.  Less concerned with correctly steering discourse and more concerned with providing information needed for discourse.	yes Much more concerned about directing things to social justice issues and "proper" political policies. Concerned about being on the "right side of history".  Less concerned with national cohesion and more concerned about social justice issues (which over time ensure cohesion - at least in a utopian way)	large
Costly commitment display direction	sometimes Mainly directed costly commitments during times of crises like war. But also steered costly commitments by highlighting heroic behaviour.	yes Very concerned about highlighting heroic behaviour. News is often presented in terms of heroes and villains.	large
Existential concerns		yes Concerned about Orange-man-bad hysteria, climate change hysteria, life-coaching info, etc. The difference is the level of hysteria and the embodiment of sensationalistic fears which are minimally rational (in the conventional sense) see this post	huge
Public square	some what Used to share info on public events, but was not interactive and could only show a sample of ppl	yes Twitter and social media enable interaction between people.	huge
Common experiences & narratives	some what Used to maintain general discourses about national narratives and judeo-christian heritages. Minorities were often left out (melting pot promulgation)	yes Very active in pushing certain narratives. However narratives are generally polarizing. Similarly many pushed experiences (the resistance, 2nd A etc) are tribal in nature. Even those which are common (voting) are presenting in polarized terms (vote for the right side)	moderate
Social change rate guardian	not since the 50's Old media used to guard social change rates. The 60's split news media a bit. But, generally up through the 80's news was "conservative".	yes Social change rate is seen as inhumanely slow. There is no question modern news media is pushing for huge rates of change here. Some modern media are, of course, conservative. But, the news media and journalism is generally very progressive.	large

CONCLUSION

It seems hard not to conclude that modern news media and journalists are potentially fulfilling a societal role akin to that of older priest classes. This certainly doesn't mean that they are leveraging supernaturalness.  Rather, it means they have fallen into a natural cultural-evolutionary landscape-well.  These wells have certain, reasonably well understood, religious like group dynamics, and certain caste-like roles.

Usually priestly classes were positioned somewhere between merchant classes and nobility. They tended to have very distinct behavioural differentiators.  One thing that strikes me about news media is their hubris. They act like the preppy popular kids from high school. As an entity, their politics certainly is not representative of Canada or America as a whole. I've seen estimates that their political orientations are monocultural at the 90%+ level.

The Washington beltway strikes me as class diverse as a 19th century seminary. They also strike me as equally ecumenical and bubble-oriented.

I have no estimates about the extent to which journalists tend to associate with elites versus commoners. But, one thing that does strike me as relevant is their interest in being connected to sources of power in order to get news.  The term "ladder climber" comes to mind - sell out a lower class connection for a higher class one.  Religion tends to temper these tendencies. But that is probably because religion promotion tends to occur by way of norm adherence. Journalism is much more meritous. And yet, here we see an interesting turn. Merit (good journalism) is no longer provides much of a reward. It is increasingly replaced by activism and, what religious folk tend to call "priest craft", which basically means the concentration of moral messaging to that which is popular and results in the elevation/popularization  of the messenger.

So what I think we see is the development of journalists who now leverage the power of moral activism for the growth of their own popularity. While this is probably nothing to be overly concerned about, the landscape of new news media has now changed in ways that are highly resonate with old priest class functional roles.  This creates some very interesting superpositions.  To me, the most interesting one is the shamanistic role.

ADDENDUM

One of the other big signals that modern news media are tending to priest class functions is aspirant elite dynamics.

If you wanted to move from a position of little power into one of great power you've got a couple of options
-getting really rich
-become a politician
-becomes a narrative shaping journalist

Peter Turchin really focusses on the role of aspiring elites.  During elite over-population (such as we now have) elites either get forced down into commoner status due to an inability to field increasingly high consumption costs. Similarly, the fitness advantages of moving out from the commoners become s increasingly significant (commoner exploitation grows exponentially during phases of elite over-production).  Of the three options above, becoming a narrative shaping journalist strikes me as the easiest thing to do.

A benefit of activist journalism as a path into aspirant elites is that the process provides a religious-like sense of having helped out.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press.

Dawson, L. L. (Ed.). (2003). Cults and new religious movements: a reader (p. 297). Oxford: Blackwell.

Hunt, S. J. (2017). Alternative religions: A sociological introduction. Routledge.

Lee, W. E. (2005). The Priestly Class: Reflections on a Journalist's Privilege. Cardozo Arts & Ent. LJ, 23, 635.

Singh, M. (2018). The cultural evolution of shamanism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41.

Smith, J. E. (1994). Humanism as a quasi-religion. In Quasi-Religions (pp. 15-44). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Taylor, V. E. (2008). Para/Inquiry: Postmodern religion and culture. Routledge.

Wilson, D. (2010). Darwin's cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society. University of Chicago press.

Adaptive Groups & Authoritarian-based Moral Change

The other night I watched a "conversation" between Douglas Murray and Sylvana Simons on political correctness. The arguments were fairly tedious. Basically

• Structural oppression exists. Respect is important. Because respect requires so little effort to produce so large outcomes, resistance to respectful behaviour that can positively correct structural oppression should be a universal norm enforced by peer pressure, and probably the rule of law.
• Free speech is essential for western democracies. That means understanding that there will be speech we don't like. But the cure (moral and speech authoritarianism) is worse than the disease.

Background Argument

The progressive argument is, on the surface, quite strong. Many religious dynamic conversations I've observed apply an identical logic:

• there's a norm that no longer makes sense in our society
• changing it isn't a big deal
• the outcomes are quite big for a small percentage of people and the cost is quite small for a large percentage of people
• therefore resistance to it is an act of overt aggression because individual reward vs individual cost differentials are huge! Don't be a cro-magnon levelled bigot.

There are two issue with this class of argument

1. It assumes cost-benefits should be judged on an individual-individual level.
2. It assumes a rational change perspective with respect to groups.

Judging Cost-Benefits via Individuals 

Issue 1 tends to get discussed ad naseum. I'll avoid doing that. I'll simply suggest that, what tends to happen in practice is that one's preferred minorities tend, in practice, to get lumped together when looking at benefits. Thus, people don't look at what may benefit an individual of minority X, they tend to look at what what may benefit individual X and then assume that needs to happen to all individuals from X's minority group.  The issue (and strength) is that as long as your minority groups are fairly small, there is no functional limit to how many benefits they should receive because the individual costs to members of the large group will always be very small.

For example, if I have a minority group of 1k individuals in a 100M population, a payment of $10 to each minority is a relatively small individual cost, but the benefit to each minority is $1M. Surely $10 is worth that level of reparation! Extend this to multiple minority group and as long as your logic is based on incremental rather that net costs for majority individuals, it takes you a very long time to hit any type of ceiling. If you don't think this is true, imagine a Canadian making $100k a year, paying 50% in taxes (hidden and overt). About 20% of this goes to the social net. Assume half of this goes to worse off individuals. That individual is already giving about $5k to worse off individuals, which can probably be understood as a conglomerate of disadvantaged minorities. The calculus of small costs and big benefits hasn't stopped working here. It tends to only stop working when the RATE OF CHANGE is too big.

Irrational Change Resistance (especially on innocuous things) is Rational

Issue 2, the limits of rational change logic is often rejected. But, this is the Achilles' heel of Sylvana Simon's argument. The main issue is that while the counter-argumentis factually correct, it is rhetorically weak.

Adaptive groups tend to have a number of unique qualities to them. These qualities result in them being able to balance (to varying degrees of success, over varying time spans) tensions between multiple levels of selection. Evolutionary transitions to higher levels of selection require

1. Extreme dependence
2. Coordination
3. Conflict minimization.

Human groups obviously don't reflect a major evolutionary change (say from a single celled organism to a multi-celled organism), but certain groups do reflect, for certain periods of time, functional units of selection. Groups which are able to provide fitness enhancements to their members which exceed group costs tend to have certain behavioural similarities. Adaptive group behaviours which end up sympathetic to evolutionary transition logic come from a variety of research traditions:

• Ostrom's common pool behaviour
• Atran's psychology of religious groups
• List & Pettit's group agency work

Other work is obviously framed from an evolutionary perspective, often directly influenced by evolutionary transition logic:

• D.S. Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral
• some of E.O Wilson's sociobiology work
• Peter Turchin's secular cycles work
• Whitehouse's cultural evolution work
• various cultural evolutionary scholars.

Resistance to Usurpation

One of the main issues with adaptive groups is their resiliency against usurpation. Groups which are easily redirected by sub-groups, including expert sub-groups, tend not to be adaptive over time, or at least tend not to display the signals people tend to use as proxies for adaptiveness. Why? List and Pettit's Group Agency has the most cogent and convincing logical arguments I've found. But, D.S. Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral is the easiest to understand.

Usurpation enabled for rational ends also enables usurpation for other ends. The ability of individuals or small groups to control large groups tends, over time, to result in tyranny or exploitation. This is especially true for groups which suddenly change norms.

Fast rates of norm change rarely provide the time necessary for the evolution of secondary exploitive controls. Thus, revolutionaries who break a system in order to fix it find what instead is created is a haven for exploitation. Slow change often, but not always, avoids this. This is because balancing behaviours have a chance to develop.

Practical vs Factual Reality

So obviously fact-based rational change should be immune to resistance? Actually, the answer is no. Factual reality and practical reality, as D.S. Wilson says, are two entirely different cups of tea. Selection occurs on practical reality (fitness increases which are blind to whether something is factually true), not factual reality. Factual reality may be correlated with practical reality, but it isn't where selection happens.

In fact, what usually happens is adaptive groups tend to leverage quasi-factuality as;

• a costly commitment display,
• a free loader detection tool which tests whether an individual really gets the group's zeitgeist,
• an in-group out-group behavioural divider.

Net Results

The net result is adaptive groups have a much more complicated relationship with seemingly arbitrary norms than is normally thought. Groups which are vulnerable to dictatorial control by special interest groups tend not to be adaptive, or if they are adaptive, tend to quickly loose the signals people use to judge adaptiveness. This latter point becomes especially true as the publicity of the power struggle increases.

The implication is that adaptive groups can rarely change quickly. Pressure to do so extracts huge social cohesion capital costs. These costs are hard to assess and tend to be complex (in the technical sense) and non-linear in nature.  Thus, seemingly inconsequential things, like pronoun usage, may actually produce huge adaptive group signal flags. Or they may not. The only way to really tell is look for the dynamics that occur when they are pushed, and then take into account how much social cohesion capital you think you can burn up before the group loses its adaptiveness. The problem is, group adaptiveness tends to be non-linear in nature and often one extra straw can break the camel's back.

Contextualization

The best way to contextualize these issues is not in terms of a hyper-loaded issue like pronouns. Rather, it's to look at how religious groups (which tend to be very adaptive) respond to purposeful change on seemingly arbitrary and pointless norms.

Imagine if a sub-group in Islam or Judiasm decided eating pork would provide huge benefits to a small group of people who didn't have any other source of meat, and that to prevent this group from being prejudiced, every other Jew / Muslim needed to accept and support the change to pork eating.

There's no question this is an arbitrary norm. One could say that failure to acquiesce to this group's demand is illogical. The only problems raised are problems resistors make for themselves. Indeed, the pork example would likely have net caloric and taste benefits for people. It wouldn't have any linguistical complications nor any interpersonal norm/structural changes. But there's no doubt that it would rip each religion apart.

Conventional rational logic can't explain why people would sacrifice whole societies (and engage in huge wars) for something of such little intrinsic value. And yet it is obvious that they do. The only explanation is the adaptive group one I've presented.

To think that many of today's social progressive change issues won't impact the adaptiveness of modern groups is naive. But, as I say, it is a rhetorically weak position to take. The issue isn't the rationality of the "ask" but the adaptive dynamics it broaches.

You can slowly ramp up the amenability your society has with respect to change rates, but if the norms constraining the tension between within and between group selection haven't had time to solidify, then you're probably just going to implode the whole thing.

Further Reading

If you want to learn more about the specific logic of change, I'd strongly suggest List and Pettit's Group Agency book. It is excellent!

If you want to get a better sense on why groups, especially those based on moral and religious morals, are adaptive, I'd suggest Darwin's Cathedral.

If you want to get a better sense of the logic of sacred values I'd suggest Scott Atran's In God's We Trust.