Whither the West?

Tag: neomodernism

  • Stories and Truth – a Rivalry?

    I recently engaged in the following conversation about the nature of stories and truth. Others’ comments in quotes, mine unquoted. All have been edited for readability and style.

    “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”

    I strongly dislike this idea. Reality is enchanting and amazing. Things happen in history and real life that would seem utterly contrived and  unbelievable if written down. If one can’t tell a good story without bending the truth, then maybe one is just bad at telling stories.

    Facts happen once and are gone. Sharing it or writing it down completely changes what happened. The storyteller or writer chooses what to convey. So reality may be amazing, but cannot be shared in its full splendor.

    I do not agree that just because reality may be ephemeral that we should not attempt to hold ourselves to it as much as possible. Of course our forms of communication limit how much of reality or of lived events can be conveyed, but I eschew the notion that since absolute truth is not possible that we should fully abandon its pursuit.

    Adherence to facts and truth is the goal in serious journalism, but even there the journalist is limited by their subjectivity. And when the facts don’t fit the narrative it’s usually a lot more common to change the facts to fit the narrative. But the same is true of readers, who bring their own subjectivity to the reading experience. In other words, since words carry meaning, we can never have an objective recounting of the truth.

    I agree and I take these points seriously. However, there’s a postmodern idea that says that since we can never truly reach truth and objectivity, it’s pointless to try and we should indulge in subjectivity, letting one person’s biased and subjective views counter another person’s biased and subjective views. I find this unworkable and self-defeating, because why would we engage in the process of meaning-making at all if it’s ultimately impossible to arrive at an understanding of another person’s thoughts and experiences?

    I propose, rather, a neomodernist framework: we take in stride the postmodernist criticism that objective truth is an unreachable ideal, but as with any ideal we follow it as best we can. We also elevate other interpretations that aim for the same ideal and strive for critical awareness of our own biases and preconceptions, and from those triangulate what the ideal “objective truth” might be, even if it is unattainable.

    And more consequentially, we must have a shared epistemological system in order to maintain or construct a shared global culture and civilization. If every person has their own epistemological system, then the world contains more than 7 billion different cultures and civilizations, rendering a true shared human community an impossible dream. It should not be an impossible dream. It should be the goal we work toward every day.

  • The Heterozygote Advantage and the Crisis of Western Authority

    question

    I.

    There is a concept in biology known as Heterozygote Advantage. If you’re already familiar with this concept, feel free to skip to section II.

    As one may know, sexually reproducing organisms inherit two copies of each gene: one from the mother, one from the father. Sometimes having two identical copies doesn’t mean much. Sometimes it means a lot. Having one recessive allele (gene variant) and one dominant allele usually means that the recessive one can be passed on along with the dominant one, but the dominant one is the one that is presented in the organism. For example, if a child inherits one blue-eyed allele and one brown-eyed allele, the dominant brown-eyed allele is the one that drives (so to speak) the phenotype (the way the organism biologically presents its genes) while the recessive blue-eyed allele rides shotgun, serving no function in the organisms per se but maintaining the possibility of being the one that is passed on to this organism’s offspring when it’s time to send one of the two genes into the next generation’s car, to continue the metaphor.

    Say hypothetically that there’s a recessive gene that allows people to heal really quickly. If you inherit only one copy of this gene, since it’s recessive, the dominant “normal healing” gene is the one that is presented in the organism, and there’s no biological difference from someone not having the “quick healing” gene. If, however, an organism has two parents who have this recessive “quick healing” gene, and happens to inherit both copies, then this child would have the Quick Healing trait. This child could get in deadly car crashes and be more likely to survive, be shot on a battlefield and be able to heal before bleeding out, etc. Even if this child never got an adamantium skeleton and never gained the ability to eject and retract blades from his hands, this child would be more fit – more likely to survive into adulthood and pass on genes – than one who did not have this genetic combination (ceteris paribus). This would be, for most intents and purposes, a good genetic combination to have (leaving aside the fact that in many organisms in nature, quick healing attributes are correlated with higher propensity for cancer). We would say in this situation that this organism has a Homozygote Advantage. This means, there is an advantage to having both copies of a gene where there is not an advantage to having only one.

    Then we have the opposite concept: a heterozygote advantage. As one may be able to infer from the above idea, a heterozygote advantage is one in which it’s more beneficial to have only one copy of an allele than two. The classic example of this is Sickle Cells: one copy of the gene that produces sickle-shaped blood cells makes red blood cells less susceptible to attack by the parasitic plasmodium that causes malaria, conferring an advantage in fitness. Having two copies of this same gene, however, makes too many blood cells too misshapen; the circulatory system struggles to deal with this complication, and Sickle Cell Anemia results, usually ending in premature death. This is a homozygote disadvantage, or a heterozygote advantage.

    II.

    The term “meme” has in recent years taken on a very different meaning than that which it originally had. Professor Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to refer to the cultural analogue of a gene. In the same way that “genes” were the discrete units of genetic information that were passed on and selected for and allowed a population to achieve continuity and evolve, likewise “memes” were the discrete units of ideas and cultures that were passed on and selected for and allowed sociocultural populations to achieve continuity and evolve.

    In the past decade or two, this term was somewhat misappropriated (though somewhat accurately applied) from its original usage in cultural studies and information theory and used to describe elements of Internet Culture – image macros, witty comment chains on reddit, propensity for voting to name things “Harambe” or “Xy McXface”, or the trope of misdirecting people via links to 80s British Pop music videos. Perhaps because internet culture was create ex nihilo so recently, participants were eager to identify elements of commonality and give them the name “meme”, hence the prominence of this term in reference to internet culture viz. every other area of culture.

    Nevertheless, the original definition of a meme – any transmittable element of culture – remains valid. How broadly or narrowly one should define memes in this sense is open to debate – people’s idea of the proper length of a Toga can be a meme as much as the concept of the Mandate of Heaven or the consensus about the right age for a boy to begin his manhood quest – these are all culturally specific ideas that are transmitted vertically (communicated between generations) and horizontally (communicated verbally, textually, etc. among contemporaneous members of a group), and are subject to inception, evolution, and oblivion.

    III.

    I would like to focus on one particular meme: skepticism. I will define this simply as “the notion that propositions should be doubted”. This is a meme, an idea-gene, if you will, that not everyone has. In some cultures great efforts are made to minimize the prevalence of this meme, namely in rampant authoritarian or theocratic societies in which doubt of the Supreme Leader or The Party or The Faith are seen as ills to be purged; critical thinking is not prized or cultivated. When the skepticism gene is manifest in a skeptical culturotype (the ideological analog to phenotypes) they are pruned from the flock.

    Thus, like any genes or memes, the meme of skepticism is not an unalloyed good. In environs and situations in which survival is precarious and military-esque deference to authority is necessary to stay alive, having a sudden increase in skepticism and doubt of the hierarchy could lead to the death of the society and the individuals that it comprises. But at other times, the meme of skepticism presents great advantages: being creative, willing to go one’s own way, follow one’s inclinations and not blindly stumble after the herd can yield enormous benefits when it comes to science, business, art, politics, or personal interactions. I would posit that there is a strong correlation between the prevalence of the skepticism meme and the level of creativity, dynamism, and liberty of a society.

    But that does not mean that this correlation is purely linear. That does not mean that forever increasing the prevalence of the skepticism gene results in ever more creative, dynamic, and liberated societies; or perhaps it does, but that manifests in ways we don’t like. Because when the low-hanging, transparent falsehoods of life are stripped away, when the lies of the authorities are exposed, how does skepticism know where to stop? How does the skepticism known if it has penetrated the facades and is gnawing through the pillars of the firmament?

    IV.

    When we picture the embodiment of skepticism, we may picture someone like Galileo, or Descartes, or Martin Luther. In the minds of many, skepticism is associated with things that we generally prize in humans: with discovery, with challenging oppressive institutions, with exploration, with innovation, and perhaps with a scientific mindset. We normally wouldn’t associate it with people we despise, with people we think are delusional, with people we might think are in the grip of dogmatic and destructive ways of thinking. We don’t think of Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers, Global Warming Deniers. We don’t think of 9/11 Truthers. We don’t think of Pizzagaters.

    But these groups are in many ways extremely skeptical. In fact, they are far, far more skeptical than the rest of us. They’re homozygous skeptics. They’ve inherited a double-serving of the “skepticism” meme. They doubt not only the facts, but the authorities that produce those facts, the institutions that those authorities serve, and even go so far as to doubt the ideologies that give rise to those institutions and authorities. A natural reaction of most normal people is to say that Flat Earthers are crazy and deluded. But they are saying “using only empirical observation, the world looks flat. You and I have never gone into space, never built a GPS system, never had to calculate and experience parabolic trajectories that take into account the supposed curvature of the Earth. You are taking it on faith from books and authorities that the Earth is round, whereas there have been plenty of societies that just took it from faith and books and authorities that the earth was flat. How are you any better than that?”

    Antivaxxers, dangerous though they are, are equally skeptical of authority and “established” truths. An antivaxxer points to thalidomide, to the vacillating warnings on fat and cholesterol and sugar, to the financial links between pharmaceutical companies and regulators, an Antivaxxer points to Tuskegee and says “how can you trust that?”

    Global Warming Deniers and 9/11 Truthers similarly point to the credibility of the authorities that interpret evidence at us. In an interview on the Ezra Klein Show, journalist danah boyd [sic] makes the argument that Pizzagaters were doing their own form of investigative journalism, truly feeling that they were seeing through secret codes and webs of lies and deceipt to expose a dark Washington DC underground. [source]

    These groups of hyperskeptics are not un-explainable deviants, nor could they not have been predicted. Rather, we created them, you and I and our school systems and our cultural tropes. They are the natural predictable end state of western society: when we encourage everyone to think for themselves, question everything, and doubt authorities, why shouldn’t we doubt all the things we can’t directly observe? Why do we still have any trust in any authorities? Who are we to say “whoa, wait a minute, I didn’t mean question that!”? When the selective pressure of western society encourages the proliferation of the “skepticism” meme, how are we surprised when people begin to inherit it homozygously?

    How does the skepticism know if it has penetrated the facades and is gnawing through the pillars of the firmament?

    V.

    The above skepticism is corrosive in itself, and the game of undermining scientific and medical knowledge presents obvious dangers. But in recent years these tendencies have reached a fever pitch, and become tinged with cynicism. If skepticism is the notion that propositions should be doubted, then its cousin, cynicism, is the notion that motives should be doubted. Cynicism would tell us that people who promise great things, who ask for your trust and loyalty in order to change your life or the world for the better, are usually looking for a way to take advantage of your trust and use you for their own ends.

    This brings us to the crux of this argument, and the fulcrum of Western society: what happens when this skepticism and cynicism is turned on our social and political institutions? What happens when homozygous skepticism is swapped out for cynicism, or occurs alongside it? The fact is that this process is happening now, throughout the West. From Trump to Brexit to Hungary and everywhere in between, the meme of “agenda-calling” is infiltrating social and political discourse. Anyone who wants anything has “an agenda”. The media has a liberal agenda. The EU has an agenda to subdue British power, or to erase Hungarian culture. Scientists have an agenda to destroy the oil industry and American jobs. And of course, their expressed motives – of providing information, of delivering on the promises of liberalism, of securing the peace and health of the world – are just facades to hide their secret abuse, pilfering, and power-grabbing.

    Be skeptical of them. Doubt the institutions. Doubt the motives.

    I do not wish to enter the argument of whether, or to what extent, Russia is actively interfering in Western politics, but I wish to submit that this ideology of cynicism and skepticism intertwined and directed at politicians has long been a core of Russian political psychology, and that it is the idea now infiltrating western political discourse. “I think what the Russian discourse is [is] that it’s, in fact, very difficult to cleave perfectly to [a set of morals],” Nikitin said. “And anyone that claims to the contrary can be unmasked as, in fact, being just as flawed as anyone else is” [source].

    This strategy is commonly called “whataboutism”, but that term misses the mark. “Whataboutism” is, literally, a usage of “what about…” also known as the “tu quoque” (you as well) fallacy. When someone criticizes you, you can respond with an accusation that the other person, or something the other person supports, is guilty of the same thing. Rather, this tactic of agenda-calling, unmasking, and dragging of idols through the mud perhaps deserves terms like “weaponized cynicism”, “weaponized skepticism”, or “weaponized postmodernism”. The idea that all ideologies – democracy, liberalism, good governance, freedom of the press, etc – are merely lofty promises that abusive politicians make to empty your pockets when you’re not looking – is a defense mechanism used by autocrats to make their critics out to be doe-eyed naifs.

    But to return to the Russia question, the fact is that it doesn’t really matter whether this is Russian meddling – because either way, we set ourselves up for it. We encouraged the skepticism. We filled the ideological meme pool with the skeptical meme. We must contend with the results. And we must find new pillars to hold up new firmaments.

    PS.

    An obvious criticism to this description is that there’s no need to resort to genetics and heterozygote advantages to explain this; this is a simple question of extremism. There’s a moderate, healthy amount of skepticism, and then there’s extreme, nigh-solipsistic skepticism. What we need to do is to encourage the healthy amount and discourage the extreme nigh-solipsistic kind.

    But I’m not sure that quite captures the way this works. First of all, it seems hard to pinpoint that a person picked and chose their level of skepticism and thought “hm, I really like being an extremist”; rather, these seem to be a priori propensities to doubt everything or not. In that way, they perhaps operate more like genes than political ideologies, which are at least in part a collection of individual policy and candidate preferences.

    Second, I’m not sure it’s one-dimensional; I think it’s possible that there are two slightly different domains of skepticism that someone can have individually, and only when they inherit the skepticism gene in both domains do they get these dysfunctional outcomes like flat-eartherism. Perhaps these domains are along the lines of “institutional skepticism” – skepticism of the authority of impersonal bodies; “societal skepticism” – skepticism of the veracity of lay common sense; or “empirical skepticism” – skepticism of the authority of senses to deliver veritable outcomes; “scientific skepticism” – skepticism of the truth-finding ability of scientific processes and community. I’m sure we can all think of people who have a few of these attributes, but do we know anyone who is skeptical in all of these domains?

    Can we agree that these are, to a large extent, uncorrelated dimensions – one could be maximally skeptical of science while having no skepticism for societal lay common sense, or vice versa – ?

    To that extent, I do think these operate as discrete attributes rather than a general “skeptical” spectrum.

  • Not Postmodern

    What is the West?

    Not Postmodern.

    Now, a lot of people like to use these terms like “modern”, “postmodern” and even “anti-postmodern” without knowing exactly what they mean. So for the sake of having some common vocabulary for once, let’s define our terms.

    Modernism – the philosophical outlook that defined the West through the late 19th and early 20th century. Essentially, a belief in progress, a belief in objective success in human development, and a belief that a better and more prosperous and free world could be achieved through the right combination of technologies and institutions. Modernism requires a belief in an objective truth, a belief in some sort of scale upon which human societies can be judged, and a belief in the power of human intellect and spirit.

    The Nobel Prize, the World Health Organization, and the Kellogg-Briand pact were examples of applied Modernism.

    So were Colonialism, Communism, and Nazism.

    Gulags, concentration camps, and apartheid were seen as necessary means for these grand visions of social progress. In the eyes of many “moderns”, force and death were unfortunate but necessary means of making way for humanity’s future, of eliminating the unwanted vestiges of the old to make way for the new.

    It is no surprise, then, that in the wake of the Second World War, some people began to question the tenets of Modernism. “Who are you,” the first post-modernists might ask, “to determine what a better society should be? What does ‘better’ even mean? How is it defined? These are socially constructed terms that don’t mean anything. I am entitled to an opinion about social progress as much as you are”.

    In the past few decades, this postmodern discourse has proven startlingly successful. Though initially postmodernists scored excellent political points against racist, sexist, and other repressive ideals, these memetic ideas, having run out of monsters to slay, have been turned in praetorian fashion against some of the core pillars of Western civilization. The attitude that “everything is opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own” and “there are no objective facts, only narratives” have taken the West by storm. This cynical weaponized postmodernism has propelled Brexit supporters to grow “tired of experts”, have propelled Trump supporters to create their own “alternative facts”, and the impulse to “question everything and think for yourself” has subsidized the rise of Flat Earthers, Intelligent Design subscribers, creationists, anti-vaccine advocates, and birthers, content to believe that “what they feel to be true” is just as valid as empirical evidence, for, after all, we are all entitled to our opinions. The pendulum of philosophical dialectic has swung far too far.

    To put it squarely – albeit perhaps too on-the-nose – postmodernism is anti-Western, for it is against the large group identities such as those of civilizations. Post-modernism is a critique of all collective values, a critique of shared assumptions, even if those values are freedoms of inquiry and debate, and those assumptions are rational and scientific ones.

    Post-modernism says “why should we privilege traditional western freedoms over other kinds of values? Why should we privilege scientific mindsets over other kinds of mindsets?”

    The Neomodernist West must respond: “because they make everything better”.

     

  • To Explain is Not to Excuse

    Scott Alexander recently posted his thoughts on the merits of social shaming of explainable sociopsychological phenomena. Beginning his discourse with the new hyperprogressive idea that “lazy-shaming” should be ended, Alexander counters that

    I imagine [an anti-Lazy shamer] believing he has a fundamental value difference with people who use the term “lazy”. They think that some people are just bad and should be condemned, whereas he wisely believes that everything has a cause and people who have issues with motivation should be helped. But it’s not clear to me that this is a real difference.

    Alexander’s dialogue goes in a more semiotic and semantic direction than I would think about this subject from, but nonetheless touches on an important idea that should perhaps be one of the cores of neomodernism: being able to explain the origins or nature of problem does not necessarily excuse it. We should strive to explain and understand as much as possible. But once explained and understood, we must then strive to decide which things are good or bad, and encourage those things which are good and reduce those things which are bad. Body image/weight/fat-shaming discourses fall into the same category as the Lazy-shaming discourse above. There are many reasons that people gain excess weight — social, psychological, emotional, genetic, habitual, economic — the list goes on. No one should ever be bullied or abused for their physical condition. Yet at the end of the day, obesity is an extremely deleterious condition that is for the most part correctable — and to the end that it is correctable, social carrots and sticks must continue to demonstrate that obesity is condition to be escaped and avoided.

    To some extent, I am a supporter of the to explain is to excuse mindset with regard to socioeconomic conditions. A person who grew up and lives in a “poor” community may be subject to many socioeconomic memes that influence his or her behaviors in ways that are not conducive to his or her socioeconomic advancement. This is not that person’s fault, and thus, to some extent, we should not poor-shame on the personal level. On the one hand, it is simply, unarguably, better not to be “poor”, and in some aspects this is a correctable condition based on some changes such as saving (do more), spending (fewer depreciable and consumable assets), and behavioral (don’t smoke or drink too much alcohol) habits. And then on the other hand, in other aspects (the majority of aspects, likely), there are areas of this that are completely uncorrectable by individual means (educational background, job availability, level of income).

    With laziness as discussed by Alexander, there are many similarities — often, laziness is simply the result of bad memetic input: people have learned the wrong habits, have not learned the right habits, etc. But there is a difference between explaining how or why someone becomes lazy and condoning or accepting it as a should.

    Neomodernism must avoid the pitfalls of modernism: the anti-human, unexplaining, undeterred drive to some form of grand betterment. But it must too avoid the excesses of postmodernism: the all-accepting particularism that sees no difference between the is and the should be. It’s important to break the perception that explanation and condemnation are some kind of substitutes for one another and that they exist on the same spectrum. Rather, one can ideally strive to explain everything and then figure out what to condemn after the fact, and not let the status quo become synonymous with the should.

    Applicability to Academic Freedom/Freedom of Inquiry

    There is another aspect to this Explain/Excuse relationship: often, seeking to academically explain or research a topic, or to publish information on a topic, is seen as apologetics or excuse for heinous things. People who interview or research terrorists, KKK members, pedophiles, etc., may all be shamed for even engaging in such practices. “How can you even listen to what this person has to say? You’re giving them a platform! You’re validating them!” This was often the case with Trump supporters, for example, in the lead up to the 2016 election.

    This enters into murky waters. On the one hand, freedom of inquiry and expression means very little if it does not grant the ability to research topics that offend and disgust us. On the other hand, there are some highly offensive fringe views or objective behaviors that do get amplified and normalized by their publication and repetition.

    What do we say to this dilemma?

    The answer, I think, is to research and publish these ideas, but to do so from an objective, neomodern lens (“these people have their own reasons to believe these things, but they are factually wrong”), and never from a relativist postmodern perspective (“these people believe these things, and how do we really know that their truths are less valid than our own?”). I contend that a core problem with modern academia, journalism, and other sorts of “publicative/promotional” media is not bias, but rather the fact that in attempting to avoid bias, journalism has cultivated a relativism and apathy toward objective fact. There is a difference between apathy to valid opinion based on objective fact (whether, given racial socioeconomic discrepancies, there should be affirmative action programs, for example), and apathy toward the basic facts themselves (whether or not significant portions of welfare recipients are lying and manipulating the system to receive free money).

    This is what a neomodern research and journalism should be about: understanding the perspective of others, understanding that different interpretations exist, but being firm and unyielding in the face of abuse or falsification of objective fact. To Explain is not to Excuse.