Edited

Harry Marks wrote: . . . Harari is getting rather too much mileage out of his classification of abstractions as "fiction" and "myth." He is implying that someone thought up a good plan for a social order, invented a myth, and everybody else said, "Cool, wish I'd thought of it" and fell in line. The truth is that his "fictions" are descriptions of a plan or order which people follow, or can understand based on what they are already doing and so are almost following.

I do think you’re right that Harari is implying agency where perhaps none exists. I’m reminded of Jonathan Haidt’s idea that a “lawyer” in our brain makes up post-hoc rationalizations to explain our (mostly) impulse-driven actions. It’s true that we create hierarchal roles in society, always with some classes at the top, some on the bottom. Harare discusses the Hindu caste system and the racial hierarchy illustrated so well in America. Maybe we invent stories after the fact to explain why a society is structured the way it is (whether by castes or race or patriarchy, etc.), and that story becomes the scaffolding to support a continuation of that structure. Even social animals, such as chimps and bonobos, have hierarchies, but presumably they don’t invent stories to explain it to themselves. We humans do.

In the latter part of Part II, Harari discusses religions and in particular the move from animism to polytheism to monotheism. I don’t think Harari tries to explain why religions have become monotheistic, but I have always thought that as our nation-states grew in size, our religions had to change to encompass such societies. As such maybe monotheism, as well as our hierarchal structures, are emergent qualities of complex societies.

According to E.O. Wilson, humans and the naked mole rat are the only eusocial mammals on earth. Eusociality is most often associated with insects: ants, bees, and wasps—those with reproductive "queens" and more or less sterile "workers”. These insects make up only about 3 percent of the known species of animals on earth. But make up about 50 percent of the biomass. So these eusocial insects are pretty successful in their own right.

It seems to me that more populous societies would require a more regimented organizational structure, with increased specialization. So just as there are worker ants and soldier ants, humans have worker people and soldier people. Even food production has become an industry in of itself in the last couple of hundred years. Most people today (in first world countries) have never seen an animal butchered.

This increasingly structured world is what Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth despaired over. We are becoming worker bees, mere cogs in the wheel of an increasingly complex, industrialized world of our own making. But none of it was planned. Humans aren’t trying to be the dominant species. We just are because it’s built into our genes. If it was possible to consciously override our natural instincts, we would have to start by dismantling the fictions we invent to explain—and justify—everything we do. So even if Harari stretches this idea of myth-making too far, I still think it’s one of the more important concepts in this book. We have to be able to distinguish between myth and reality or when a story is metaphor or parable and not to be believed as literal truth.

I don't know if you guys have seen the news that a new species of gibbon was discovered in a 2,200-year-old Chinese tomb. The gibbon—now extinct—was kept as a pet, which suggests that humans may have caused this species' extinction. Harari discussed in this chapter how humans have contributed to extinctions of many animals, and so I thought this was pertinent.

Likewise, a few months ago, we were discussing how difficult it is to find fossil evidence for many species, and here's a prime example. To date, no fossils for this particular gibbon had ever been discovered. A gibbon expert happened to see the gibbon skull in a museum exhibit, and after extensive research learned that it was a whole new genus and species.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/scie ... china.html

Harry Marks wrote: Harari is getting rather too much mileage out of his classification of abstractions as "fiction" and "myth." He is implying that someone thought up a good plan for a social order, invented a myth, and everybody else said, "Cool, wish I'd thought of it" and fell in line. The truth is that his "fictions" are descriptions of a plan or order which people follow, or can understand based on what they are already doing and so are almost following.

The bridge between drawing a map of an ambush for the Neanderthals and giving nobility status to the people who have invaded with horses is a long one. The steps are probably mostly not too imaginative, but even when they are, they are probably not dreamed up by mystics and storytellers but by practical people who see a slightly better way to do things that are already being done.

In fact, from the beginning and most particularly in the comparison of Hammurabi to Jefferson, I have been irritated by his deliberate avoidance of the practicality of the arrangements. He makes it sound as if the border between the U.S. and Mexico would magically disintegrate if a lot of people just stop believing in it, because after all, it is a "fiction." But I urge you not to try this experiment, for practical reasons. No matter how much you close your eyes and repeat "I don't believe in borders, I don't believe in borders," the borders will still be there. And ICE will still enforce it.

Well, to be accurate, Harari didn't use the word "fiction" in this section. I thought, though, that myths amounting to imagined orders were in the same family. Perhaps in giving little attention to the incremental constructions of these imagined orders, Harari seems like an intelligent design guy on the biological side of evolution. I'm with you in thinking that a small cultural change occurred, it seemed to work (even if not in the nicest utilitarian way), it remained in play, and then another baby step happened. It might take centuries for the whole grand scheme to emerge. Harari does say that myths are "stronger than anyone could have imagined," so he clearly doesn't think of them as mere myths or fictions. He might have been wise to emphasize that fictions have probably been more powerful throughout history than mere facts.

Add to your example of the U.S-Mexico border the West Bank settler who will never concede that he is an occupier, because didn't God say Joshua would have possession of the promised land if he eliminated those occupiers?

geo wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: . . . Harari is getting rather too much mileage out of his classification of abstractions as "fiction" and "myth." He is implying that someone thought up a good plan for a social order, invented a myth, and everybody else said, "Cool, wish I'd thought of it" and fell in line. The truth is that his "fictions" are descriptions of a plan or order which people follow, or can understand based on what they are already doing and so are almost following.

I do think you’re right that Harari is implying agency where perhaps none exists. I’m reminded of Jonathan Haidt’s idea that a “lawyer” in our brain makes up post-hoc rationalizations to explain our (mostly) impulse-driven actions. It’s true that we create hierarchal roles in society, always with some classes at the top, some on the bottom. Harare discusses the Hindu caste system and the racial hierarchy illustrated so well in America. Maybe we invent stories after the fact to explain why a society is structured the way it is (whether by castes or race or patriarchy, etc.), and that story becomes the scaffolding to support a continuation of that structure. Even social animals, such as chimps and bonobos, have hierarchies, but presumably they don’t invent stories to explain it to themselves. We humans do.

That tie-in to Haidt seems on the money. I think I know what you mean by agency not existing in the creation of the imagined order It might be like saying the myth is the cart rather than the horse. At some point down the line, of course, purpose and intent emerges when it becomes clear that for social/political reasons something needs to be put out there, and Haidt's lawyer goes into action. In the beginning of U.S. slavery, there wasn't much need for an imagined order justifying slavery as the way of nature and God. Slavery was an ancient institution, and furthermore indentured servants and slaves shared the labor. When it gradually become clear that slaves were better for the bottom line, partly because of their greater immunity to contagious diseases, the switch began to slave labor to produce the cotton and tobacco that built the entire American economy. In the nineteenth century, countries began to abolish slavery, putting pressure on the U.S. to form a rationale for resisting abolition. Slaves were the most valuable single financial asset in the U.S. economy before the Civil War. Slaves also made possible the Southern aristocratic lifestyle.There needed to be a bigtime defense. What resulted in terms of an imagined order, with blacks being created to be used by whites, seems preposterous today but was a fervently held belief.

In the latter part of Part II, Harari discusses religions and in particular the move from animism to polytheism to monotheism. I don’t think Harari tries to explain why religions have become monotheistic, but I have always thought that as our nation-states grew in size, our religions had to change to encompass such societies. As such maybe monotheism, as well as our hierarchal structures, are emergent qualities of complex societies.

I didn't see that discussion occurring until Part 3, Chapter 12. I hope we get to discuss it.

According to E.O. Wilson, humans and the naked mole rat are the only eusocial mammals on earth. Eusociality is most often associated with insects: ants, bees, and wasps—those with reproductive "queens" and more or less sterile "workers”. These insects make up only about 3 percent of the known species of animals on earth. But make up about 50 percent of the biomass. So these eusocial insects are pretty successful in their own right.

It seems to me that more populous societies would require a more regimented organizational structure, with increased specialization. So just as there are worker ants and soldier ants, humans have worker people and soldier people. Even food production has become an industry in of itself in the last couple of hundred years. Most people today (in first world countries) have never seen an animal butchered.

This increasingly structured world is what Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth despaired over. We are becoming worker bees, mere cogs in the wheel of an increasingly complex, industrialized world of our own making. But none of it was planned. Humans aren’t trying to be the dominant species. We just are because it’s built into our genes. If it was possible to consciously override our natural instincts, we would have to start by dismantling the fictions we invent to explain—and justify—everything we do. So even if Harari stretches this idea of myth-making too far, I still think it’s one of the more important concepts in this book. We have to be able to distinguish between myth and reality or when a story is metaphor or parable and not to be believed as literal truth.

Harari says: "The handful of millenia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of deities, kingdoms, and empires was not enough time for an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve" (p.102). I tend to see human eusociality as what made it possible for stratagems such as deities to work in the first place, to extend sociality beyond the limits of personal contact. Jonathan Haidt thought that human sociality was an underreported and unappreciated asset of ours. Nobody thinks to make a big deal of 20 unrelated people getting together to produce and put on a play--but it is a big deal, he believes.

DWill wrote: . . . That tie-in to Haidt seems on the money. I think I know what you mean by agency not existing in the creation of the imagined order It might be like saying the myth is the cart rather than the horse. At some point down the line, of course, purpose and intent emerges when it becomes clear that for social/political reasons something needs to be put out there, and Haidt's lawyer goes into action.

The slavery example illustrates very well what I was trying to to say. In that case, the myth is the cart, not the horse. But I was also thinking about some of the gun myths going around today. The most prevalent of these is probably that liberals are trying to abolish the second amendment and take away people's guns—all of them. In fact, the general attitude is that we need better common-sense gun laws. But the paranoia on the right seems to sabotage any kind of meaningful dialogue. Or, as you said in another thread, one side's emotional stance sort of provokes an equal and opposite emotional stance from the other. It could be reasonably argued, for example, that we need more restrictions on military assault weapons (not outright bans) but in fact gun laws have become looser in recent years. The gun situation in America is insane. These myths suggesting that the second amendment is about to be abolished—perhaps propagated by the gun industry—seem more of a horse than a cart. Then again, maybe the gun culture is just a continuation of entrenched attitudes against big government that predated the Civil War. Over time we have seen many myths that keep those anti-establishment fires burning. In terms of memes, the more a myth triggers an emotional reaction, the more fecund it will turn out to be. People aren't going to pass along a meme if they're not fired up in some way.

geo wrote: I do think you’re right that Harari is implying agency where perhaps none exists. I’m reminded of Jonathan Haidt’s idea that a “lawyer” in our brain makes up post-hoc rationalizations to explain our (mostly) impulse-driven actions.

I agree with DWill that this is a good analogy. On the other hand, I am not exactly arguing for lack of agency in "mythologizing" the way things are done - only arguing that a lot of our abstract systems are "carts" to explain the "horse" of practical arrangements. The explanations can be quite impressive in their inventiveness.

I was doing some thinking about changes of whole systems of explanation. Some are relatively easy to describe and even to invent because the purpose is fairly clear. So when the French Revolution wanted to substitute democracy and liberty for aristocracy, everyone understood what these were to do: to "rule" or "govern", i.e. to make laws and policy and put them into practice. But if we Progressive Christians want to substitute different idea structures for the traditional one, we run into the problem that it is not clear what the new order is supposed to be better at. The definitions of goals like "worshipping God" are themselves up for grabs.

This mattered a lot at the time of the Protestant Reformation. Calvin was a lawyer and saw himself reforming the system of making rules for people's lives, and so we get the Calvinist strict rules about the Sabbath, about plain clothing (among the Roundheads who overthrew Charles I, for example - they were Calvinists) and even about such things as dancing. The Puritans were Calvinists.

Luther was more of a theologian, and wanted people's understanding of salvation to change to rid Christianity of materialist abuses such as the sale of indulgences. Thus Lutherans went down a rather different road with structures (there are Lutheran bishops, for example, but no Reformed bishops).

What interests me the most about this is that they had to have a theory for what was supposed to be happening in order to revise how it was to be done. In both cases they wanted an alternative to the church hierarchy, and the Bible had to serve as the alternate authority. Then the implications were developed over time, in dialogue with each other and with moderates like Erasmus of Rotterdam.

geo wrote:The slavery example illustrates very well what I was trying to to say. In that case, the myth is the cart, not the horse.

Out of the blue today it occurred to me to wonder how different the U.S. would have been if Lincoln had not been assassinated. He wanted to bind up the wounds - would he have allowed the Democrats of the South to reenter more easily and thus, perhaps, not interfered as much in their society as the Radical Republicans did? Might he even have accepted local decision on citizenship and voting rights, rather than passing the 14th Amendment? If the white Southern rebels had re-entered easily, they could have blocked some of those reforms we treasure, and the South would have been even more oppressive than the Jim Crow system that evolved after the 1876 election travesty and the Plessy v. Ferguson case. It's an odd thought, that John Wilkes Booth may have been responsible for the 14th Amendment.

It was a revolutionary moment (or perhaps one should say "liminal"), when the system was changing drastically. Black people in the North were certainly free of being kidnapped as supposed "property", but their status was anything but settled. And so people had to debate what was the "right" way to organize things, with the previous way having been discredited but, again, the goal itself up for debate.

It's conceptually much simpler to say we are going to change the types of cars we drive, to cut out internal combustion, or even to change voting to ranked preference to eliminate the tyranny of extremism, than to figure out, as the Supreme Court is now trying to do, what is the purpose of protection of free speech. Is anything involving any political expression protected from compulsion, as the recent decision on public sector unions implies? Since there is no consensus on what freedom of speech is meant to achieve, the question of what political view it protects has become the determining factor in legal reasoning about whether particular types of expression are protected, which is a disturbing trend. (Of course conservatives might argue that things were already decided that way, as the decision in Citizen's United implies.)

I think such cases of open-ended goals being revised might explain some of the bizarre conflation of fact-claims with political opinions these days. Since an argument for the other "side" of an issue carries implications about which values should be attended to, fact claims become part of a dispute that is larger than the dispute about the facts themselves. As much as we might wish that the fact issues would be separated out and addressed independently, in politics this was never treated with the respect it deserved. McCarthy was repudiated not because he was lying, but because he started lying about the Army, an institution seen as fundamental to security (and not plausibly Communist).

geo wrote: In fact, the general attitude is that we need better common-sense gun laws. But the paranoia on the right seems to sabotage any kind of meaningful dialogue.
These myths suggesting that the second amendment is about to be abolished—perhaps propagated by the gun industry—seem more of a horse than a cart.

Yes, I think this might be worth thinking about along these lines. The paranoid imaginings about what the other side is "up to" are more likely, and more likely to catch on, when the point of our institutional arrangement is still not settled or well understood.

Liberals are plausibly trying to "re-think" the Second Amendment, to at least help in drawing clear balancing tests of its priority against other competing priorities. But this opens the door to conservatives imagining what conclusions might be arising in liberal minds, some of the imagined results being realistic and others not. It's a "theory of mind" about the other, when we are called on not just to imagine chess moves from the perspective of the other, but the whole set of mental connections and how they arise.

Well, trying to sift this down to a conclusion, I'm not sure unclear purposes are a hornet's nest when we are re-thinking our abstract systems, but they do seem to be a complication. Arranging new institutions without a clear consensus on what the purposes should be, of either the old or the new institution, is almost guaranteed to be very "cart-like" with an absence of "horse".

I always consider "explain the purpose" to be fundamental to good communication. (Giving reasons for orders may not be the only criterion for a good manager - but it is an important one, at least outside the military.) Ironically, the Constitution does explain the purpose of the Second Amendment - in fact it is virtually the only part of the Bill of Rights that supplies reasoning. Yet people are ignoring that anyway.

In the last section of Part Two, Harari details how the imagined orders that Sapiens cooked up always resulted in raw deals for many of the people living under the regimes. Thus, "there is no justice in history." This is obviously opposed to a Christian view that despite appearances to the contrary, God has been working his plan of justice all along, difficult for us to see though it is. The Hindu caste system and the racist theories that underpinned slavery are good examples of the stronger imposing an order on the weaker, with no basis in fact. Harari also wants us to see the dominance of males in the same light, but I think his analysis is weaker there. He's correct that that there was never any justification for women to be treated as badly as they have been, but the origins of that aren't as mysterious as he says. He could cite male dominance in other primates; the role of greater male size and strength, especially in throwing; the relative scarcity of polyandry vs. polygamy; hormonal differences between male and female; the need for the mother to care for babies; and so forth. There were, in other words, biological differences that formed the germ around which social inferiority became established. The latter lasted long after the point at which the male attributes had become unimportant. Today in liberal democracies, women are judged to be able to fill any role that males occupy, with the possible exception of combat fighting. We are entitled to call this moral progress, even if it actually resulted from material change such as labor-saving technology and harnessing energy sources.

DWill wrote:In the last section of Part Two, Harari details how the imagined orders that Sapiens cooked up always resulted in raw deals for many of the people living under the regimes. Thus, "there is no justice in history." This is obviously opposed to a Christian view that despite appearances to the contrary, God has been working his plan of justice all along, difficult for us to see though it is.

Having finally finished this section, I do want to respond a bit to your observation. First, not all Christians who see God at work conclude that human affairs are moving toward greater peace and justice, as Pinker would argue. Ross Douthat, the NY Times columnist "representing Catholicism", scoffs at this "arc of justice" claim and seems to see humanity as pretty hopelessly mired in sin, as evidenced by the Red Guards and the rise of one-party China, by the deterioration of Russia after the collapse of communism, by the acceptance of abortion and pornography, and, well, one could go on.

Second, as an arc of history believer, I tend to think that the greater levels of education, better management of reproduction rates, and improved communication that have come with technological advance (and fostered it) have made it more difficult to sustain just the types of oppressive vicious circles of misperception that he tells about. Is that due to the spirit of love in operation? Well, of course. But that doesn't mean there is a plan, or a planner. It may instead be the slope of the "ground": as humans get better at cooperating, cooperative values become more and more appealing. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin seems to have been the first to lay this out in a sort of theological anthropology of progress, arguing that Christ is the "Omega point" toward which human affairs will tend.

But that hardly means, as Fukuyama proposed in "The End of History", that we are out of the woods and no longer in danger of losing it all.

DWill wrote: The Hindu caste system and the racist theories that underpinned slavery are good examples of the stronger imposing an order on the weaker, with no basis in fact.

Well, military dominance is hardly "no basis in fact." What he seems to have in mind is the growth of claims, or inferences, that are based on what people see but ignore the violent history behind those appearances, as well as the blatantly mythological elements such as the curse of Ham or the claim that Brahman created the different castes from different body parts.

Those separate strands are worth looking at independently. Purity judgements are pretty widespread in human culture, suggesting that the reasoning may involve fair amounts of imagination but also have some evidence base.

The post-exilic Jews seemed to be incredibly sensitive about biological mingling (read Ezra 9-10 sometime if you like Biblical scandals) and the term "adultery" refers to adulterating the bloodline, akin to adding unhealthy substances to meat or wine to disguise bad flavors. Some of this concern with impurity may come from experience with disease, and with odors or other warnings to avoid potentially toxic material. Harari covers that base.

And of course, the current New York City resistance to desegregating schools is from the same pattern; Harari has analyzed such situations. People may conclude, quite rationally, that if their neighborhood or their children's schools include more racial minorities, the quality of their education may go down. (And equally rationally, may note that richer, more educated Whites use their options to move away, while they have to stay and fight.) It is easy to rule out "irrational" judgements about individuals, but people in the middle of cultural fault lines may be racist from the same motives of fully rational self-interest that are extolled at the level of economic policy.

As a side note, I have never considered Haidt's analysis of "missing dimensions" of morality among liberals to be legitimate. For Haidt, any moral judgement has the same status as any other moral judgement, and if people think mixing linen with cotton is disgusting and classify it as a "should not" then he is willing to class it with other moral rules. I can see how they may take up the same part of the mind of a person who feels that way, but moral emotions (Haidt's "elephant") are all mixed up with things like status judgments and elaborate interpretations that a person overhears, and so reason tends to guide an evolution of these emotions over time.

The fascinating story of Derek Black, the white supremacist who was invited to shabbat dinner, is perhaps the most revealing example of this process that I have ever seen. Cultural evolution on fast forward.
https://onbeing.org/programs/how-friend ... t-may2018/

I am suggesting that purity judgments are a confusion of moral emotions, but one that does tend to reinforce social stratification.

The other part I think worth reflecting on is the way such purity rationales tend to be used to obscure the original violent source of the stratification. The overlords know that their rule is not legitimate, that it is based on naked power. The discomfort with this situation leads them to substitute stories that contain an element of rationality, one might even say an "evidence-based" rationale.

Purity rules, in this case, will take on the added value of making people disgusted by any "experiment" such as allowing a well-bred minority member to go to university, or allowing intermarriage between races. By nipping the problem in the bud, purity culture heads off larger battles further on when some tipping point is reached.

DWill wrote: Harari also wants us to see the dominance of males in the same light, but I think his analysis is weaker there. He's correct that that there was never any justification for women to be treated as badly as they have been, but the origins of that aren't as mysterious as he says. He could cite male dominance in other primates; the role of greater male size and strength, especially in throwing; the relative scarcity of polyandry vs. polygamy; hormonal differences between male and female; the need for the mother to care for babies; and so forth. There were, in other words, biological differences that formed the germ around which social inferiority became established.

I also thought his treatment of this question was too shallow. Maybe he felt he had nothing useful to report, since there is no consensus on this question. Maybe casting it as a mystery seemed like the most interesting and provocative point he could put out there.

This idea that the dominance started with biological differences and ran away from there seems like an obvious call. But maybe we should back up a step further - patriarchy is hardly ubiquitous. There are many matrilineal systems of descent, and in many of these (and some patriarchal) the brothers of a wife are in charge of enforcing good treatment for her.

My guess is that it started with a combination of physical proficiency at killing along with the sociobiologists' observations of the differences in incentives for number of progeny and the problem of managing rape. And that a big part of the inertia was bonding between women.

Rape interferes with a woman's ability to mange her reproductive fitness. Instead of forming a bond with a male, who will continue to contribute food and protection, etc. for his children, rape sets up a situation in which the father is a sneak and/or brute, and likely to be less fit than someone of her choice, and so not welcome in a long-term household. The importance of culture probably has to do with the evolution of hidden estrus in humans, and along with it, a male role in protecting his wife from rape. But that puts a premium on strength, cunning and ability to persuade other males to join in policing. None of this would work as well in a system of common policing by women, which Harari suggests is used by some apes. That is, nobody has as strong an incentive as the woman's mate to help her police rape.

Once agriculture got going, the dynamics would be further tipped by the ability of a successful patriarch to impregnate many women. Women's reproductive fitness is inherently limited by the fairly small number of offspring she can successfully nourish. It is necessary to get less successful males to buy into this before it can be used to enforce a system of segregation in the division of labor, but economists have had good success with models of "tournaments" to explain why big prizes for a single winner can be acceptable to all the lesser lights. If you grant the point, then there is a good likelihood that the biology of the tribe or clan would come to have a high proportion of genes of men who push hard for dominant positions. And why include women in the tournament, who have much less to gain by winning?

But on a completely separate line of analysis, I think Harari's version understates the challenges of "women's work" and the rewards to cooperation within it. Even leaving aside medicines and other herbal "lore" there are important things to be known about cooking, cloth-making, cleaning and other occupations that are commonly allocated to women. Thus in a system of culture it saves tremendously on the investment costs if people are sorted by occupations according to roughly equal time requirements. Women don't have to learn to hunt and fish, men don't have to learn to sew and deal with colicky infants. Thus each subculture can get better at what it concentrates on. Is it too radical a suggestion that men who wanted to do women's work or women who wanted to do men's work would be treated as a disruption to an effective arrangement?

And finally, of course, women have not always been excluded from leadership and power. Zenobia, Boadicca, Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great and Cleopatra are prominent examples of women who wielded power effectively in the spotlight. Behind the scenes were any number of other women who wielded power through men. Intelligence and subtle understanding have always had a way of translating into achievement, at least when circumstances made it possible.

DWill wrote:The latter lasted long after the point at which the male attributes had become unimportant. Today in liberal democracies, women are judged to be able to fill any role that males occupy, with the possible exception of combat fighting. We are entitled to call this moral progress, even if it actually resulted from material change such as labor-saving technology and harnessing energy sources.

Moral progress is, as far as I'm concerned, the main point. I don't think "quotas" will ever be a good idea, but this is the point in cultural evolution when they have the most leverage, I would say. The overt barriers have broken down. Quotas can push that further by pushing back against unconscious barriers.

But material circumstances have clearly changed since the traditional rules were set. And if we can't do the right thing when the material conditions favor it, we are in truly sorry shape.

Harry Marks wrote: Having finally finished this section, I do want to respond a bit to your observation. First, not all Christians who see God at work conclude that human affairs are moving toward greater peace and justice, as Pinker would argue. Ross Douthat, the NY Times columnist "representing Catholicism", scoffs at this "arc of justice" claim and seems to see humanity as pretty hopelessly mired in sin, as evidenced by the Red Guards and the rise of one-party China, by the deterioration of Russia after the collapse of communism, by the acceptance of abortion and pornography, and, well, one could go on.

I think you're right that Douhat's view would be closer to the mainstream. It makes some sense, too, in that if justice depends humans acting justly toward one another, it is only their sinfulness that stands in the way of a truly just world. (I'm not hostile to the concept of sin.) Further in the back of my mind, I was thinking of the attitude that whatever bad thing happens, it must somehow be in the creator's plan; we just can't know his mind. Somehow, it all sorts out in the divine scheme. This might apply especially to the problem of evil, or why bad things happen to good people. Justice isn't involved when it comes to babies with Zika virus or thousands killed by a tidal wave. Why would God let either of those things happen?

Second, as an arc of history believer, I tend to think that the greater levels of education, better management of reproduction rates, and improved communication that have come with technological advance (and fostered it) have made it more difficult to sustain just the types of oppressive vicious circles of misperception that he tells about. Is that due to the spirit of love in operation? Well, of course. But that doesn't mean there is a plan, or a planner. It may instead be the slope of the "ground": as humans get better at cooperating, cooperative values become more and more appealing. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin seems to have been the first to lay this out in a sort of theological anthropology of progress, arguing that Christ is the "Omega point" toward which human affairs will tend.

That's the naturalistic pathway to progress, and I would agree that it's more likely than a vaguely directed providential ascent.

But that hardly means, as Fukuyama proposed in "The End of History", that we are out of the woods and no longer in danger of losing it all.

Does Fukuyama get the Most Premature Declaration of Victory Award, or what?

The post-exilic Jews seemed to be incredibly sensitive about biological mingling (read Ezra 9-10 sometime if you like Biblical scandals) and the term "adultery" refers to adulterating the bloodline, akin to adding unhealthy substances to meat or wine to disguise bad flavors. Some of this concern with impurity may come from experience with disease, and with odors or other warnings to avoid potentially toxic material. Harari covers that base.

And of course, the current New York City resistance to desegregating schools is from the same pattern; Harari has analyzed such situations. People may conclude, quite rationally, that if their neighborhood or their children's schools include more racial minorities, the quality of their education may go down. (And equally rationally, may note that richer, more educated Whites use their options to move away, while they have to stay and fight.) It is easy to rule out "irrational" judgements about individuals, but people in the middle of cultural fault lines may be racist from the same motives of fully rational self-interest that are extolled at the level of economic policy.

With immigration, too, it's easy to make the charge of bigotry or xenophobia against people who who object to allowing many immigrants into a country. Easy if one doesn't have to deal with that problem at all, as I don't.

As a side note, I have never considered Haidt's analysis of "missing dimensions" of morality among liberals to be legitimate. For Haidt, any moral judgement has the same status as any other moral judgement, and if people think mixing linen with cotton is disgusting and classify it as a "should not" then he is willing to class it with other moral rules. I can see how they may take up the same part of the mind of a person who feels that way, but moral emotions (Haidt's "elephant") are all mixed up with things like status judgments and elaborate interpretations that a person overhears, and so reason tends to guide an evolution of these emotions over time.

I see his moral foundations theory as useful in drawing Western attention to aspects that we don't moralize much, but other cultures do. I think many of us would hold that attitudes on the purity, sanctity, and authority dimensions aren't in the moral realm at all, so certain are we that morality comprises only fairness and care. It's good to realize that that really isn't true, but it's not to deny that multiculturism must have its limits within the framework af nationality. Is it reasonable for France to forbid full facial coverings, to cite only one example? I'd say perhaps so.

Purity rules, in this case, will take on the added value of making people disgusted by any "experiment" such as allowing a well-bred minority member to go to university, or allowing intermarriage between races. By nipping the problem in the bud, purity culture heads off larger battles further on when some tipping point is reached.

We have a very unfortunate recent example of disgust arising from purity violations, with our prez lamenting immigrants infesting our country. He also is said to be a germ phobe, which indicates a real visceral reaction regarding the wrong kind of immigrants. Norwegians carry no germs.