Hi, Less Wrong.

I am idea21, I am from Spain and I apologize for my defective english.

I got acquainted with the existence of this forum thanks to the kindness of mister Peter Singer, he recommended me to expose my own idea about altruistic cultural development after questioning him whether he knew something similar about. Apparently there is nothing similar being discussed anywhere, which turned to be very dissapointing to me. But I still feel that "it" makes sense, at least from a logical point of view.

I will post here some excerpts of the message I wrote to Peter Singer, I hope any suggestion or comment from yours could be enlightening.

"Cultural changes about ethics have happened very slowly across history. According to some people they are motivated by economic issues (land´s property, trading, industrial development…) or political ones, also connected to economy. But although I read what Norbert Elias wrote about, it disturbs me the idea that the real change happens first in the people´s minds, influencing then to economics and politics, and not the other way around.

Primitive men started to create arts in Paleolithic previous to start agriculture in Neolithic. They decided to create arts, probably for the same reasons they decided to try to settle down: social needs, sharing emotional and intellectual activity in bigger groups. Agriculture was the economic answer to the practical problem of how affording sedentary way of life.

Norbert Elias (and Steven Pinker then) explains that an economic and political necessity urged authorities in the Middle Age to try to promote values of cooperation and less violent human relationships: that idea of the “civilité”, gentlemanliness, new rules of behavior advancing to modern humanism. But it seems to me that Elias and Pinker forget that rules to control individual aggression were created previous to the date they give (XIII century, as the European kings courts promoted the new gentle habits). The real origin of that is in monasticism, San Benito´s Rules are from VI Century, and monasticism did not start with the fall of the Roman Empire either. It did not start with Christianity, as a matter of fact. Buddhism started it.

All this reminded me what Miss Karen Armstrong wrote about “compassionate religions” and the “Axial Age”. So, the thing could be this way: First, intellectual changes happened (arts, communitarian life, ethics), and then new economic phenomena came, developing social, cultural, ideological forms; second, as social life increased human relationships, a new adaptation of individual behavior is demanded to control aggression.

It seems that monasticism is the answer to the need of developing new ways to control human behavior for the benefit of outside society, the same way that animals are tamed to be used by men. Monasticism is, basically, a "High-Performance Center" for behavior, producing “new men” able to control better the violent behavior and teaching these new discoveries for the outside people.

According to some current psychologists, like Simon Baron-Cohen, there are many people bearing features of “super-empathy”, being the opposite equivalent to the psychopaths, but unlike psychopaths, who can enjoy their own fitted sub-cultural environments (the underworld of criminality), there is not today a particular sub-cultural environment fitted for people particularly able to develop self-control of aggression and antiaggressive, affectionate and altruistic behavior. But in monasticism, these “super-empathic” people were specially fitted to develop patterns of aggression self-control: that psychological personal feature proved to be adaptive.

My idea (I hope not only mine…) is that monasticism should be re-invented.

A new monasticism of XXI century could be attractive for many young people, as providing them with emotional, intellectual and affectionate experiences that probably they could find nowhere else. It must be kept in mind that old monasticism existed because, at some extent, it fulfilled this kind of social needs for many people, particularly the young ones. Nobody compromises on the hard search for a future better world if they are not expecting to get, in that process, some kind of psychological reward in the present.

A monasticism of the XXI century would be, of course, very different from that of XVII century. It should be rational, atheist and non-authoritarian, emphasizing in affectionate and cooperative behavior by secluding from mainstream society. That could make much more against poverty that all the current NGO and every current humanitarian trend.

Human behavior is the “raw material” of humanitarianism. Not only because they could influence the mainstream society by demonstrating that a full antiagressive way of life is possible and emotionally rewarding, but also because the economic activity of “super-empathic” people culturally organized would be totally focused on altruistic work. Using modern technology, extremely cooperative organization and concentration of work resources (like in a “economy of war”) the results should be very good.

Remember that in Spain, in XVII century, there was a 2 % of population secluded from “civil life”, as monks, nuns or priests (and remember also the very committed communist activists of the first half of XX century). Can you imagine what a 2 % of this planet population could do with our technology, if rationally concerned to dedicate their lives only to ease human sufferance only in exchange for emotional, affectionate and intellectual rewards? Psychopaths are between 2 and 4 %: how many people “super-empathic” ones could exist? It would be worth trying to get them organized, culturally evolving for the whole world´s benefit.

Don´t underestimate young people idealism. The problem today is that they have not an alternative to start to create a better world outside our cultural, social and political mainstream limitations."

This idea could be develop much deeper, but I hope you will understand that it deals with the creation of a last religion, rational and of course atheist, in order to allow a furtther enhancing of human abilities for mutual cooperation.

As I mean "religion", I mean the necessity of developing an own system of cultural symbols and understandable patterns of social behaviour, which could not be the same as those of the current mainstream society (which is competitive, non-idealist and still irrational). As highly cooperative society could be based only on extreme trust and mutual altruism, it could be a bit similar to some traditions of the old compassionate religions, but now detached from any irrationality, any tradition and based on rational knowledge about human behaviour.

Thank you very much for your attention.