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“Meritocracy” in a ruthlessly capitalist country can easily incentivize sociopathy (or at least an efficiency of mind that discounts actual moral feelings to a degree reminiscent of sociopathy). Let’s say I want a job at Google. Any evolved instinct to care for others or to experience guilt about moral choices (getting answers from a previous student; is working at Google even moral?) takes up cognitive space that could be allotted to my repetitive studies and task-list completion. It’s trivially easy for a sociopath-ish student to understand that he needs to pretend to have moral feelings and to do the requisite extra-curricular to signal this; these are small barriers in the pursuit of self-gain. Once he is a manager or CEO and running our nation’s search engine and algorithms, he’s not going to magically experience moral compunction about the consequences of what he’s doing. He was never trained in that, he was selected for having the least of that, and he may not even have it in him. Anyway: Google job secured, mates secured.
This is different than the selection in effect within a devoutly Christian society, as was common in European history (back when everyone genuinely believed the religion). Acting Christlike and having Christ-ian moral feelings were genuine sexual section factors on their own, and were also factors in being selected for high positions. (You also had interesting things like the practical wisdom of the society being clothed in Christian language, easily accessed to those who believe but less accessible to sociopaths). Obviously it was far from perfect as a social technology, but I think that this likely led to an increase in prosocial gene proliferation. People weren’t chiefly judged on their widget production but on their faith (capacity for moral and social feelings) and their imitation of the singular moral paragon.
What I mean by all this is that it’s entirely possible Europeans have higher prosocial genes due to 1400 years of evolutionary selection, that this is pro-civilizational, but that our current “widget meritocracy” is ultimately anti-civilizational because it rewards self gain through widget production which (because cognition is zero sum) necessarily punishes those with substantive moral feelings.
I'm not sure on selection of prosocial genes, will think on this - Fukuyama puts it culturally with regard to practises of Roman Catholic church disrupting familial inheritance etc
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The regions of Europe that became Christian later tend to due better than those that became Christian sooner. I.E. Northern vs Southern Europe. Saint Paul was converting Greeks in the 1st century, and Albanians were ruling and converting the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries; yet, these countries are basket cases compared to Finland or Lithuania. The last bastions of Paganism in Europe.
The regions of Europe that became Christian later were also much, much flatter, had more interior waterways, and in many cases had easier access to the Atlantic Ocean. I.e. factors that support large, contiguous empires, industrialization, and overseas colonization/trade vis-a-vis the Roman Empire's mediterranean core which was functionally centered around coastal enclaves largely isolated from eachother by rough (and expensive to economically develop) terrain. The southern European and Levant states didn't even have a non-Gibralter route to the world's oceans until the world-spanning empires who did have Atlantic ocean access were already established.
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If Christianity helped to spread "prosocial genes" in population, we would observe that people who were Christian the longest - Greeks, Sicilians, Southern Italians, Spanish and other Mediterrannean peoples - would be the most "prosocial" and people who were Christian only for short time - Nordic and Baltic peoples - would be wild raging two legged beasts.
Do we observe it?
The people who were Christian the longest would be various tiny middle eastern ethnicities. I think the largest and best continuity are the Maronites, who’ve been an endogamous Christian group since well before the Islamic conquests and who are doing quite well by the standards of ‘minority group living in a shithole country ruled by terrorists’. Ditto for Palestinian Christians(Arab Christians actually outcompete Jews in the Israeli education system) and copts.
The longest continually Christian ruled territory is probably northern Italy, although plausibly some other part of the carolingian empire(maybe the Ile de Paris) has it beat. And northern Italy, unlike the south, has outcomes similar to germany.
‘Christianity is mildly eugenic, but not enough to overcome most confounders’ fits the data we have. There’s plausible explanations; monogamy, reduction of cousin marriage, monasteries as a dumping ground for autists. I wouldn’t say there’s strong evidence but it seems to lean in that direction.
And these people are typical Middle Easterners, not "pro-social" at all outside their family and clan.
Why you exclude Central (with Rome) and Southern Italy? Excepting small and short lived emirate of Bari it was in solid Christian hands since Constantine.
Your picture of Christian history seems too rosy. Autists and other mentally ill were seen as possessed by devil and treated accordingly. Monasteries were, for most of Christian history exclusive institutions, serving as dumping ground for excess unmarried sons and daughters of aristocracy (mostly daughters), and were tiny, not enough to influence general genetic composition of population.
So what caused European specific high IQ genetic development? More plausible is theory of Peter Frost it was work from home.
More technically, cottage industry and distributed manufacturing.
In other civilizations, succesful craftsmen (presumably with high IQ and conscientiousness scores) moved to cities where they thrived and prospered until they died of disease. In Europe, guild system specific in European civilization prevented it, and distributed manufacturing evolved as workaround.
Under this system, craftsmen stayed in their villages, worked with material brought to them by merchant and sold him the finished goods. It was miserable existence combining drawbacks of city and country, life at complete mercy of the trader.
Still, succesful craftsmen had large families, who, unlike children born in plague pits that were premodern cities, survived. This way, by series of historical accidents, high IQ and conscientiousness genes spread in the population. Until end of guild system and development of capitalism put end to this process.
Yes, at least on this issue, Elon Musk is full of shit.
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You would need to account for the infusion of genes into eg Sicilians (8%+) due to the Muslim conquests, and then also account for whatever the Northern Europeans were doing with their own religion prior to Christianity. Always found it interesting that Odin is also a figure who sacrifices himself on a tree to benefit the world: “I know that I hung on that windy Tree nine whole days and nights, stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to my own self given, high on that Tree of which none have heard from what roots it rises to heaven. None refreshed me ever with food or drink, I peered right down in the deep; crying aloud I lifted the Runes, then back I fell from there.”
No, Odin sacrificed to learn secret of the runes for himself.
Anyway, you just disproved your previous assertion that Christianity was necessary to evolve "prosocial genes" in population. If old Germanic religion was as good, the Northern Europeans could stick to Odin and Thor and would be just fine.
It’s only disproven if you discount all the complexity of the question. Southern Europe had an influx of conquering Muslim genes and Jewish genes, whereas Northern Europe did not. And while we don’t know a ton about Norse Paganism, the figure of Odin shows interesting overlap in emphasizing the idea of self-sacrifice for social benefit, which is actually not common to all religions (as an example it’s absent in the figure of Muhammad). Rather than seeing Christianity as wholly distinct from every other religion, we should just consider the underlying social technologies of the religion and how they influence sexual selection — couldn’t Odinism have some but not all of the benefit of Christianity? I also wouldn’t deny that there are independent variables from geography (cold winter theory).
Except, in the myth, the benefit was learning secret of runes, the myth says nothing about how it was useful to anyone else than Odin.
??? Mo was happily married and living well, and sacrificed it all to preach his message to unfriendly audience, faced hatred, persecution, and finally had to flee his hometown to save his life.
This sacrifice was, of course, quite ephemeral, as he then became an ultra-powerful warlord with multiple wives and an army of devotees. Yeah wow, poor guy, his life sure must have been hard.
Ten years are not ephemeral.
Yes, Mo made it big, unlike 99,9999% self proclaimed prophets in history. Their stories usually end with "murdered" "executed" "died in prison" "died in poverty". Mo knew it, but never gave up, because he meant it, he was certain that his message true revelation from God.
Would you openly stand for your beliefs for ten years, while your town hates and despises you, would you persevere while your neighbors regularly spit at you and smear your house with camel dung?
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