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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Yeah, I think that a lot of folks here have been really struggling with the Problem of Evil, so to speak. There's so much mental illness and frankly broken people in the world that they want a quick easy solution, just sweep all the 'bad people' under the rug to fix it.

The problem as I see it is that there's clearly some major issues with the way we have organized modern societies, or maybe the influence of technology on us, that makes it so an increasing number of people just can't cope. They don't have meaning in their lives, and they can't seem to function well in society.

The progressive view is that we need to better our institutions and safety nets to allow for more flourishing, the conservative ideal looks to be that we just shame and punish people over and over until they act better. I think that we do need both sides, but too few people are willing to find a compromise between the two.

While it's fashionable to sneer at this today, it is not a new idea that one solution to evil is to fight it. While it's a truism in many circles that the only appropriate things to do when an unhinged mentally-ill drug-addict is acting aggressive towards you are to help them and to walk away, there are no stone tablets from God setting that out as the Truth. (or if there are, I've never heard of them).

Similarly, it is received wisdom -- but not necessarily true -- that every such problem needs a systemic solution which puts no onus on the unhinged person in question, but all of it on "society", government, or those around them to somehow fix their problems without impinging on their agency.

As for "safety nets", the name of the concept is itself deceitful. A safety net is something you fall into after screwing up, then get out of and climb up and try again. What we have today aren't so much safety nets as permanent support.

that one solution to evil is to fight it.

Great turn of phrase!

While it's fashionable to sneer at this today, it is not a new idea that one solution to evil is to fight it.

Is using a systematized solution to stop evil not fighting it?

I suppose what I'm saying is that there are many ways to fight problems. In general I favor non-violent solutions where possible, which I think is the start of where a lot of system-oriented folks get to. Our whole modern conception of agency is incredible fraught, I don't know if I can even touch that reasonably.

I agree with your point on safety nets. It's a bad term, and permanent welfare is often far worse for people. Once someone's self image becomes weak and dependent, I think it exacerbates the problem rather than solving it.

Is using a systematized solution to stop evil not fighting it?

Systemizing the solution isn't what makes it "not fighting". Demanding that the solution be restricted to "helping" is what makes it "not fighting". Systematizing it does tend to make it too big to solve and removes the responsibility of anyone to solve it. The idea seems to be "to keep the homeless person from assaulting people, you must first solve drug addiction and mental illness".

Systematizing it does tend to make it too big to solve and removes the responsibility of anyone to solve it.

This is the fundamental paradox of a massive, globally connected society. We need systems to coordinate, but humans are built to live in systems. Definitely makes for interesting discourse.

The idea seems to be "to keep the homeless person from assaulting people, you must first solve drug addiction and mental illness".

Part of this is also the nature of democracy. It's hard to win a campaign being 'tough on crime.' Generally more feel-good solutions will appeal to a broader majority, as they're far easier to justify and seem less morally fraught. Even if these types of solutions have worse outcomes overall.

Part of this is also the nature of democracy. It's hard to win a campaign being 'tough on crime.' Generally more feel-good solutions will appeal to a broader majority, as they're far easier to justify and seem less morally fraught. Even if these types of solutions have worse outcomes overall.

Is this some kind of joke? Apart from a few ultra-left-wing cities in a short period after the death of George Floyd, essentially every politician running for election with the intention of winning claims to be tough on crime (some of them are lying, of course). This is most notoriously the case in America, but it is true in every democracy where I have been paying attention. In the UK, the "soft" end of the Overton window is that we should build fewer prisons and spend the money hiring police. (The logic being that a higher chance of being caught more than makes up for a shorter sentence, so you get more deterrence with less punishment). The Chesa Boudin recall tells us that even in San Francisco, being openly soft on crime was a political non-starter by 2022.

What we have today aren't so much safety nets as permanent support.

You missed a great opportunity for a hammock analogy there.

Or maybe crazy people just died off historically and it is the abundance that keeps the homeless alive today?

If that is true, why are crazy people still in the gene pool period?

Our conception of 'crazy' in the modern world may just be a symptom of our worldview. Many people who have schizo-affective disorders today would probably be legitimately accepted as prophets, or being possessed by demons, or called by the gods in previous societies. And based on historic data, those 'cures' seemed to be quite effective, at least form the anecdotes that we have passed down.

Perhaps our entire frame of the problem is an impediment to solving it.

Not so much the crazy ones as the wildly-antisocial ones - there's lots of kinds of crazy that aren't nearly as disruptive, but there are benefits to getting rid of the worst, whether crazy or not:

In each generation from 1500 to 1750, between 1 and 2% of all English men were executed either by court order or extra-judicially (at the scene of the crime or while in prison). This was the height of a moral crusade by Church and State to punish the wicked so that the good may live in peace.

Meanwhile, the homicide rate fell ten-fold. Were the two trends related? In a recent paper, Henry Harpending and I argued that a little over half of the homicide decline could be explained by the high execution rate, and its steady removal of violent males from the gene pool. The rest could be partly explained by Clark-Unz selection—violent males lost out reproductively because they were increasingly marginalized in society and on the marriage market. Finally, this decline was also due to a strengthening of controls on male violence: judicial punishment (policing, penitentiaries); quasi-judicial punishment (in schools, at church, and in workplaces); and stigmatization of personal violence in popular culture.

These controls drove the decline in the homicide rate, but they also tended over time to hardwire the new behavior pattern, by hindering the ability of violent males to survive and reproduce. The last half-century has seen a dramatic relaxation of these controls but only a modest rise in the homicide rate among young men of native English origin.

This was the height of a moral crusade by Church and State to punish the wicked so that the good may live in peace.

But yet the same church says that we are supposed to suffer in this life and that we will get eternal peace in the next so this life doesn't even matter etc etc.

Eppur si muove - whatever the rhetoric, the result speaks for itself in this case.

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