13 October 2020: I split this off of Cultural Moloch.
Practically Speaking
How much does talk of Moloch affect one's daily life? We can enter cognitive worlds that have little effect on what we do. Alexander's Moloch-talk (I think) encourages his listeners (all those inspired by Elua) to apply more effort against Moloch. That's the main practical outcome I'm left with. "Cultural Moloch" leaves us with, "What Alexander said, plus Elua himself can be co-opted by Moloch, so fight that by remembering old values and don't let human existence be subordinated to human well-being, as it is conceivable some state or AI might convince us to so subordinate."
So what can you and I do? We live lives that are tuned toward this generation and maybe the next. Cultural drift is inevitable without thinking beyond what most of our lives concern themselves with. Most people think that what's important is the suffering people right now. There's no value in thinking of the future, because we have a moral imperative to right now. Right now is where all the facts are, and we like to know things. It would make sense that real orientation toward the long term was often in the past based in traditions no one understood.
I, personally, regardless of this article, "Cultural Moloch", would like to see people being as deep, true, real as they can be, and to adjust their sense of what depth, trueness, and reality they are capable of upward. In a way, this is an answer to the pursuit of rationality. I think that people that are maximally real are the kind of people who would make good leaders (not forgetting other virtues such as rationality), to take on the burden of disciplining competitive systems, "God-over-Gnon", which must be filled by specific personal beings. A spreading of depth and reality and the seeking for depth and reality in more and more people makes it easier and easier to grow up to be such a leader -- a community produces a leader. So that's an area of goals that a reader could take up.
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Readers might not see too much threat in cultural Moloch. The most frightening thing is the potential for cultural Moloch to sacrifice human existence itself as one of its child-values. We're not likely to do that as long as we have evolved brains that balk at stepping too near cliff-edges and so on. But given the potential of genetic engineering, maybe we could change those evolved brains.
There's a connection between fighting for, or building up, courage, and an orientation toward meaning outside of this life, on the one hand, and continued human existence, on the other. Have you ever run a race? When I was on the track team in high school, the coaches had me run through the finish line, not try to just reach it. That way I would run my fastest instead of slowing down as the end approached. We could instead say "Running 800 meters at full effort was hard and brutal back in the day, but we've made the 800 meter race a bit easier by only requiring runners to run 790 meters. We get faster times for the same race. But we're noticing that the advances in people's personal records are going down as people get used to the new distance, so we're thinking of lowering it even further to 780 meters." Eventually it would get to where we stop running races altogether, and wonder how it was possible that anyone ever ran a whole 800 meters at once.
A system can wind itself down or kill itself off, but can it grow without a connection to something outside itself? If a system has any capability of damaging itself or slowing itself down, then it can get stuck at a lower level of functioning. But something outside itself can bring it back up. So the social totality would do well, for its own sake, to look outside of its own interests.
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It's possible that this whole essay suffers from Westernness bias. In other words, the industrialized societies that are emerging in non- Western regions will not end up like Western industrialized culture.
(Similar to the implicit assumption by minorities and women that they will be less bad than white men once they're equally represented in power. Similar also to the implicit assumption by leftists that such self-interest-based institutions as capitalism can be removed, as though human nature is not the same in the 21st century as it was in the 16th. I think all of these assumptions may be correct, but may not be.)
International economic development relies on "leapfrogging", the ability of developing nations to skip ahead to the present technologies instead of slogging all the way through all the intermediate steps, as the West had to. The West paves the way. Maybe there could be "cultural leapfrogging", where non-Western cultural leaders take care to try to preserve their non-Westernness (their Indianness or South Asianness, Ethiopianness or Africanness, etc.) as they industrialize, look ahead to our cultural Moloch lest they fall prey to it. I'm sure this is already on some people's minds.
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Cultural Moloch proceeds two ways. One way is to increase the fitness of those who bear the culture. This is the way things seem to have worked for most of human history. Another way is for the ideas themselves to appeal to people independent of how they affect fitness.
Reason works by "seeing things from your own best point of view" or "seeing things from humanity's own best point of view" and getting what you personally, or humanity as a whole, sees as good. The first, seeing things, is epistemic rationality, the second, getting things, is instrumental rationality.
Tradition works by suppressing reason so that what is superior to reason, evolved culture, can rule over us. Since "God died" or after similar cultural movements, we can no longer rely on tradition. Whatever blind spots are in our reason must damn us.
Sometimes you realize that what the appetitive side of you "sees" as good is not the same as what you really see as good. Tradition could clamp down on your appetites, perhaps even by causing you to deny facts that connect to your temptation. Sometimes a culture realizes that something isn't good but can't coordinate resistance to its own mass temptation.
Arts and entertainment tend to proceed appetitively. If you don't feel like making it, don't make it. If you don't feel like watching it, don't watch it. But it might be possible for people to make art deliberately but not appetitively, and to consume it deliberately and not appetitively. This seems to already be in practice to some extent in the avant-garde art scene.
One thing I try to do is consume art by non-famous people, to erode the power of fame. I'd like to see fame as a value ratcheted down a bit, in order to ratchet up the value of listening to people just because they're people. But it doesn't always feel natural to do this. I'm not much of a fiction reader these days. So when I want to read someone's novel, I have to soldier through it like it's a textbook. Reading a famous novel, I might have an easier time, but it's still like getting through a pile of material. But soldiering through things is good, it fights the slide into suicide- by-cultural-Moloch.
Avant-garde people report that they gain the ability to have appetites for strange sounds, images, objects, flavors, etc. I've experienced something like this. If you practice seeing something some way deliberately, sometimes you can start to see it that way appetitively, having opened your eyes to what was there all along. Well-directed avant-garde art and art appreciation could resurrect old "children" on the appetitive and not just deliberate level.
Culture also proceeds by social interactions, whether casual or as part of ongoing relationships. In theory, one could cultivate less appetitive relationships deliberately, and maybe they would become appetitive, or not. Sometimes this would turn out to be a bad idea, but other times it would allow for positive cultural change, and it would be "anti-morphine".
Traditional cultures rely on that which can never be understood, and so subordinate individual human nature and appetites. So they are a discipline against the worst of individualism. Modern cultures rely on what human beings can understand, and they in turn can liberate us from traditions that no longer fit our environments, and in this liberation enslave us to human nature and human appetites. Postmodern cultures, then, could knowingly oppose human nature and human appetites in order to deliberately have what is better than what we feel like. So we could say that traditional cultures proceed by tradition, modern cultures by nature, and truly postmodern cultures by art.
Postmodernity (whether in its art-world or academic versions or its on-the-ground hipster version) has gotten a bad rap, whether because it's destructive in its aims or overly-refined or not excellent-spirited or whatever other objection. But, if those charges are true, postmodernity can shift toward championing something really deep and courageous.
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"Art" perhaps is too artificial a word. Good art is made by genuine people. Art can be fake, mannered, manufactured. You can never really overcome fakeness on your own -- to try is fake itself. All you can do is "wait for God" -- often enough, literally wait for God.
So God, the teacher and source of ultimate depth of personality, with his long-term, general, short-term, and specific desires, is a fourth term alongside tradition, nature, and art. But God is outside human institutions, so I will not make a case for him being an element in some deliberate social order. However, waiting for his revelation (allowing, taking the point of view of the atheists, that it may never come) is conducive to the goals of postmodernism.
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"Art" sounds like something that should go along with what we class as the fine arts or popular culture. But "art" in a more general sense could characterize any deliberate, knowing human behavior. It characterizes the virtue-form of the artist. (Art is the behavior of people who are always artists.) The artist could be someone who is inspired and disciplined by God and deliberately speaks (or performs the equivalent of speaking) to act on the side of God. (And to take the point of view of secular people, what is deepest in personal nature.) Artists see things as God sees them and then act and create out of their own desires which align themselves to God's.
So there could be "artists" who are academics or politicians or pastors or entrepreneurs or perhaps even managers or military officers.
Even parenting, or the kind of casual disciplining that occurs between friends, could be considered art. Here most clearly we see the dangers that come of doing so without being trustworthy in how we approach things. Taking on some kind of "I am an artist" point of view, or "they need me to 'work art' in their lives", is dangerous. We have to have respect. The book of James in the Bible warns us that "teachers will be judged more harshly". The dangers of being an artist (and yet the necessity of some people being artists) apply in all areas of human leadership, in the arts, the academy, politics, religion, business, military, and those not mentioned above.
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What is deep, real human personality? A good starting place is whatever people tend to say it is already without thinking too hard. One more definite idea is, "trusting as much as is appropriate; trusting with the deepest parts of you". So whenever you can, advance the frontier of trust. Another is "loyalty that costs you". I can hear a rationalist on one shoulder saying "define everything before we begin" and a postmodernist on another saying "don't define anything". The midpoint is to offer ideas. But also to say that deep, real human personality is never a formula. Since it is not a formula, it can't be the formula of anti-formula, and so does conform at least to some patterns, without being fully graspable. Formulaic thinking goes along with lack of trust.
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A discussion of depth of personality should address love.
Modern love tends to be "emotional attachment" plus "maximizing others' well-being". It's that simple, that definite.
A more traditional or postmodern approach might not define love, but rather describe it. The New Testament, which deifies love (or looks like it does, in a sense) also never defines it, but only describes it and shows it in action. So we do not fully grasp love, and if we're wise, we don't hold onto it as a complete formula for agenda-forming.
Is love patient, kind, not envious, not proud, not rude, not self-seeking; doesn't keep record of wrongs, and so on as in 1 Corinthians 13? That sounds like a start.
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Speaking of love reminds me that after all I've said about art, the real goal of postmodernism is new human nature. Being loved artistically, overriding human nature, can eventually lead to collapses and betrayals. The words of 1 Corinthians 13 are supposed to have their counterpart in the Spirit that enables Christians to live them out. Every child starts out as unformed as any and then has to learn and be taught how to become a member of their culture. It's difficult to live to a certain age and not be a member of your culture, whatever your culture may happen to be. Looking at the different traditional and modern cultures shows that the cultural component of human nature has a considerable range. If this part of human nature can be brought into a state which is excellent and sustainable, then we will have moved past the age of art and once again into an age of nature, an actually trustworthy neomodernism.
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So a life aspiration can be to be a postmodernist, seeking a new modernism perhaps many generations in the future, one which will educate its young (our descendants) into real personality.
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