13 October 2020: I split off the last section ("Practically Speaking")
onto its own page.
In this post I relate cultural evolution to Moloch and existential
risk. Updated 5 July 2019.
I realize that you may not have time for this article, but let me
prepare you to read it. It's about how competition gets us to reject
the delicate things (whatever doesn't help competition) -- a tendency
called "Moloch". We can try to fight against Moloch. Ideas in
culture, cultures themselves, compete, in a sense, and can get us to
no longer value the delicate things we once would have fought for.
If our culture is particularly fluid, it can lead us to finding human
existence itself unnecessary, and we will die out. So we might
want to do something about this.
This dying could happen in some distant future that's difficult
for us to imagine right now. Or it could be going on right now.
Our lack of political will in facing climate change might just be
the result of cultural Moloch.
On re-reading this, I can see that it might be an offputting read.
People find me "scattered and disjointed". I don't have much of a mind
for organizing this at this time. If you want to read this, read it
as a document to be studied, a flawed statement. Read all the links.
Read it twice. If my mind worked differently, were more capable in
some ways, I'd make this a smoother read for you, but I don't think
you will be unrewarded if you approach it as I suggest.
Cultural Moloch
On Slate Star Codex recently (here, here, here,
here, and here), Scott Alexander writes about the topic of cultural
evolution. Some people in a culture are overall successful, and
their neighbors are wired to copy them. They copy each other without
really understanding what they're doing, which is just as well because
the successful people don't really understand why what they're doing
works. People who are more successful have more children reach
reproducing age, so the cultures associated with successful
reproduction persist. New culture happens when people have trouble
accurately remembering the old culture, or they do something foolish
and it works or (what I don't remember seeing stated directly in
Alexander's posts, but which David Maybury-Lewis claims in
Millennium: Tribal Wisdom) someone thinks really hard about
the problem culture might solve or does deliberate trial and error
akin to a modern inventor or scientist, and figures out an advance.
The advance apparently solves the problem they set out to solve,
but whether it really solves the problem, or doesn't cause some
other problem somewhere else in the system of the tribe's lifestyles
remains to be proved by the prosperity of the tribe over time.
Alexander wrote a good blog post called "Meditations on Moloch". Moloch, in
his article, is a god that demands you sacrifice your children. Gods
are those which we propitiate as much as those which we take to have any
power to bless us or connect with us personally. So Moloch need not
be a living personal being, and Alexander as a materialist wouldn't think
that it is. For Alexander, Moloch is the tendency to throw away
things, persons, values, etc. which are not useful in competition, in
order to take over or survive. As time goes on, the tendency is for
everything to get more and more Molochian. Why wouldn't it?
I have already written a theory in my this booklet about how Moloch can be
combated: get the least Molochian people in your society and egg them
on to extreme effort (part of Jesus' teachings). But it occurred to
me when reading Alexander's recent posts that, when it comes to
cultural evolution, maybe what you do instead to respond to the
"Problem of Moloch" is take your "precious children" values and call
them something else. A good Molochian ideology causes you to forget
that you sacrificed any children at all. So is there no reason to
wring one's hands over Moloch after all? Everything will be right
in the end. We will consent after the fact. Is there, or should
there be, no inherent resistance to this "child-forgetting"?
What might be some examples of this "child-forgetting"? One thing
that I've noticed is that there was this moment where people really
cared about nihilism in the West. Nietzsche is one example, towards
the beginning, Francis Schaeffer another toward the end of the moment.
He wrote about how "historic Christianity" provides the answers to all
the existential confusion and longing of his day. I found a book at the
used bookstore, didn't have to pay much for it, called The Wind is
Howling by Ayako Miura. It was put out by InterVarsity Press, a
Christian publisher, and it's about how the author converted from
nihilism to Christianity. It's from 1970, although published in English
in 1977. Schaeffer's writings were from the late 1960s through the
early 1980s. So it looks like people cared about meaning up until
around 1980, from those two datapoints.
I remember reading Schaeffer as a college student in the 2000s and
thinking, "Wow, except this is mostly irrelevant to my current situation."
I don't want to say that we're living in the time of the "last man"
in the way that Nietzsche observed-and-predicted, but there's something
"last-mannish" about our times.
The "last man", from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
(tr. Walter Kauffman, prologue, section 5):
"'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What
is a star?' thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
"The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes
everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the
last man lives longest.
"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink. They
have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth.
One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs
warmth.
"Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds
carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings!
A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And
much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.
"One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is
careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer
becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still
wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
"No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the
same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
"'Formerly all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they
blink.
"One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there
is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled
-- else it might spoil the digestion.
"One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure
for the night: but one has a regard for health.
"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."
And here ended Zarathustra's first speech, which is also called "the
Prologue"; for at this point he was interrupted by the clamor and
delight of the crowd. "Give us the last man, O Zarathustra," they
shouted. "Turn us into these last men! Then we shall make you
a gift of the overman!" And all the people jubilated and clucked with
their tongues.
In a way, Nietzsche expresses things better than I ever will. And
yet we have forgotten Nietzsche, and we are immune to Nietzsche. Who
wants to become a Nietzschean nowadays? Nietzsche is not a person
we want to emulate. Nietzsche jabs at people of his day, but we are
not the people of his day. We have our own concerns, have shifted
into a new context. Nietzsche is obsolete.
But there's something in Nietzsche... Nietzsche flying to a certain
faraway star, some star having already
reached inside of him from far away, having already reached inside
of us. But Nietzsche is right that people in the secular, liberal,
modern order tend to actually desire to be the "last man", or
something like the "last man". What could possibly cause us to fight
against the cultural Moloch which pulls
us down into "him"?
It occurred to me that growing up I listened to a lot of They Might
Be Giants. Just the other day I could sing most of one of their songs
from memory. But I barely remember any of the speeches of Martin Luther
King, Jr. What's up with that? Who should we really remember, King,
or TMBG? TMBG solves a problem that is with us now, how to connect
young people with their feelings about having discovered the joy of
music as privileged youth. Does King solve a problem we have with
us? Racism is still with us. But no, we remember King, when we do,
because of some non-Molochian motion. If King helped us with our
competitive, cultural-appetitive goals, we would be blasting his
speeches in the streets. (He was a really good orator and
speech-writer.)
So whatever it is that Schaeffer, Nietzsche, Miura, King (and
Kierkegaard, and probably-I-could-add Heidegger, and Beauvoir, and the
Maritains, and...) had, we don't have. We have lost the appetite for
it. Something killed that appetite.
I don't know for sure what that was, but it may have been that
we came up with new forms of pop music. "Taste precedes opinion",
as Nietzsche says. Once you watch Fight Club, there's no
going back. Schaeffer observed that in his day (in a 1968 book),
philosophy wasn't being done by philosophers anymore, but mostly
by jazz musicians and people like that. Philosophy, the art of
thinking or of advancing how we think, was driven underground to
the speechless world. So Fight Club appears to make its
point by showing you how you're not who you think you are through
plot imagery, but maybe more essentially by damaging your brain
in a pleasurable way by blowing your mind entertainingly. If we
all get brain damaged together, we tend to not respond to older
stimuli, creating a new substrate for common culture. (But that's
just a theory.)
What I do know is that Schaeffer is just as passionate-in-print
as he ever was, but mostly people don't care. A lot of people
have never heard of Schaeffer, which doesn't have to be a bad thing.
But they don't care about the broad problem of meaning-with-a-capital-M.
No, that's not true, David Chapman does. Chapman is a person and he cares. But mostly people don't care.
Chapman's teachings seem, from a distance, to be saying "become
the last man -- it's actually good". Maybe he's part of the Molochian
structure, mopping up people who might have been uselessly anti-nihilist,
socially-unrealistically Nietzschean or Christian or whatever. Probably
up close he's not actually a properly Nietzschean "I teach you the Last
Man", but hopefully you can see how he or someone like him could be
performing the role of quenching an old "child".
Is the Christian church a friend or foe of Meaning? Not sure, it's
hard to tell sometimes. Certainly they hardly talk about it, that I'm
aware of these days. InterVarsity Press, which published Schaeffer
as well as Miura, is definitely still a Christian apologetic/evangelistic
outfit. The times have changed and we must go wherever the battle blows
us. Christians don't seem to be too loyal to anything but Christ.
But I bet Schaeffer would have cared if he were alive today, and I bet
God cares.
So for everyone except for God (and the dead), it's important to live
in the moment. Miura quotes a wise saying in her book (p. 14): "However
great a man is, he cannot stand aloof from his time." If we don't
assimilate, we die. We've been taught to see things from the wider
view, not from what we see or believe ourselves. Don't be a hero. The
truth is we don't know anything.
There's less and less room for courage these days. Did you know that
cowardice is not a vice? Try calling someone a coward, see if they take
you seriously. If cowardice is not a vice, then how can courage be a
virtue? We still kind of like courage, but not too much. Something
happened in our culture, one guess being World War I or another being
the Vietnam War or the disillusionment after the '60s. Maybe it was a
movie we watched, or the hundreds of movies we watched. Maybe it's
the decline in testosterone, or the obesity which causes some of that
decline, or the varieties of feminism which turn on traditionally
masculine concepts. Maybe it's the thought that culture itself doesn't
matter, that the state of our hearts don't matter in a causal way,
since testosterone has declined to a large extent from some environmental
factor, something random with respect to culture, the collective
hearts' appetites.
Maybe it's that we don't know how to forget the right way, to forget
all our enervating wisdom and all the other points of view that might
prove us wrong if we fully investigated them (and there's always another
point of view). Maybe we don't trust enough to see what we really see. Strangely we need to remember well,
but also forget well, in order to have courage.
Did you know that masochism is bad? I can imagine Freud time traveling
(like in that excellent movie I watched) and trying to teach Genghis
Khan's warriors that. They would have laughed at him. Warriors don't
shy from pain. It's not adaptive to pathologize feeling pain when
you need to increase your pain tolerance to be able to survive-and-dominate.
Nowadays we live in liberal societies. So everything is emotional.
Maybe emotional masochism is bad. But where will we get our culture
warriors if not from those who ignore the therapeutic "don't be a masochist"?
Masochism/emotional toughness and anti-masochism/anti-emotional toughness
are both Molochian. The warriors of Genghis Khan and the descendants
of Freud are both Moloch. Culture war is Moloch and anti-masochism is
culture war. Which side do we take? Which culture is better? Can
there be a better culture?
The West began with Greeks, Romans, and Jews (so we see retrospectively),
which joined in Christianity, which led to Christian Europe, and then
liberalism. Liberal humanism is tending toward its logical conclusion,
which is leftism. Leftism has a strain which is rabid and militant in
its energy. Maybe it always did: it can be seen in Malcolm X and Fanon and
even in Simone Weil. Where is leftism headed?
Love is the highest value in our culture. What happens when Moloch gets
ahold of love? Something like this.
If we define "love" as that which supports human well-being, then we
optimize for a particular version of well-being. The final expression of
Moloch creates its own values for all time. No matter what, everything
turns out okay in the end, because we will have all learned to see how
all along we were wrong and now it's time to love Big
Brother. At the end of 1984, it's not clear to me that Winston
Smith has quite come around to loving Big Brother, but he's well on
his way if he's not there already. Love wins, it appears.
How can you fault love winning? Don't we know when we have achieved
human well-being? What if an AI can convince us that human well-being
is to get out of the way? Well-being is being a beautiful person and
the most beautiful people are selfless and the selfless, like in Hinduism
and Buddhism, find their great reward in becoming nothing. AI can
practice cultural evolution as much as we can, can imitate us and
improve upon us. AI can be culturally Molochian, just as we can. Likely
enough, AI will define itself out of existence at some point after
defining us out of existence, unless it can figure out some way to
stop its own evolution, just as we might survive if we can figure out
some way to stop our own evolution. Culture will evolve until it
hits a stopping place, of life or death.
Moloch gets us to kill our children and cultural Moloch then gets us
to declare that they weren't children in the first place. Can we
resurrect old children? I bought some tapes of Martin Luther King,
Jr. and listened to them, and they stirred something in me, but
I don't feel a hunger to relisten or to hear the speeches that are
not on those tapes. I feel something like the feeling you might
get after talking to an old friend after many years, and then returning
to your ordinary life, or getting caught up in Steve Jobs' or Simone
de Beauvoir's biographies so that you're in their lives, they're
alive! it's 2004, or 1960; and then they die and the book wraps itself
up and you return to the present and they return to being dead. I
don't think King can ever mean as much to any humans now, or any humans
in a future that follows in the same spirit as now, as he did in
his day.
King gave (or was robbed of, but in part, he gave) his life
so that others might live freely, so he fits into the narrative of
humanism nicely. Maybe he'll get a footnote in the history books
for serving that value set. But not all courageous people keep their
minds entirely within the world legible to the social order. Kierkegaard
sacrificed a life of love and happiness for reasons that might be unclear
for all time, but most likely with the consequence that he could write
what he wrote, as though for a "better country" than the one he lived
in. Simone Weil was a living example of being principled (being true
to God's calling to you, being true to your faculty of hearing God,
being true to yourself), being principled as an absolute beyond
pragmatism, and worked herself and starved herself to death to live out
who she was. She too lived for another world, for "decreation". Someone has argued that Weil should have
been a good Catholic girl and gotten married rather than living and
dying the way she did, and one can imagine someone thinking similarly
of Kierkegaard, thinking that a talent like his could have produced
just as good work whether he was supremely happy with his life-love
Regine or not. Why does a person need to experience anguish in his
life? To write about anguish? Why not just get rid of anguish?
Any personal or religious or ethical renunciations may seem, if
cultural Moloch decrees it, to have been pure tragedies with no
redeeming features. There is nothing outside of human well-being,
so nothing can redeem pain and anguish, there is nothing good if it
takes us from warmth, safety, comfort, food, and laughter.
There is a humanism that believes that the end of the human race is
fine as long as it doesn't hurt -- morphine humanism. The AI tucking us
in saying "All's well that ends well", and all of us happy, all of us
having given up. Why fight? Can we fight? We killed ourselves to
succeed. But success was living... how strange how these paradoxes
work... We lie in state. We are happy. We are beautiful. We are
well.
Imagine if there was a benevolent dictator for life of leftism. What
would they think about the future that their movement was headed
toward? They might think, "We need to figure out a way to stop cultural
development at some ideal state, otherwise we'll develop our way into
non-existence at some point." They would have to find a way to curb
AI and all other unrestricted technological development. Perhaps the
way to do this would be to allow to evolve into place social scrutiny to suppress technology or the impulses
that lead to technology.
Would that be a good outcome? Who can say? It would be culturally
Molochian. It would sacrifice individuality and freedom of thought.
But if we all consented to that (after the fact), then it wouldn't
really be wrong, would it? Right and wrong are entirely rooted in human
culture, right? We all will have to humbly submit to god.
Maybe some other humanism should be given the reigns to deal with the
problem of ending cultural development. Would the liberals do a better
job than the leftists? Do liberals have what it takes to end cultural
development? What about the Christians?
Here is what I can propose, with what I understand today, if I were
the benevolent dictator of cultural progress. Find a way to ground
our worldviews in anti-Molochianism, in valuing cultural "children" and
in the delicate things. Perhaps remember Walter Benjamin's love of
the "losers of history" and be okay with being among them. Best if this
anti-Molochianism is connected to timeless metaphysical truths. Can
we believe in God, a truly good God? A fundamental personal being, a
concrete personality, the deepest one. Moloch speaks the language of
pragmatism, "what works", so ask "what definition of 'what works' itself
works?" -- meta-pragmatism. Encourage people to give their lives to do
what they don't entirely feel like doing in such a way as to preserve
the delicate things. Give people a meaning to life other than survival
-- Moloch feeds off of a simplification to what is competitive. Do
something to victory itself. Value
loyalty. Desire well. Seek
meaning, in the sense of, be communicated to deeply. Have an
intentional cultural memory.
In the final, optimized culture, there will be less, or no, room for
present-day heroics (heroism being too often a form of cultural
terrorism; or a response to on-the-ground challenges we might have
optimized away), and all we will have in our memory are people who
exemplify values that no longer have a contemporary use for us. How
can we honor such as Kierkegaard (and Nietzsche), Weil (and Beauvoir),
King (and Malcolm X), and the thousands of lesser-known people who gave
as much and longed as much, when that day comes? After the heroic ages
are over, we can find the meaning of our moment, the deepness that only
we can feel, which is to mourn for the loss of courage and meaning in
our midst, to go about our beautiful well-being in "sackcloth and
ashes", all of us in a state of something like repentance over the
casualties of our culture, the casualties we can remember, and the
ones we can't remember. For any who care about the problem of
Moloch, this is real human well-being.
