American Nations: Wokeism as Puritanism 3.0

I'm now reading American Nations  and have been quite impressed with it.

The book traces the cultural legacy of America's founding European nations, and does a great job highlighting what gave rise to all the internal wars preceeding the Civil War and all the cultural wars which followed it.

One of the biggest mind shifts it has made in me is to see Yankeedom (north eastern puritan culture) as much more of an authoritarian influence than I ever did before. The prefferred governance model for this culture remained community conformity and a desire to ensure a rigtheous environment. That this came across as authoritarian busy-bodiedness among Appalachians is to be expected.  It was the antithesis of Scot-Irish independents.  As a conservative mountain folk type guy, I can certainly relate to this.

The question this raises is to what extent do today's woke Washington elite relfect the puritanical tendencies of their past cultural groupings? Is political Wokeism a re-imagined Puritanism? Have they rediscovered and resold the value of ensuring a society's environment is a pure and righteous as possible?  

This seems like the turn Islam made that helped it be so successful.  Once you assume a universalist moral objectivness to a position, there is no arguing.  It is a "right side of history" question.  Political wokesim is there.

RELEVANT ACADEMIC READING

Cognitive mechanisms of Intolerance Thesis= "Viewing a moral issue as objectively grounded removes it from the realm of legitimate personal/social negotiation (i.e., individual and/or social attempts to condone it will be deemed unacceptable, and censorship/prohibition will be supported). Viewing a moral issue as non-objectively grounded, on the other hand, allows people to acknowledge its moral significance (i.e., that it is not simply a personal matter), while at the same time maintaining room for choice, dialogue, and debate—thus, social censorship/prohibition will be viewed less favorably)

The Right has Become the Left to Accuse the Left of Becoming the Right

Is there something about the phase change from Left to Right (horseshoe theory of politics) that is foundationally important?  Is it reflective of a change in pacing and leading between religion and governance?  Is it reflective of a phase change to authoritarian assimilation?

From the amazingly perceptive book Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia

Basics for Approaching our Current Secular Collapse

 A lot of times, I get asked about the dynamics of secular cycles from people who are used to religious cycles.  Here's the very basic set of books I'd suggest:

Adaptive Group Dynamics

You first have to understand the basics of what makes an adaptive group.  This gives you the tools to understand Wokeism's rise.  Since the collapse of religion as a social cohered over the last couple of decades, moralized politics has quickly taken the functional role casual religion used to play.

Darwin's Cathedral by D.S. Wilson

 Secular Cycles

The best set of texts on this topic has been done by Peter Turchin.  If you're wanting to get to the meat of things, look to his analysis of American History and his predictions of a mid 2020's secular collapse.  You can get some basic information from his blog - but it will be incomplete, and fairly piecemeal.  I personally prefer the more complete "Ultra Society" to Ages of Discord", because the former goes over about 6 test case societies instead of concentrating on the modern U.S.  Both go. over the same basic theory though...   (i.e. the intro chapters are mostly cut and pasted from one to the other).

Ultra Society by Peter Turchin

Historical Parallels

American Revolution (late 1700's)

There are three good time periods to study to get a feel for what is going on today.  But since there are so many history books about these major eras, don't expect to just pick up anything and figure out the dynamics.  To see what is going on at the proper level of scale - you have to be picky.  I'll order these based upon how good the information is rather than which era had the most informative parallels for today's time.

American Revolutions by Alan Taylor

This will get you up to speed about Antifa dynamics, cancel culture dynamics and societal bifurcation. While it isn't presented in terms of multi-level selection theory (i.e. the theory that forms Darwin's Cathedral), it enables an astute reader to pick up everything they need here. Most other histories actually hinder this lens.

If you really want to get some more insight into the Revolutionary era you can also read this one on the French Revolution. But, it won't give you insight into the tensions on BOTH sides.  You just get a sense of how breaking the norms around critiquing your government, and "re-imagining power" can let the cat out of the bag.

War of Religions (1600's)

Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe by Daniel Nexon

This one will get you up to speed on the Protestant - Catholic war of religions during the 1600's.  This is when the printing press came out and revolutionized the tools available for group formation.  It resulted in a bloody mess.  It is very good at revealing the process of grievance sacralization.  Obviously social media is the parallel to the 1600's printing press and cancel culture and intolerant Wokeism is the parallel to Protestantism. The main superficial switch is that Wokeism-as-Protestantism has the establishment place, while historically Catholicism occupied this side of things.  This is not a big deal if you're comfortable with multi-scale thinking (i.e. systems thinking).  History rhymes - never repeats.

Roman Christianity (300's) 

Centre Place podcasts on Paganism, Manichaeism, and the fall of Rome,

There are no good books here.  Nor are there any good podcasts.  The historical record is just too thin to do anything more than speculate.  Nonetheless understanding the basics of how Constantine took over Roman systems from the outside via the adoption of Christianity to satisfy societal equality appetites is a very close parallel to how Wokeism is energizing modern desires for equality.  It also matches the tools the modern left is using to delegitimize their opponents "in the sake of peace, equality and progress".

Inquisitions (ie. Spanish Inquisition - late 1400's)

I haven't gone deep into this period.  Mass hysterias whose energies are re-directed/enhanced to purge societies obviously has strong parallels to modern Wokeism (and early 1900's facism).  If you don't know how mass hysterias go, you'll need to find some resources here.  The Salem Witch Trials are an easy entry point.  I'll just link to a Centre Place podcast as I already have it saved in a youtube list.

Spanish Inquisition - Centre Place

Group Dynamics

If you want to start going past the basics, then you'll need to have a good grounding on group dynamics. While you can use the cultural evolution literature here (Mesoudi, Henrich, Lewens, etc.), the scale they tackle things is just a bit off.  You need something that bridges the gap between individual psychology and sociology.  Group agent theory does this perfectly.  It explains the dynamics of WHY we form adaptive groups and HOW proximate genetic control manifests itself in practice.

Group Agency  by List and Pettit

The Dynamics of Freedom

 

Pop Culture

 It is taking a while for parity to come to pop culture.  I wonder if this is the war the Pagans missed when Catholics came for them in the dark ages?

Right now I'm still thinking about the role media (and pop culture gatekeepers) play societally.  In particular I'm thinking about the Chiefdom polity size split between war chiefs and religious/moral chiefs. Why do societies need moral gatekeepers?  I suspect big societies do.  We had religion for a while.  But governmental pacing and leading of religion means we've left the sweet spot where society was equally balanced between secular moral chiefs and religious moral chiefs.  And, we're clearly seeing Media (and academia) trying to take the role of the new moral chief.

Too True

 I suspect the only way to get peace for the next half century is for the majority of countries to split into collectivist and individualist nations.

For example this cartoonist was fired for this and other Covid cartoons.

Meme

 

Sins

I wonder how productive this functional definition of sin is:

"Sin is that which destroys or erodes correct meta-narratives".

That would separate out things which simply erode group boundaries from that which destroys authenticity and authority.

 

Civil War Splits

 I just have to say that my decades old prediction of US civil war is now pretty accurate.  About 3 or 4 years ago I updated it a bit to suggest that any conflict should follow the standard weak empire evolutionary track. That's where a nation with too large of a de facto boundary fractures. The fracture typically produces two distinct states. Although during the fracture period more than that number of states may spring up, but over time, they coalesce or evaporate away.

Here's Tim Pool now discussing these issues based on a recent survey (of unknown quality) saying that around 40% of both Republicans and Democracts think it would be a good idea for the US to split into Red and Blue countries.

I think the spectre of a Trump 2nd (3rd) term would freak a lot of people out. This is especially true if he finally has a political machine and can pull the type of authoritarian BS that Biden's controllers can.  Do you think the left wouldn't want to split if Trump purges the military, disbands the FBI and "builds it back better"? And then purges some of the judiciary due to various hyped up issues and "suddenly opened skeletons in the closet"?

Personally, I think figuring out the city state influence problem is the major issue.  How do you keep city states from controlling urban states? You can remove the cities to some non-contiguous blue zone. Then the real cost of resources and labour could shoot up, providing equitable control between commoner classes and elite/coordinator classes.  Coordinator centers would then have to go to small rural cities. Over time the same problems would emerge, but at least for a while issues would "flatten out". Horizontal or flat networks are good for a time, but not for a long time, and not during times of nasty military threats.

RESONANCE

One thing that will likely energize this split is the fact that many progressives want "America" to cease so that it can be recreated.  This is probably an artefact of Hegellian dialetics.  The radical left has made most of its culture war progress since the 90's by redefining terms. Thus, why not "redefine" your nation's name?

Once you do this, you have a clean Taliban-level break from cultural history. You can exclude anyone you want as an "other" and sacralize the allies/identities you want.

The only problem, is sometime the other side agrees to this. This produces a pyrrhic victory. Your side gets what it theoretically wants, but it looses what it oft-time really wants - power over their foes.

Here's a twitter post with a racial progressive calmly espousing the end of America.  I can't see many right wingers disagreeing with her. "Let's divide the country and you can do whatever racial things you want - we'll focus on equality of opportunity and equality under the law."