Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Chapter 1 - The Why

Previously:
Preamble

Chapter 1 - CULTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY TOOL

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]

Culture And Biology

Why do we even want to craft a religion? The Collinses begin by talking about Culture writ large.

Culture is the means by which complex behaviors—behaviors that cannot be easily encoded into biological instinct—“evolve.”

as humans developed social environments we had not biologically evolved to handle (such as early cities)[…] we evolved social technologies that permitted relatively rapid adaptation.

A culture can be thought of as ever-evolving software that sits on top of— and synergistically interacts with—both biological hardware and firmware, addressing flaws our biology hasn’t had sufficient evolutionary time to address.

This is familiar ground for Rationalists so I’m not going to go deeply into it. I would recommend Scott Alexander’s review of The Secret Of Our Success, or read it directly if you have the time (I talk about it as well in TBC podcast episode 90). Culture is what let humans take over the world, it’s probably why we have consciousness (which was needed to transmit culture), it’s a big deal.

The Collins’s addition here is something I hadn’t run into before — culture alters our biology as a species.

Because culture can affect a person’s number of surviving offspring, traditional evolution (not just memetic evolution) shapes culture.

If culture doesn’t affect surviving offspring, it’s not that powerful of a tool (see above for But It Is IRL). So a culture will actively alter the genetic composition of a group that practices it. Over generations, a population will become more and more adapted to a certain culture, and that culture will also adapt to become more and more compatible with the biology of that population. Some cultures are literally more adapted to certain genetic lineages vs others.

This is not a thing I would have believed ten years ago. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve come to understand that people really are truly, deeply different at fundamental levels. I would have protested that we’re all basically the same inside, and therefore there obviously must be an optimal culture for everyone, and the project is to take all the best parts from all the cultures of the world, refine them and combine them, to uplift our species as a whole. The idea that cultures with massive values differences would be adaptive to some people and maladaptive to others for basic biological reasons was unthinkable.

Now I’m thinking it so hard I just plain believe it as fact. I still hold that there are cultures that are just flat out much worse than alternatives (for everyone including the people trapped within them). But those are local improvements to be made in culture-space. There isn’t that a single culture would work for everyone.

Which makes tolerance a whole new level of important for human flourishing. No one should tolerate things that are just BAD and make everyone worse off. Everyone has to tolerate some cultures that feel awful to them, because those cultures are the best cultures for people who are radically different. And because some cultures create what our culture would consider suffering for their adherents, this means we will always have to tolerate some level of suffering.

More on Tolerance later in the book.

The human brain evolved to work within a strict cultural framework. Our brains and cultural/religious mechanisms co-evolved to work together. Operating our brains in a cultural/religious vacuum is like trying to run a machine without any grease—it will start fritzing and fall to pieces at a much faster rate.

Since humans have been biologically shaped by their cultures, they are as much a part of us as many biological processes. They are a load-bearing part of our basic psychology. Removing large chunks of them without something to take their place causes massive disfunction (which is why New Atheism led directly to the new Woke Religion.)

Personally, I agree that the failure of culture/religion we’re currently experiencing has led to a lot of misery. Needless misery! Which is why I’m so interested in rectifying this.¹ The Collinses take it a bit further:

we genuinely believe that failure could lead to the death of our species and eventually all life

Look, you had me at Culture Is Our Software, I don’t need the hard sell!

The Fertility Connection

If a culture has a low birth rate […] it will either eventually use up the existing supply of non-adherents or become parasitic, essentially using other cultures as breeding pits of livestock
…
Vampires might be sexy and cool when they are in the minority, but we are well past that stage and will soon be entering one in which, bereft of life to suck from the world, vampires will turn on each other.

Anyone familiar with the Collinses knows that their primary concern is the upcoming worldwide collapse in population (if trends continue). The quote above paints a fantastic emotional picture, I love it on narrative grounds. :) But it doesn’t hold up to translation into the actual world. What “a vampire using other cultures as breeding pits” looks like in the real world is America providing an incredibly attractive lifestyle of fun, self-exploration, and luxury. People want that, and join willingly and happily (I sure did!). The poor, high-fertility cultures that are drawn from will lose their most productive members, but they get remittances in return, and the benefits of the previous generation of tech advancements.

Imagine someone arguing in favor of female disempowerment and poverty for a nation just so we can rely on it for a steady supply of human capital. Horrible!

Oh dang it.

I’m kinda confused by this turn around, because tolerance of other cultures seems to be a pretty big theme later in the book. We can all live together and trade with each other for mutual benefit, is the idea. That means allowing such poor high-fertility cultures to exist, and continuing to provide attractive alternative lifestyles to anyone who wants to leave those cultures and join ours instead.

I would think the better argument to make would be “If your culture is replacing itself with the immigrants of other cultures, it won’t be your culture for very long. You’ll soon find yourself assimilating to them rather than the reverse, your culture will die, and that’ll suck.” The argument of “their culture is really bad so any benefits of its existence are defiling” strikes me as shallow moralizing. It’s not what I’d call a pragmatic argument.

Unless it’s a second-order pragmatism. The pragmatism of “If we don’t convince people to avert population collapse it could lead to the death of our species, so we will say anything that someone could find convincing in hopes that something will land.” Arguments are made not because the speaker actually believes them, but because they hope they’ll lead to an outcome they desire.² I really dislike these sorts of arguments, because I’m sick of being lied to told things the speaker doesn’t personally feel are actually true on the object level.

Lets go back to the object level, then. Maybe a low-rights high-fertility society sending their best to a high-rights low-fertility society isn’t ideal, but every individual person is pursuing their best options and is improved relative to the alternative. That’s pretty good, all things considered. The problem is getting a large enough poor high-fertility culture that is compatible with the larger seductive culture. The Collinses cite some alarming stats that many readers are probably already familiar with.

In 2021, the Mormon population in Utah almost fell below replacement rate

South Korea has a birth rate of 0.81. For every 100 South Korean great-grandparents, there will be 6.6 great-grandkids[…]Imagine if we knew a disease would kill 94% of South Koreans in the next century.

That’s a lot of people we need to replace from our friendly neighborhood high-fertility culture. I don’t think the Amish and Orthodox Jews are going to cut it. What happens if the modern west can’t replenish its numbers?

Civilizational collapses appear more like:
*An exodus of the elite from major population centers
*A rapid decline in infrastructure quality in densely populated areas
*A breakdown of supply chains (e.g., some stuff you used to be able to get at grocery stores permanently disappears from the shelves)
*Growing hostility toward ideas that deviate from orthodoxy

This is an interesting list. Signs to look out for, I guess. From what I hear, all of these things are happening to some degree in San Francisco, but are unrelated to the population level. Is SF collapsing? It doesn’t seem to be… maybe small amounts of this are just general decline, and a collapse would be a whole lot of these happening pretty darn quickly.

So OK, the real worry of demographic collapse is economic chaos and political fallout. I consider these to be issues of policy. I am hoping to create a cultural/religious structure that provides people like myself with the social software we need to be happier, more fulfilled, and more successful. All the things talked about earlier in this post. Tackling economic policy and political upheaval is outside of scope. The culture will hopefully give our people the tools they need to coordinate with each other, make good decisions, and lead meaningful lives while dealing with all that crap. But it’s not here to address any of it directly.

Soon after this they return to the argument that current high-fertility cultures suck.

From 2004 to 2018, differential fertility (more conservative people having more kids) increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million.

I initially pulled the above quote because when I first read it I was alarmed. 17% growth in 14 years! Then I pulled total population numbers. The US grew from 294M to 332M in that time — +38M people, or +13%. This is less than the anti-gay growth rate of +17%, so still alarming! But it is significantly less alarming. This context is a basic and important stat to give, any number is meaningless without it. The Collinses are smart enough to know that. The only reason to withhold it is to make the 17% number look bigger and more alarming. This again makes me believe they are willing to lie to me withhold object level truth that is less than maximally supportive of actions they think are species-survival-level important.³

The Collinses return to the fertility crisis frequently throughout this book, which means I’ll probably be touching on it more than once. But I place a lot less importance on it, and will likely skip it entirely quite a few times.

Still, as they say:

The civilization we have built is about to undergo a massive and permanent change. The world in which our grandkids will grow up will not resemble our own.

This is dramatically true regardless of how one feels about the fertility crisis. It’s what is going to drive the creation of many new cultures/religions. Likely doing so intentionally and with eyes open will be better than a drunken walk.

Quick Note on Vocabulary

Culture vs. Religion
We use the word cultivar when discussing a mix of religion and culture that acts as a distinct memetic package. While in our society, most cultures heavily overlap with religions, the two are not intrinsically bound, making it more accurate for us to use a distinct word.

I’m not really trying to start a cultivar or a culture. The culture already exists, we’re basically swimming in it. I want a “religion” as a structure to interface with that culture and give us a tangible form to work with. So I probably won’t be using this word much. It’ll appear in a lot of quotes though.

So What Do We Do?

Rapidly dropping birth rates among the increasingly sterile and decaying “elite” circles in our society mean anyone who can craft a self sustaining new cultivar that produces competent, highly educated, technophilic individuals gets the chance to write the future of human civilization.

The answer is create a new “cultivar.” As the chapter draws to a close we are told this is the answer they decided to pursue to deal with demographic collapse. Create a new culture that can inherit the Earth while riding out falling population troubles. That’s definitely a good idea, I strongly support keeping a descendant of western liberalism going! It’s a lot more ambitious than my goals—I just want a community structure that will serve the people that think and emote like I do. Hopefully less ambitious goals will make it easier to craft a useful religion, and there isn’t some phase-shift that makes the techniques useful for crafting one type of religion not useful for the other.

We end with a plea for diverse ideas in exploring the religion solution-space:

Suppose a group of scientists knew the world’s temperature was going to drop 50 degrees, but they only had time to genetically engineer 50 species of plants to survive in this new environment. Would it be optimal for them to genetically engineer 50 closely-related species? Of course not; these scientists would select for maximum genetic diversity as doing so yields the highest odds that something survives in this new future.

They push strongly for cultural diversity, and heap a lot of contempt on cultural homogeneity. The future is very uncertain, they’re advocating for radical and untested treatments, and by necessity many of them will fail. But changing nothing will fail with 100% certainty. So put as many wild mutants out there as possible and hope a handful of them find a way through.

They really dislike cringing cultural cloistering:

Why is their culture so weak now that it can only survive in a hermetically sealed pod? […] Ethnically and culturally homogenous societies have some of the lowest birth rates of any cultural ecosystem and are wildly fragile. […] if your culture is on life support, putting it in a hermetically sealed room just gives it a chance to die in peace.

They call out by name the ethno-states of South Korea and Japan, and multiple times ridicule white ethno-nationalists. Interestingly, they are very pro-Israel in this section, due to its high birth rates, and point out that it’s very culturally diverse (which I don’t have the standing to argue). But it’s also an ethno-state, that’s literally the point. Why don’t the same forces that cause other ethno-states to stop making babies have power in Israel?

Regardless, I also dislike cultural segregation and am very much for lots of diversity and borrowing and tolerating among cultures, so I’m not complaining much.

One of our goals with this book is to recruit new participants for what we call the Index: A “cultural reactor” that catalogs intentionally constructed family cultures and monitors their outcomes intergenerationally while distributing said information in a way that allows all participating cultures to improve at a faster rate than that of a non-cultivated society.

This is probably the most fascinating part of their project. If we’re going to unleash a hundred new religions, we should track them so proper science can be done!

On the one hand, I’m not sure how useful this will be. Everyone can see which new religions of the last great revival era survived, and it’s not hard to find out what their beliefs and practices are. I’m not sure having records of how those beliefs changed over the generations would be that useful? How does knowing the history of Mormonism help us, for example? Which of their beliefs should we adopt? It’s not like we can attribute x% of success to belief Y but not belief Z.

On the other hand, observing + recording + doing science is really freakin’ cool. It’s been responsible for so much awesome stuff that our species has done. This Index will likely end up being useful in some way. Plus it’s better to have the data than not have it (we can always ignore it if we want to). And the costs of recording it will be very low, and borne by the Collinses anyway (I believe).

So yeah, my nerd soul delights in this, I can’t wait to see what sorta insights shake out form it.

But then we get some confusion of terms?

When any of our children prepares to have children of their own, they can choose to either remain in House Collins or create and take ownership of a new set of traditions through the creation of a new House
…
The Index and House system allow partners in a new family to reflect on the aspects of their birth culture—and other cultures to which they’ve been exposed —that have most significantly improved their lives, then weave them into a single, integrated, new culture in a way that is supported and considered normal by others in the Index network.

This is not a culture, as I recognize it. This is more of a family-cult, in the traditional not-bad sense. Every family in ancient times could have it’s own house gods and familial beliefs, but those aren’t distinct cultures. The greater population they lived in, and their norms and standards, are the culture. The idea that children should reflect on the aspects of their birth traditions and weave those into new traditions — that’s the actual culture that’s being lived in.

I’m interested in a bit more than personal traditions, I want community traditions. A religion is powerful because it unites many families. The Index is the actual religion here. I’m assuming we’ll learn how it was born, and grew and adapted to serve the families that are within it, and all the lessons that were learned from that process. That’s the crafting I’m here for!

The next chapter is titled “The Fundamentals of Culture Crafting.” Sounds promising! But that’ll have to wait for 2-ish weeks from now, because I first have to scrape together a post covering all the miscellaneous bits of this chapter that… were in this chapter? When they should have been somewhere else? I’ll have it up next week, you’ll see.

1. Specifically, for those who are sufficiently like me that we would benefit from sharing in such a new religion.

2. Simulacra Level 2

3. FWIW, total US anti-gay percentage went from 16% in 2004 to 16.5% in 2018 based on these numbers