= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Azathoth123 comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (440)
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
I am reminded of:
@stevenkaas
In trying to find the above quote by wildcard searching on Google, I stumbled upon another quote of this nature by the dog's owner himself: "I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I." There appears to be another one about science being bad not because it encourages doubt, but because it encourages credulity, but I'm unable to find the exact quote.
Who could have imagined that Zizek was so derivative! Oh wait...
Zizek himself lampshades the method here.
As does Chesterton, less explicitly:
and at length.
I get the impression that he (thankfully!) eased off on that particular template as time went on.
I'm inclined to think that non-ideological autocracy (we're in charge because we're us and you're you) is the human default. Anything better or worse takes work to maintain.
I'm not sure about that. In fact, I can't think of any actually non-ideologically autocratic society in history. Are you sure you're not confusing "non-ideological" with "having an ideology I don't find at all convincing"?
I seem to remember reading that tribes were more egalitarian than modern society, although its possible the author was just romanticising the noble savage.
There's reason to believe that foragers were more materially egalitarian than farmers, just because material wealth was harder to store. But it's not obvious that they were more egalitarian when it comes to political power or ability to do violence.
When the most powerful weapon is a mounted knight in full plate mail, its easy for a small minority to dominate. When the most powerful weapon is the pointed stick...
The medieval period is pretty late in the history of farming; I had in mind the early period of farming, when foraging and farming were more competitive.
But I think this focuses too much on visible organized violence and not enough on total violence. Were forager men more or less likely to beat their wives than farmer men? Forager parents vs. farmer parents? It seems possible that a larger percentage of the male forager population had potential access to rape through raids than the percentage of the male farmer population that had potential access to rape through soldiering, but I would want a lot of anthropological data before I made that claim confidently, which is why I don't think it's obvious.
This is a bit of a change in topic from the original comparison- tribal hunter-gatherers to modern society- but I think that the sorts of things people use violence and political power for are so different that they can't be compared that directly. As the saying goes, God created man but Sam Colt made them equal: in America it's not that uncommon for individual losers to shoot the most politically powerful man in the country, often leading to his death. I suspect the rate of losers in tribes murdering the local chief is much lower. But maybe what we want to compare is not 'ability to do violence' but 'ability to get away with doing violence,' but even then I don't think we have the data to make a good comparison. Was the ability of tribals to go on the run to escape vengeance better or worse than the ability of moderns? It seems like there are multiple dimensions with different directions for that comparison.
An interesting read, but I was not claiming that a more egalitarian distribution of physical power decreases violence - if anything, having one dominant power leads to peace because no-one challenges them, while as you say, the levelling power of firearms means that anyone can inflict violence.
AFAIK many tribal societies were much more violent - I read somewhere that in some tribes the majority of adult male deaths were due to homicide.
Skill is an a large premium. Thus those who have the free time to practice can end up dominating.
Actually, one thing that I noticed while reading this book is that despite engaging in violence far more frequently than people in non-tribal cultures, the Yanomamo don't really seem to have a conception of martial arts or weapons skills, aside from skill with a bow. The takeaway I got was that in small tribal groups like the ones they live in, there isn't really the sort of labor differentiation necessary to support a warrior class. Rather, it seems that while all men are expected to be available for forays into violence, nobody seems to practice combat skills, except for archery which is also used for food acquisition. While many men were spoken of as being particularly dangerous, in all cases discussed in the book, it was because of their ferocity, physical strength, and quickness to resort to violence. In fact, some of the most common forms of violent confrontation within tribes are forms of "fighting" where the participants simply take turns hitting each other, without being allowed to attempt to defend or evade, in order to demonstrate who's physically tougher.
I'm not sure how representative the Yanomamo are of small tribal societies as a whole, but it may be that serious differentiation of martial skill didn't come until later forms of societal organization.
This seems like Chesterton is making it up completely. Most progressives base the impulse on the hope that things could be better; dealing with the decay of conservatism is not a hypothesis that even enters in their minds. The 'truth of conservatism' (at least, the straw-conservatism defined by Chesterton here) is taken for granted by most people: if things keep on going like this, they'll keep on being like this.
No one has ever become a feminist by saying 'my god! if we leave things alone, the patriarchy will keep becoming even more oppressive and brutal with each year! We need to fight this slide of the status quo, and incidentally, it would be nice if we could not just repair the rot but also yank the status quo towards feminism and get women the vote and stuff like that'.
No, it tends to be more like 'the status quo is awful! Let's try to move it towards getting women the vote and stuff like that'.