Do religions really scale?
A lot of talk about the social benefits of Mormonism, Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism talks about the effects of the religion on local communities.
The social “benefit“ of hellfire as a deterrent against crime, in addition to secular punishments like jail or fines should persist on a national level.
Positive effects of Mormon communities extent to their non-Mormon neighbours.
It’s really unclear to me if a belief in the supernatural is necessary to create these benefits, or if the benefits of the beliefs vanish if you’re the only one with them, or if they vanish as a religion becomes the majority in a country.
Religion has one hell of a Simpson’s paradox. The wealthiest nations are also some of the least religious, and poor nations tend to be more religious. But within nations, religion correlates positively with income.
I do not understand this, and I wish I did.
Entrepeneurs standing on the shoulders of nerds?
This one seems pretty straightforward.
From the viewpoint of a social group, society-at-large can be modeled as a giant Prisoners’ Dilemma, where liberal norms = cooperating and tribal norms = defecting.
Liberalism: “We are going to be scrupulous about giving our individual members the freedom to pursue their individual well-being, even if that results in them doing things that degrade group coherence or group prestige. We will also try very hard to pretend that we don’t care about outsiders less than we care about our own people, even to the extent of giving them our resources for reasons of abstract principle.”
Tribalism (which includes many popular forms of organized religion): “We are ruthlessly going to optimize for group success, which will entail both quashing inconvenient outbursts of individualism and systematically privileging our own interests over the interests of outsiders whenever we possibly can.”
If every group is tribal, then you end up with the sort of place where politics is always zero-sum and corrupt, where infrastructure isn’t developed because there isn’t enough widespread trust, where conflict and violence are rampant, etc.
If every group is liberal, you end up with a well-developed, atomized, highly mobile society full of people who do whatever the fuck they want (which will often involve wasting lots of time and energy on stupid shit).
If you are the only tightly-knit tribe in a liberal society, then you can move through it like a shark. You find ways to hunt down lone undefended tribe-less people and absorb their resources into yourself. You parasitize the infrastructure built by the liberals and redirect its benefits to your members as much as you can. You redistribute resources within yourself to the places where they will be the most useful.
Man, everyone has been writing about liberalism as a social technology this week. I guess I ought to write my post about it (which is going to be anticlimactic at this point).
@balioc, I mostly agree with you, with the caveat that a liberal society can still have a police force, which serves as a centralized system for punishing defectors. Like, yeah, gangs seem to wreak havoc in the way you’re describing, but I assume the reason that they haven’t overrun society is that the police manage to stop them.
To be clear: most of the sharky “defecting” I’m talking about isn’t illegal. It’s often not even particularly immoral, in any very clear-cut way.
I mean, this includes stuff like “we hire group members for jobs whenever we can.” Or “we deal preferentially with group members when making business arrangements” (something for which the Orthodox Jews of the NY diamond business are famed). Or “we use community-wide social pressure to come down hard on group-member kids who seem like they’re about to go off and do something self-destructive / low-status.” Or even “we maintain a relatively insular and group-norm-focused culture while piggybacking off a capitalist system that frees us from the need for productive autarky.”
Tribal groups (including religious groups) can do plenty of terrible things – but there’s nothing so very terrible about any of the things I’ve just listed. They all make a lot of sense, mostly in a fairly wholesome and understandable way. Yet the fact remains that society falls apart if everyone tries to do them, but doing them while others don’t gives you a massive concrete advantage.