Published in National Affairs. An excerpt:
Economists and scholars of public policy are not the only ones conducting this research; students of human behavior are also finding support for Burke and Hayek’s theses — that the knowledge embedded in social norms and practices is vast compared to the knowledge of even the brightest, most educated individuals. As individuals, we cannot figure out very much by ourselves, but we learn a remarkable amount from others. In short, some social scientists in recent years have been building (or rebuilding) a powerful case for cultural intelligence.
You can read it as an argument for a libertarian/conservative alliance rather than for a liberaltarian alliance. Please comment specifically on the essay itself, and only after reading the whole piece.
But any acknowledgement of this point will run up against the problem that no libertarian society has evolved naturally, industrialized, and persisted over time. Moreover, the classical liberal ideal of treating all men as equal and even blank slates runs up against the reality that people differ not only by temperament and ability but cluster in groups according to race, family, ethnicity, and history. Plus, institutions that can change these traits and reduce tribalism in a constructive way require a degree of coercion, force, and social pressure that is at odds with the anti-authoritarian tendencies of many strains of both libertarianisms and anarchic liberalism. Finally it is not easy to create a society that is both liberal, civilized, and able to survive the onslaught of less enlightened but determined invaders with a sufficiently committed military. As the classical Greeks, Romans, and Song Dynasty Chinese learned. Or Western Europe absent aid from the US for that matter. Civilization has not been very robust in the longer run.
It doesn’t sound like you really believe in an ecological model. Living things don’t seek to maximize the collective good, they fight to survive, to take everything they can and to dominate everything around them.
Many species have evolved traits for the common good. For example giving a warning call when a predator is detected which makes the caller more of a target, but promotes the welfare of the rest of the group, and species.
I think that’s fair. Some species learn quite advanced forms of cooperation, often with other species.
I was hoping to question whether an ecological model was instructive for public policy. Can we really choose our ecological destiny? An ecological model doesn’t propose natural learning or competitive adaptation, it proposes natural selection.
The aggressive are aggressive, the cooperative are cooperative. One might thrive, and pass on its tendencies while the other fails. It’s competitive, and often brutal.
It is important to remember that our brains and cultural capabilities evolved to keep us safe from large predators and other people. The fact that our brains carried us from the stone age to the modern world is at best a quirk of fate. So, there is no particular reason to privilege ecology over engineering.
I agree that ecology is indeed a powerful explainer as to why we live in a modern world. But if ecology produces good things like cheap food to feed the world, it also produces hyper-addictive crap food that causes an obesity epidemic. It may have encouraged marriage, but it also produced widespread pornography, a destroyer of marriages and relationship stability. Pornography and junk food (just to name two examples) are not market failures – but they are social failures that exploit biological loopholes in our brains. Only the engineer can recognize that and do something about it
I still don’t see how the global competitive market can teach cultural (Christian) values to young people? Sure the Koch Brothers are Christian but how are they teaching Christianity to young people? Or Google? Or even Hobby Lobby who sells 80% (mostly non-Christian) Chinese made goods?
The other point that the most successful people marriages are just college graduates but later in life. They wait to get married until 28 – 30 years and several more years to have children. (And realize most do not follow the no martial sex Christian beliefs either.) So if all the successful people are focused on career & education until 28+, then what happens to churches who is suppose to teach cultural intelligence? Church attendance is dropping dramatically. (And notice Trump does well with non-Church going Christians.)
There is just a tremendous amount of concepts “stuffed” into that essay, by reference and implication.
It would require an equally detailed essay to respond or properly comment.
One would have note and deal with the concept of what constitutes “intelligence;” how it is applied to “gather and accumulate” information; to “convert” information into knowledge; and then, transmit or transfer it.
One would have to note the difference between information and knowledge and what gives social rather than just individual significance to each.
The use of the term “Institutions” as concepts seems to have different forms in different contexts. There are those which are like “norms,” traditions, patterns, etc. and those which scholars note are facilities created to meet or serve “social” functions that become institutionalized into serving their own purposes, usually fixed by an internal hierarchy. The education “systems” cited are certainly among them.
Missing is reference to the compl-e-mentary nature of human actions and what motivates or deters that in the perceptions of information, its conversion to knowledge and the transmissions of both.
It is a broad essay.
Some meditations:
It depends what you mean by ‘political institutions’ I suppose. To the extent they include many of the enterprises that are managed by the modern state, one should indeed want them to evolve. The trouble is that many of these institutions cannot start out as other than text-based rational constructions with crude, formalistic processes and distributions of roles and authorities. But if those institutions are allowed to be flexible and adapt and refine their systems in response to lessons learned they can continuously increase their correspondence to complex reality and produce better successes. The military is a good example of an monopolistic state enterprise that must and does evolve rapidly in part because of having this flexibility.
If, because of gridlock or other structural political issues, it becomes too difficult to evolve or renegotiate the bargains implicit in certain enterprises, e.g. Social Security, then one ends up in an unsustainable situation where one is sleepwalking toward the cliff in a way that will only end when reality reimposes itself the hard way.
Maybe a meta-lesson is that one should avoid establishing political institutions that both will need to evolve and, for whatever reasons, probably wont. If they can’t be avoided, then care should be taken to insert automatic ‘annual re-balancing mechanisms’ that can at least partially substitute, however inadequately, for evolutionary refinement.
This just seems completely unbelievable to me and inconsistent with many things we knows about the social character and cultural and intellectual output of past ages. Colonial Boston would have been an impossibility. And, for example, if Jones is right, then it should have been impossible for all those high-IQ-dependent coordinations and pro-social institutions to have arisen in the early colonial era, but instead we know that they were well-established and flourishing. Indeed, the institutions of those days are practically revered by plenty of libertarians.
Very well said, but it needs more Hanson to get to the root of this kind of signalling.
Another thought:
Embracing the humility implicated by accepting the evolved results of ‘cultural intelligence’ is never going to be acceptable to those who require justification for political discretion and who cannot accept admitting impotence or precautionary policies cheered by political opponents when faced with social problems.
Consider the commentary about the recent terrorist attacks in Belgium, especially the articles that point out that many Islamic State recruits are second and subsequent generation descendants of the original immigrants. Specifically, consider the words of Jan Jambon, Belgium’s Interior Minister, spoken on Monday and thusprior to the attacks
From a ‘cultural intelligence’ perspective, it would be reasonable to conclude that the Belgian government obviously has no idea what to do about this problem, but that, furthermore and more to the point, it is highly unlikely to be able to discover whatever solution may exist anytime soon, through an evolutionary process or otherwise.
But that statement, and any policy implications deriving from it, are virtually unspeakable by members of respectable society in the current European political context. Unfortunately this, with plenty of other possible example, is likely to generate a social disincentive to accept the validity, and any insights derivable from, a ‘cultural intelligence’ perspective.
Glenn Reynolds has a clever expression for why politicians hate market allocations of resources, “insufficient opportunities for graft.” Cultural intelligence, if taken seriously, offers insufficient space for political maneuver, and insufficient opportunities to signal virtue.
Your piece was excellent. But I don’t read it as calling for any particular political action by libertarians (in alliance with either conservatives or “liberals”), for to me political action seems quite futile: I’ll just hope for the best.
An impressive synthesis.
Arnold, I think your article is very nice. In some ways it updates Russell Kirk’s ideas with new knowledge from the social, biological, and economic sciences. I was most in agreement with the conclusion of the piece, where you express concern about where our society is headed, such as the role of the academic and entertainment complexes in trying to tear down traditional cultural values and practices. Evolution has always been an interest of mine.