More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jamie Wheal
Read between
May 22 - June 12, 2021
there’s one final rate-limiter, one dial that we have to tweak in order to handle what’s ahead: our ability to grieve.
As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once advised, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity; but I would give my life for the simplicity the other side of complexity.”
Another Wendell, MacArthur Fellow Wendell Berry, wrote that we have no choice but to “be joyful, though [we] have considered all the facts.”
Culture, as conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart observed, is upstream of politics. But he neglected to mention that biology sits upstream of them both.
the past four hundred years have a tarnished record of “scientific” arguments propping up everything from the institution of slavery to chemical castration for homosexuals to wage gaps between men and women. Social activists aren’t wrong to suspect that science hasn’t always been a pure pursuit of knowledge free from ideology.)
Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, himself no stranger to the culture wars, notes that “there are really two ways in which cooperation evolves. The first one is very ancient and is based on genetic relatedness. . . . The other kind of cooperation is based on various kinds of reciprocity and it is much newer and much more fragile [starting 10,000 years ago]. When reciprocity-based cooperation breaks down we default to gene-based cooperation. . . . Backing people against the wall who have a genetic basis for cooperation is very dangerous because history tells us . . . they may turn into a
...more
While evolutionary biology looks at these dynamics playing out across hundreds of generations, neurochemistry maps the
“According to our experiments,” Oxford researcher Molly Crockett wrote in an address to the World Economic Forum, “[when] serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in self-regulation . . . levels are low, people become more focused on immediate rewards, and they become more impulsive and aggressive.”
Doped up on dopamine, we feel better, but we behave worse.
There’s a final layer of neurochemistry that drives group bonding—oxytocin. While oxytocin has been touted as the “cuddle drug,” the “love hormone,” and even the “moral molecule” because of its ability to prompt generosity and bond mother to child and lover to lover, it, like most explanations of the biology beneath our psychology, isn’t quite that simple. “Now these studies [showing the positive effects of oxytocin] are scientifically valid, and they’ve been replicated,” Crockett explained at TED, “but they’re not the whole story. Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases
...more
Katherine Wu, a Harvard immunologist, takes it a step further. “Oxytocin [also plays] a role in ethnocentrism, increasing our love for people in our already-established cultural groups and making those unlike us seem more foreign. Thus,...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Left to our own devices, we regress under stress. Put simply, tribalism is destiny. Humanism is optional.
Alt-right neo-Nazis actually have more in common with far left radicals than either would be willing to admit.
Dark Triad of personality types—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
the centrists—those people who held pro-social values but also respected the choices of others—did not show any correlation with the Authoritarian Dark Triad. But both the radical left and alt-right did. That’s the basic contrast. Omni-Considerate win-win, versus self-interested win-lose.
Robespierre is the poster boy for the Dark Triad, warping the ideals of the French Revolution into the bloody Reign of Terror.
As cathartic as it may feel to be not just right but righteous, as justified as that rage and disillusionment may be, if we go that way, it will be our undoing.
Unleash the dogs of war and they’ll almost certainly come back to bite us.
after the Vandals sacked ancient Rome, it took until the Declaration of Independence for us to claw back to the same standard of living.
In 1987, theologian James Carse wrote a short book called Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. In it, he described most of human history as consisting of finite games, i.e., discrete contests with clear winners and losers. These would include war and conquest, but also transactional business, sexual negotiations, and national politics. Anything with a one up/one down outcome. According to Carse, there was another game, the Infinite Game—which, instead of having winners and losers, creates conditions where the purpose isn’t to end the game victorious. The purpose
...more
“The dream of the 18th century was that a single, coherent set of values, rooted in rationality, could make a heaven on Earth,” UC Berkeley philosopher Alison Gopnik writes. “But more-recent philosophers . . . sobered by the 20th century’s failed utopias, have argued for a more modest liberal pluralism that makes room for multiple, genuinely conflicting goods. Family and work, solidarity and autonomy, tradition and innovation are really valuable, and really in tension, in both the lives of individuals and the life of a nation. One challenge for enlightenment now is to build social institutions
...more
While that kind of split-the-difference compromise is often held in contempt by revolutionaries, there is a subtle genius to M.A.D.—mutually assured dissatisfaction. At its worst, this kind of strategic stalemate leads to stagnation and frustration. At its best, this sort of agonistic liberalism leads to the kinds of hard-won compromises that delight virtually no one, frustrate nearly everyone, and perversely expand the chance to keep playing the Infinite Game with more and more players, better than any other options we’ve found.
The only honest answer is “it depends.”
every time we’ve repaid oppression with oppression, it’s ended in bloodshed and more suffering. The few times our Better Angels have met oppression with compassion, we’ve remade the world.
If we conclude that the regression into violent win-lose tribalism as the planet strains to support eight billion humans is a catastrophically bad idea, then we must also conclude, as Muhammad advised, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” At least for now. Maybe forever.
Even the “early adopters” who’d planted gardens, raised barns, and forged community in that ideal spot were suddenly refugees from events sparked off halfway around the world. There really is no “away.”
To understand how viral ideas propagate and mutate, we need to examine a horrific example of global infection that makes the others seem tame—the 2012 YouTube spread of the K-pop song “Gangnam Style.” That year, a strange, atonal, numbingly repetitive song exploded in popularity, becoming the first video on YouTube to pass one billion views.
Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. . . . We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools. —Martin Luther King Jr.
As Elon Musk said recently when challenged why he would give away all the technology behind his battery patents, “It makes no sense to be the only person sitting in the lifeboat.” Even Machiavelli and Sun Tzu would have to agree.
The saints and sages of the Axial Age—Jesus, Plato, Zoroaster, Buddha, Lao-tzu—all had some universal insight that transcended tribe and allegiance. But virtually no one truly picked up what they were laying down, and many of their profound insights got co-opted. “In truth,” Nietzsche wryly observed, “there was only one Christian and he died on the cross.”
it’s looking more and more like an Intertwingularity. As we search for some kind of coherent explanation for a world in turmoil, everyone’s favorite mythologies are smashing, crashing, and blending into each other. It’s getting near impossible to separate signal from noise.
To be sure, there are social media algorithms amplifying our worst instincts, geopolitical players weaponizing content, and fringe theorists confusing things almightily—but these seeds are landing in especially fertile soil in our minds right now—and here’s why. Our little amygdalas, oxytocin, and dopamine.
it’s fair to say that our amygdalas—our threat detection systems—have been on super high alert.
Each time we listen to that amygdala alarm clock and find something that Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky calls “salient”—meaning it might make us or break us—we get a strong squirt of dopamine.
But a funny thing happens when we get too much dopamine in our systems. We succumb to apophenia. It’s the tendency to perceive patterns and meaning between otherwise unconnected events and facts. It shows up in early onset schizophrenia and in conspiracy theorists.
When we’re considering End of Days Rapture Ideologies, there’s less difference between what’s written on ancient papyrus, celluloid, and comic books than we might think. All our mythologies, both contemporary and historic, are products of human imagination expressed in language and image—it’s only the format that has changed over the years.
When it comes to holy scripture—there’s text, there’s subtext, and then there’s context.
According to the Pew Research Foundation, 58 percent of American evangelicals believe that the Second Coming is going to occur before 2050. Consider that for a minute. Saving for retirement? No point. Transitioning off fossil fuels? Why bother? Saving endangered species or solving world hunger? That would just be playing God when He’s coming again, soon enough.
No matter how nerve-racking the Cold War might have been, at least it operated on a game-theory rationale of self-preservation shared by the major players.
But Meaning 2.0, what we might term the religion of classical liberalism—the belief that free markets and democracy will usher us all forward to an era of equality and prosperity—has come up short as well.
If Meaning 1.0 was all about salvation for the faithful, Meaning 2.0 has been about inclusion of the masses. Religion has always promised inspiration, healing, and connection, but it did so at the cost of identifying an elect who deserved such perks, and nonbelievers who didn’t.
Meaning 2.0—with its extension of inalienable rights to everyone regardless of belief or background, offered inclusion—but at the price of salvation. That was what Nietzsche was talking about when he observed that “God is dead.” We got the vote, the fridge, and the smartphone, but we forgot what it was all for. That has played a large part in the rise of diseases of despair. Fundamentalism on one hand and nihilism on the other. Neither is especially helpful.
Thousands of products and vendors and somehow all of it arrived fresh, on time, and in overwhelming quantity. To which Adam Smith would have replied—the Invisible Man got it all done. Or at least, his Invisible Hand—the miracle of the free market. A thousand small decisions, each made in a frictionless environment by a thousand independent actors, all resulting in a sublime concert of grocery greatness (and pudding pops).
We’re in the age of philanthrocapitalism—where Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others, after ruthlessly crushing competitors and exploiting offshore tax havens, are now redirecting their historic fortunes toward solving many of the problems they helped create (and to be fair, a few they had no part of).
As much as it’s tempting to sit back, secretly relieved that our Iron Man Super Geniuses are going to swoop in to save us, the strategy is flawed.
There are several reasons philanthrocapitalism doesn’t work as well as we need it to. First, it absolves us of reviving dysfunctional democratic responses. Our systems for addressing social needs are broken, but the solution is to fix them at the local level, not bypass them altogether. Second, it’s a massively inefficient redistribution of capital. There’s an enormous amount of humanitarian and civil engineering that is not sexy at all, and may never catch the eye of a major donor. Waiting for earmarked handouts from the digital Robber Barons is a lopsided way to address a broad portfolio of
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
MacArthur fellow Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health, agrees. “It doesn’t surprise me that as someone who has made his fortune on developing a novel technology, Bill Gates would look for ‘magic bullets’ in vaccines and medicines. But if we don’t have a solid delivery system, this work will be thwarted. That’s something that’s going to be hard for the big foundations . . . they treat tuberculosis. They don’t treat poverty.”
We need to update I, Pencil, with its emphasis on the invisible hand of the market, into We, Humans, and our collective wisdom and resourcefulness.
we’ve lost many of the pro-social elements that Faith used to convey. We’re suffering in their absence. After all, religion, as a cultural meme, would not have persisted for tens of thousands of years if it didn’t convey an adaptive advantage.
What you believe appears to be far less important than that you believe.
