From Alexander himself:
People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell — the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable — until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.
5 comments:
Interesting to note that in order to justify their actions, various folks invoked the 'tuning the alien machine really really carefully' analogy according to that Time article. The problem is, of course, conflating 'well tuned' with 'we won'.
Exactly. I'm guessing Scott Alexander means by "tuning" some careful attention to ensuring that all voices can be heard, but others will understand him to mean more and better censorship. He can talk about the dangers of brutally enforced conformity until he's blue in the face without making a dent in that mindset. They'll just keep yammering about the obvious dangers of "giving a platform" to their enemies in thought.
I think the HBD Chick, Steven Pinker "Better Angles" and Hajnal Line model is a better explanation than the liberalism, enlightenment model (though Pinker claims to subscribe to it too, despite his own data showing otherwise). Increased cooperativeness and lower internal violence has been going on since the 12th C, maybe even the 8th in NW Europe, most likely because of the genetics of reducing cousin marriage and transferring loyalties from clans to feudalism.
It is double-edged, as the cooperative can more easily get together and cooperate in taking over other places, but getting along increased steadily. Post WWII, it wasn't because everyone decided they'd had enough of war, though that is what they said, but that tribal groups in most of the world consolidated behind their own borders rather than being mixed. Germans mostly went back to Germany, and that helped.
"A technology for preventing civil war" is an original and worthwhile description, but why an *alien* technology?
Pentagon declasses documents about alien metal in failed reverse engineering scheme.
Cw2 was inevitable so long as factionalism was on the rise. I noticed this issue in 2007. The cycle of history.
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