Hi Roger, I agree with comments. Yes, there has been important progress within the content of thought. But because that kind of morality is just ideas, it’s not permanent or durable. It can change quickly based on particular local circumstances. It is of course nonetheless an important project to keep working on.
Here’s an example which may add to what we’re exploring.
To my knowledge, every ideology ever invented has inevitably subdivided in to competing internal factions. The universality of this experience suggests the source of the division is something that all ideologies have in common. This can not be their content, for the content of ideologies varies widely. What all ideologies have in common is what they’re all made of, thought.
And so we see many very different ideologies all follow a similar path of internal division, due to the nature of the medium in which all the ideologies exist.
Yes, cultural mindsets and institutions are impermanent and dynamic. But that implies they can improve as well as deteriorate. Twelve thousand years ago most people were part of a band with a moral circle or network of three or four dozen people. Today we see networks of cooperation that involve billions in some cases. Part of this is from the creation of rules, institutions, norms, and behavioral mindsets which allow us to increasingly solve the problems of cooperation. We have become more moral or at least our morality has become more effective and broader in scope.
Yes, culture can improve, and has. Is our morality more effective? That’s a tricky one.
Consider that we have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, and we generally find this ever present existential threat too boring to bother discussing. It seems we have a ways to go yet in achieving effective morality.
I think we’re basically agreeing that culture can both improve and deteriorate. The history of modern Germany perhaps offers one example of that. High culture, to primitive barbarism, and then back to high culture.
Hi Roger, I agree with comments. Yes, there has been important progress within the content of thought. But because that kind of morality is just ideas, it’s not permanent or durable. It can change quickly based on particular local circumstances. It is of course nonetheless an important project to keep working on.
Here’s an example which may add to what we’re exploring.
To my knowledge, every ideology ever invented has inevitably subdivided in to competing internal factions. The universality of this experience suggests the source of the division is something that all ideologies have in common. This can not be their content, for the content of ideologies varies widely. What all ideologies have in common is what they’re all made of, thought.
And so we see many very different ideologies all follow a similar path of internal division, due to the nature of the medium in which all the ideologies exist.
Yes, cultural mindsets and institutions are impermanent and dynamic. But that implies they can improve as well as deteriorate. Twelve thousand years ago most people were part of a band with a moral circle or network of three or four dozen people. Today we see networks of cooperation that involve billions in some cases. Part of this is from the creation of rules, institutions, norms, and behavioral mindsets which allow us to increasingly solve the problems of cooperation. We have become more moral or at least our morality has become more effective and broader in scope.
Yes, culture can improve, and has. Is our morality more effective? That’s a tricky one.
Consider that we have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, and we generally find this ever present existential threat too boring to bother discussing. It seems we have a ways to go yet in achieving effective morality.
I think we’re basically agreeing that culture can both improve and deteriorate. The history of modern Germany perhaps offers one example of that. High culture, to primitive barbarism, and then back to high culture.