I think this article is quite badly mistaken, both in its account of what particular groups believe and its understanding of worldviews as such. It’s also an excellent illustration of what happens when you fail to notice the walls of your own “snowglobe”—in this case, contemporary Anglophone politics (such as it is) as seen from the inside.
This is a domain where the most visible fault lines between worldviews really are about The Right and The Good—to a certain degree because politics has always been about The Right and The Good, but also because we happen to live in a culture—a worldview—that excludes most other substantive disagreements (from “are any normative claims even truth-apt, let alone true?” to “to what extent is political persuasion possible?” to “are real economies close to equilibrium?”) from the political sphere.
On the rare occasions when other issues make their way into public discourse (or when you wait for things to get heated elsewhere), you see just as much baffled incomprehension.
“Why do mathematicians complicate things by talking about real numbers, in real life you can only ever observe rationals” (missing insight: “the” real numbers are more complicated as a set but simpler as e.g. a topological space (or other relevant structure))
“Qualia don’t offer any explanatory power, this is just rehashed vitalism” (missing insight: they’re explananda, not explanations)
“Dark matter is just some placeholder physicists came up with to explain there being too much gravity, they should change the theory instead, why should I believe in something I can’t even see?” (missing insight: all objects are placeholders to explain our measurements)
Worldviews are not principally about moral beliefs because they’re not principally about beliefs. They’re principally about concepts—the ones you use habitually, the ones you recognize, the ones you actively reject, the ones you don’t even know you’re missing—and the relations between them. The object-level disagreements are, for the most part, further downstream.
An example from the linked post: the “American Communists” table (which I’m going to round off to “Marxists”) is more wrong than right. Relevant excerpt:
Intrinsic values: Equality
Where does good come from? Labor, and workers owning the means of production
Where does bad come from? Capitalism and class systems
Who deserves good things? Workers
What should you do to be good? Try to abolish capitalism and support labor rights
The missing insight here, I think, is that unlike most of the other entries (but like the “Silicon Valley Techno-Optimists”, with whom they share far more than most members of either group would care to admit), Marxists see themselves as carrying out a historical process, not advocating for a set of values.
The view of history, accordingly, should come first. Tanner Greer’s account here is a good one
Orthodox Marxism describes the last few thousand years of history as a dialectical advance, each step in humankind’s social evolution an emancipation from natural forces paired with deepening servitude to artificial ones. The problem is not greedy capitalists, but capitalism, a structure of incentives that gives capitalists no option but to live rapacious. It was not the capitalists’ fault, really: for those inside the vortex there is no escape from the ceaseless whirl. We all live in thrall to the depersonalized incentives of the capitalist machine; we all are slaves to the blind force of the marketplace. The game cannot be changed by those stuck playing it: one must play or perish. The only solution possible is for an outside force to intervene and reshape the terms of the game. Socialist revolution will be that force. With no stake in the current order, the propertyless masses will wipe the slate clean. Human life in the world to come will be twice blessed: technology and industry has freed mankind from the shackles of nature. Revolution will now break the artificial shackles that technology and industry themselves had forged. From that point forward great decisions will not be filtered through the partial interests of the individual, but decided rationally, with the entire whole in mind. Then mankind would be free! Free from the manipulations of the market! Free from egoism, from indecency, from all the terrible things the system forces us to do to each other! Moloch vanquished, human life would finally flourish as our inborn natures intended.
Intrinsic values? Human ones, no further comment. Where does bad come from? Moloch. Where does good come from? Also Moloch. What should you do to [kill Moloch]? Feed it until it chokes on its own waste.
This is not a worldview that fits in a value-system shaped hole.
“The problem is not greedy capitalists, but capitalism”
Our piece says:
“Where does bad come from? Capitalism and class systems”
The piece you quote says:
“The only solution possible is for an outside force to intervene and reshape the terms of the game. Socialist revolution will be that force. With no stake in the current order, the propertyless masses will wipe the slate clean.”
Our piece says:
“View of history: Capitalism will lead to a series of ever-worsening crises. The proletariat will eventually seize the major means of production and the institutions of state power.”
So I’m confused because while you frame what you’re quoting as a counter argument to what we say, it lines up well.
By simplifying it all down to Moloch you’re losing a lot of detail.
If you think that American communists don’t have an unusually strong intrinsic value of equality then I think you’re mistaken (of course, I could be wrong). I don’t
think you provided any evidence against that thougu as far as I can tell.
We also didn’t say that communists “see themselves as advocating for a set of values.” We said they tend to have an intrinsic value, which is not the same thing.
If you think worldviews aren’t to a substantial extent about beliefs that I suspect we just mean different things by “worldviews”. For instance, I would not call a bunch of the examples you gave “worldviews.”
If you think that American communists don’t have an unusually strong intrinsic value of equality then I think you’re mistaken
My claim is that it’s not an intrinsic value—it’s the result of “instrumental convergence” between adherents of many different value systems, grounded in their shared conception of our present circumstances. If our circumstances were different, the conclusions would be too.
If, for instance, the United States had a robust social-democratic welfare state, most communists would be much less concerned with equality than they are now.
If it were instead some sort of agrarian yeoman-republic (certainly impossible now, but conceivable if early American history had gone very differently), then plausibly communists could instead take a mildly anti-egalitarian tack—inefficient small farmers frustrating the development of the productive forces and so on.
What you would never get, regardless of prevailing conditions, are communists who are also market fundamentalists.
If you think worldviews aren’t to a substantial extent about beliefs that I suspect we just mean different things by “worldviews”.
Really what I think is that beliefs can’t, in general, be cleanly separated from attitudes and concepts and mere habits of thought and so on—at the end of the day human cognition is what it is. But to the extent that there are distinguished object- and meta-levels, I think meta-level variation is the strongest driver of object-level variation between at least moderately educated people.
For instance, I would not call a bunch of the examples you gave “worldviews.”
Those were intended as characteristic beliefs that would pick out clearly recognizable clusters, not entire worldviews themselves. “Love Thy Neighbor” as a substitute for “Christianity”—except that I don’t have good names for the worldviews in question.
I’ve likely overestimated how salient the concrete-instrumentalist-(problem solver) vs. abstract-(scientific realist)-(theory builder) divide is for most people, but I think the two are clearly at least as different and understand each other at least as poorly as mainstream liberals and conservatives in the US.
I think this article is quite badly mistaken, both in its account of what particular groups believe and its understanding of worldviews as such. It’s also an excellent illustration of what happens when you fail to notice the walls of your own “snowglobe”—in this case, contemporary Anglophone politics (such as it is) as seen from the inside.
This is a domain where the most visible fault lines between worldviews really are about The Right and The Good—to a certain degree because politics has always been about The Right and The Good, but also because we happen to live in a culture—a worldview—that excludes most other substantive disagreements (from “are any normative claims even truth-apt, let alone true?” to “to what extent is political persuasion possible?” to “are real economies close to equilibrium?”) from the political sphere.
On the rare occasions when other issues make their way into public discourse (or when you wait for things to get heated elsewhere), you see just as much baffled incomprehension.
“Why do mathematicians complicate things by talking about real numbers, in real life you can only ever observe rationals” (missing insight: “the” real numbers are more complicated as a set but simpler as e.g. a topological space (or other relevant structure))
“Qualia don’t offer any explanatory power, this is just rehashed vitalism” (missing insight: they’re explananda, not explanations)
“Dark matter is just some placeholder physicists came up with to explain there being too much gravity, they should change the theory instead, why should I believe in something I can’t even see?” (missing insight: all objects are placeholders to explain our measurements)
Worldviews are not principally about moral beliefs because they’re not principally about beliefs. They’re principally about concepts—the ones you use habitually, the ones you recognize, the ones you actively reject, the ones you don’t even know you’re missing—and the relations between them. The object-level disagreements are, for the most part, further downstream.
An example from the linked post: the “American Communists” table (which I’m going to round off to “Marxists”) is more wrong than right. Relevant excerpt:
The missing insight here, I think, is that unlike most of the other entries (but like the “Silicon Valley Techno-Optimists”, with whom they share far more than most members of either group would care to admit), Marxists see themselves as carrying out a historical process, not advocating for a set of values.
The view of history, accordingly, should come first. Tanner Greer’s account here is a good one
Intrinsic values? Human ones, no further comment. Where does bad come from? Moloch. Where does good come from? Also Moloch. What should you do to [kill Moloch]? Feed it until it chokes on its own waste.
This is not a worldview that fits in a value-system shaped hole.
The piece that you quote says:
“The problem is not greedy capitalists, but capitalism”
Our piece says:
“Where does bad come from? Capitalism and class systems”
The piece you quote says:
“The only solution possible is for an outside force to intervene and reshape the terms of the game. Socialist revolution will be that force. With no stake in the current order, the propertyless masses will wipe the slate clean.”
Our piece says:
“View of history: Capitalism will lead to a series of ever-worsening crises. The proletariat will eventually seize the major means of production and the institutions of state power.”
So I’m confused because while you frame what you’re quoting as a counter argument to what we say, it lines up well.
By simplifying it all down to Moloch you’re losing a lot of detail.
If you think that American communists don’t have an unusually strong intrinsic value of equality then I think you’re mistaken (of course, I could be wrong). I don’t think you provided any evidence against that thougu as far as I can tell.
We also didn’t say that communists “see themselves as advocating for a set of values.” We said they tend to have an intrinsic value, which is not the same thing.
If you think worldviews aren’t to a substantial extent about beliefs that I suspect we just mean different things by “worldviews”. For instance, I would not call a bunch of the examples you gave “worldviews.”
My claim is that it’s not an intrinsic value—it’s the result of “instrumental convergence” between adherents of many different value systems, grounded in their shared conception of our present circumstances. If our circumstances were different, the conclusions would be too.
If, for instance, the United States had a robust social-democratic welfare state, most communists would be much less concerned with equality than they are now.
If it were instead some sort of agrarian yeoman-republic (certainly impossible now, but conceivable if early American history had gone very differently), then plausibly communists could instead take a mildly anti-egalitarian tack—inefficient small farmers frustrating the development of the productive forces and so on.
What you would never get, regardless of prevailing conditions, are communists who are also market fundamentalists.
Really what I think is that beliefs can’t, in general, be cleanly separated from attitudes and concepts and mere habits of thought and so on—at the end of the day human cognition is what it is. But to the extent that there are distinguished object- and meta-levels, I think meta-level variation is the strongest driver of object-level variation between at least moderately educated people.
Those were intended as characteristic beliefs that would pick out clearly recognizable clusters, not entire worldviews themselves. “Love Thy Neighbor” as a substitute for “Christianity”—except that I don’t have good names for the worldviews in question.
I’ve likely overestimated how salient the concrete-instrumentalist-(problem solver) vs. abstract-(scientific realist)-(theory builder) divide is for most people, but I think the two are clearly at least as different and understand each other at least as poorly as mainstream liberals and conservatives in the US.