You thought it was a contest between Hazony and Lukianoff-Haidt for which book I would read next. And by the time this post goes up, Fukuyama’s book will be out. For that matter, security guru Bruce Schneier’s provocatively-titled Click Here to Kill Everybody was on my radar even before a commenter mentioned it.
But then, fairly deep among Amazon’s recommendations, I find Minds Make Societies, by Pascal Boyer.
1. The introduction didn’t cause me to want to raise objections.
2. I have already told you that I think very highly of the concept of evolution as an interpretive framework.
So Boyer wins. That’s what I’m reading now. [UPDATE: Finished the book. A couple of the chapters did not succeed with me, but overall I found the book very stimulating and insightful. It will easily make my list of best books of the year.]
Here is a taste:
people find the authors of descriptive texts, for example, about a computer program or a hiking trip, more competent and knowledgeable if the texts include threat-related information.
The mechanism is this: We have evolved to detect threats. We have evolved to learn about threats from other people. Therefore, we have evolved to ascribe expertise to people who describe threats.
Hence, rumors and conspiracy theories. And of course, some small fraction of those will prove to be true, so we can’t completely throw away our evolutionary programming.
It occurs to me that this explains how Henny-Penny could make “The sky is falling!” go viral. Instead, if she had said, “I just saw a gorgeous rainbow with polka-dots,” no one would have believed her. The threatening story is taken as credible, and the benign story isn’t.
I used to think of Henny-Penny as a stupid bird with stupid friends, like Turkey-Lurkey. But after reading Boyer about the way we build coalitions on top of our evolutionary program for threat detection, I would say that Henny-Penny is an astute coalition builder. She shows aptitude as a journalist or politician, while Turkey-Lurkey displays an aptitude for signaling his value as a reliable follower.
Boyer does sound interesting if maybe a bit condescending, like another determinist attempt to reduce humanity to programmed algorithms via reductive evolutionism.
The Fukayama excerpt at Quillette this morning appears to provide a more humane, possibly compatibilist counter-thesis:
Identity grows, in the first place, out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that does not adequately recognize that inner self’s worth or dignity. Individuals throughout human history have found themselves at odds with their societies. But only in modern times has the view taken hold that the authentic inner self is intrinsically valuable, and the outer society systematically wrong and unfair in its valuation of the former. It is not the inner self that has to be made to conform to society’s rules, but society itself that needs to change.
It will be interesting to see which book sells better. Both authors have established reputations although Fukuyama probably has more fame due to EOH. But if I had to guess I’d say his last half dozen books are so have not really moved. A comparison might be fair in getting a sense of the general appeal of hard determinism and what I am guessing is Fukuyama’s compatibilism.
Therefore, we have evolved to ascribe expertise to people who describe threats.
But it can’t be that simple — it wouldn’t make sense for evolution to leave humans with such an simple, obvious chink in their cognitive armor. So people who have a track record of identifying genuine threats — ones not generally seen by others — are granted high status (and deservedly so). But people who develop a track record of predicting calamities that never occur (or who make solemn predictions of threats that everyone can already see coming) become objects of ridicule. Like Henny-Penny.
The threat mechanism works with the climate change narrative. “We’re all going to die, and it’s someone else’s fault!” is far more compelling than, “It’s just weather.”
Maybe, this phenomenon is related to Bryan Caplan’s claim that people exhibit negativity bias. Even generally positive sentiments may gain more gravitas when presented in a threatening context. For example, exhalting the virtues of liberal capitalism may seem pollyannaish compared to warning that the erosion of liberal capitalist values threatens all of the gains.
This may also explain in part why pro-immigration arguments struggle to gain acceptance (in addition to anti-foreign bias). It’s much more natural to describe the gains from immigration than to warn of the threat of losing those gains from overly restrictive policies. Anti-immigration arguments, in contrast, are almost always couched in the form of threats. Even the most effective pro-immigration, or at least anti-anti-immigration, arguments seem to be of the threat variety: “If we truly want to deport 12M people, we will need to become a police state”, “A zero tolerance policy will require separating mothers from children”, etc.