First, thank you for engaging with my essay(s). Second, the conscientiousness point was over-stated and has been corrected.
I agree, modern elites are status insecure. That’s why they cling to various markers of status so fiercely. The point that ibn Khaldun and I are making is not that competition for status and resources goes away, but that it becomes inwardly focused (so corrosive) rather than outwardly focused (so cohesive).
The notion of efficient self-deception is not an explanation on its own. Efficient self-deception is a persistent feature of human existence. The question is what are the patterns and levels of efficient self-deception in a society. If the levels of efficient self-deception are rising, and are particularly high among elites, that will have consequences.
But I agree, lots of other things are going on. For instance, if one wants to identify a period most analogous to our own, then it is the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the C4th and C5th. We see very similar factors: collapse of a religious order, massive increase in bureaucratisation, flipping of the gender-orientation of sexual mores.
Christianisation feminised sexuality (no sex outside marriage for anyone: sex-as-commitment being the dominant female orientation, given our remarkably biologically expensive children, for obvious evolutionary reasons). The Sexual Revolution masculinised sexuality (sex as cathartic pleasure). A pattern dating apps have ramped up.
So, the patterns and levels of efficient self-deception in our society is only part of the pattern.
"analysis of group cohesion as intensifying in harsh or threatening environments, but degrading from peace and sedentary living, fits with this."
Isn't it somewhat more complex than this because of all the niche and fractured micro cultural identity groups and the internet. In Turchin's "War and Peace and War" he references Khaldun to talk about high asabiyya required to form an empire and the meta-ethnic frontier that brings this about for a society. Don't people on the left and the right currently have high in group asabiyya because the meta-ethnic frontier is now digital? You can go online and join any group and with social media you will see trolls and detractors of your in group everywhere even if they are very small in number. Noah Smith made a comment that he has never experienced much if any anti-semitism in real life, and yet he can see people espousing it online regularly to no end. Martin Gurri made a similar point with regard to the fascism/anti-fascism discourse to say the number of actual Nazis living in America might number somewhere around 3000, in a nation of over 300 million.
The bit about conscientiousness in the academy is a little odd to me. I recall Caplan pointing out that being good at school (good grades, don't get in trouble, keep at it through degrees) is a signal of high conscientiousness. So while high conscientiousness might make you more likely to be conservative, it also makes you more likely to be an academic. Considering only something like 1-2% of Americans have PhDs, it doesn't seem like a stretch to say that the university system selections for conscientiousness by accident but also filters out conservatives.
I am the last person to laud the virtues of academics, but a certain willingness to jump through hoops set forth by others and grind through long term projects tends to be one. Of course, vices like dishonestly, cowardice etc. are also endemic.
Lorenzo's essay also highlights for me why he is not my favorite writer: fuzzy thinking. Consider this sentence:
Instead, [hyper-norms] come from coordinating status, social leverage and cognitive identity in prosperity-and-technology-cocooned societies flooded with information.
What, exactly, does that mean? What does "coordinating status" entail? Are we changing the status of the people? How does that work outside of the group doing the coordinating? Are we coordinating people with the same status? If so, isn't that just a version of the notion of class identity? How does the notion of hyper-norms differ?
To me, inventing hyper-norms seems like reinventing group membership signals. "All good people believe these 5 non-obvious and probably wrong things. If those people don't believe them, they are not good people, and we can attack them." Usually the impracticality of the notion is the point; everyone wants to believe useful things, and has to at some level, but only the truly ascended can afford to believe madness. That's how the group differentiates insiders from outsiders.
…The causes of decadence, of mental and moral deterioration? Too long a period of wealth and power, selfishness, love of money, and the loss of a sense of duty."
Really? Is this really how empires end? How many examples of this can you point to? If this really does happen, I suspect it is rare. Show me.
I am beginning to understand that all of this is inevitable. We are improved and then degraded by the cycles in which we find ourselves. Age of Decadence is surely what we are within right now as we write.
First, thank you for engaging with my essay(s). Second, the conscientiousness point was over-stated and has been corrected.
I agree, modern elites are status insecure. That’s why they cling to various markers of status so fiercely. The point that ibn Khaldun and I are making is not that competition for status and resources goes away, but that it becomes inwardly focused (so corrosive) rather than outwardly focused (so cohesive).
The notion of efficient self-deception is not an explanation on its own. Efficient self-deception is a persistent feature of human existence. The question is what are the patterns and levels of efficient self-deception in a society. If the levels of efficient self-deception are rising, and are particularly high among elites, that will have consequences.
But I agree, lots of other things are going on. For instance, if one wants to identify a period most analogous to our own, then it is the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the C4th and C5th. We see very similar factors: collapse of a religious order, massive increase in bureaucratisation, flipping of the gender-orientation of sexual mores.
Christianisation feminised sexuality (no sex outside marriage for anyone: sex-as-commitment being the dominant female orientation, given our remarkably biologically expensive children, for obvious evolutionary reasons). The Sexual Revolution masculinised sexuality (sex as cathartic pleasure). A pattern dating apps have ramped up.
So, the patterns and levels of efficient self-deception in our society is only part of the pattern.
"analysis of group cohesion as intensifying in harsh or threatening environments, but degrading from peace and sedentary living, fits with this."
Isn't it somewhat more complex than this because of all the niche and fractured micro cultural identity groups and the internet. In Turchin's "War and Peace and War" he references Khaldun to talk about high asabiyya required to form an empire and the meta-ethnic frontier that brings this about for a society. Don't people on the left and the right currently have high in group asabiyya because the meta-ethnic frontier is now digital? You can go online and join any group and with social media you will see trolls and detractors of your in group everywhere even if they are very small in number. Noah Smith made a comment that he has never experienced much if any anti-semitism in real life, and yet he can see people espousing it online regularly to no end. Martin Gurri made a similar point with regard to the fascism/anti-fascism discourse to say the number of actual Nazis living in America might number somewhere around 3000, in a nation of over 300 million.
The bit about conscientiousness in the academy is a little odd to me. I recall Caplan pointing out that being good at school (good grades, don't get in trouble, keep at it through degrees) is a signal of high conscientiousness. So while high conscientiousness might make you more likely to be conservative, it also makes you more likely to be an academic. Considering only something like 1-2% of Americans have PhDs, it doesn't seem like a stretch to say that the university system selections for conscientiousness by accident but also filters out conservatives.
I am the last person to laud the virtues of academics, but a certain willingness to jump through hoops set forth by others and grind through long term projects tends to be one. Of course, vices like dishonestly, cowardice etc. are also endemic.
Lorenzo's essay also highlights for me why he is not my favorite writer: fuzzy thinking. Consider this sentence:
Instead, [hyper-norms] come from coordinating status, social leverage and cognitive identity in prosperity-and-technology-cocooned societies flooded with information.
What, exactly, does that mean? What does "coordinating status" entail? Are we changing the status of the people? How does that work outside of the group doing the coordinating? Are we coordinating people with the same status? If so, isn't that just a version of the notion of class identity? How does the notion of hyper-norms differ?
To me, inventing hyper-norms seems like reinventing group membership signals. "All good people believe these 5 non-obvious and probably wrong things. If those people don't believe them, they are not good people, and we can attack them." Usually the impracticality of the notion is the point; everyone wants to believe useful things, and has to at some level, but only the truly ascended can afford to believe madness. That's how the group differentiates insiders from outsiders.
"The final age is an Age of Decadence.
…The causes of decadence, of mental and moral deterioration? Too long a period of wealth and power, selfishness, love of money, and the loss of a sense of duty."
Really? Is this really how empires end? How many examples of this can you point to? If this really does happen, I suspect it is rare. Show me.
I am beginning to understand that all of this is inevitable. We are improved and then degraded by the cycles in which we find ourselves. Age of Decadence is surely what we are within right now as we write.