Dwarves and Titans
Will Wilkinson has had a few posts worth reading about the human moral sense and “the evolution of ethics.” He’s right that acculturation, not our hard-wired responses, sustains good social order. Little-l liberals like Will and religious conservatives like myself can agree on this, if nothing else:
The norms that undergird the peaceful liberal order of impersonal, extended, massively positive-sum exchange are the result of generations of often self-conscious resistance to the “factory defaults.”
One might say the same about the norms that undergird the peaceful Christian order, if one were feeling generous, no? I’m surprised that this is controversial enough to attract hostile blog comments. Has evo psych scientism really colonized our thought so thoroughly that Will needs to marshal arguments against it? Does Huxley’s Titan really have so many fans among us Dwarves?
“…might say the same about the norms that undergird the peaceful Christian order, if one were feeling generous, no?”
Absolutely not. Your hypoth tanks on the rocks of Prop 8, miscegenation laws amd segegation academeies.
You are not humanists…….you are christianists. You only care about your tribe.
Vast difference.
— matoko_chan · Feb 15, 09:30 PM · #
I always enjoy matoko’s comments. Everyone in the universe stacked neatly in their pigeonholes in fifteen words or fewer.
— Alan Jacobs · Feb 15, 10:35 PM · #
I sometimes count the syllables on matoko’s comments along with the line breaks; I wonder if he is creating a new 21st century haiku structure in the bowels of the internets.
— rortybomb · Feb 15, 10:46 PM · #
Matt, What do you have in mind when you mention about the “peaceful Christan order”? I might be feeling generous!
— Will Wilkinson · Feb 15, 11:48 PM · #
By the way, I have no problem with a lot of what you might classify as “scientism,” but the proliferation of vulgar evo psych is truly becoming a problem. Ironically, it’s becoming something like the problem knee-jerk leftist sociobology haters (Lewontin, Gould, Rose, etc)said it would be. (“Science says women are for having lots of babies!”) If one actually follows the literature, one finds a subtle and textured debate that I think is actually leaning in the direction of vindicating the centrality of culture in human behavior. The old SSSM blank slatism is dead dead dead, yet work on gene-culture co-evolution, and on the adaptive advantages of high-fidelity culture-acquisition capacities, is mostly unknown to the intelligent reading public. But that’s where it’s at.
— Will Wilkinson · Feb 15, 11:58 PM · #
Agree with Will, and will add one more: philosophy of science. For instance, most of what you hear thrown around by both sides of the theist/atheist divide is mean procrustean nonsense.
(That’s very easy to say, of course. Anybody can squat in the middle and grimace. I, however, do not squat lightly.)
— JA · Feb 16, 12:52 AM · #
Will, may I recommend Maynard-Smith’s Evolution and the Theory of Games?
The appendix maths are highly enjoyable.
Also Boyd and Richerson’s The Origin and Evolution of Cultures.
And sorry, Alan…..I am not high verbal.
Tell you what…..give me a valid secularist/humanist reason to oppose SSM and I might feel generous.
— matoko_chan · Feb 16, 01:34 AM · #
I sometimes count the syllables on matoko’s comments along with the line breaks; I wonder if he is creating a new 21st century haiku structure in the bowels of the internets.
she.
— Freddie · Feb 16, 01:39 AM · #
Matoko is kind of the Bart DePalma of this blog. As soon as I see that she has commented, I stop reading the comment thread.
— y81 · Feb 16, 03:42 AM · #
By the “Christian order,” I mean those institutions that deliberately and successfully apply the Gospels to social arrangements, like families, churches, monasteries, missions, etc. I’m not talking about any macro time or place – I don’t have some Golden Age in mind.
Whatever the time or place, though, the basic mandates of Christian virtue – expand your moral obligations beyond your tribe, disconnect your moral judgements from your aesthetic ones, perceive in others an intrinsic worth independent of utility – are all pretty “unnatural” in the sense that I understand you and Huxley to mean.
And y81 – I hear you, man. I hear you.
— Matt Frost · Feb 16, 04:32 AM · #
mea culpa
far be from me to spoil threads
I’ll take my diogenes-like search for an honest conservative elsewhere.
i see nothing but liars, scammers, hypocrites and poseurs here.
— matoko_chan · Feb 16, 01:49 PM · #
Ah, but Matoko, you’ll miss ‘my’ all-too-valid secular/humanist argument against SSM (or S&M, for that matter)! Though possibly I really am a poseur for keeping the awful truth under wraps. Andrew’s theory of SSM is more deadly to his evopsych ‘allies’ than any of them have dared to realize. What? There are WORSE things than being a poseur?
— James · Feb 16, 02:04 PM · #
“…‘my’ all-too-valid secular/humanist argument against SSM”
fantasy.
Heather couldn’t do it, Razib couldn’t do it, and you can’t either.
— matoko_chan · Feb 16, 03:10 PM · #
And please, don’t insult my IQ with another of those gimped “traditional wisdom” arguments.
— matoko_chan · Feb 16, 03:15 PM · #
I didn’t mean to start a matoko-bashing thing. I just wanted to say to matoko, don’t be so quick to put people in simplistic categories. Matt spoke of being a Christian, and you jumped immediately to all sorts of unwarranted assumptions. There are lots of Christians who aren’t Christianists, who aren’t tribal, and whose views on SSM you don’t know. I think it’s a good rule of thumb, in controversial matters especially, to ask rather than assume what you think is the worst.
— Alan Jacobs · Feb 16, 03:34 PM · #
Here is another terse and pithy summation of the empirical data for you, Alan.
From what I have observed, all christians are either christianists or apologists for christianists.
The same thing is evident in the CSS of al-Islam, the rule to not criticize another of your memetic tribe.
— matoko_chan · Feb 16, 05:47 PM · #
Oh I may as well get it all off my chest……after centuries of attacking science in general and darwinian evolution in particular, now you are goin’ to attack evolutionary psychology?
That means you will have to discredit cognitive psych too, you know.
I think you are punching waaaay above your weight class as usual…..or… should that be IQ class?
— matoko_chan · Feb 16, 06:24 PM · #
Not because it’s evolutionary, and not because it’s scientific, matoko. Because it’s frequently bullshit.
— Freddie · Feb 16, 07:01 PM · #
You’re barking up the wrong tree, makoto_chan. Visit an Episcopal or UCC church some time, please? I’m not even in one of those denominations, but I’m Christian, pro-choice, and pro-same sex marriage. There’s no contradiction between any of those things and knowing that vulgar evo-psych is bullshit.
— mealworm · Feb 16, 08:23 PM · #
Vulgar evo-psych is, by definition, vulgar. But we need to know more than that it offends Episcopalian sensibilities before we conclude it is bullshit. If you accept that we, including our minds, are the product of a process of descent winnowed by natural selection, then the capacities of our minds, including our moral capacities, must be explained by that process. The alternative is some ad hoc supernatural intervention — and it is this, rather than just Young Earth creationism, that Darwinism threatens.
Episcopalians don’t like this because they don’t want to be confused with the vulgar Young Earth types, but they also refuse to believe that the post-sixties moral psychology of the secularized elite is just as unscientific.
— Pithlord · Feb 16, 08:43 PM · #
If you accept that we, including our minds, are the product of a process of descent winnowed by natural selection, then the capacities of our minds, including our moral capacities, must be explained by that process.
Choices always have facticity; there are always circumstances surrounding choice. But the fundamental choice remains— I can do one thing, or I can do another. The black student who is considered by “race realists” to have little chance of performing well on IQ test, whatever his natural ability may be, whatever the surrounding factors that influence his choice, he still chooses— A, B, C, or D, the right answer or the wrong one. He chooses, he decides. That’s the only important question, do we have a choice, and the answer is always yes.
— Freddie · Feb 16, 09:54 PM · #
Pfft
Here is a small thought experiment for you.
Why are conservatives so against young girls having sex?
Sex is good for homosapiens sapiens both physically and mentally.
In the age of birth control and safe sex there is no reason to restrict sex to adults.
Heres the “vulgar” evo psych explanation.
In the EEA there was no DNA testing….so in order not to be expending resources on raising some cukoo’s egg, virginity became highly prized.
Sexual activity in young girls reduced our market value when we were chattel.
Mealworm, so what?
You are tellin me that episcopalians are like the “good” germans?
I have just one thing to say to you….Prop 8 and 20+ million bucks.
That is the public face of your tribe.
— matoko_chan · Feb 17, 02:02 PM · #
And…what Christians believe to be “instruction from god” is really social mores and taboos that developed during the Evolution of Cooperation.
A kind of hangover from the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptation) like our self-destructive passion for sugar.
Useful at the time, but in the 21st century, not so much.
— matoko_chan · Feb 17, 02:19 PM · #
freddie….all men are equal under the law, but no men are equal under the genes.
Your hypothetical black student operates in a window of free-will hystereisis bounded by the cruel unscalable walls of heredity— genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic.
— matoko_chan · Feb 17, 03:37 PM · #
_freddie….all men are equal under the law, but no men are equal under the genes.
Your hypothetical black student operates in a window of free-will hystereisis bounded by the cruel unscalable walls of heredity— genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic._
But he can still choose, right? Or are you a hard determinist— that our genes literally decide what choices we make, all the time?
— Freddie · Feb 17, 08:27 PM · #
Like I said, he has a window of free will.
But his choices are bounded…..or shall we say…..limited… by the iron wall of of heredity.
Non-deterministic.
— matoko_chan · Feb 18, 12:15 AM · #