Links to Consider, 3/14
Jean Twenge on the case for reading; Two reviews of Rob Henderson's book; Jason Manning and me on pre-modern society; David Roman on self-discipline and early religion
Reading is not natural for humans the way that speaking is. Children learn how to speak by hearing others speak. Reading is different: It must initially be taught, and then it must be practiced. For most people, the more you read, the faster you can read, and that pays off later in school and at work.
In particular, reading long-form text, including books, is necessary for success in college, graduate school, and in many jobs.
The skill that you need most is skimming. The trick is that you have to do a lot of reading in order to acquire the skill of skimming.
If you are reading whole books, rather than skimming them, chances are you are wasting a lot of time.
Reviewing Rob Henderson’s Troubled, Helen Dale writes,
The reality that classical liberalism—the closest to my own political views, I admit—has at least a whiff of the luxury belief around it stings. It’s discomforting to acknowledge that what goes by the name of paternalism has its own intellectual pedigree, while liberalism can be a system developed by the clever, for the clever. “Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal,” Henderson says. “This doesn’t make sense. The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”
My response to Henderson’s drug policy claims is to highlight the importance of trade-offs. There is a reason why economists and law enforcement hate black markets. Unfortunately, cultural memory of Prohibition and just how murderously violent it was is receding as the Greatest Generation dies off. Whatever policy a given government adopts, drug harms among the poor—Henderson argues drugs “are often a gateway to further pain”—must be set off against the gang violence and mass incarceration that go with criminalisation.
I think in the United States today, we have legalized drug abuse and kept criminals involved in the manufacture and distribution of drugs. If it were up to me, we would have much stronger social norms against alcohol and drug use.
Dale points to a review of Troubled by Holly Mathnerd, which I recommend. She writes,
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one aspect of this book: the extent to which dishonesty is entirely normalized in our society among the elite. The luxury classes people pretend to believe that marriage doesn’t matter, but very few of them have children out of wedlock. They pretend to believe that fat-shaming is a serious moral affront, while they spend a fortune on organic food and personal trainers to keep themselves fit and trim. They pretend to believe many things that their lives betray they don’t actually believe at all.
It’s easy to think that most of them are just going along with the crowd and don’t realize they’re lying, but the truth is that most of them do know
Jason Manning and I discuss some topics in sociology. We started out discussing honor culture, dignity culture, and victimhood culture. Then we moved on to Patricia Crone’s book on the pre-modern world. I was not feeling well, so fortunately Jason was lively and insightful. He had a lot of interesting things to say. For example, when peasants wanted to stage rebellions, they often need to recruit a nobleman to teach them how to organize violence.
Earlier religions such as the Greek, Egyptian or Mesopotamian cults, even to a large extent Chinese Taoism, were based on rituals to flighty gods and specific, often short-term rewards that were expected from them if the proper procedure was followed. A turn away from such ritual-for-reward approach and towards morality, with an associated focus on self-discipline and asceticism, was fairly well synchronized around Eurasia, a fact first noted by Nicolas Baumard, a psychologist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris[2]. This insight was based on the previous work of German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who dubbed the time when these new religions arose “the Axial age.”
…Baumard, meanwhile, coined an unexpectedly down-to-earth theory to explain why this was the case, why in this era and not before or later: that an increase in wealth, a consequence of technological improvements across the somewhat-pacified and somewhat-unified lands of the Mediterranean, India and China, led to cultural switches toward what modern psychologists call “delayed gratification”
…Baumard's theory is based on the notion that the values fostered by affluence, such as self-discipline and short-term sacrifice, are exactly the ones promoted by moralizing religions, which emphasize selflessness and compassion. As most have their worldly needs attended to, religion could afford to shift its focus away from material rewards in the present and toward spiritual rewards in the afterlife. In societies where the well-off had a reasonable expectation of living a long, comfortable life, moralizing religions eventually arose to reflect new values
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"The [classical liberal] position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”
No. The classical liberal position is that there should be a safety net, but one provided by the private sector. Private charities deal with individuals, governments with categories.
Marvin Olasky’s book, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," documents in detail the tens of thousands of lodges, charities, mutual aid societies, missions, civic associations, and fraternal organizations that existed across the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These organizations helped pull people out of poverty by addressing individual causes – ignorance, addiction, or simply bad luck. Thanks to the power of the free market and organizations such as these, the poverty rate plummeted from 80% of the population in 1800, to about 15% in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, the government stepped in with its “Great Society” programs and displaced private charitable organizations. As a result, the poverty rate has remained frozen at about 12-15% ever since. The government is very good at writing checks, but not very good at compassion. Real compassion isn’t feeling pity for the less fortunate, it’s climbing into the foxhole with them and sharing and understanding their individual problems.
Rather than addressing the unique issues that keep individual people in poverty, the government writes checks that do little more than help make the poor more comfortable in their poverty.
“If you are reading whole books, rather than skimming them, chances are you are wasting a lot of time.” This is presumptuous. The way you read depends on what your goal is.