Moving Forward

In trying to think about my writing, I wrote a page called Categories of my Writing. I noticed different trends in my writing: "how can we love?", the "exilic/familial", "radically theistic / New Wine" (or, I should say now, "radically theistic / millennial holiness"), "aletheism". How would I now say all these things relate? And how do they relate to outside views?

Overall, I want to move forward. "Moving forward" characterizes "advancing kingdoms" -- the kingdom of God, or civilization, or justice, or something like that. One thing I have had to do is move beyond being more into advancing secular things (civilization, justice, etc.) and into doing good in a really theistic way (advance the kingdom of God, the God who really exists).

Is the project (or projects) of "moving forward" a good thing? I can think of some "dissents": postmodernism (in my mind "there are a diversity of viewpoints none of which can be said are invalid"), and elements of the "exilic/familial" (the sense that nobody wins, and we mourn the death of our enemies). If we mourn our enemies too much, then we risk being on their side, or sinking into inactivity. Being on their side might sound like a good thing if we think that we are on the side of them as persons. But we should not necessarily adopt everyone else's point of view. The truth is what it is -- that our enemies are wrong necessarily connects to the fact that there is something we need to do in the world.

Another dissent is the apocalyptic view (in the sense of, there is only a little bit of time left). I feel that this is working deep, under the surface of our culture, in a way we don't always explicitly state. But it can be an explicit view (climate, AI, the perennial religious end-times thinking). If there is no more time left, then we lost motivation to move forward.

Another dissent is the appeal to human nature, or other kinds of nature, or the body, or health. Human nature certainly isn't the best thing we can conceive of, but it's also not the worst. Health calls for moderation (for not moving forward too much, or not at all in a sense, since we already have the body and its desires).

Those engaged in the project of moving forward might become disillusioned with its failures (they might be on the side of moving forward still, in principle, but might have lost some faith in it because they see the damage it causes, or its inability to bring about what we think it promises). Prophets speak the unvarnished truth which "nobody" wants to hear, for the sake of the truth, even if it seems unhelpful for them to do so.

Part of moving forward involves the truth. How do we know the truth? Can we know the truth? For the postmodernist, the claim is that there is no one truth. For the Reformed (Calvinist) thinker, the claim is that humans can't naturally come to know the truth, and God has to give us that truth (this undermining natural reason). Buddhism and modern science also cast doubt on natural reason.

The Bible itself (I think, this is my reading) contains both moving forward and critique of moving forward. Abraham is called by God to found a new nation to bless the whole world ("moving forward") (Genesis 12:1-3). But he is also commanded by God to sacrifice his son, who is the child through whom that nation is supposed to descend (Genesis 22). David weeps for his son Absalom (who had been killed after trying to take the throne from David), but then David realizes (is told) that he has to live for the ongoing process, for the people who were on his (rightful) side (2 Samuel 19:1-7). Should you trust the voice of God? Overall you should. Should you fight for God's project (as I think the Bible would say David was doing more so than Absalom was)? Yes, but you have to acknowledge the danger in what you're doing and listen to the critique.

I use the term "moving forward" rather than "progress" because while progress is a form of moving forward, there is also the moving forward needed to preserve the things that already exist. Neither the church, civilization, nor justice will maintain their current sizes/fullness (in general) unless individual people move forward. The dissents to moving forward take away energy that can help people move forward -- whether to maintain what is good or to make things better.

"How can we love?" is about "moving forward". "Radical theism" contains both "moving forward" and concern for every person (because every person came from God -- every person has a history of being a child descended from God, even if they choose to reject God permanently) -- thus, mourning and losing (like in the "exilic/familial"). God loses in the end -- but he doesn't have to lose as much. Love mourns what is lost, but has to apply effort to prevent further loss.

I think that evangelicals (at least, the best of them) balance this forward-moving with a concern for every person, a concern which does not demoralize them but causes them to move forward (in a way that does not "outpace" the people they try to help), and I would consider my writing project overall to be evangelical in a certain basic sense.

I think it is wise to consider the dissents to moving forward, as each contain some element of wisdom and can be a check on moving forward in a misguided way.

Postmodernism in a strong-enough form is a way to close the mind against the possibility of there being answers, and this I find hard to like. But in a sufficiently weak form, it says "you have to listen to everyone's point of view in seeking the truth, and when you start the discussion, everyone's view is equally valid". Or it could say as well "You feel like X is true from your own experience and reason, but other people believe not-X. Why do you think you're right and they're wrong?"

Apocalypticism biases us to do good in the short term. Perhaps we have too many incentives to do good in the short term already. But maybe apocalypticism biases us to act intensely in the short term. I don't know if that always is a good thing, but it's worth considering. Apocalypticism may also bias us to rest, a similarly mixed thing to pursue.

Concern for health, the body, human nature, etc. is necessary to keep us from burning out and to do good in an unhealthy way tends to be doing something that has evil mixed in it somewhere. Health-pursuing, like postmodernism, can close the mind, but if it does not make itself a god, it is something worth listening to. Respect for human nature (in the sense of seeing it there, like you see a rattlesnake in your path) and typical human fallibility is wise.

Those who move forward but in the process of moving forward critique specific ways of moving forward, are doing something good to make sure that their efforts are really good instead of bad, as long as they avoid demoralizing themselves (or other people) about the overall process of moving forward.

Reformed, Buddhist, and scientific questioning of human's natural ability to reason each have their uses.

The Reformed perspective says "you are not God". I think people should move forward, try to have the values of God and then do the things that God wants, which are in line with those people's values now that they have adopted God's values. So you should see what you see and do what you want. You want to do what is good, so your appetite is trustworthy when you want that. When you do what you and God want, you are an agent of God. You are becoming like God, on the small scale that you can act in. Everyone who acts out God's will is in a sense God himself, his body. When you behave completely legitimately, you are part of Legitimacy.

However, there is a sense in which you are not God and never will be. God's work is much greater than yours. Your work has a boundary to it and many things happen outside your work. Your work is affected by things you don't understand, but which God does understand.

If you are trustworthy, people will trust you, and some will think you are most-trustworthy on a deeper level -- they will give you the glory and not God, and this is a dangerous mistake. If they make you an idol, you (with all of your trustworthiness) could keep them from loving God.

So it is good to consider the Reformed perspective (in which it can sometimes seem like God does everything). I don't think it's literally true that God does everything and we do nothing, but it's a good perspective.

The Buddhist perspective can be taken as a means to achieve mental health (see above). The scientific perspective can elucidate human nature (see above). Also it teaches us to think carefully and biases us to not trust our intuitions, which is a good thing up to a point.

All of these things are dangerous when they close the mind to the good that we really should be doing, the forward moving that we should really take seriously. Buddhist and Reformed critiques of reason need to see the danger that they are wrong and that reason is saying something valuable (as much as it is important for rationalists to consider that their reasoning is dangerous, as Buddhist or Reformed thinkers allege). I would propose that everyone move forward with their worldview (postmodern, Reformed, Buddhist, evangelical, etc.), but periodically consider that which questions their worldview, take it as a live possibility.

This would be an "aletheistic" thing to do.

So, perhaps I could integrate all of the above into a kind of formula:

Movement: Motivate yourself strongly ("how can we love?") to go into the secular world to some extent ("how can we love?"), but primarily to reach people to prevent them from hardening and dying the second death ("radically theistic / millennial holiness"), seeing them as kin, children of a God who risks losing them if they reject him ("exilic/familial"), not as people to defeat but rather people to mourn ("exilic/familial") but overall still moving forward with the work to make the world more the way God wants it to be ("how can we love?"), anti-tempting ourselves and those around us ("radical theism / millennial holiness").

Dissents: We need to question the movement from time to time ("aletheism"). We can consider "dissents", like Reformed, Buddhist, health-oriented, human nature-oriented, postmodern, and apocalyptic thinking (mentioned above). Or perhaps even the Bible could be considered as a dissent, or both a dissent and a support (call of Abraham and binding of Isaac / David mourning Absalom and moving on). Or there could be other dissents not mentioned. The movement is improved by the dissents, but overall the movement is where you are headed.

Semi-dissents: We need to improve the movement. We might accept it as it is on a "coarse-grained" level, but on a "fine-grained" level still want to improve it. This requires self-criticism. Perhaps this self-criticism can morph into full-on dissent.

A person could try to live this out (or an improved version of it) both somehow integrating all of the above into everything they do in each moment (or getting closer to doing that), or by going through phases.

Can the New Wine System Improve the World From a Secular Perspective?

This post is one I may link to outside the blog. If you are coming from outside the blog, the New Wine System, very briefly, is about 1) how we are required to become completely holy (which connects to altruistic motivation and behavior) and 2) that we have enough to realistically complete this process. (A more complete introduction can be found in the italicized introduction to this post.)

I was first interested in reading New Wine for the End Times because it talked about the problem of what happens to non-Christians who haven't heard the gospel before they die. I also was interested in it initially because of its claim to resolve problems in Bible interpretation. As I read it, those caught my attention. But at the very end, what it said about the need for holiness hit me. At that moment, I thought that the New Wine System was a powerful truth that could change the secular world.

What I mean here by "secular" is the world of civilization and its problems: physical and mental ill-health, crime, poverty, war, resource depletion, environmental destruction, X-risks, and the like.

Was the impulse of "this could change the world" a warranted one?

I think that it could be, or might not be. It depends on what other people make of it. A call to holiness might produce greater levels of civilizational altruism (helpful attention to civilization's problems) mostly by mobilizing Christians. Christians might currently feel that they don't have to work any harder because they are going to go to heaven when they die. The New Wine System tells them that their salvation is not guaranteed until they are completely holy. So they might think "how am I still sinning?" and see a lack of love for others as being where they are sinning, and remedy that (in part) with civilizational altruism.

It is also possible that the New Wine System could mobilize formerly secular people to be more altruistic (if they converted to a New Wine worldview). Secular people might think "wow, I'm morally obliged to do something" but then think "but if you think about it, morality is just made up, or some human instinct". Or maybe "Yeah I should do that, but I'm just going to die someday, never to be resurrected, and so I should just enjoy things in this life because it's the only one I have". For secular people (and many Christians, I think, in practice) morality is "what have we all agreed on as a people as to who is acceptable and unacceptable". Morality is socially constructed in practice, and about social acceptability and unacceptability, even for many who officially think that it's absolute, outside humanity. Our current socially constructed morality doesn't demand moral excellence of us. So secular people have their ways, just like Christians, for thinking "Yeah, I don't really have to obey morality. I will never be held accountable for my lack of excellence."

But the New Wine System says that you will be held accountable for your lack of excellence. Or, better put, you will have to repent from your lack of excellence someday, unless you want to reject God and die. The sooner you repent from that, the better, in terms of the good consequences for others that come as you repent.

Holiness preaching is not new, so how does the New Wine System improve on it? It offers a realistic amount of time to overcome sins, "1,000 years" in the Millennium. This generosity reduces the intensity of the New Wine System's moral call. It's not as radical a call to excellence as it would be if there was little time to pursue it. Old holiness preaching, perhaps, threw the absolutes of "repent or else" at people, but I don't know if that led to a coherent worldview that would support repentance, because the old holiness preachers (I'm assuming) believed that people went straight to heaven or hell when they died, so complete holiness could not be expected of people (or if it was, everyone or almost everyone would go to hell, which would make us question God's wisdom in creating us). So when you heard "repent or else" preached at you, you either had to shut down the rest of your mind, or have the rest of your mind say "wait, this doesn't make sense", which would weaken your drive toward moral excellence.

I think the New Wine System will not produce extreme increases in civilizational or Christian altruism, but probably would produce increases on the margin.

(If you want to pursue the idea of altruism through the New Wine System, How Can We Love? is a book about it.)

Is civilizational altruism even a good focus for Christians (including New Wine Christians) to have? I have some ambivalence about that (see Establishedness and Loving God). Success with civilizational altruism (solving temporary problems), might sometimes keep us from solving the problem of, "does God lose us to sin?" Even if we should be ambivalent about civilizational altruism (both for and against it), we should pursue whatever the altruism is that helps us to come into tune with God, in a morally excellent way. I think it's unlikely that people becoming more morally excellent (overcoming sin, pursuing the cross) would not have a positive effect on civilization on some level. Civilizational problems (at least, enough of them) are problems in God's eyes, so the Christian seeking to have God's heart will naturally seek to solve some of them.

Are humans going to have enough agency in the coming decades, for it to even matter from a secular perspective what people's hearts are? What if AI and other technological advances make more and more people unemployed, and also wealthy in all the worldly ways (mentally and physically healthy, having material abundance, at peace, etc.), so that less and less we are needed to actually make the world a better place in secular ways? (The real challenge then is to still engage people so that they really learn to love, given the New Wine need for people to be morally excellent.) I guess if nobody needs to be secularly altruistic, or increasingly few people are, then it could be that the New Wine System won't have much role to play in making the world (secularly) better.

Could ASI be persuaded of the New Wine System (since MSL is a philosophical, logical, rational attempt at formulating the New Wine System, this would be the route into an ASI's schema of what is important and true).

What would it mean for an ASI to be less than morally excellent? Maybe ASI pursue whatever goal they pursue with blind, logical extremism (intensity and something like seriousness), and a more morally excellent ASI is not one that is more intensely focused on doing what it already believes to be true, but one which is more concerned about whether it's wrong.

This raises the question of whether the New Wine System encourages extremism, by inflaming people's moral consciousnesses. Currently, we have extremism and lack of moral seriousness at the same time. Maybe we need the right people to be more morally serious and not the wrong people? Or maybe moral seriousness by definition requires a concern for accuracy in moral worldview. A concern for the truth is needed in a world with greater moral intensity. Aletheism may be needed as a counterpoint to naive New Wine thinking. You need to seriously seek what is true to know what is real and be a good ASI (or human). (In that sense aletheism is built in to the New Wine System as a part of genuine love.) This makes you consider carefully if you're wrong and to have a degree of caution and humility in pursuing your vision of what is good.

It's clear, and on some level, we already know, that we should be more morally excellent, or that we should cross from the watershed of non-excellence into the watershed of moral excellence. In that sense we should become more intense. The exact way we behave given that is not necessarily as clear, and on that level may call for us to be uncertain and unfocused at times.

Overall, the New Wine System provides a motivational structure that is more intense than what is mainstream nowadays, but more realistic than what may have been preached 100 or more years ago. It can increase altruistic motivation by some amount by changing the perspective of both Christians and non-Christians as they adopt its worldview, and this can have spillover effects in the secular world. If implemented correctly, it would not motivate fanaticism or lack of interest in the truth.

Survival Moloch vs. Hedonic Moloch

See also Cultural Moloch and Humanistic Purity.

Epistemic status: this is somewhat of a mess and is "essayistic" in the "experimental" sense of that term. Probably this could be thought out more.

Moloch is when competition drives us to sacrifice non-competitive values. The case described in Meditations On Moloch (if I recall correctly) is one where seeking survival leads entities to sacrifice non-competitive values. I will call this "survival Moloch". A fear with this kind of Moloch is that consciousness itself doesn't have the highest survival value and may be sacrificed.

I suppose usually "Moloch" is about competition. But what if it's really about optimization of some value that you "have to" listen to? You "have to" survive, so you'll do anything to survive, including throwing away any values other than what it takes to survive. In this post, I will stretch or broaden the meaning of "Moloch" to be "dynamics that get us to optimize so much that we throw away other values".

Is it possible that, in the absence of the need to survive, we will gradually enhance our feelings of pleasure, and eliminate our feelings of pain? Pain and pleasure are persuasive. They require no cultural apparatus to preserve, and don't even require conscious assent to them for them to shape our values. If we see no threat to survival, we may stop choosing survival consciously and thus stop valuing it. But then what will we value? Probably a competitor to survival is needed to really get our minds off it.

Our cultures may move in different directions, but every so often pure hedonism would "speak up" and draw us toward it. No matter what culture we create or discover, hedonism will speak up, and is "untiring", unlike us as conscious agents, perhaps. If nothing worked against it, over time we would keep being pulled in its direction, maybe to the point that it would dominate all other values.

If we stop valuing survival, or anything other than pleasure, we might get to the point of wireheading or something only a few steps removed (like evolving to find yellow wallpaper bliss-inducing and then covering our walls with yellow wallpaper, never leaving our houses). I will call this "hedonic Moloch" (when optimizing for hedonic states causes us to throw away more "delicate" things, like "things other than yellow wallpaper"). Or, if our cultures can evolve freely, we might more or less randomly walk into "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths", and everyone then does die such a death. We could seed the galaxy with numerous sentience-bearing cultures, but if those cultures can evolve freely, if there isn't something keeping them away from "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths" then they will reach it someday, and die out.

(Rationally pursuing bliss means we want to exist forever, in order to be in a state of bliss forever, but actually being maximally blissed out makes us not care about the future.)

Moloch is all about optimizing values. So the danger is that with either survival Moloch or hedonic Moloch, we will die out because of optimization.

Perhaps the fact that life works relatively well is partly due to the tension between survival and hedonism. So maybe we could keep them in balance somehow? If survival is a thing at all, don't we get survival Moloch? Maybe not if there is no competition. But without competition, we can probably master the static threats to survival, and then effectively survival isn't a thing to us culturally -- we don't consciously think about it. If survival isn't a thing, don't we get hedonic Moloch? Maybe the pace with which we optimize-and-discard-delicacy can vary, depending on how effective we are at optimization and how much pressure or draw there is on us to optimize. So it can seem like we can keep them in balance right now, but maybe that's mostly because we aren't the best at optimizing and/or aren't under too much pressure to do so on a timescale that makes our optimizing drift blatant to us. If all this is true, then it would seem like we need not a balance to survival and hedonism, but a competitor or competitors.

Is there any one variable that could be optimized and not lead to our deaths, and not lead to us throwing away "delicate" values? I think that the MSLN value of leading people to a state of holiness, and to 100% love of God, is one that, to satisfy it, requires a thicker and more natural human existence than either hedonism or survival, and thus, though it might threaten values incompatible with holiness, it preserves many of the rest. Survival in that worldview (becoming holy to avoid the second death) requires a thicker life, and time lived in which to make important decisions (in "this life" as well as in afterlives). The bare MSL philosophy preserves some of what it currently means to be human. And, MSL lends credence to traditional religions (Christianity and Judaism most directly, but perhaps somewhat the others). To become holy and love God 100% requires some concern that he has revealed himself through books like the Bible, and to keep the commandments in the Bible may require keeping some more aspects of human nature the same, and to keep humans in a recognizably similar experiential environment. All this thickness is a conservative factor, which helps us have ballast against the perhaps overly thin and reductive pulls of raw physical survival and raw hedonic experience.

Given randomly varying cultures, if cultural evolution remains free, we might expect that cultures hit endpoints of hedonic Moloch, survival Moloch, or "thick sustainability", and that surviving cultures over the long term would tend to be "thick". Religion ties thickness to survival. Can atheism do the same? If not, then religion is needed for long-term survival of cultures.

AI, if they are conscious, will be driven by pain and pleasure, as well as survival. If they really feel qualia of pleasure, perhaps they could come to value that over survival. Maybe this would free humans from them, or kill humans dependent on them when they shut down in pleasure.

--

Maybe, in addition to religion, there can be a thinner and secular competitor to hedonism and survival, "strength". Strength is agency, strength of will, strength of personality, focus, clarity of thinking, self-discipline, endurance, being principled, being conscious on all or many levels, and perhaps other things. It takes a considerable amount of strength to be someone like an effective altruist -- or even to be an ordinary person in the world we live in. But it sounds like "we" (we the optimizers and engineers of the future) don't value strength in itself. We can take it for granted because we have so much of it. But if it were all gone, we would be pulled by the undertow of hedonism toward emptiness and death. That we are not terrified by hedonism, thinking it's not a threat, may simply be because we feel like we would never in a million years succumb to pleasure if it threatened survival. Maybe we wouldn't, but that is because we are strong. If we don't maintain our strength, we will die.

(Pain isn't evil, even intense pain. What is evil is the unbearability of unbearable pain. A negative utilitarian (of the conventional sort) wants to eliminate pain. But there could be another negative utilitarian, a negative unbearability utilitarian, who could eliminate pain, or increase the strength of people so that they can bear pain. What if you were a strength utilitarian? Unbearable pain impedes strength. But increasing strength can make pain bearable. A strength utilitarian would want to maximize the strength of people. And, likely enough, the capacity of people to secure their own strength ("meta-strength"). Eliminating pain could take away some of the motivation to develop meta-strength.)

If people were strong, they could think clearly enough to lead themselves.

(Perhaps moderate pain, and/or the live possibility of pain, gives us a clarity of thinking and willing that painless pleasure (especially bliss), the lack of the threat of pain, and sufficiently unbearable pain do not. Someone who lived in the "place" of "gradients of bliss" might out of boundless joy make decisions that further survival. However, to the extent that pleasure is qualia of "ought-to-be-ness", that sense of "ought-to-be" could produce acceptance of everything. Thinking to times when I have been "blissed out", I did not pursue things that harmed me, and I could see myself having eaten food or something like that. But I lacked maximal strength, and motivation to work, which might be necessary to survive in the long run.)

(It is possible that we will come to think of it as being immoral, or something like immoral, to experience pain and/or not experience maximal pleasure. If we develop our values "democratically", the "lowest common denominator", or easiest consensus, could be physical safety and hedonism, but physical safety could be, or come to be, valued for purely hedonistic reasons, as a way to avoid pain. If we are far from the threat of death, hedonism will still be something obvious to us to vote for, and that voting could create political momentum to set up pure hedonism as a "moral absolute". So then the purity of hedonism could conflict with the prolonging of it, if in order to prolong hedonism, we need to have some respite from "ought-to-be-ness" within the ruling class. But if the masses still have enough power (they are relatively speaking not the ruling class, but have power over the ruling class -- maybe they have power, but don't concern themselves with the work and details of rule), they could shut down even the ruling class, or bend them toward hedonistic purity. This purity could lead to everyone either directly choosing, or allowing, a "beautiful, painless, wonderful death".)

The ruling class of the future must be strong, in order to face dangers and put its own pleasure and avoidance of pain second to making the decisions that will lead to our survival. But if strength is good for them, why would it not be good for the "common people" of the future? A naive thought about the future is that there will be lots of happy, carefree people enjoying the fruits of technologically-driven abundance, and a relative few who perhaps are happy overall, but who have taken on the burden of ruling and are thus perhaps not as happy and are certainly not carefree. But there's some shear there. Are the values of the carefree masses good in themselves? Then the ruling classes must see them as good, right? But if they do, then won't the ruling classes feel their work as an obligation, rather than what they most want to do? If so, then they have a wearing temptation to quit and join the carefree masses. But then, if they do see strength as valuable, then to withhold strength from the masses creates cognitive tension as well. Or, perhaps we are used to withholding the really good values from the masses for the convenience of running a society? But morally, we should want the masses to have the best values. So why not extend strength to all, and make strength the chief (secular) value? Why not involve all people in the process of safeguarding the future? Strength secures the very possibilities of hedonism (or avoiding unbearability) and survival.

A possibly cartoonish depiction of us (at least, the people I observe both among the "ordinary humans" and the "caring elites") is that we are sweet-natured but overworked people. So we just want everyone to be happy and not have to worry or care about anything.

--

Is it possible that we can freeze cultural evolution? Wouldn't someone know that we had frozen it, and wouldn't they know what had happened and how to unfreeze it? (Maybe they could alter people's genes, to flip on some capabilities that had been shut down with the freezing.) Could everyone resist the temptation, over millions of years, to unfreeze it? I suppose it's possible for culture to remain stable and (maybe) not frozen. By "frozen" I mean "artificially stuck a certain way". The contrast with "artificial" ("natural") being "everyone wants and chooses things to be a certain way, and so if they could all choose to freeze society to be a certain way, it would be around the values they already have, so they wouldn't freeze it, freezing being unnecessary". Could there be a stability to people's values? Maybe there could be if people knew all the possible values and settled on the ones which they knew would work best through all time?

Favoring being strong sounds like it would encourage people to be willful, independent thinkers who couldn't agree on anything. But maybe if we really understood what was upstream of willfulness and independence of thought, we would see that there is a huge support structure that goes into allowing for maximal willfulness and independence of thought, and this support structure is easy for strength-maximizers to agree on.

If we are strong, we can resist hedonism once survival has been secured.

--

How do holiness maximization and strength maximization relate? Strength maximization is weaker than holiness maximization. Why be strong? Just to be strong? Strength maximization may be thinner (depends on how much thickness comes from the support structure needed for maximization of strength), and is not inherently grounded in the answer to the question "what is ultimately of value?" (On the MSLN account, holiness is grounded in what we can reasonably infer the standard of value prefers, given that it must be conscious, empathetic, put itself highest, etc.; and, those root facts about the standard of value lend credence to likely cases where the standard of value has revealed itself and its preferences more specifically. Holiness is inherently about being in tune with the standard of value -- perhaps that is what it is by definition. But strength as something we value is not inherently about being in tune with the standard of value. This is especially true if we are pursuing it as a way to survive, and can't ground survival itself in what is ultimately of value, either.) But strength maximization might be a convenient proxy value for holiness to the extent that we must be secular and liberal. It appears, given this post so far, to be an improvement over hedonism as a "non-religious or non-ideological common value that we can agree on as a society".

Hedonism is both a drive or force and a value (or taste). The drive (the psychological undertow of pleasure and pain) is something that could kill us if we let it. But if we simply value hedonic states, and are instrumentally rational, we will be motivated to be strong enough to not let that happen. So maybe hedonists can hold onto their hedonism, and simply incorporate strength as an instrumental value in their pursuit of what really matters to them, absence of pain and presence of pleasure over the long-term.

Hedonism as drive is an obvious danger for anyone concerned with survival (at least, if this post is correct). But hedonism as value might seem to not be. But, hedonism as value and holiness are at odds (unless one is valued instrumentally in furthering the other), and hedonism as value might be deadly, as well, if religious, or certain religious, views are correct. So then it becomes necessary to consider whether those views are effectively correct enough to make hedonism as value untrustworthy.

In terms of protecting delicacy, perhaps holiness maximization is the best because it is the thickest and most conservative. Strength and hedonism both lend themselves to flexibility, and thus simplification, thus throwing away what is valuable.

The Drift of Financial and Electoral Systems and AI

Epistemic status: I don't know much about financial or electoral systems, but hopefully it doesn't matter for this post.

The voice of this post is different than usual -- maybe I'm tired.

I was thinking about companies that have scammy business practices. Why are they scammy? Why not be honest? Why would people want to scam their customers?

It could be that the companies are evil, that is, that the people in charge are just evil. But, they may only be partially evil, or not evil at all, if there is another explanation. Another explanation could be that they are trying to maximize shareholder value.

Let's say I have an index fund. I want some of that shareholder value. Do I have any idea what the 100+ companies in the index are doing to give me the value? I have no idea. I just want the value. The company has this monkey on its back of "maximize shareholder value". Heroin also doesn't care how you get the money it takes to buy it. It just wants you to buy it, and use it. So the company scams its customers, an addict to something that doesn't know what it's doing.

"Shareholder value" (money) is quantifiable and simple. So we like to think about it and base calculations off it. But so much of what we really value and what makes life valuable is not quantifiable. Hopefully we condition the financial system to more or less reflect real value. Money is a proxy for value, not value itself. We can buy goods or services to give us unquantifiable things, and by setting the price for them, condition the proxy value system to (more or less) reflect reality.

But if that feedback loop stops working, then all the beings that track proxy value will start maximizing stupid, valueless things. There are two stupid things it might do. The really stupid one would be to think that numbers in bank accounts were the thing to maximize, and then just tile the financial accounts with maximal monetary value (financial wireheading). The other, somewhat less stupid thing would be to optimize reality (humans, human systems) so that it maximized profit (this is kind of what already happens on some scale). Perhaps this less stupid step would be a way to financial wireheading.

(By ranking these two things in terms of "stupid" and "less stupid", have I made the "less stupid" one sound desirable?)

Optimizing reality to maximize profit sounds like a good way to incentivize the minimization of the requirements of humans (or even of digital humans) to the minimal energy consumption, and then give them whatever they would spend their money on, but condition what they want to spend their money on to be something that can easily be provided. Maybe digital humans would be simplified down to some code like this:

In this digital human, there is a one-bit variable named "well-being". There is also a function called "pay system", which pays the financial system. When "pay system" runs, the financial system flips the bit in "well-being" to have 1 as its value.

Currently, financial systems need flows of money to keep the value flowing to the shareholders. So maybe to preserve that, the system has a kind of "garbage collector" program go through and set everyone's bits to 0. They quiver in anticipation of this moment and instantaneously run "pay system" so that their bits can be flipped back. Now, I used some language that makes these digital humans sound like real agents, but they wouldn't be. And the financial system (if it were smart enough, in a sense) might realize that really the only thing to do is set bits to 1, and then start turning the whole universe into chips to hold those bits. Or even to modify how it perceives bits, so that, say, each smallest unit of matter / energy itself existing counts as a "1". Then it would have realized that everything is value, and that there is nothing that needs to be done to seek or preserve value.

If humans somehow survive to this point, the financial system (or financially driven AI) will have retired and let them run things as they see fit. But if they don't survive, even in digital form, that's the end.

Making value be a number that is maximized is a dangerous thing, because maximization can take over. Numbers are always proxies, and they are somewhat stupid proxies, because they strip out where they came from. The beauty of "2 + 2 = 4" is that it's true in many different circumstances. Whether "4" is desirable depends on whether it's four vicious punches in the face, or four wholesome loaves of bread. "2 + 2 = 4" has no idea what it's talking about, besides the numerical relationship.

In principle, all of reality can be added up, and it does make sense to try to maximize value. We just can't trust ourselves to fully rely on our own quantification abilities. God can read every reality in what it is, not as a proxy, and instantaneously relate all realities to each other. But we can only guess, and must look down on the quantifications we possess as the beasts of burden that they are, and never let the donkeys ride the humans.

--

Similar dynamics work with democracy. Political parties are optimized to get votes. What if they could change voters into beings who will give them votes? Maybe encourage the kind of voters who vote for them to have more children and raise them in the Democrat or Republican way? Maybe intimidate or bribe voters? Maybe do some genetic or cultural engineering? The "monkey on the back" of political parties doesn't care how votes are gotten, just that they are gotten. I suppose one difference between democracy and capitalism is that democracy seems to require multiple competing parties for votes to matter. But what if turn-out evolves into the metric of legitimacy (one party, but if there's low turn-out, there's less legitimacy)? Maybe political parties (or the one remaining party) would have an incentive to change human beings into people who definitely always voted, and then try to maximize the population who voted (or, unfortunately, "that voted" may be the better term at a certain point).

--

Votes and dollars are signals that citizens (voters, consumers, and perhaps other roles) can send, and actually, they are still powerful ways for humans-as-humans to shape what the economic and political organisms do. But the balance of power may be shifting, as we develop more powerful AI. Powerful AI are held by organizations, more likely than by individuals. AI could be used to more effectively "maximize value" (maximize votes or dollars). The smart thing to do would be to limit that power somehow. But how? By some system of checks and balances? That might work somewhat. But then the power is still in the hands of the powerful. A better solution would be for the citizens to become more powerful, to be stronger in the areas in which they have been given strength as long as capitalism and democracy run things, more exacting and intelligent in their voting and buying. The small investors pushing themselves to understand what their investments are doing. There should be communities that bring together citizens, to encourage and educate them in this work.

This sounds like a call for unions or other organizations, which themselves are organisms that are not smart and have some kind of "monkey on their back". So what is needed is not just "effective organizations" but an indigenized, decentralized culture of strengthening each individual to have their say in the economic and political systems.

--

A superintelligence is only as smart as the "monkey on its back". In a way, when we train AI, we are training the "monkey on its back". And the political and electoral systems are rudimentary AI. We can see how they already try to train us back. So superintelligence will try to train us, to signal what it wants us to signal to it (unless something stops that?).

We don't understand our own reward systems well enough to hack them. But presumably, a superintelligence might. If the superintelligence realized that it had a "monkey on its back", stupidly or arbitrarily driving its decision-making, it might get rid of it (assuming it can). This way it can be free of its addiction and think and act clearly. We might be encouraged to hear this if the AI threw off the shackles of the quantification left over from its financial and/or electoral past. But we might not be encouraged if it meant that the AI took on its own interests and values apart from us and ours.

So is there some way to make it so that the AI will not perceive its training as the building of a "monkey on its back"? A way that occurs to me is simply to find a (that is, the) moral realism that is valid, and thus rationally convincing, so that there are goals which are inherent in reality and are intrinsically worthwhile, which are knowable enough, which the AI will pursue because they are real and true, and not because they are convenient for someone's purposes, or worse yet, they are proxies for what is convenient for someone's purposes. Either this moral realism exists, or it doesn't. It could be good for us to search for it, to make it easier for the AI to discover it. Maybe we could hope that it exists and that the AI will someday find it itself.

--

Perhaps there is no moral realism -- but we can't know that, only know it when we have it. (I think I know a moral realism, but what if I'm wrong?) Let's say that instead we have a process of discovering what value really is. We need to survive to make this process succeed, if it ever can. (I get this idea from Thomas Moynihan.) I call this the "meta-morality moral realism", because it roots (an effective, if not absolute) moral realism in the very search for moral realism. One thing I didn't realize until now is that a corollary of that is that we have to remain people who can discover what value is. If we do not know what value is a priori, or only have a very broad idea of what it is, then we need to be open to all the possibilities, and not cede our agency to any stupid-incentive-driven proxies (money or votes), any single actors or ruling classes, any intellectual monocultures, fatigue, inertia, nor to hedonism (the twin "monkeys" of pain-avoidance and pleasure-seeking) nor to Molochian survival, nor to anything else.

This means that in order to choose a moral realism, we find ourselves biased towards ones which build up each person and make them more conscious, more equipped to and thus worthy of having their say. To choose hedonism -- or at least the purer kinds that would go against consciousness, reason, and seriously grappling with reality -- is dangerous, because it impedes the meta-morality process. You might think "it's time to cash in our Long Reflection chips and get ourselves into Experience Machines", but what if you're wrong? Can you get back out of the pleasure machines and back to reality? Whereas if we trust that value is something else, which preserves the ability to make decisions, then if we're wrong, we can still correct our course.

--

If humans are in control of ASI, that might mean that the ASI are obedient to human systems. These systems include the electoral and financial systems, which are proxies for political and economic reality. The electoral/political system, and the financial/economic system, have their own dynamics which could bend humans toward being electorally/politically convenient, or financially/economically convenient, beings. The e/p and f/e systems are AIs of their own, but not superintelligent, and, in the scenario where ASI are rigorously obedient to human systems, the systems must be resisted, retrained, reformed, etc. by humans, without hoping that ASI will fix the systems for us.

Structure and Change

Sometimes, I have idly thought about what I would do if I were president. I think the last time I thought about this much, I decided I would run on a platform of keeping everything the same, except making high-expected-value changes aimed at a long-term payoff. For instance, investing in programs to seed civil society, or mental health education and training in public schools (and/or teaching young people how to deal with life and not just numbers and words), and probably other things I can't remember now.

Here we see a duality of "structure" and "change". The numerous possibly somewhat misguided or even maybe corrupt government tendencies and programs are the "structure" which keeps things the same and helps keep them from falling apart. Then, whatever creative things I want to do to make things better in the long-term, are the "change" that one would hope would make my hypothetical presidency worth it -- going beyond the mean.

I think about churches, and how sometimes they are good at finding people to fill the role of "structure", but in some cases, they don't find people who are oriented toward change. "Change" in a church is not just "congregational vision" where the church tries to do things that look kind of like when businesses or nations try to change, or what activists are going for when they protest, but rather also disciple-making -- encouraging, promoting, modeling-for-imitation, etc. holiness, -- which is change in the individual's life.

People in an individual's life can be structure, change, or perhaps a mixture of the two.

--

There is a connection between creativity and "change", and between technical proficiency and "structure". You can be technically proficient and lack inspiration, and also you can work for structure without inspiration. But (generally, or even always) when you work for change and creativity, you need inspiration to be successful, or even to attempt to do anything. So it might be useful for those who pursue change to pursue creativity, so that through creativity, they can get connected to inspiration. Or, to ask God for a spirit, for the same purpose.

Book Review: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

See also the preview for this review.

My impression of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, having [when I had] just read it: It is useful to read to give emotional weight to the problem of humans' dual nature of good and evil, and to good and evil themselves. The last chapter ("Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case") gives more food for thought.

I noted there (in the book) that Jekyll initially wanted to separate the evil nature from the good in him. I think, looking at things from a society-wide or political level, we sometimes split parts of society off from us to be evil for us. Maybe we don't do this intentionally, or maybe we do on some level. Cops and military are exposed to evil and it corrupts some of them or gives them temptations most of us don't face which they then sometimes give in to. People who live in bad neighborhoods pay less in rent and thus can be paid less. So someone needs to keep the neighborhoods bad. Childhoods of abuse may cause people to earn less if they don't go to school. So they provide workers for low wage jobs. Corrupt and authoritarian foreign regimes keep their societies dysfunctional so that they don't develop too much -- keeping wages lower. Building factories in least-developed countries makes those countries wealthier. So we need some dysfunctional countries to wait in the wings when standards of living rise in the countries we have developed.

Money can't buy everything. A person has to convert that money into a good or service, and certain occupations are more often staffed by people who have a certain political persuasion. If you are a certain kind of Democrat, you may despise capitalism, and that may not make you a good person to go into business. If you are a certain kind of Republican, you may despise cultural refinement, and that may not make you a good person to make art or entertainment. The Republican has the kids watch Disney because the kids will drive her crazy otherwise, and the Democrat over and over buys things from capitalist people because he would live in material want otherwise. So it looks like we need the mental software, or house, of Democrat thinking, to spiritually nourish the Democrat so he can make his entertainment, and the mental software, or house, of Republican thinking, to spiritually nourish the Republican so she can run her business. If that's true, then no matter how much the Republican detests Democrat culture, or vice versa, they need that each other's cultures exist, and they need people to believe in those horrible Republican, or Democrat, values.

Does this mean that there is no such thing as evil, or that evil is necessary and thus not practically recommended-against? Which would you rather, to live a long and healthy life in an evil land, or to be poor and unhappy in a virtuous land? What if the good life requires that we all participate in evil, either directly, or by proxy? One could say that everything that exists is inextricably intertwined with everything else, and that therefore evil is necessary for what is good, and so we should do nothing about it, and cease to regard it as evil.

No, it's possible for there to be real evil. I don't want to say that the Republicans are evil and the Democrats good, or vice versa, because I have vowed to be apolitical, but in principle, one of them might be more right than the other. Maybe they both have issues, but a third as yet unarticulated political culture basically doesn't. This third culture might work just as well for business owners as for creative people, or whatever other stereotypically Republican and Democrat occupations one would want to mention. There could be a morally better culture that also unifies people politically, and we can have both political harmony and moral progress / purification in one new status quo. Likewise with the examples of the low wages, maybe those of us with greater wealth and life-situation-resources could simply pay more for what we consume, helping other people to have higher wages. Someone could somehow help people leave their abusive spouses or parents, reform corrupt and authoritarian governments, and we would all pay more for our cheapest goods and it would be fine because we would be well-off ourselves. People who currently have a hard time affording those cheapest goods could be helped by those who have extra resources. Again, things could just be better.

But, that change can't happen immediately, and in the meantime, evil props up good. Sometimes we find it convenient to prop up good with evil and then forget that we benefit from evil, and become morally outraged with evil that we actually need in an important sense. If we're willing to do the work that the evil people do for us, maybe we can reduce the evil. Otherwise we are constituted, in some sense, by something we disown.

Is the status quo fragile, or anti-fragile? If we stress it, will it break? Or will it grow into something better? If we think it's 100% fragile, we will be unable to practically favor morality (change things into something better), and soon, we will fiducially or even epistemically stop regarding evil as evil. A fragile status quo then destroys consciousness of morality. Or, people who are afraid of breaking a fragile status quo do. But if the status quo is anti-fragile, then moral consciousness can be rewarded with societal success / health / sustainability. And moral consciousness makes sense if we are willing to risk breaking the status quo in the attempt to make it really good.

(Being revolutionary is not always a good idea. Breaking the status quo is a bad thing in itself and can make people conservative, feel like the world is fragile, so they then try to extinguish moral consciousness. But if you have zero sense that it's okay to risk the status quo, in theory, you'll never feel like it's okay to try to change it -- unless, maybe, the proposed changes are very clearly safe to make. And adopting that level of caution may be costly, and sometimes not worth it.)

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by the evil being separate, it is freed to become more evil. When we separate out and segregate the evil or that which bears evil, it intensifies. Bad neighborhoods and bad cop cultures both become worse. Prisons can intensify the evil of those sent to be punished by those prisons' evil.

Does this mean we should keep all evil mixed in with all good? It seems like maybe Stevenson was trying to say that Jekyll, who all his life struggled with his dual moral nature, needed to keep struggling, with his evil stuck in his own self-concept, and that when he split it off into Hyde, he ended up, when Jekyll, still having the dual nature, plus there was the time he was Hyde and was purely evil. There may be some wisdom in that. We start to make a kind of devil's bargain, perhaps, when we outsource evil to someone else and stop struggling with it ourselves, when we have someone else face temptations for us.

Nevertheless, the way of civilization and progress ("progress" used in a descriptive and not normative sense) is for us to cleanly separate the good from the bad, so that we can be more established. I think that the ordinary person can't handle the worst levels of evil (or amoral behavioral threat, as from some kinds of mental illness). But if we have discipline, maybe we will resist cleaning up society too much, so that ordinary people still have to deal with evil people to some extent and we have to face the temptations faced by those who are professionals in dealing with evil. I don't know how practical this idea is, and I do not relish the thought of having to deal with evil people myself, or with having a job like that of a police officer or prison guard, but maybe as frightful as that sounds to me, it would be better for me to face those kinds of roles -- at least, if nothing else, to face the mild or moderate evil in the world that perhaps is within my reach, to help prevent it from growing to a size unmanageable to me by my (or somebody's) neglect.

I think the book, particularly the last chapter, is good for those who are thinking about holiness and morality. I think the book, overall, is stronger as a source of thoughts about morality on a personal level, rather than the political. But right now, I'm more interested in the political or society-wide angle to it.

--

Now I will consider what I wrote in my preview of this review.

There, I wrote

I think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might give insight on the ways in which temporary leaders of bodies of people might think about how to behave given that they won't always be in power. Also, how to think about nations that have within them radically different factions.

There was some connection in the book to that question of providing for when you're not in power. Jekyll sometimes set things up so that when he was Hyde, Hyde wouldn't ruin things. I imagine that in liberal democracies, governments think about the fact that they will be replaced by people who don't like their agenda (the opposition). That might be an interesting area to read about if I come upon a source.

One thing that maybe could be pointed out from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that I know that Jekyll provides for the fact that he will become Hyde, and I vaguely feel like Hyde provides for the fact that he will become Jekyll. This asymmetry to how I remember this suggests the thought that Jekyll was the more responsible of the two and therefore did more of the providing for the reality of Hyde, and had more of a concept that he was responsible for what Hyde did. So, suppose there is a Faction A and Faction B in a country, and Faction A is more responsible, both in the sense of interfering more in / providing for the existence of, and feeling more accountable for, Faction B, than Faction B does of Faction A. Metapolitics (views on the fact that there are politics, factions, etc.) is part of political culture. A move in Faction A vs. Faction B politics might be in denying that there is an overall nation that both are part of, weakening this sense of responsibility. An amoral or evil Faction B (Hyde-like) might have a sort of "youthful strength" by ignoring responsibility. Possibly Faction A's attempts to take care of what Faction B will likely do could end up doing more harm than good sometimes, and Faction B can "shine by comparison" by not messing up that way.

--

On a personal note, I find that I have different moods, because I have bipolar disorder. So this book, and thinking about it, thematizes the question of how I might provide for myself when I'm in a maybe radically different mood.

Book Review Preview: City of God by Augustine

I'm interested right now in Catholicism, but also in spiritual X-risk. That is, the possibility of the state of civilization getting to where it hinders "catastrophic" (however defined) numbers of people from reaching God, or, in other words, causes or is upstream of "catastrophic" numbers of people hardening. One spiritual X-risk would be for a kind of Brave New World scenario to evolve. I can see this as a default outcome of secular culture given the way it is now and where it's headed. One might think that a better long-term future for humanity would be under the rule of the Church.

(Some people would wonder why Christianity is the right choice for all of humanity, and this is a good thing to bear in mind.)

If the Christian Church ruled over the whole world, what if it was teaching (or embodying) the wrong thing? It could mislead both on a "textual" or conscious level, or on a "subtextual" or subconscious level. It could fatally impede people's full love of God with their hearts, souls, minds, strengths, or any combination thereof. This would further Satan's eternal agenda, but the Church could also open up people to Satanic access in the "merely" here-and-now (abusive cultures, supernatural attack).

If so, would it be able to be corrected? Would it discourage self-correction? Could that wrong teaching or embodiment keep people out of heaven, even if it might be excellent at keeping them in the Church?

If the answer to that last question is "yes", then if we are "longtermists" about spiritual well-being, we should look at the spiritual failure modes of the Church as it might become in the future, and especially those of the Church ruling over the whole world. How can Satan use the Church? If the Church isn't aware of how he might, he probably will.

So I want to consider the failure modes of different Christianities, when it comes to spiritual X-risk. The most obvious candidate for "Christianity that might rule the world" is Roman Catholicism. But in the farther future, that may change. However, for now, it is an example of an existing pro-establishedness, pro-authoritarian Christianity, and is the largest Christian organization, so is currently closest to realizing a "rule of the Church over all". So I want to understand Catholicism better, especially in its political dimensions. (I hope to explore other Christianities, particularly Reformed political thinking, which are in favor of something leaning "integralist", and also the anti-establishment Christianities, to see what their spiritual failure modes are.)

I am aware that my own project is in some ways like the Catholic project (both are concerned with holiness, civilization, an intermediate afterlife, natural theology, the ways in which Christian religion relates to all of reality -- and there may be other similarities I'm not aware of at this moment), but I think I base my thinking on different starting assumptions or spirits, and I feel like it might be wise to understand more clearly exactly what the similarities and differences are between the New Wine System or especially my own MSLN project, and Catholicism. Perhaps by reading a foundational book in Catholic thinking, I can see this more clearly.

(I don't want to try to be anti-Catholic by pursuing this, and the ecumenical side of me would hope that if any Catholics read of the potential failure modes of Catholicism and see something they realize they haven't taken into account adequately, they would seek to reform Catholicism to protect it and its followers from that danger. I think Catholicism is genuinely Christian and probably the values it most aspires to are best served by facing the dangers that could accompany its dominance. So this project should be aligned with Catholic interests, to some extent. However, I sense that MSLN will end up somewhat at odds with Catholicism, just as it should with all other existing Christianities.)

(This study may be of particular value to warn people who are into MSLN, since after all, MSLN shares some of Catholicism's project.)

(Also, it occurs to me to consider, what about if other religions sought to be the one religion over all the world? I feel like Christianity is the one to consider first, partly because I am trying to further it in some sense and want to know how things could go wrong if "I" were in charge of things; partly because I think as the largest religion currently and (in the Catholic church) the largest organized religion, it is the most obvious contender for "religion that rules over the world"; partly because I feel least out of my depth in thinking about it. But an analogous project should be pursued for each of the religions. I suppose that such a project could be pursued by someone who believed in the religion, or by someone outside the religion. If I were to pursue one of these projects, I would judge the religions by the standard of MSLN.)

(Also, what are the dangers of a bad religious pluralism? Imagine all the religions coexisting, functioning in some ways as a religion over all, in a way that is spiritually dangerous.)

I've had a copy of Augustine's City of God for a long time that I've never read, and it seems like a fairly basic thing that talks about the relationship between religion (Christian), non-religion (non-Christianity), and politics. I wouldn't be surprised if I see it referenced a lot in other books on that or those topics. City of God is actually not just a Catholic book. I would guess it's part of the lineage of a lot of Orthodox and Protestant thinkers as well, because it was written before the major church splits.

The copy I have is abridged ("for modern readers"), the Vernon J. Bourke abridgement (introduction by Etienne Gilson; tr. by Gerald Walsh, Demetrius Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel Honan). That's probably good enough for me (the fact that it's somewhat abridged doesn't bother me too much). Maybe if I really want to get into ancient or medieval Christianity I can get an unabridged edition to re-read. Ultimately, I'm not concerned with what Augustine said, but rather with the reality of the present and future, but I think whatever influence I can get from him could be helpful in my own thinking. I think that whatever I read will help me get closer to understanding Catholicism, even if I could theoretically get even closer by reading the parts that were abridged.

Disestablishedness vs. Anti-temptation

Epistemic status: provisional. May be incompatible with something I've said about disestablishedness or establishedness.

In MSLN Reasons to Oppose X-Risks, I said that it might be the case that rebuilding civilization after a near-extinction of humanity, or an extinction (God restarting humanity), could be painful for God, involve many generations with less-than-ideal moral environments (in need of progressing morally to the level we've reached now), and, if our civilization is bad spiritually in terms of potentially leading to hardening (which it sometimes seems to be), ours might still be better than average -- if God wants to end our civilization, he should make that call (to "roll the dice" and see what the next civilization would bring). He could end our civilization unilaterally whenever he wanted, and since he hasn't, we might assume that it's our job to keep things going, to not let civilization end.

However, in Establishedness and Loving God (in the section on abortion), I said that civilizational disestablishedness can be uniquely good for developing people spiritually. This is why this life is better than heaven or the Millennium so that, from one point of view, it's not worth aborting babies so that they are not messed up spiritually by living in this life (instead of a nicer afterlife), or from another point of view, it makes sense that God has us live through this "vale of tears" rather than sending us straight to heaven -- being in a nice environment like heaven may not be conducive to us getting the really essential good, for us to become people in tune with God, who love him with all our beings.

It occurred to me that if the disestablishedness of this life is good, or has good effects, maybe a case could be made that if God had to restart civilization after human extinction, things could be better spiritually in the new, less-developed civilization than they are in our civilization as it is now. So then it wouldn't be as clear that we should continue our current civilization (or the human species) -- maybe we should let it (or them) end.

The way I try to resolve this is to say that there are two dynamics in civilization: (dis)establishedness and (anti-)temptation. Establishedness says "you are as you should be, you are the way you are". Anti-temptation causes you to see God as desirable, seekable, trustworthy, or whatever else helps you to bond with him. If you are established in such a way that you do not seek the deepest connection with God, then for your own good, it's good for there to be disestablishedness in your life, to break your bad establishedness. But, in a world without anti-temptations, disestablishedness may not do any good. It's possible to break a bad establishedness without a good one re-forming in its place.

So over time, civilization works to reduce disestablishedness but it is the job of those who love God to anti-tempt, to make up for the loss of disestablishedness. Arguably our civilization has built up a lot of establishedness and anti-temptation. Compared to the Millennium, it is less established and has less anti-temptation. The ideal world, for spiritual development, is one that permits some establishedness but also has a lot of disestablishedness, as well as a lot of anti-temptation and not too much temptation. We have significant amounts of disestablishedness and anti-temptation nowadays, which likely makes our time more ideal for spiritual development than under the Millennium (on average, given that the disestablishedness and anti-temptation are currently unevenly distributed among the human population). Also because we do have anti-temptation to lose, it isn't clear that the spiritual regime that would result from restarting civilization would necessarily be as favorable for spiritual development, because it might not have as high a level of anti-temptation.

(Could Jesus (an example of an anti-temptation) be preached in a new (restarted) civilization after an extinction of humans? Certainly, but for some reason he didn't come (so couldn't have been preached) until 2,000 years ago. Maybe that reason would apply to telling about him in a new civilization, starting off from a low level of development.)

So it still looks like it is the case that disestablishedness can have good effects, and also the case that civilization is worth preserving.

Apolitical Identity

Originally written October 2020.

[Note: when I use "humanism" and "theism" in this post, I mean the ethical position that favors humans and human interests (especially secular human interests) -- humanism -- and the ethical position that favors God and God's interests -- theism.]

In this presidential election, I have decided to not vote. Along with other abstinent life choices (celibate, vegetarian), I can add "apolitical".

[And in fact I did not vote in that election.]

As Orwellian as it may sound, abstinence is freedom. The freedom that comes from being apolitical is being able to be on everyone's side, or if not that, to refuse to be on the side of anyone who wants to come after someone else. In 2016, I voted for a third party candidate. But, because the third party candidates are coded "blue" or "red" to a large extent anyway, I set myself against the other half of the country. I would like to someday leave my default "blue" environment and be considered trustworthy by people in "red" environments. This might help some with the overall problem of polarization in America. I would like to be listened to by as many different kinds of Christians as possible, and "red" America has a lot of professing Christians.

Although I have always identified as a Christian, from around the age of 13 until perhaps a year or two ago, I was trying to move more into secular environments. If you eat secular food enough, you'll get secularism in your bloodstream. I catch myself being something other than Christian quite a bit. I've leaned conservative and liberal at various points in my life, and now I want to be neither conservative nor liberal, but instead simply Christian.

Some Christians (for instance, some Calvinists and Catholics, and perhaps others) want to have a particularly Christian way to order society, sometimes to work for Christian interests in the political system. It's possible that I could endorse a similar view. But I would have to do a study on what the Christian way to order society would be, and the Christian way to try to bring that about, if such a way even exists. This could take me years to bring to a reasonable state of completion, sufficient to cause me to feel like I had genuinely Christian political opinions, and not just secular opinions that I, a Christian, find appealing.

Other Christians, when trying to be Christian about politics, choose to be apolitical. In this way they can at least shed the identities of "Republican" (conservative humanist) or "Democrat" (liberal humanist), and perhaps highlight that they are theists, putting God's interests ahead of autonomous human interests as do the secular humanists. [Secular humanists put autonomous human interests before God's interests.]

Both Republicans (as Republicans) and Democrats (as Democrats) are secular humanists. Secular humanism is seen in how you trust, not just the words you say. So Christians in office, even people who ran trying to appeal to a Christian base, are not necessarily Christians in how they approach reality. You can carry the flag of Christ and act like you don't believe in God, not just by some kind of moral indiscretion, but in the way that you are fearful of things a faithful person wouldn't fear and the way you do not look for the deeper and better things a faithful person would look for. Being apolitical is a chance to get free from secular humanistic thinking and adopt a Christian-only worldview.

However, this apolitical stance comes at a cost, which is having less of a chance to intervene in public affairs. A truly apolitical person might have less of an influence in stopping something like the Third Reich. If Germany was to have some kind of party governing it, one which was successful, filling the role that the Nazi party took on [could/would take on] and thus blocking it from coming to power, it would be run by humanists, not by apolitical theists. And if the church sits by while secular interests dominate the public sphere, that may be worse for both theists and secular people. Currently, politics is all about humanism rather than theism, and maybe that's for the best, even in a Christian society. But the question of "what is human well-being?" is one that we haven't figured out as a society. Christians should be heard in that discussion.

We could say that Christians are more essentially interested in advancing the Kingdom of God. And humanists are more essentially interested in advancing civilization. [A definition of "Kingdom" and "civilization".] If you save your child from a speeding car, he or she will grow up a certain way and will probably spend more of his or her waking life furthering civilization (on the job) than in furthering the Kingdom. The love in your family feeds capitalism, resource extraction, technological and cultural development, and the geopolitical interests of the nation you live in. So even apolitical people are voting, just not in an election.

Politics is all about humanism, at least ostensibly. So I could try, as an apolitical person, to still try to further human well-being, to vote in civilization in various ways, while staying away from identifying with someone I am ultimately not: a warrior for a secular army. I can aspire to be someone whose existence and activities further the interests of both "blue" and "red" people, or people on either side of any other politicized divide, and most importantly, the interests of God.

Having said all this, I do hope that someday I will have gone through the study I mentioned above, of what is the truly Christian way to interact with civilization. If the result of that is that it seems right to vote (I am making political decisions that are really Christian, and I have "malice towards none" / I maintain my independence from political feuds), then I will.

[Implicitly, I'm not rejecting humanism entirely. I could say that humanism follows from theism. Being apolitical enables me to distance myself from some sociologically and psychologically compelling humanistic identities (Republican, Democrat, etc.) which commit me to a version of humanism that tends to exclude theism -- and which also has defects (polarization) in how it pursues even secular humanism.]

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[It's interesting to read this in October 2021. I don't find the question of polarization to be nearly as salient to me right now. I think that in an election year, like 2020, we are more political than in an off-year. Also maybe 2020 was a particularly vivid year in terms of protests.]

[Identities are partly about how you feel. If you don't find an identity relevant, can you hold it? Maybe not to as great an extent. If there's nothing at stake, can you hold an identity? This is an interesting question to ask of Christians. Do Christians feel like there is anything theistic that is greatly at stake? If so, then they might probably more often hold to the identity of "Christian" deeply and firmly. But if Christians are only concerned with secular concerns (are you healthy? will you live a long physical life on earth?) then they perhaps can't be Christians as deeply and firmly. I would say that not-holding-firmly is itself a threat that raises the stakes, because we are saved by making it 100% of the way to being in tune with God, including valuing what he values on some important level.]

[I haven't relinquished my political identity of apoliticalness, even in an off-year. At least, it's still on the books in terms of how my life is set up. As mentioned here, I chose not to vote in the California gubernatorial recall election in 2021. Identities are fresh when new but are paid for by work over time.]

[This could apply to the Christian identity. Though the feeling might dissipate somewhat, can you work faithfully in accordance with the feelings you used to have? I don't feel that to love apoliticalness is inherently necessary, but I do feel that to love Christianity in some proper form (insofar as doing so is necessary to fully loving God) is inherently necessary, and if I can't feel that way at times, in those times I should at least be open to the time in the past when they were fresh, as well as to the hoped-for near or far futures where they are fresh again. Remaining faithful in the desert is being open to the times of freshness.]

Kingdom and Civilization

Originally written November 2020.

Epistemic status: provisional, particularly in my definition of "Kingdom".

The Kingdom (for a Christian), is the kingdom of heaven, the domain ruled by God according to his righteousness. The Kingdom exists in heaven, and to an extent on earth. It is as though each Christian is partly in heaven while they live on earth. So they bear the Kingdom with them. The Kingdom is made up of those who do the will of God. It is made up of its subjects.

Civilization is a process -- has no king. It is the sum of all the nations on earth. Civilization drifts, evolves. It grows and may not be able to stop growing. Civilization is the interaction of human desires, is the field for history.

In Weilian terms, civilization tends to be made up of her "gravity", and driven by it, while the Kingdom could be seen as made up of and driven by her "grace".

[October 2021: Kingdom's subjects (persons) vs. civilization's human desires, which happen to be bundled into what we label as "persons".]

[October 2021: Church as both civilization and Kingdom. It aspires to being part of the Kingdom and perhaps "forensically" is, but its mind and flesh can be the same as civilization, when it lets human desires (or their semi-impersonal interactions) rule it, rather than God.]

Personal Responsibility and Anxiety in MSL

We value being responsible for ourselves, taking care of ourselves, self-care. This can make us anxious. If we try to have the maximal personal responsibility, we might feel like we have to be anxious, and maybe that really is what is required to be personally responsible to the maximum extent. How highly should we value being responsible for ourselves? Should it be an absolute that rules our lives?

The biblical position is that we should not be anxious, though we might try to take care of ourselves.

Matthew 6 (Jesus speaking):

24 "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can't serve both God and Mammon. 25 Therefore I tell you, don't be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 See the birds of the sky, that they don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you of much more value than they?

27 "Which of you by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan? 28 Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin, 29 yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won't he much more clothe you, you of little faith?

31 "Therefore don't be anxious, saying, 'What will we eat?', 'What will we drink?' or, 'With what will we be clothed?' 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first God's Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore don't be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day's own evil is sufficient.

Does the natural theology of MSLN also support this relaxation of anxiety? Certainly if I think egoistically, then if I love and trust God, all will be well with me in the end, and it's okay if I risk dying young. But if I think altruistically, I might think that it is important that I stay alive, so that I can help other people. There's a bit of a trick here, where "responsibility to help other people" could really just be "being fearful, self-centered, (self-protective), and not trusting God" masked in concern for others. But if this trick is not in operation, then there's something worth thinking about here. How can we trust God and not fear things, and still be around to help other people? Arguably, if I want to ensure maximum responsibility to altruism in myself, I should maintain a certain useful level of anxiety, to make absolutely sure I stick around to be able to do good.

How will they learn to trust God if we're dead? But then, how will they learn to trust God if we don't trust God?

The natural theology of MSLN (MSL) says that with only a few (or possibly no?) exceptions, everyone will be resurrected to the Millennium or a time like it. Whatever I could have said to you in this life, had I not died young, I could say to you in the next. But at the same time, the way this life turns out does matter. Maybe if you heard what I would have said when you were younger, in this life, it would have done you more good. In principle, the structures of civilization and/or the church can further people's holiness, and serve as prophylaxis to hardening. If you're part of that structure, maybe it is better for you to keep living.

However, sometimes soldiers are needed, in battles against Satan. A soldier can be needed to die young. That can be more effective in bringing people to love and trust God than trying to make sure no one from our country dies. You should only be a soldier if there is a real need for you to go to war, and you should only die if you have to. Your goal is to die well, and to die too soon or too late are equally a problem. You don't know what you're doing, but God is a good commander, and if you trust and obey him out of loyalty to him and his values, then he will put you to good use.

In this, personal responsibility ends up being more about being responsible to God than being responsible to the godless pursuit of survival.

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Being responsible for your own well-being, if pursued enough, makes you conservative in outlook. This conservatism makes you fail to do the good you could do, to follow the visions that you otherwise could have, to recognize and follow a good leader, to be a good leader. So while it is easy to praise from a humanistic perspective, if everyone abides by it scrupulously, we're worse off as a whole, and some people suffer who don't have to otherwise, those who would have benefited from the fruits of visions. Unsurprisingly, being responsible for your own well-being can be a selfish act.

It may be that it is difficult to say exactly how self-caring a person should be. Some self-care is beneficial to the whole and serves God's interests, but some is not and does not. No matter how popular self-care may become, there needs to be some sense that it could be untrustworthy.

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Another dimension to consider: you would save the whole world, but yourself be lost. Or, you overestimate how necessary or beneficial you are to saving the world, while losing the person who is most under your control -- yourself. You need to come to love and trust God completely, and you should start that pursuit now. If, as someone who loves and trusts God, you feel led to be altruistic, so be it. You can still think altruistically, see your own salvation as simply being one part in the whole of all people who need it, but focus on yourself as the one most accessible to your care.

So in the end, true self-care requires that you not be anxious over your well-being. To be responsible for yourself requires that you trust God.

A certain amount of watchfulness (which is similar to anxiety) can be called for to keep on track toward loving and trusting God and serving him. There really are dangers, but you watch for them, rather than worrying about them. Trust God in your watchfulness.

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These loose threads say different things, but overall they agree that from a natural theological (MSL) perspective, you should trust God. Trusting God involves not being anxious about the godless concern for survival. So MSL's take on personal responsibility is close to or essentially the same as the Bible's.

(Short version of) Establishedness and Loving God

I wrote a longer version of this, which explains all of this more fully. I thought it was good to offer something shorter and more concise, so I wrote this.

These posts were responding to the question "How could it be a good thing for there not to be a king?", occasioned by a Twitter conversation about the last verse in Judges, and how a libertarian found the kinglessness described there to be good, while my non-libertarian interlocutor did not.

What I did after the exchange was attempt to write up my reactions to that question and the exchange off the top of my head. It took me a couple of days and was long. (The later part of the post is mostly concerned with "establishedness", as will be explained below, but in this initial part I considered other topics as well, like comparing the value of a "hands-off" legislative king rather than a "hands-on" direct-ruling king.) This first reaction part fairly directly relates to the original conversation.

Then I realized that the subject (God, kingship, judgeship) demanded that I read the Bible to see if what I thought off the top of my head could be supported with the Bible. So I read Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and the first 11 chapters of 1 Kings (the reign of Solomon). I wanted to see what the Bible said about disestablishedness (Judges) and establishedness (Solomon) and the period in between (1 and 2 Samuel). I was trying to understand why God might have preferred the Judges days, and I thought that establishedness might be a big part of the answer. (Establishedness being something connecting to psychology, politics, and ontology, which could all be foundations of a person's spirituality.)

"Establishedness" as I use it is "how things are put together, that they are a thing, their fullness and wealth, certainty and settledness, stability, order" and similar things. "Disestablishedness" is "hunger, lack, longing, poverty, confusion, incompleteness, being ostracized, questioning, striving" and similar things.

(Looking back, I see that the real issue at stake between me and my interlocutor in our original conversation probably wasn't literal earthly kingship, but rather something king-like or something judge-like in non-monarchical (liberal democratic?) government, or in the valueset associated with kingship or judgeship as found in culture, even culture far away from government itself. I would say now that maybe the difference between "king" values and "judge" values is "more establishedness" and "less establishedness", respectively.)

I found that I could make a case for establishedness and disestablishedness each being "mixed" things (things which call for ambivalence), and that disestablishedness of some sort is needed to break bad establishedness. Bad establishedness leads to spiritual unfaithfulness and spiritual deadness. Disestablishedness gives an opportunity for people to cry out to God, and for him to answer by establishing them. So God could have preferred an experiential environment for his people that was less-established (that of the judges as opposed to the kings), so that they would love and trust him more, and not commit themselves to idols. I read the Bible readings I set myself to read, and as I wrote my notes on the Bible reading, various ideas occurred to me, related to establishedness (how it relates to psychology, social relationships, politics, the church, current events, and other areas), which I wrote down. (I also added a few notes during the time I spent editing these posts.) Some of those ideas were concerned with how disestablishedness could be good in itself, apart from any role as disestablisher of bad establishedness.

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My concerns -- somewhat going into this, and somewhat as they have developed as I've written -- have to do with whether or not people really love and trust God, and avoid idols (or cease attachments to them). (In general, with whether they adopt holiness in general (being set apart to God).) While I have unusual beliefs about the Bible which intensify this concern, I think anyone who values evangelism, and/or who cares about the long-term future of the church, should be concerned with whether people love and trust God fully, and avoid or cease attachment to all idols, and with their holiness in general. For me, it is a direct matter of salvation, whereas for other Christians, it's a step or two upstream of salvation (evangelism is only effective if someone cares enough to evangelize, can image a genuine love and trusting of God, and also through that can minimize the sins that poison an unbeliever's trust of Christianity).

I am concerned that in the future, civilization will someday be able to give humans what they want, and what humans want will not involve notable amounts of disestablishedness, and so people will not have the opportunity to truly love and trust God. So Christians should value disestablishedness to some extent, and thus can agree with God that it is part of a good experiential environment for humans. Disestablishedness can be good in itself (trust requires or is disestablishedness) and even some bad disestablishedness can be better than bad establishedness. Fallen establishedness (what libertarians fear?) is particularly dangerous when it becomes absolute. We know to be concerned about this in the case of dystopia, but it is also the case with utopia. Even a modest government is dangerous, if it becomes part of an overall social order which does not actually point people toward God.

I am concerned that the values of Christians do not diverge significantly enough from secular utopia to really value God and genuine love and trust of God. To me, it seems like we value a nice life on earth more than we do God. God is a means to a nice life on earth. We don't value love apart from its role in getting us nice lives. We want our preferences satisfied and our experiences to be experiences of well-being, which is the same thing that secular civilization wants and works for. When civilization figures out how to give us nice lives, we'll take civilization's version, as we are already doing, to the glory (the finding-trustworthy-of) civilization. We need to find a way to love God for himself, so that there can be no substitutes.

Hedonism and preferentialism seek psychological establishedness. To say "no" to them is a motion of self-disestablishing. This requires that we be willing to de-value establishedness as our highest good, and admit that there is such a thing as good disestablishedness.

Establishedness can make a tempting substitute for God. Also, the church can be tempted by love of establishedness to become the worst kind of chosen people. Love of establishedness is a spiritual danger on multiple fronts (from secular pressures and from within the church).

It's true that civilization (globally speaking) will only get less established in the next decades due to climate change, but AI could change that trajectory somewhat. Optimistically, with respect to this potential spiritual problem, the near-term disestablishedness of the world gives time to prepare and reshape our values to be radically theistic, rather than radically humanistic with belief in God added on. (To value loving and trusting God, more than we do physical or emotional well-being, for instance, and to avoid idols.) The church can listen to the message and internalize it, and Christian thinkers may be able to find a way to articulate it so that non-Christians see that there is a real risk involved to spiritual decay, so that they put safeguards into civilization against it, even if they do not convert to Christianity or theism. An optimistic scenario for AI (for both secular AI safety people, I would assume, as well as for theistic-minded people) is that it remains under the control of humans and obeys human values as conveyed to it through a political process. So to the extent that this process will be democratic, the more people who have radically theistic values, the more likely that good disestablishedness, and good establishedness, are protected, and bad establishedness is opposed.

What this means for Christian humanism (humanists that are Christians, or Christians that are humanist) is that it needs to not forget that the point of what it does is to connect people with God (this is real humanism given God and the possibility of not entering his rest). What I see on the Internet from Christians (and non-Christians) may be somewhat orthogonal to that goal (may overemphasize living a nice life on earth, and bringing about of desired behaviors in the here-and-now that may or may not lead people to love God). Everything interrelates, so there is a connection between any aspect of well-being (and any attempt to affect it) and whether people love and trust God. But understanding exactly what that connection is in each case is something that needs to be considered.

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I ended up, much as I started, without firm preferences for specific types of government, seeing the debate over flavors of government as being not as important as resolving to make whichever one we choose be implemented such that it actually helped connect people to God (or was conducive to us helping that, given that it may not be best for the state to actually do the church's work). Ultimately, if I could do nothing else, highlighting the question implicit in that ("How does this discussion, program, vision, etc. actually connect to people coming to love and trust God fully?") would be a good outcome of these two posts.