Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Chapter 2 - Numbers Go Up

Previously:
Preamble
Chapter 1 - The Why
Chapter 1 digressions

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]

Chapter 2 - THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CULTURE CRAFTING

This chapter starts with the following words:

A culture’s growth and long-term viability are dependent on only four variables:
Cultural Adoption: The rate at which new adherents are converted
Birth Rate: The rate at which members have children
Cultural Fidelity: The probability someone raised within the culture will stay within it
Death Rate: The rate at which members die

I’m immediately a little concerned I may have the wrong book. What I have IRL is a group of people with certain unmet needs, and my hope that a coherent social technology (best summarized as a “religion”) can meet many of those needs if we can figure out how to wield it. I was hoping for a user’s guide or owner’s manual to using that technology. The lines quoted above sound like the start of a dissection of how to follower-count-max over many decades. More akin to a video game than to building a shared space.

However I’m aware that often doing something very complicated and delicate can mean drilling down to some very bedrock concepts that seem completely unrelated at first, but which underlie a LOT of really important aspects of the Thing. Fundamentals are foundations, and they’re usually hidden or don’t look much like what is built on them. So maybe this will be important stuff going forward.

1. Cultural Adoption

The Collinses are not fans of cultural conversion. They say it is ineffective (“cultures with high cultural adoption proliferate over the short term but die quickly over the long run”) and imply that it is immoral (“harvesting the children of another culture”). More examples are below. However when listing some ways that it has worked in the past, the most effective on their list is Incentives.

Conversion Incentives: Offering tax-advantaged status or highly sought-after jobs only to members of the culture in question can significantly boost conversions.

This is the whole point of a religious community, is it not? The network of support and interdependence? As individual humans we are weak. Culture is the technology that allowed humans to work collectively and conquer this planet. We share resources with those we know we can trust. We provide communal gathering places, conflict-resolution systems, child-care, safety-nets, etc, for others in our community. The people we don’t know and can’t trust yet? The ones who don’t contribute to the commons? Of course they don’t get access to that.

The example they give is very negatively framed:

The current university system uses this strategy to convert people by controlling “elite access” in our society and requiring a college degree at one of a few institutions to enter it, then using said institutions to culturally convert people out of more “traditional” birth cultures.

While this is true, I think the situation on the ground is complex enough that this is an overly-complicated example of conversion incentives which was chosen to maximize revulsion for Conversion Incentives rather than for clarification.

2. Birth Rate

This section is two sentences, stating nothing is more important than birth rate. To be honest I agree with their choice of sparing words here, since half of the rest of the book is basically making this argument.

That being said, I suspect they reason they go so hard against cultural conversion in the prior section is because many people think of conversion as a substitute for having their own children (“my memes are more important than my genes” (using memes in the traditional Dawkins sense)). The Collinses strongly believe that falling birth rates are an existential crisis and thus really need to push against the idea that it’s fine to not have kids because you’ll just get the population from elsewhere.

3. Cultural Fidelity

If half the remaining book is about the importance of birthing children, the other half is about the importance of not losing them to a culture with sterilizing ideology.

How many people raised in Culture X stay in Culture X and raise their own kids within it?

They bring up two tactics that worked a lot better pre-internet:

Threats of shunning
Warnings about not-quite-true consequences

Jehovah’s Witnesses used both, of course. Their point about the internet destroying these tools is well-taken. It allowed for formation of quasi-communities outside the church, and made debunking lies super easy. New Atheism is directly descended from the rise of the internet, and just demonstrates once again how much everything depends on and is shaped by technology.

Their broad prescription for cultural fidelity nowadays?

creating a culture that fosters pride, strategic advantages, and human flourishing. If people are clearly better off thanks to their culture, they are more likely to raise their children within it and remain loyal adherents themselves.

This makes me extremely happy. It’s exactly what we should strive for! If I was in a teasing mood I might point out that this sounds suspiciously like an Incentive to adopt a culture. :)

An interesting claim follows from this:

For this reason, the cultures with the highest cultural fidelity are typically either tough to convert into (to ensure a level of quality / exclusivity among members) or require rigorous lifestyle adjustments demanding more willpower than most people have (which naturally weeds out weak-willed applicants).

It’s certainly good to have high standards and quality members. We are not a church for violent junkies, for example. On the other hand, communities are in part there to help each other when we are at our lowest. Ideally with some excess left over to help raise the human capital of those that can be rescued. I think it’s a tough balance to strike, as evidenced by so many churches failing at it. But it’s another very good point to keep in mind, so I’m adding it to the list.

4. Death Rate

When death rates were much higher, a culture’s ability to impart behaviors that reduced odds of death granted it a significant advantage. […] [re: a culture that had its adherents washing five times a day] It’s wild to think that this knowledge was imparted through cultural evolution into a tribe of desert nomads (and later adopted by Islam) centuries before Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis arrived at this knowledge through science.

That is pretty sweet!

Even though death rates are much lower now than they used to be, modern cultures can still secure a competitive advantage by imparting healthy habits to adherents. A culture less likely to be plagued with obesity and addiction will outcompete an otherwise identical culture that lacks these defenses.

Seems likely! And not just due to lower death rate, I expect most of it would be due to increased productivity and joyous living. Our culture already embraces the goal of eliminating aging and death entirely. When we get to that point we’re already set to be among the first cultures to embrace unbounded lifespans without reservation.

That’s It

This is a very short chapter. I don’t think that these are the fundamentals of culture crafting at all, they’re just the inputs to make a number go up. I think of culture as vastly more than that. But, again, it’s probably just laying out some terms and tools that’ll be used in the rest of the book. Due to the chapter being so short I’m not breaking out digressions into a different post, they’re all below. They were mostly my digressions this time. 😅

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Further Cultural Conversion Critiques

Nearly half this chapter consists of critiques of conversion.

A common attribute that makes cultures seductive is “easy and forgiving” elements, which in turn contribute to low birth rates.

Wait, do we know this to be true? It’s not explained here, so I assume we’ll get further arguments later on. I’ve heard arguments that people have less children because the opportunity costs of children are much greater in a world full of riches and fun. This would suggest to me that it would be good to have a culture that makes having children more easy and more fun/rewarding for everyone.

For the most part, religions almost only grow through conversions over very limited temporal and geographic windows.

OK, but those can be a very big deal. Going from 12 followers to an entire empire in a few hundred years was limited to a specific temporal and geographic window, but it made quite a difference forever thereafter.

Even when religions do grow rapidly through conversions, they often fail to spread their original culture, instead forming a new cultivar which is a mix of local culture and the new theology.

This also seems like a good thing. A group should adopt the beliefs and traditions that are most beneficial within the context of their surroundings. A culture that can’t adapt will also die out.

Successful proselytization is commonly achieved through harvesting the children of another culture at a very young age

This just seems wrong to me? Children are pretty hard to tear away from their parents.

Quakers, for example, grew by specializing in educational fields. Shakers gained adherents by specializing in orphanages. Ultimately, however, both Quakers and Shakers began to collapse when government-backed alternatives wiped out their top recruitment channels.

OK, well that kinda papers over the fact that these groups were literally raising the children. Yes, I’ll grant that if you require a child spend most of the day isolated in an indoctrination prison for the majority of the year until age 18, or if you literally house/feed/raise them, you have massive input over their cultural heritage. But that’s a bit beyond what is normally thought of as “proselytization.”

I realize at this point that I’m defending cultural conversion pretty heavily, which makes me suspicious of my motivations. I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and I hated it, so why am I so pro-proselytization here? I think it’s due to my current culture’s dedication to truth-seeking. Rationalists believe that what can be destroyed by the truth should be, and that the best way to discover the truth via maximum openness and exchange of ideas. The least wrong ideas win out in the long run, and the best strategy is to adopt all the best parts and most useful/productive practices we know. A group is best served by being flexible enough to adapt when this is the optimal play. A focus on cultural purity is the opposite of that, and leads to long-term stagnation and decline.

Also Bayesian Rationalism is very young, first taking form in ~2007. The first generation of cultural rationalists are just now being born, so 100% of current adult rationalists are cultural converts.

Later they say:

If a single culture is to become a throughline between many successive generations, it must be capable of adapting.

So I’m glad we agree there. :) Seems a little at odds with some of the items quoted above, maybe we’ll get more clarity in coming chapters.

Proselytization Is Poop!

Some really interesting statistics in the cultural conversion section on direct proselytization. Citing several sources and doing some math they come to:

the average Mormon converts 0.6 people in their lifetime […] even in best-case scenarios[…] missionary work is only marginally effective and seldom capable of conversion at “above repopulation rate” (e.g., >1 convert per member per lifetime)

I remember the abysmally low conversion rates of knocking on doors as a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s shocking how much effort they put into something with such low returns, and quite frankly I think it’s more demoralizing than helpful. Any value in it was primarily the bonding aspect and auto-othering it caused us. Which is to say I find these numbers entirely plausible and consistent with my experience.