Yoram Hazony's Virtue of Nationalism

 Hazony's main novel point in his book on Nationalism is the idea that the post 90's globalist ideology which is now wedded with Woke progressivism functions as an illiberal catholicism. Just like 5th, and 15th century Catholicism couldn't contemplate the non-ubiquity of its morals, globalist political Wokeism does the same.  There's simply no way there isn't a god, and there isn't anyway these aren't his judgments and precepts.  They're just too correct not to be. The arrow of progress is clear and only a fool, who would call the sun black, would disagree.

One of Hazony's challenges is his inability to reference cultural group selection. He argues that nationalism is the best unit of organization, but has to resort to handwaving to make his arguments.  Kingdoms are too dictatorial and warlike. Globalism is too over reaching and hence too authoritarian.  But, the only reason we're in this current state is because gene-culture evolution has temporarily positioned us here.

Near page 90 Hazony does try to address the "right size" issue using non-technical adaptive group logic.  Large groups must elevate ideology about the tribe.  Doing this requires tribes, and the individuals that make up tribes, to subvert their needs and desires for the large group's conformist ideology.  This is how the larger group orientation becomes adaptive.

The small group orientation, which he reduces absurdo to anarachy, is adaptive because individual needs are knowable. The people to whom you give quid pro quo loyalty to, can therefore repay you in kind. Inefficiency is small because of small world network dynamics (i.e. Everyone is part of a node where members are well known and association is voluntary.  Brokers connect to other nodes via scale-free patterns).

WHY DOES A LARGE GROUP ORIENTATION REQUIRE IDEOLOGY AS ITS CONFORMING PRINCIPLE

This of course begs the question why ideology is the necessary conforming principle (when existential physical threat is absent).  I suspect the answer, undoubtably, leads back to List & Pettit group agents.  

Before getting to group agents, it is certainly possible to say that ideology is likely to function as a costly commitment display.  Some views are certainly adaptive (think Christian inter-member charity). but other views are certainly irrational (at least superficially so, especially over short time frames and individual rather than population level aggregations).  Scott Atran's "In Gods We Trust" tends to this type of logic.  A little bit of counter-factualness mixed with the right balance of immediate/obvious adaptive benefit and long-term/obfuscated adaptive benefit produces an perfect cultural group evolution solution.

Hazony of course doesn't take this track.  That's fine.  This line of reasoning comes across as "just so" logical cherry picking.  Instead, Hazony suggests large group orientation and small group orientation revolve around two attractors: self-selecting anarchist-like groupings, and universalistic globalism which is morally authoritarinistic.

I'd tend to interpret these poles as strange attractors. That's basically how I operationalize the topology of cultural group selection.  But, this again begs the question why the large group orientation has to be both universal and ideological.

UNIVERSAL and IDEOLOGICAL

Hazony's answer seems to be that only ideology can bind non-related kin with no common heritage nor culture.  This is the standard lesson of French revolution curriculum and the standard logic of christian era monotheistic world religions.  But, such answers seem entirely unconvincing to me. Such answers are like saying a cold is sniffles rather than viruses.  So, what are some possible deeper reasons why the large group / universalistic globalism is so based in unquestionable moral universalism?

Hazony suggests that once you break down xenophobic tribal barriers, you tend to fall into an assumption that "everyone is human".  This seems demonstrably false.  One race may consider another race "human" but another "un-human".  Technological elitism justified this pretty well in the 17th to 19th centuries.

Rather, I suspect you need List & Pettit group agents (or equivalent) to explain what is going on with catholic universalistic progressive globalism.

Group agents emerge from random policy decisions. Individuals infer a moral interpretation of the group's decision in order to better predict future positions. Such a moral based heuristic is also exceptionally good at spotting freeloaders and edging the group and its members through Atran's religious like dynamics (which are of course very adaptive - see Atran and D.S. Wilson).  Exceptions to the group agent's morality are usually interpreted as a testing and purification processes.  Thus rather than causing cognitive dissonance, rebound to the inferred moral position actually strengthens commitment.  Rebound to slightly different positions is usually interpreted by individuals as an interpretational fault on their part.  Hence the need for the "right" level of ambiguity in the group agent's essence (think the Catholic mystery of the trinity, etc.).

GROUP AGENT: EQUALITY & OPEN MEMBERSHIP

The question then becomes what type of group agent fits nationalism (ie. what are the group agent's primary moral properties & focus)?

I suspect the proper nation-state enabling group agent has two main moral characteristics

1. open membership (within reasonable bounds)
2. equality

Open Membership

Open membership based religions were a feature of the bronze and iron ages. No one batted an eye if you went to a city and made a donation to a certain temple. These temples weren't religion in our modern sense.  They were more like political-moral think tanks (i.e. Lincoln Foundation, or  Dems for Open Borders).  When the monotheistic religions emerged during the axial age, things changed.  Conversion was something more than acquiesce to a certain god's legitimacy and power (amongst a large pantheon of beings and competing meta-narrative fables).  Conversion entailed a new level of illiberalism.  It wasn't that your god was strongest and therefore had domination rights, it was that every other option was wrong and heretical to nature and logic itself.

This came hand in hand with a substantively different kind of proselytization.  You weren't just convincing opposing tribes of your god's legitimacy, and hence really just doing military diplomacy via meta-narrative and religious symbols. Rather, proselytization was about ensuring the right ideology was followed so damnation could be avoided.  Military politics was icing on the side.  Converted muslims could still rebel against a king. But rebelling against Islam was categorically different.  Religion supplanted governance as the prime organizing factor (they always lead and pace each other).

This meant that religious membership eventually evolved to be quite open.  Pretty much anyone could join Christianity. In practice I suspect there was actually a set of necessary but not sufficient factors that had to be met (i.e. 8 of these 10 factors or so and you were worthy to join).

So I assume the nation-state group agent emerged from this open membership morality. Anyone (within reason) that proclaimed a certain universalistic (moral) ideology was accepted. The French revolution just got rid of the supernatural element and added a secular one - liberte, egalite, fraternite.

Equality

The second moral group agent characteristic I think was needed for a nation-state turn was equality.  Just because you have a religion with open membership doesn't imply that all members are equal. Just think of the Roman Catholic church during the dark and medieval ages.

But equality doesn't imply some fantastical sort of progressive utopia (no rich or poor). Rather, I suspect it just means you are heavily biased to assume the range of behaviours you think are appropriate to people within your society also apply to those outside your society.  Thus, if you can take advantage of low IQ workers in your society you can do so to those outside. But while $2 an hour wages may be OK, slavery is not.  Bounds may be fuzzy, and may be coloured by perceived heritage and ideological sympathies, there are bounds.  (In general, I think such bounds tend to be aggregate sums rather than legalistic individual line items).

CONCLUSION

I think a nation state group agent that emerges giving prominence to two moral values of open membership and equality satisfy Hazony's ideas of Nationalism.  Nation states aren't just an inevitable balance point between anarchy and imperial authoritarianism.  Rather nation states are a product of a moral group agent based upon open membership and equality which occurs in a cultural group polity evolution landscape where hard borders are taken for granted.

Education as indoctrination?

 In the US, there's been a recent upsurge in opposition to Critical Race Theory, and to a lesser extent its parent theory, Critical Social Justice Theory.

The opposition basically boils down to this

Black Lives Matter activists and white supremacists shouldn't be employed in our schools for exactly the same reason.

— James Lindsay, intentionally unendurable intellect (@ConceptualJames) June 23, 2021

Education has now mostly completed its shift toward what history usually refers to as "citizenship" education. In these phases education takes on a substantial moral character. The late 1800's was one of the more dramatic examples of this cyclical shift. Protestants tried to remove the catholic nature of immigrants. The result was a focus on morality. Catholics, feeling the marginalization this brought with it, elected to separate from the public school system.

I expect we will see a similar shift in K-12 education. In Alberta you have teachers who refuse to teach the "white supremacy" of a right wing curriculum. You also have rural folk saying much the same thing with regard to woke progressive indoctrinal curriculums. Decisions will get made based on the relative strength of bureaucratic institutions (which are exclusively left wing progressive) and populism (which is the last bastion of center and conserverative power).

The evolutionary arrow suggests institutions will win.  The only question is whether their lack of magnanimity in cultural victory will cause as second great split in public education, like the late 1800's public - separate school system schism.  We have the tech to do this.  Homeschooling is always the system to look at in this regard.  I suspect we'll see teacher's unions and progressive controlled governments locking up homeschooling.  But, you may also see populist governments de-fanging union control by enabling alternative educational systems.

Political "Catholicism"

 This week I've been reading Yoram Hazony's "The Virtue of Nationalism".  He had an interesting term for Wokeism - he called it a type of anti-liberal catholicism.

His idea was that wokeism is at least as religious as any other conventional religion, has the same type of appeals to authority as any other religion, has the political desires of medieval catholicism, and has the same assumptions of universality as small c catholicism (it is all encompassing and nothing escapes it).

Looks like Tim Pool has an editor from the New York post on who is following the same line of reasoning.  Wokeism is a new political religious force that just assumes it is the only possible paradigm and all other perspectives are just wrong an sinful.

As you can see, this sets up a huge fight with America's protestant roots.  You don't have to go too far back (to the time of Kennedy) to remember how reviled papists were.

I'll have to see how this interview goes.  Tim Pool, tends to be a bit too non-academic for me to handle his long-form stuff...

America's Political Prisoners

 No more needs to be said.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/10/letters-from-a-d-c-jail/

The US is now a third world democracy at least in most places where things actually matter.

Back to Religion's Roots

I have just started reading Czachesz's article on the transmission of early christian thought in order to get some info on its parallels to Wokeism.

It's hard for us to remember that religion WAS NOT historically in control of a unified system of narratives, rituals, social life, philosophy, etc. This turn happened during the axial age (8th to 3rd century BCE). 

Not only the variety, but also the complexity of early Christian religion is highly perplexing. Most religions in Greco-Roman antiquity were cults, which can be basically described in terms of rites and institutions. Mythology was also important, but it was transmitted in a number of different ways (history, poetry, fine arts, etc.) rather than controlled by religious institutions. The interpretation of mythology, together with the discussion of the great issues of life, was outside the realm of religion. In early Christianity, in contrast, a single institution coordinated aspects of mythology, ritual, social life, philosophy and ethics.  - pp 66

Thus Wokeism is probably just taking us back to the roots of socio-political religion. It is not an aberration. It's the de facto way cults, temples, shamans etc. used to operate.

Right now we see a cultish explosion and people tend to think, "that can't be religion.... it doesn't have much supernaturalism to it".  Well, it certainly has a devil figure. Does it really need a fully embodied deity?  Will the quintessential BIPOC develop?

Other people see Wokeism's fragmented cults and think "that can't be religion.... it is not a formal institution".  Sorry, as I've said before, it seems like most ancient cults and chiefdom era temple-based groups weren't either.  They were more akin to political thought tanks that had a decent-enough influence on some of the populous to act like a CNN contributor.  They both spout some imaginary stuff, push a certain meta-narrative view, have specific views that can be modified or enlarged by the right "donation" or ask by the right sort of power figure.  Should they both have messaging that comes out on the "right side of history" they add to a meta-narrative cannon.  This cannon, should it resonate with larger cultural wells can then tweak that society's grand meta-narrative textural base.  For instance the addition of a Baal vs Elohim script. Or a 1619 counterfactual trope.

I'm looking forward to reading more...

Great Awokenings In Early China

 This last year or so I've been looking deeper into "Axial Age" transitions. 

Jespers was the originator of the Axial age transition. His theory was that something fundamental happened in governenance and religion around 800 BC to 300 BC to move societies to function more liberally.

Peter Turchin's crowd did a deep dive with the Seshat database to test this idea.  The conclusion was that there was no formal axial age transition.  Rather, various liberal principles came in and went away, in a variety of Kingdom age polities.  There was no evidence for a single phase change once a critical mass of liberalness developed.

The latest book I'm reading in this vein in Li Feng's Early China.  It time focus is on 2000BC to about 300 BC. This includes the Erlitou, Xia, Shang, Zhou and later dynasties.  If I'm remembering the details correctly, during the Xia and Shang eras a very strong kin based morality developed. New territory was awarded to family lineages. The meta-morality was the taking care of ancestral roots. Ancestral veneration was tied up in this. But is was a bit more than ancestral veneration - it was an expansionist morality that tied the adaptive benefits of familial lineages into a religious code and day-to-day moral compass. In some sense, to me it seems reminiscent of North American tribal societies where religion couldn't be separated out from wise behaviour and cultural narratives.

But, what's neat is how this morality was overthrown during the fall of the Western? Zhou empire. A growing abundance of elites and geometric realities of territorial expansion meant that family lineage based city state control could no longer provide the adaptive benefits necessary to "keep things in the family". Very quickly, a new morality emerged that eschewed ancestral line control. There was a huge shift to intra-elite competition. Quid pro quo alliances quickly dominated. These quickly devolved into outright war. The number of elite "families" shrunk.  But the weak empire didn't split neatly into two nearly equal halves (or so I think). 

It's hard not to see this shift from lineage veneration/morality as anything other than a Great Awakening.

The next major Awakening is the emergence of the Shin class.  This is basically the emergence of a middle-class.  This is where Confucius comes in.  It's hard not to see this as a solution to disparity between elite classes and commoner classes.  After the warring states period, I suspect the commoner class was depopulated and the elite class growth had stalled and shrunk.  According to Turchin, that drives up commoner's real wages.  That's probably why the middle class was able to emerge and gain power.

The main relevance of these things for today is how powerful Great Awakenings and their correlated social dynamics are.  I really see resistance to Wokeness akin to the futility of resistance to Roman era Christianity, or to pagan resistance to European Catholicism.

In some ways this is not at all bad. We definitely need some more equality in society. The Iron Rule of Oligarchies is only making this more true.  One just hopes that Woke extremists don't reproduce the follies of 1900's socialism. But I don't see that as likely.  Political leaders see the power of Wokeism and the opportunities for grift it affords and just can't keep their hands out of the cookie jar.  Thus Wokeism has emerged at the wrong phase in Turchin's secular cycles.  It has emerged during the climb to peak elite overproduction, not at its denouement. To me, that's a VERY bad sign.

Grand Narrative Truth Wars

 A few years ago I had a four part post on Grand Narratives (policy meta-fables).  Here's a great example of their memetic fitness issues.  Hannah-Jones is the founder and pusher of the 1619 trope (America's founding was fundamentally oriented and based on slavery and racism).

Ellen Carmichael

@ellencarmichael

I’m still marveling at the defense of Nikole Hannah-Jones over this tenure stuff. A core tenant of journalism should be, I think: “Don’t make stuff up,” and yet every historian actually trained on the topic she writes about said that’s exactly what she did.

There's obviously a lot of push back, and push forward, on this idea.  From a broader lens what is happening is a fight between meta-narrative truth and objective truth.  From some perspectives, meta-narrative (or in this case post-factual truth) is actually more accurate than objective truth. That's because meta-narrative truth encodes "balancing information" that insists interpretation done in modern contexts.

It's as if there is a complicated and subtle math function that most people will get wrong, in well known ways, when they try and use it. Objective fact leaves those issues for the user to worry about.  Grand Narratives (or post-factual truth) includes a bunch of "balancers" that ensure the average use of the complicated and subtle function will produce the desired result.

Another analogy is engineering.  Meta-narrative truth is akin to engineering a bridge to minimum strength standards by doing the minimum strength calc and then doubling its value. If the minimum strength function really produces a "minimum" strength number, then why double it? It is by definition illogical (assuming of course your minimum strength function is accurate).  That's the meta-narrative truth of 1619 and Critical Race Wokesim.  The meta-narrative is always more accurate than the facts.  

That's why hate hoaxes and more true than actual hate crimes. They reflect the deeper reality of the "real" levels of trauma.  Only the super-marginalized need to personify their trauma in order for it to even be heard.  It is a Kafka trap. The only way to truly signify marginalization starts to become to hyper-sensationalize it so even the most minor problems are personified as huge.  New religions and religions undergoing normal inquisitional cycles do this too. Soon it's not just sexual misconduct that's a sin, it is the mere thought of it that is. It's not alcohol that is a sin, the use of grapes themselves becomes a sin.

This is a classic purge dynamic. Costly commitment displays and faith tests are an adaptive way to clean house and install a new, purified, ruling class and norm enforcement protocols.  That's also why there is so much push back to this stuff, and why the only adaptive solution to counter this push back is to form resistance to it as a Kafka trap.

Critical Race Theory has done this beautifully.  US wokeism is a disease akin to Nazism, 1900's marxism. But it's also just as much a disease as 4th century Christianity, Christ era Christianity, or any  axial age religion.  Trying to judge things on an objective - factual basis misses the point.

Religious Garb

 Is this how the identity demarkation of religious garb starts?

Not the Babylon Bee

David Hogg

@davidhogg111

I feel the need to continue wearing my mask outside even though I’m fully vaccinated because the inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/david-hogg-is-triggered/

Woke racial hysteria weaponized for bullying

 Here's an article I stumbled on - it gives background on the Papa John's founder = racist story that went around 2 years ago.  Looks like it was the soon to be fired PR's firm revenge for something or the other....  Papa John's not using Kanye West because he used swear words, and the PR firm getting ticked off?

The relevance here is how wokeist religion is getting used for political ends.

If you wanted to get a co-worker or boss fired, how would you go about doing it today....  I certainly know.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/new-plot-twist-in-papa-johns-scandal/