Value Competition

Robert Wright's Next Book

The Evolution of God is very good as a critical but sympathetic guide to the Abrahamic religions and their scriptures.  I would like to see Wright's next book be something that the current one isn't, namely an argument for God as a plausible scientific hypothesis.  That hypothetical book would challenge those of us who are secular in a way that his current book and related NYT op-ed don't, as Daniel Dennett points out in today's letters.  

How might that work?   In the book and the op-ed, Wright refers to the possibility that a divine presence arranged the algorithms of natural selection, presumably including the "non-zero-sumness" of reciprocal cooperation that Wright rightly regards as a central feature of the way history and evolution work.  My skeptical response is, "How could it be any different?"  That is, if the algorithms of natural selection, including the logic of reciprocal cooperation, have to be what they are regardless of the universe you're in, I don't see a case based for God based on those algorithms.  But if I'm persuaded that non-zero-sumness is like physical constants that could be anything but have to be just so for matter to coagulate as it actually does, then an advocate for God as a plausible hypothesis has an "isn't it amazing that things are so neatly arranged morally as well as practically in our universe" argument that a good scientific Bayesian has to engage.

Personally, I'm a skeptic about the "isn't the moral order wondrous" argument; my prior is that the algorithms of natural selection and non-zero-sumness--and the humbler algorithms of value competition that I try to tease out--are universe-invariant like math, not universe-variant like physics.  But I'm less than confident about that prior, and would love to read a book by Wright that tries to persuade me that I'm wrong.

Live Long and Prosper?

Nicholas Wade's NYT article on the prospects for life-extending drugs made me wonder about a passing claim in the article that evolutionary biologists are skeptical on theoretical grounds about life extension.  My outsider's sense of natural selection leads me the other way; life extension seems like an area in which there could indeed be twenty-dollar bills on the ground.  A mutation that produced long life without a proportional increase in reproduction would be selected against, and a mutation that produced shorter life with more children per year would be selected for, all else equal.  If in the days of old there were indeed elves living for thousands of years or Methuselahs living for 969 years, a newly-rising race of shorter-lived men would outcompete the long-lived group, which is one way to interpret Tolkien, the Bible, and other myths of a lost golden age.   

Of course, it's possible that the individual boon of life extension would be a curse for society, with stagnant oldsters dominating everything and little new getting done.  I'm fairly optimistic on that score.  Excessive leverage seems to me a bigger problem with human civilization than insufficient leverage, and a society of longer-lived people seems like a better bet to deal with risk in a way that will sustain the society than a society of shorter-lived people.   If that's right, the results of biological evolution can be improved upon at the social as well as the individual level.

If biological evolution leaves plenty of twenty-dollar bills lying around for individuals and perfectly competitive economic markets leave none, I'd say value competition is in between.   Cultural watchmakers aren't as blind as Darwinian ones, but they aren't as sharp-eyed as Rolex.

Black on the Block

While in Chicago recently for business ethics, marketing, and management conferences, I bought Mary Pattillo's book on the black middle class in North Kenmore-Oakland, a neighborhood in Chicago north of South Kenmore (home of Barack Obama) and Hyde Park.  There's lots of good stuff in the book--for example, she makes the correct point that middle-class blacks like Bill Cosby who criticize the behavior of poor blacks are showing their engagement with the idea of a black community.  Inspired by the book, I took the South Shore train to Hyde Park and walked to Kenmore.  I wasn't allowed to walk down Obama's block, which had barricades and police cars at both ends--no problem, though a middle-way approach like turning in all your stuff at a kiosk and then getting it back after completing the stroll down the block and back might better accommodate tourist interests as well as neighborhood and security interests.  Anyway, a few blocks away from chez Obama, North Kenmore, with plenty of vacant lots along with some beautiful old homes like Mary Pattillo's (although she'd moved, as I found out when I rang the bell) and some snazzy condos, was open for strollers.  I bought a decent taco at a decent price from a deli, Atlantic Foods, which I saw from the pictures on the wall--Malcolm X, other black luminaries, owner with aldermen and other politicians, community service recognition awards--was owned by a Sam Joudeh, who appeared to be from the Middle East.   That led me to think about how important or not the strong sense of racial identification/obligation by black middle class members that Pattillo discusses, and the different but also powerful sense of racial identification by poor blacks, are in encouraging or discouraging middle class blacks' from involvement in business in black neighborhoods.   My sense is that it's an important factor in deterring black-owned businesses in places like North Kenwood.  As a member of the black middle class running a deli in the ghetto, I believe you are externally and also internally or psychically vulnerable to poor blacks, like the young men standing around in front of the deli or the woman on Drexel Boulevard who told me she'd just failed a drug test and asked me to look after her stuff for a minute, asking you or hitting you up for money for good or bad reasons in a way that a non-black like Mr. Joudeh is not.  

Your Parents and How Bad the World Appears to Be

In a recent email on my book proposal I got good pushback on my contention that it's good for politicians to be electorally oriented.  It depends, my interlocutor correctly noted, on how bad a place you think the world is currently--if it's bad enough, the risk of politicians just imposing what they think is right is presumably less than if the world's doing sort of all right.   In my response, I acknowledged that the world didn't seem nearly as bad as it had to me in the 1980s when I was working at a law firm job I disliked.  Afterword, I thought of a response that I think also gets to the psychological reality of the situation: My sense of a world awry in the 1980s had a lot to do with going from a home setting in which my parents had been highly solicitous of me (and from school settings that rewarded certain skills of mine) to work settings that weren't so aligned with my desires and skills.  The point, I suppose, apart from the VC issue of whether "the world is doing pretty well"/"the world is doing terribly" dichotomy is a useful value dichotomy (yes) is that a dark view of the world can be associated not only with having had mean parents but also with having had benevolent ones.

The Future Evolution of God

Just finished reading Robert Wright's new book, which I liked a lot.  My guess/hope is that the God who eventually emerges as the one major God for the planet will be less austerely unitary than the dominant Jewish and Muslim versions and less male than all three major Abrahamic versions.  One way God might evolve to give Chinese yin-yang and Greek, Hindu, and other polytheisms or complex monotheism/polytheisms their due: There's a "male" component to the future God that embodies authority and its sometimes self-interested assertion but that also embodies distance between authority and the acted upon, and consequent freedom of the acted upon; we might call that component Zeus.  There's also a "female" component that embodies maternal authority exercised on behalf of the acted upon, with limited distance between authority and the acted upon--that would be Hera.  Within the necessary, cooperating, and also competitive "female" and "male" aspects of God, there are subaspects.  For example, there is a compulsive, technical, socially withdrawn but needy "male" component of God--Haphaestus.  There's a similar "female" divine component that is also withdrawn and skilled in crafts but is associated with nature rather than technique--Artemis.  There is an emotional, physically powerful and not always wise "male" component of God--Ares--and an emotional, physically beautiful, and not always wise "female" component--Aphrodite.   And so on through Apollo, Athena, and the rest of the faces of God.

No, the Greek pantheon will not return.  But a good thing it is, I believe, if God is seen in terms of having competing valuable principles/character features rather than as featureless, characterless, and homogeneous. 

An alternative to left-right ideology in everyday life

Competing political ideologies that are antagonistic to one another can work well, or well enough, in settings in which there is no effective exit option.  Legislatures and courts epitomize such settings.  On the other hand, a competition between such antagonistic ideologies will not work well in firms, families, comunity groups, and other settings in which entry and exit tend to be flexible and close day-to-day cooperation between colleagues, family members, and group members is crucial. 

Is there a substitute for conventional political ideologies that would have some of the benefits that these ideologies bring--such as keeping people on their toes and motivating them to care about the preferences of "swing voters" or more generally uncommitted people--without the deep flaws that such ideologies have in non-government, non-compulsory settings?  One idea: Men and women, and a whole complex of traits, principles, and characteristics culturally associated with maleness and femaleness, are interdependent and simultaneously cooperative and competitive.  "Maleness" and "femaleness" in the form of constructed sides in everyday life settings that are not limited to people of any one gender or position present a possible way to benefit from the energizing effect of competing values that also cooperate better than, say, liberalism and conservatism.  Value competition is useful--but it's also necessary to avoid having people in intimate settings be torn apart from one another by the divisive features of conventional ideological competition.