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NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - Less Wrong
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I strongly agree. It's possible that history has a side, but we can hardly know what it is in advance.
I don't think you agree. I think Eugine has a problem with the idea that just because an idea wins in history doesn't mean that's it's a good idea.
Marx replaced what Hegel called God with history. Marx idea that you don't need a God to tell you what's morally right, history will tell you. Neoreactionaries don't like that sentiment that history decides what's morally right.
There are (at least) two things wrong with "the right side of history". One is that we can't know that history has a side, or what side it might be because a tremendous amount of history hasn't happened yet, and the other error is that history might prefer worse outcomes in some sense.
I find the first sort of error so annoying that I normally don't even see the second.
My impression is that Eugene is annoyed by both sorts of error, but I hope he'll say where he stands on this.
There's a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
What's the precise sense of "attribute" in that claim? It's not obviously implausible to claim that the more groups are competing with other, the less likely it is that any one can become totally dominant, and so the more likely it is that most of them will eventually see mutual toleration as preferable to unwinnable conflict. This doesn't have to be an intended effect of the new sects to end up being an actual effect.
I hadn't even thought of the first objection, possibly because I stopped considering "what side history is on" a useful concept after noticing the second one.
I am not a neoreactionary and I think the sentiment that history decides what's morally right is a remarkably silly idea.
You have to compare it to the alternatives. Do you think it's more or less silly than the idea that there a God in the sky judging what's right or wrong?
Marx basically had the idea that you don't need God for an absolute moral system when you can pin it all on history with supposedly moves in a certain direction. You observe how history moves. Then you extrapolate. You look at the limit of that function and that limit is the perfect morality. It's what someone who got a rough idea of calculus does, but who doesn't fully understand the assumptions that go into the process.
In the US where Marx didn't have much influence as in Europe there are still a bunch of people who believe in young earth creationism. On a scale of silliness that's much worse.
Today the postmodernists rule liberal thought but there are still relicts of marxist ideas. Part of what being modern was about is having an absolute moral system. Whether or not those people are silly is also open for debate.
Sure. Let's compare it to the alternative the morality is partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined. By comparison the idea that "history decides what's morally right" is silly.
Yep, he had this idea. That doesn't make it a right idea. Marx had lots of ideas which didn't turn out well.
Oh, so -- keeping in mind we're on LW -- the universe tiled with paperclips might turn out to be the perfect morality? X-D
And remind me, how well does extrapolation of history work?
Do you, by any chance, believe there is a causal connection between these two observations that you jammed into a single sentence?
We didn't talk about right or wrong but silly.
Let's do what partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined is not exactly the battle cry under which you can unite people and get them to adopt a new moral framework. It also has the problem of not telling people who want to know what they should do what they should do.
Yes, I do think that Marxism and Socialism has a lot to do with spreading atheism in Europe. Socialist governments did make a greater effort to push back religion and make people atheists than democratic governments did.
If I hear Dawkins talk how it's important that atheists self identify as being atheists to show the rest of America that one can be an atheist and still a morally good person, than that does indicate to me a problem of American culture that's largely solved in Europe. Socialist activism has a lot to do with why that's the case.
Promoting a century-and-a-half-old wrong idea looks pretty silly to me. You want to revive phlogiston, too, maybe?
That's a good thing. I am highly suspicious of ideologies which want people to adopt new moral frameworks, especially if it involves battle cries.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Oh yes, they certainly did. I take it, you approve of these efforts?
That question indicates being mindkilled. I happen to be able to discuss issues like that without treating arguments as soldiers.
Discussing cause and effects is hard enough as it is without involving notions of approval or disapproval.
The implication that somehow socialism isn't responsible for spreading atheism in Europe because socialist used some immoral technique is a conflation of moral beliefs with beliefs about reality.
I haven't said anything about morals. In particular, I haven't labeled any actions as immoral. I just inquired whether you approved of the efforts that the socialist governments have made in reality in the XX century to spread atheism.
Moreover, we are already past the question of whether the socialist governments made "a greater effort to push back religion and make people atheists" -- we know they did -- the issue now is the cost-benefit analysis of these efforts. You clearly like the outcome, so do you think the price was worth it? This is what I mean by the question about whether you approve.
I do approve of democratic socialism.
I'm heavily opposed to what currently happens in France when it comes to fighting religion.
But I guess both claims won't tell the average person here where much because the political background of European politics isn't that clear in English speaking forum.
It seems to me that you two are talking past each other. Here's what I hear:
ChristianKI: "Socialist movements and governments did successfully promote atheism and materialism in the populations of Europe. This is why Europeans do not tend to believe, as Americans do, that atheists are incapable of being moral." (This is a descriptive claim about history and public opinion.)
Lumifer: "We should not advocate socialism as a way of promoting atheism and materialism, because socialism is awful and Marxist ideas of historical progress are silly." (This is a normative claim about advocacy.)
You're using "socialism" vaguely. Iron curtain socialism was awful. North-western European social democracy is not.
Thanks. The fact that I made that error is pretty interesting to me. Someone else used the Dawkings spelling a few days ago on LW. I felt that it was wrong and looked up the correct spelling to try to be sure.
Somehow my brain still updated in the background from Dawkins to Dawkings.
Since culture evolves with history there is a lot of overlap between culture determining moralty and history determining morality.
What's the overlap between two empty sets?
There's no culture and no history?
I think they're both quite silly. Also, the fact that many people believe in God as a source of morality, is itself a reason why history (i.e. the actions of those people) is a bad moral guide.
Surely most pre-modern philosophers also had absolute moral systems?
Beforehand there was the idea that God's simply beyond human comprehension. One day he tells the Israelis to love their neighbors and the next he orders the Israelis to commit genocide.
You were supposed to follow a bunch of principles because those came from authoritative sources and not because you could derive them yourself.
If you read Machiavelli, he's using God as a word at times when we might simply use luck today. Machiavelli very much criticizes that approach of simply thinking that God works in mysterious ways.
Greeks and Romans had many different Gods and not one single source of morality.
Of course absolute morality is not all the modernism is about.
I was thinking about classic and medieval Christian philosophy, which tied morality to an unchanging (and so absolute) God.
As an aside, when the Israelis were ordered to love their neighbors, the reference was to the neighboring Israelis and peaceful co-inhabitants of other tribes. Jews were never told by God to love everyone or not to have enemies; that is a later, Christian or Christian-era idea.
But still a mysterious God who's so complicated that humans can't fully understand him so the should simply follow what the priest who has a more direct contact to God says. Furthermore you should follow the authority of your local king because of the divine right of kings that your local king inherited.
The idea that you can use reason to find out what God wants and then do that is a more modern idea.
Things switched from saying that if the telescope doesn't show that planets move the way the ancestors said they are supposed to move, then the telescope is wrong to the idea that maybe the ancestors are wrong about the way the planets move. The dark ages ended and you have modernity.
I don't have much to say about the actual point you're making, but you've been setting off alarm bells with stuff like this:
What's your background on the history of this period? And on the philosophy of Marx and Hegel? The things you are saying seem to me to be false, and I want to check if the problem isn't on my end.
What do you mean with this period?
I don't think that modernity started with Hegel but with people like Machiavelli with is around ~1500. Hegel and Marx on the other hand did their work in the 19th century. I did read Machiavelli's The Prince cover to cover.
In the case of Marx and Hegel I'm a German and in this case speaking about German philosophers. That means I have been educated in school with a German notion of what history happens to be. I don't see political history in the Anglosaxon frame of Whig vs Tory.
I did spent a bunch of time in the JUSOS with is the youth organisation of the German SPD and the abbreviation roughly translates into Young Socialists in the SPD. I therefore did follow debates about whether socialism as end goal should be kicked out of the party program of the SPD or be left in.
Lastly I did a lot of reading in political philosophy both primary and secondary sources. Most of it a while ago.
But one sentence summaries of complex political thoughts are by their nature vague. Of course Hegel already had the notion of history and me saying replaced might give the impression that he didn't. But Hegel did have God and Marx did not.
Just out of curiosity, what was the result of those debates?
It's still in there but more for symbolic reasons. Party leadership didn't really want it but the party base did. The relevant phrase also happens to be democratic socialism. Meaning that the goal is economic equality but representative democracy and not a bunch of soviets and "consensus" decision making.
In practice the party policies under Schroeder were more "third way" and as a result they wanted to "update" the party program to reflect that policy change.
Thanks, that's helpful.
For Hegel and Marx history is the process of change.
Both the amounts of Gods per person and the percentage of people who believe went down over time. Thus history favors atheism.
I don't see why the 'amount of Gods per person' is a valid metric for anything. Progression from poly- to monotheism doesn't imply a future progression to atheism.
The actual percent of atheists in society has indeed increased over time, but it's never been significantly above 10% worldwide and it's not clear that's it's rising right now (Wikipedia source). It's hardly strong enough evidence to conclude that a majority of humanity will be atheistic one day. Other religions surely exhibit or previously exhibited rising trends at least as strong.
In general, neoreactionaries seem to have cribbed this position from Herbert Butterfield's critique of what he called the "Whig Interpretation of History". Butterfield was not himself a neoreactionary, and infact warned against the trap that many neoreactionaries fall into: that of thinking that just because Whig histories are invalid, that this somehow makes Tory histories valid.
I'm very far from being a reactionary or neoreactionary, but I also don't put much moral weight on history - that is, on what most other people come to believe.
For one thing, believing that would mean every moral reformer who predicts for themselves only a small chance of reforming society, should conclude that they are wrong about morals.
Speaking of which, let's see what history has to say about Marx. It would appear that the Marxist nations lost to a semi-religious nation. Thus apparently history has judged that the idea that history will tell you what is right to be wrong.
If you're on the winning or ascending side, you have more arguments in your favour..at this point in history,where democracy and it's twin, rational argument, reign. That doesn't add up to being right because epistemology, ie styles of persuasion, have varied . To know the right epistemology,you need...epistemology. That's why philosophy difficult.
Meaning: You can't spot a trajectory in while you're half way along it?
Meaning: You can,but it doesn't mean anything epistemologicaly?
Considering how many centuries it took humanity to get from its first curiosity about how things work to predicting the trajectory of a falling rock (the irony of your handle piles higher and higher), predicting trajectories in history is a fool's task. How many predicted the Internet? How many predicted the end of the Soviet Union? How many can predict developments in Ukraine?
"History is on our side" is not an argument, but a cudgel.
Yep. It's nothing but a minor variation on "God is on our side!" X-D
Don't use it then. :-)