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What is this beast called modernity, how does it grow, how does it change us, how does it devour us? And what is "progress" and what is "emancipation"?
Indeed we see many things changing around us, and they have changed rapidly. We see a radical transformation of love and marriage. We see the collapse of fertility, and we feel as if we have gained the world, and lost our own souls
Pervading all of our modern discontentment is a feeling of selfishness and self-centeredness. On some level we know we arenât supposed to regard ourselves above all others. But what causes our selfishness? And what is the alternative?
Many people think that the opposite of selfishness is some kind of altruism or activism, but this could not be farther from the truth. The moralist is the most selfish person of all: she derives a truly voluptuous pleasure from her morals
The activist, the crusader, the exhorterâshe thinks at all times of how her moralizing reflects on her, on the honors she will accrue for it. A desire to be seen as moral is always born of hidden, immoral thoughts
The alienation of modern groundlessness is a direct consequence of one other event: the change in the composition of our social environments, specifically: we are cut out from the web of familial relations that enmeshed premodern man
We know that wealthier societies experience a decline in fertility, but why? Why does wealth, which should enable people to have bigger families, instead retard their growth?
As economic opportunities proliferate, a curious thing happens. People move away from their families and seek prosperity in hubs of economic activity. But this in itself does not explain our modern condition.
We imagine that our loneliness comes from isolation from our families, who are ordinarily a source of âmoral supportâ, but this is psychotherapeutic claptrap.
Spiritual and emotional health donât come from emotional support, they come from constant, escalating, low-grade trauma. Struggle causes hormesis of the soul https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1079436149850963968
Being in the presence of your family exorcises your selfishness because they control you to a degree that friends and strangers will not. A purpose is merely what you are compelled to do by something bigger than yourself
Social power is decentralized in a network of mutual obligations. The topology of those obligations is determined by social norms. Social norms evolve from changes in the information and feedback between members of a social network https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1075401164466704388
The cascade of cultural changes called modernization is the result of the recomposition of the social environment that occurs early in economic development
A decline in fertility is always preceded by a widening of the social sphere
A decline in fertility is always preceded by a widening of the social sphere
Social science, for what itâs worth, tells us that people exert more pro-natal social pressure on their relatives than they do to strangers, and that in aggregate, that pressure does affect our behavior
The business of having and raising children is expensive and always has been, not only monetarily but also in the cost of your time and your energy. This not to say it has no rewards, but everything is a tradeoff https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025738284520103936
Traditional norms limit peopleâs aspirations by keeping them focused on fundamental biological goals. They do not permit the level of comfort that moderns see as necessary because excess resources are invested in the production of children.
Kin selection, the investment in the reproductive success of those who are genetically similar to us, biases us in favor of pro-natal norms.
Decadence, the diversion of resources to non-reproductive ends, is identical to âemancipationâ. Emancipation in the progressive sense is the divorce of humanity from their genetic purpose https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1024461176783044608
Traditional norms derive from and are sustained by the preference for inclusive fitness that people show towards their own families. Religiosity in this view is more of an effect than a cause (though feedback loops are everywhere)
It takes several generations for norms to change after our social circles change, but modernity is a tight and predictable pattern of change that has many cross-cultural similarities
We are still learning where modernity will take us, but once we understand the mechanism behind the change, it becomes truly ridiculous, and contemptible, to imagine that the breaking of the social machine that perpetuates us is some kind of moral victory
What the progressive calls âmoral progressâ is in fact the attenuation of fitness-maximizing social pressure. What the progressive calls freedom is the way this attenuation allows you to commit genetic suicide
Survival is a greedy process. It consumes all available resources, because if it doesnât, something else will come along that survives more efficiently, and it will crowd you out
Being controlled by traditional norms isnât altogether pleasant, especially moment by moment, but it is fulfilling.
There is some optimal level of art and music production for human flourishing, but in modernity, our desire to signal reproductive fitness overtakes our desire to actually reproduce, because the delicate balance of social forces that control us has been upset
Itâs almost impossible to build an agent that optimizes for success. Instead, agents optimize for easy-to-measure proxies of success. This works as long as the proxy works. Desire for sex is no longer desire for children. Birth control broke the proxy https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1047844190741135360
If all this is true, it may be possible to reverse the degeneration of modernity by consciously creating pronatal norms, slogans, and examples. To retain the benefits of industrial capitalization, is we would have to promote such norms among strangers, against our instincts
If there is any hope of this, it would likely have to come from Hollywood and the press, but of course those entities, driven in part by a need to sell things that are popular, are engaged in driving the feedback loop that is antithetical to this goal
True or not, we have to convince ourselves that society represents the collective creation of human intelligence and will, and that for this very reason men retain the collective capacity to understand their own work and even to rise above its historical limitations
On the other hand: https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1084305997051572224
