Summing up contemporary social change
For decades now, as an amateur opinionator, I’ve been writing critical things about cultural and political developments in the Western world. I’m still far from being elderly, and certainly haven’t stopped writing about more specific, technical topics for my day job. But I’ve now mostly lost interest in condemning specific deleterious social trends, because I can see that they all stem from, and are sustained indefinitely by, the root problem of human foolishness. Human beings, even “advanced” Western ones, are just not all that bright. Remember the Clinton campaign slogan from 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid”? Better to say: “It’s the stupid, stupid.”
Because we are stupid. We are apes. As individual animals, and as animal collectives, we are cognitively too limited to grasp the complexity—and enormity—of the reality in which we find ourselves. We also have, as our evolutionary firmware so to speak, many error-inducing psychological biases. My writings about cultural feminization have included lots of points about female cognitive bias, including the apparent female preference (relative to males on average) for short-term feelgood policy choices, blindness to long-term consequences, preference for non-rational methods in group and interpersonal conflicts, emotional alignment and groupthink, etc. But males have their own biases and blinders, and, arguably, as the physically and emotionally stronger, more independent-minded sex, should bear most of the responsibility for the fragility of human civilization. The bottom line, in any case, is that H. sapiens always seems to promote itself to its level of incompetence, where it cannot manage its societies well and—hubris having long been an adaptive trait for it in inter-civilizational competition—cannot even see its own shortcomings. Thus “man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”
This isn’t the place for a catalogue of modern human folly, but here are just a few significant examples of recent sociopolitical phenomena that we don’t understand enough to manage successfully, or simply represent stupid mistakes:
- “Democracy”
- GDP-maxing
- “Diversity is our strength”
- Market regulation and financialization
- Large-scale national welfare programs
- “The sexual revolution” / “women’s liberation” / “feminism”
- New media technologies
- Strip malls, billboard-infested highways, centerless “bedroom communities” etc.
Sure, we often argue about such things, but we seem incapable of resolving those arguments successfully—i.e., in ways that won’t blow up in the long run. It’s not just that we are too nearsighted to see the probable long-term consequences of bad social changes; we also are relatively blind to the existing selfish and “tribal” interests that initiate and/or defend such changes. In general, in assessing ideas and their consequences, our attitudes and habits seem primitive in comparison to what they could be.
Accepting our limitations would require a deep transformation, in which, at least, we replace our oblivious hyper-confidence with self-critical humility, and our faith in progress with a wary, “small-c conservatism”—an Amish-like instinct against changing long-evolved and thus probably adaptive lifeways. If we in the West were a bit less blinded by our collective ego, we would see that the most robust and fertile forms of contemporary human civilization—some of which are already replacing our progressive societies in situ—are relatively conservative in this sense.
Yet Western peoples so far show little sign of wanting to abandon their more “dynamic” and “progressive” mindset. Perhaps they are by now effectively addicted to it—require the relentless stimulation of error-prone social change, and at least subconsciously, and stupidly, choose its likely terminus in chaos and ruin over the boredom of stasis.
* * *