- 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
- It assumes cost-benefits should be judged on an individual-individual level.
- 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
- Extreme dependence
- Coordination
- 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.
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.
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.
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