What's Good for the Goose is...

As I mentioned last post, it seems the American, (and to some extent the general Western) ideal of equality under the law is reforming, or at least under pressure to reform.

MULTI-LEVEL FRAMING

Equality under the law and as a social contract can, from a multi-level selection lens, both be seen as a necessary condition for inter-dependency / coordination / conflict minimization and as a limiter for each of those. These conditions are of course the main factors required to stabilize selection at a higher level. Equality basically ensures there is no gamesmanship. Everyone, in theory, gets treated equal.

Yet, you wouldn't think your brain needs the same amount of energy as your skin? Both are organs, but some organs are more equal than others. Thus, at some point selection at higher levels requires specialization. That's one way of viewing todays lukewarm civil war. The American social contract no longer works. Specialization is required to prevent structural issues from solidifying different classes of life.

But, ironically, this position seems to occur by solidifying Orwell's famous quip "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others". System rules against the solidification of caste are being asked to be broken by solidifying a new type of intersectionalized caste.

The rub seems to be the grift that occurs in elite allies and elite allied leaders. This comedy bit highlights this issue - are protests for Black Lives Matter and against the President alright in a Covid world? If so, what about protest for All Lives Matter and for the President / against a politically-moralized priest caste?

Tim Pool takes a long time to get at these same ideas. He is very concerned about the implications of two-sided standards where the government clearly provides immunity for one politicized side.

It seems inevitable that if society can't solve issues of protracted disparities in outcomes, either operation at this level of selection must stop, or the system itself will stumble into untested experimental remedies. The probability of stumbling into something sustainable is very low. The probability of breaking into smaller more cohesive units is very strong, especially in a world with few major existential threats that require operation at a higher level to survive.

Climate change and open borders can be seen as one attempt of the system to frame things for selection at a higher level. But, despite the new priest class' exhortations that the world will end, the threats are just not credible at an "organize or die" level of immediacy.

IMPLICATIONS

It was always certain that excusing rioters from Covid critiques was going to end lockdowns one way or another. People are now free to ignore what they don't like. That leaves local governance in an awkward position about enforcement. Will they go down the one-sided enforcement trap? Probably. But a demoralized police system may have little energy to attack their historic supporters (like churches, Trumpers, and small business owners).

This energized system makes a whole bunch of trigger points possible. For instance, imagine Trump decides to hold some rallies in key states where the governor or mayor has TDS. Let's imagine Governor Whitmer in Michigan gets mad about a Trump rally. She works with her ally mayor in Detroit to prevent Trump from selling a "Trump is for black business" line and they decide to ticket everyone in line.

There will be some angry people, but that is fine. I don't imagine many people will give their name, so the police will be forced to decide if they arrest some as a show of force. I imagine they will have to... "for law and order".

Now the Trump supporters see themselves as singled out in their protest movement. Who will protect them from incarceration next time? Well, violence worked for the rioters, so maybe instead of physical violence, you get a number of militia folk, putting up a similar wall of pressure, albeit with a quiet 2A show of force. Militia folk, especially people of colour, now guard the perimeter. What will the police do?

Now things are at such powder keg levels. There is near certainty that the protest dynamic of a Trump rally energizes this demographic in the same way BLM protests energize other demographics. The application of governmental force to shut them down (or fine them) is equivalent to the police shutting down BLM protests. The lack of violence at the Trump rallies will accentuate feelings of oppression. So while you can say Trump ralliers aren't oppressed like minorities, it will not feel that way to them.

Will Trump no call in a national guard to protect his ralliers from a politically controlled police? Under Whitmer, no. But under a Republican governor who is going to get voted out due to a Democratic Mayor's? Probably. What about Trump using a federal force to protect his rallies and ensure peace? That sounds a lot like what happened down in the south during the civil right's era. I would weigh that possibility as very likely. It is the natural landscape trap for this space.

Both sides will feel incredibly aggrieved, and both sides will be highly energized. Polarization is certain.

The End Game is Scary - Equality's Foundational Social Contract has Broken

It's looking like peaceful protests continue, with no lowering of the bar for what constitutes a sacrilegious offense...

I get the sense there's a huge holding pattern of energy developing within the US' other tribal faction. That's scary.

One interesting thing to come out of the Covid energized explosion is a better sense on what grounds the political tribes are now separating. The left - right divide has obviously foundered. The horseshoe theory of politics has proven itself true. The positions of the far right (KKK type) and far left (radical intersectionalists) are now pretty much indistinguishable except for which groups each consider righteous.

Steve Bannon's citizen nationalism (Trump) and economic nationalism (Sanders) was, for a long time, the most apt characterization of the new divide. But it always felt wanting.

I think the new divide is best characterized as equal righters vs intersectionalists. One side says every rule must function the same for everyone. They want special interest and loopholes out of government. But the Republican establishment will certainly never go along with that. Whether Trumpers have enough cache and integrity to do that is very questionable. Some progress may be made, but in the end, the House always wins.

The intersectionalists seem to want to revolutionize America's founding social contract that all people are created equal. The aim seems to be replacing it with equal outcomes. Albeit equal outcomes that make up for past oppressions. How could that not work well? </irony>

The rift is HUGE. It is all about an extremely fundamental social contract that makes American unique. I don't see that moral foundation going down without a fight. And, for better or worse, that sentiment is very easy to now frame as equivalent to 1860's slave rhetoric. 

I find it infinitely fascinating (in a 1984 double speak sense of things) that equality of law could suddenly get popularly interpreted as the most insidiously racist thing possible. Human culture is logic is, from a dispassioned view, unbelievably fascinating. Hyper-rationalists, like Sam Harris, who argue that pure logic can govern social systems, have never before seemed so naive.

Struggle Sessions & Maoist Purges are Real, Albeit Much Less Violent Than They Used to Be

This and the professors removal from duty as a result of mob action can either be interpreted as an overly cautious response by admin to an unnecessarily honest and unbending response from a professor to a student, or as an example of the dynamics of Maoist purges and struggle sessions (as well as most other major modern marxist based revolutions).

The two radically different interpretations of the same event are not a good sign for social coherence. I suspect an increasingly large number of wrong-thinking academics, especially those with a disdain for authoritarianism will flock to Chicago styled universities with objectivist based teleogogies and the social norms that normally go with them.

I suspect that's a good thing. Let people separate and then do their thing. Religious folk should be able to be fully religious. Secular folk should be able to be fully secular. Customers shouldn't be surprised. Open and honest norms are essential. Unfortunately, I'm not sure society can tolerate difference...

Civil War & Systems Views

Systems View of Civil War

The basic idea behind systems thinking, popularized by Peter Senge’s 90’s era book, is that a view at any level hides other views, at higher or lower levels, each of which paints a slightly different picture of things. This happens because of

-different levels have different factors which dominate (or recede)

-yet each level is connected, often by numerous factors, many of which produce novel insights when mapped through.

Senge operationalized this with his 5 level of why questions. Whenever you think you have an answer, ask yourself what is going on behind that answer. In practice this means any problem can be viewed from multiple levels of granularity. Finer views are better for some questions, but worse for others.  Complexity means that emergence always happens and no single view is able to capture every (eventually) significant thing. The nice thing about systems thinking is how it lets you hold onto the threads from one level to the next.

The US’ current cold, but gradually warming, civil war is at a stage where a systems view is probably needed.  There are multiple views of causation, each one being right is its own way, and each highlights different aspects and causes of the current turmoil, which is bound to get worse after the Nov elections.

National Level

At a high level, current civil strife is well characterized by Peter Turchin’s secular cycles frame. Current civil strife is caused by elite over production. Real wages of producers continues to shrink. The gradient between elite and non-elite status becomes starker. Governance systems become increasingly strained to employ a civil servant class who comes to expect more and more. Governance and monetary reward / power become increasingly intermixed. The only way to keep your head above water is to abuse the producer / lower classes (either directly through commerce and low real wages, or indirectly through governmental grift)

This is good view for the current US unrest. Wage disparities have energized a system. Authoritarianism and loss of trust in the rule of law are the weights that topple the cart. Intra-elite competition between moralized media and various political cabals are, at this view, the root causes of strife.

Supra-National Level

One level above Turchin’s view is a multi-level selection frame based on polity sizes. From this frame, the current civil strife is a consequence of the tensions between operation at a pan-national level of selection and a national level of selection. Steve Bannon has the best framing here. It conceives of current tension as tensions between nationalism and globalism. It explains the right side of Trumpism as a form of sort-of-ethnic nationalism and the left side of Bernie Sanders as a from of economic nationalism. This is the horseshoe theory of politics. Eventually the far right and far left become functionally indistinguishable by policy, albeit not be social demarkers.

In the 20th century, nationalism gradually stabilized. Fits and starts of it occurred during the treaty of Westphalia. It continued to settle down as the French revolution ushered in a new type of ideological unity as a national unifying force. While in the 1910’s you could still conceive of a war for land between developed nations, WW2 was the last real kick of the land grab can. Various cold war encounters sealed this deal. Nation state lines are now largely inviolable. Of course proxy possessions still occur, but they have to be framed very different than they once would have had to have been.

From the multi-level national-vs-pan-national perspective, US’ current civil strife is a result of an inevitable backlash against the requirements that occur with a country’s move to pan-national focus. The gene-cultural traits (conflict minimization, inter-dependence, coordination) required to stabilize things at a higher level of selection just aren’t ingrained or common enough to enable stabilization. The national level focusses on things like the need for borders, tighter labour markets to drive up real wages, etc. The pan-national level focusses on things like accepting open borders and  such Movement to a higher level of selection, such as pan-nationalism, is almost certainly never going to stabilize on the first few go rounds. Expect a good thousand years or so for stabilization, at least if history is any guide.

The ultimate causes here are genetic. It is simple selection between the adaptive value of larger groups vs the adaptive value of more tightly coverable smaller groups.

Stability Through Tribal Based Dynamic Tension

If you haven’t watched any of the new genre of ex-felon prison vlogs, you probably should. They’re equally informative for current social tensions as the various 1st amendment and police over-reaction vlogs that have been popular for a number of years.

From a multi-level selection frame, you can interpret current de-fund and disband the police rhetoric as both an appeal for community based policing by local militias and a desire for more localized rule of law which are not arbitrary but are sensitive to local contexts. The US constitution seemed quite keen on these ideas. Federalism sort of quashed this. Remember the uniqueness of each cities’ charters back in the early 1800’s?

That’s all well and good. But from a multi-level selection lens, what you seem to have is an exploration of dynamic tensions. To go back to the prison example, federal higher level prison have very clear race based dynamics. I doubt that such people aren’t any more or any less racist than anywhere else. What seems to happen is clear boundaries between arbitrary groups produce a stability that exceeds what could happen when migration between groups is free and you can never be certain who is on who’s side or who is subverting whom.

The result is some scary group based thinking. Things such as “I don’t care who gets punished, but your group owes us a head” tend to occur. You had similar type thinking among many native american groups, especially amongst plains indian groups.

Tension between competing groups with similar polity sizes produces an environment that doesn’t tolerate much gamesmanship. Obviously operation at a higher level of selection minimizes overall violence levels (see Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature on the history of violence decline as polity size increases), but this is only true is the conditions necessary for operation at a higher level of selection are stabilized in a population.

As the riots, and inner city violence, and police double standards show, this isn’t the case in many environs.

Socio-Cultural Level

This is a view that dominated up until a few years ago. We’re in the last stages of a cultural war. The winners of the cultural war went for total domination and now having backed its foes into a corner, have elevated things into a full existential war.

This is really a group social psychology frame.  It’s one group against another for cultural domination. I doubt much more needs to be said here. If you thought the culture wars were coming to an end as woke-ism died out these last few months, you were probably as wrong as I was. 

Governmental Level

The simplest systems frame is that of competing governing factions. Blue vs red state thinking. To my way of thinking this is overly simplistic. But, it does work, especially if one starts to look for negative sum thinking (if it hurts my enemy more than me, its good)

*Notes

Civil War 1.0 was the war of independence. It was a combination of a socio-political purge with a foreign power rebellion.

Civil War 2.0 was ‘the civil war”. I interpret it as a weak empire conflict. I believe empires that weaken (or are stretched too thin for federalist demands) tend to bifurcate into two or so strong mid-sized states. In the lead up to this war, northern and southern states solidified. But, in a very unique solution, moderately strong federalism won out. Nonetheless northern and southern differences remain very start up to this day, despite fairly large levels of migration between the two.

Civil War 2.nothing was the social conflict that almost blew up in the late 1890’s and into the early 1900’s. It was avoided, largely due to strong memories of the Civil War, and elite inter-pressure for philanthropy. The New Deal 

Civil War 2.nothing2 was the social upheaval of the 60’s with its fairly large levels of left-wing violence.  Death rates per annum amounted to 

Civil War 3.0 (usually called 2.0) is where we are now. As I’ve said before things will get bad in 2020, but really bad in 2024 or 2028.

US Civil War

Last year I did a bit of research into the possible paths into Civil War the US could fall into.

First Guess

Research 

Analysis 

With the explosion of riots following George Flynn's murder, things have definitely gotten hot. I don't think many people are laughing about the risk of civil war now as they were back in 2013 when I started to get anxious about it. Obama's symbolic embrace of interesectionalism and all the structural problem of classical racism was always guaranteed to lead to some major problems. This doesn't mean it was anyone's fault (including Trump). It just means there were some much deeper processes at work that would take an exceptionally lucky super-position of choices to escape.

Tim Pool is probably one of the wiser news people here.  He's obviously not well informed technically, but he has a good sense of the left, and seems to get the anxieties of the right. And, he's reasonably good at filtering the news and understanding how their spin processes work.  Coming from a poor Chicago neighbourhood he also gets inner city dynamics, and can juxtaposition those with West coast progressivism.

The civil war vector Tim suggests is a fairly novel one. He suggests civil war will be based on a series of legal insurrections.

LEGAL INSURRECTION WAR

Sanctuary cities based on immigration have inspired sanctuary counties based on 2nd amendment. At the same time you've got sanctuary states emerging, and the very real possibility of counties moving from one state to another (see eastern Oregon & Washington and Virginia).

Right now you have Twitter declaring themselves immune from a vengeful application of Iranian sanction law. I don't think they saw that one coming, and, other than crying that application is vengeful, I doubt they have much of a legal leg to stand on. Only judicial activism and #Orangemanbad can save them. And it might.

But Trump's long overdue designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization really solidifies the legal insurrection vector into civil war. Are all the progressive elites who materially support Antifa going to double down against the president and brazenly embrace the Antifa rioters who are destroying inner city neighbourhood under the guise of "doing it for the black people' they're razing? I suspect there will be a decent amount of double down. For instance, I imagine Biden has enough dementia for his hip staffers to push him into it.  After all #OrangeManBad. And if the legacy DNC system can save image by avoiding Russiagatehoax prosecutions, they might as well throw a hail mary. Doubling down (on both sides of the aisle) is the rule of the day.

That will leave the States with even more deep state problems than it now has. Will you have half the FBI (the Brennanites and Commeyites) subverting the Barrites to protect what they feel is an unjust application of the executive authority? Probably. I just don't see how you'll avoid that.

FUNDAMENTALLY

The problem, fundamentally, is you now have a weak state (US federalism) that is splitting apart. Divisional processes follow a 2 state bifurcation model rather than a total collapse into chaos. The "protestant" side is bouncing around a landscape that will ultimately select for grievance sacrilization. In that sense, the ultimate aim of the riots isn't for concession A of concession B. Nor, is it about total reform as the rhetoric may say. That is mainly motivational. Ultimately, it is about finding grievances that can't be fully understood, and thus can't be infiltrated or countered by the other side. These are a special type of sacred value. Any affront to them, as with 1600's protestantism, is grounds for violent insurrection. And, any legal claims that would go against such values are themselves illegitimate. Not because of any failing with the law per se, but because their intent and outcomes are counter to the bifurcation process itself.

CONCLUSION

These are very interesting times. I've deleted my twitter in protest of the information banning they've done against Trump (and have long since deleted facebook for their "curation" tendencies & mindless people's braindead political spam). Like him or hate him, I think one sided political censorship is a cure that is worse than the disease. While it may seem good and fair, based on my reasoning cited early, it will only energize the next big backlash cycle. Institutional domination by the left and a huge overton window shift in that direction makes the right feel as if they are backed up against a wall. Right now Trump is the only figure really holding that flood back (at least in their minds).

The stakes are high, and while Trump's terrorist designation and framing of his fight as that FOR minority business rights and economical success, I just have a feeling that deep state energy is too great to contain. This is an unexpected fit into Peter Turchins' elite overproduction reasoning. Neat.

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.