Isegoria

Scott Alexander summarizes the latest hullabaloo:

Curtis Yarvin (aka “Mencius Moldbug”) was invited to give a presentation on his new computer system Urbit to the Strange Loop tech conference. Then some of his ideological enemies (actually literal Communists) found out, objected to his political views, and he got banned from the conference. Article here, Hacker News thread here, impressively prescient Moldbug post here, demonstration of inevitable Streisand Effect here. I did consider not linking this since it’s so obviously toxoplasma, but I was convinced to do so by this letter where the conference organizer states he’s never read any Moldbug himself, but decided to cave to the ban request because otherwise politics overshadow the conference, which was supposed to be about tech. This kind of crystallizes a pattern I’ve been noticing recently where some social justice activists use a tactic along the lines of “Nice institution youse gots here, shame if somebody were to politicize it”. I sympathize with the desire to give into that to avoid trouble, but I think maybe the only way to avoid enshrining that kind of heckler’s veto always working is to make it clear that the choice to give in will also be politicized. Maybe if organizers know that banning all insufficiently-leftist-people and not banning all insufficiently-leftist-people will both result in politicization and Internet firestorms, they’ll say “screw it” and just follow their principles.

T. Greer sometimes complains that 21st century American political culture has been hijacked by hyper-partisan signaling:

It is easy to forget that this is not a new complaint. You can find political signaling spirals rearing their ugly head many times in humanity’s past — at the height of the antebellum republic’s Second Party system, during the intense debates of the Four Colors of Joseon Korea, and of course, in Early Modern England:

My worthy Friend Sir Roger, when we are talking of the Malice of Parties, very frequently tells us an Accident that happened to him when he was a School-boy, which was at a time when the Feuds ran high between the Round-heads and Cavaliers. This worthy Knight being then but a Stripling, had Occasion to enquire which was the Way to St. Ann’s Lane, upon which the Person whom he spoke to, instead of answering his Question, called him a young Popish Cur, and asked him who had made Ann a Saint? The Boy being in some Confusion, enquired of the next he met, which was the way to Ann’s Lane, but was called a Prick-eared Curr for his Pains, and instead of being shown the Way was told, that she had been a Saint before he was born, and would be one after he was hang’d. Upon this, says Sir Roger, I did not think fit to repeat the former Question, but going into every Lane of the Neighbourhood, asked what they called the Name of that Lane. By which ingenious Artifice he found out the Place he enquired after, without giving Offence to any Party. [1]

That is an excerpt from Joseph Addison’s essay, Spectator 145, published first in a Whig daily named the Spectator on the 14th of July, 1711.

It is difficult to exaggerate how different life is in a city of a million people or more and in a small city or town:

I don’t mean that people in big cities lack friends or even that they cannot have an important a sense of community in their neighborhood. I refer instead to differences in quotidian culture that bear on the nature of the role of government.

If you’re an urban dweller and you’ve got a problem with a water bill or getting your trash picked up, you must deal with an anonymous city bureaucracy. The policeman who arrives when your apartment is burgled is someone you’ve never seen before and will never see again. If you get into a dispute with a neglectful landlord or an incompetent contractor, there is probably no personal relationship that you can use to resolve the dispute; you have to take it to court.

By its nature, the big city itself is an unfathomably complicated machine. It has large numbers of people with serious needs of every kind, for which there are a profusion of government agencies that are supposed to provide assistance. The technological and administrative complexity of the infrastructure that provides police protection, firefighting, water, sewers, electricity, gas, and transportation in congested and densely populated places is staggering.

Now consider the other extreme: a small town or city. It might be 500 people, 3,000, or 15,000; it’s surprising how similarly communities function below a certain size. There’s no sharp cutoff point. For operational purposes, let’s say I’m talking about cities and towns of 25,000 people or fewer.

Daily life in such a place has a much different feel to it than life in the big city. For one thing, people of different ethnicities and socioeconomic classes are thrown together a lot more. There are only a few elementary schools at most, sometimes only one, and usually just a single high school. The students’ parents belong to the same PTAs and attend the same Little League games. The churches are centers of community activities, and while there are some socioeconomic distinctions among their congregations, the churches mix people up a lot.

Hardly anyone in a town or small city is anonymous. Policemen, sales clerks, plumbers, and landlords are often people you know personally. Even when you don’t, you’re likely to know of them — if the plumber’s last name is Overholtz, your parents might have known his parents, or your friend’s daughter married an Overholtz a few years ago, or in a dozen other ways you are able to place that person in the matrix of the town.

The same thing is true of whatever interactions you have with government in a town or small city. In the big city, postal clerks are so often brusque and unhelpful that the stereotype has become notorious. In a town, the postal clerk is more likely to add the necessary postage when you’ve under-stamped and collect later. It’s not because the United States Postal Service assigns its friendliest postal clerks to small towns, but the result of age-old truths about human interactions: When you know that an encounter is going to be one-time, it’s easier to be brusque and unhelpful than when you expect the encounter to be repeated. Repeated encounters tend to generate personal sympathies, understandings, and affiliations.

The mayor and city-council members of a small town are people you can phone if you have a problem. If you live in a small city, solving your problem might involve as little as a phone call to the right person in a municipal bureaucracy that numbers a few dozen people at most. Not every problem will get solved that easily, but, as a rule, the representatives of government in a town or small city are more reluctant to play the role of an “I’m just following the rules” official than is someone working in the bureaucracy of a city of a million. They are more willing and able to cut their fellow citizens some slack. It’s a variation on the reason a village postal clerk is likely to be helpful. Bureaucrats in towns and small cities aren’t faceless. They have to get along with the citizens they govern every day. In fact, they can’t even get away with thinking of their role as “governing” their fellow citizens. They have no choice but to be aware that they are, in fact, public servants.

As for social capital — the potpourri of formal and informal activities that bind a community together — the range and frequency of things that still go on in towns and small cities is astonishing. Such places have not been immune from the overall reduction in social capital that sociologist Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone. But in towns and small cities that still have a stable core of middle-class and blue-collar citizens, the traditional image of the American community survives in practice. These are still places where people don’t bother to lock the doors when they leave the house and the disadvantaged are not nameless “people on welfare,” but individuals whose problems, failings, and potentials are known at a personal level.

As cities get larger, the characteristics I have discussed shift toward the big-city end of the scale, but it happens slowly. The earliest change, and an important one, is that socioeconomic segregation becomes more significant. When a city is large enough to support two high schools, you can be sure that the students who attend each will show substantial mean differences in parental income and education. The larger the population, the more that churches will be segregated by socioeconomic class.

But many of the activities that go under the rubric of social capital continue. The churches remain important sources of such social capital, and so do the clubs such as Rotary, Kiwanis, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and others that are still active in cities of up to a few hundred thousand people (and sometimes beyond). Midsize cities often have strongly felt identities, with solidarity and pride that carry over into concrete projects to make the community better. Even in cities of 300,000 or 400,000, the local movers and shakers are a small enough group that they can be brought together in a variety of ways, as members of a local civic organization or more informally, and they are often able to deal with local problems without a lot of red tape.

I could discuss these characteristics of life for still another kind of community, the suburbs of the great metropolises, but by now the point should be made: The simple size of the places where people live creates enormous diversity in the daily life, in the relationship of citizens to the local government, in the necessity for complex rules, and in the ability of communities to deal with their own problems.

We aren’t talking about a small, quaint fraction of American communities that can deal with their own problems. Conservatives are often chastised for confusing today’s highly urbanized America with an America of a simpler time. I think the opposite mistake is a bigger problem: assuming that most of America is like New York or Chicago. As of the 2010 census, 28 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas or in cities of fewer than 25,000 people. Another 30 percent lived in stand-alone cities (i.e., not satellites to a nearby bigger city) of 25,000–499,999. Fourteen percent lived in satellites to cities with at least 500,000 people. Twenty-eight percent lived in cities with contiguous urbanized areas of more than 500,000 people — the same proportion that lived in places of fewer than 25,000 people.

In the 20th Century, events combined to both dampen and mask cultural diversity:

First, World War I triggered an anti-German reaction that all but destroyed the distinctive German culture. In the 1920s, new immigration laws choked off almost all immigration from everywhere except Britain and northern Europe, and even that was reduced. With each passing year, more children of immigrants married native-born Americans, and fewer grandchildren of immigrants grew up to carry on the distinctive features of their Old World culture. By the middle of the century, the percentages of Americans who were immigrants or even the children of immigrants were at all-time lows. Most of the once vibrant ethnic communities of the great cities had faded to shadows. No longer could you find yourself in an American street scene indistinguishable from one in Palermo or the Warsaw ghetto.

Among native-born Americans, our long-standing tradition of picking up and moving continued, with surges of the population to Florida and the West Coast. Then came World War II. Almost 18 million out of a population of 131 million put on uniforms and were thrown together with Americans from other geographic, socioeconomic, and ethnic backgrounds. The economic effects of war production also prompted a wave of African-American immigration from the South to the North and West.

These demographic changes occurred in the context of the culturally homogenizing effects of mass media. Movies were ubiquitous by the beginning of World War I, and most American homes had a radio by the end of the 1920s. These new mass media introduced a nationally shared popular culture, and one to which almost all Americans were exposed. Given a list of the top movie stars, the top singers, and the top radio personalities, just about everybody younger than 60 would not only have recognized all their names but have been familiar with them and their work.

After the war, television spread the national popular culture even more pervasively. Television viewers had only a few channels to choose from, so everyone’s television-viewing overlapped with everyone else’s. Even if you didn’t watch, you were part of it — last night’s episode of I Love Lucy was a major source of conversation around the water cooler.

In these and many other ways, the cultural variations that had been so prominent at the time of World War I were less obvious by the time the 1960s rolled around. A few cities remained culturally distinct, and the different regions continued to have some different folkways, but only the South stood out as a part of the country that marched to a different drummer, and the foundation of that distinctiveness, the South’s version of racial segregation, had been cracked by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In December 1964, Lyndon Johnson evoked his mentor Sam Rayburn’s dream, expressed in 1913, of an America “that knows no East, no West, no North, no South.” Johnson was giving voice to a sentiment that seemed not only an aspiration but something that the nation could achieve once the civil-rights movement’s triumph was complete.

But even as Johnson spoke, Congress was only a year away from an immigration bill that would reopen America’s borders.

Xavier Marquez presents a simple model of cults of personality:

One of the main problems dictators face is that repression creates liars (preference falsification, in the jargon), yet it is necessary for them to remain in power. This is sometimes called the dictator’s dilemma: it is hard for dictators to gauge their true levels of support or whether or not officials below them are telling them the truth about what is going on in the country because repression gives everyone an incentive to lie, yet they need repression if they are to avoid being overthrown by people exploiting their tolerance to organize themselves. Moreover, repression is costly and works best when it is threatened rather than actually used. All things considered, then, a dictator would often prefer to minimize repression – to use it efficiently so as to minimize its distorting effects on his knowledge and on its effectiveness. He can either allow relatively free debate, and run some risk of being overthrown (this happens especially in poor dictatorships which cannot construct a reliable monitoring apparatus, as Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin show [ungated]), or he can use repression and risk being surprised by a lack of support later.

Here is where cults of personality come in handy. The dictator wants a credible signal of your support; merely staying silent and not saying anything negative won’t cut it. In order to be credible, the signal has to be costly: you have to be willing to say that the dictator is not merely ok, but a superhuman being, and you have to be willing to take some concrete actions showing your undying love for the leader. (You may have had this experience: you are served some food, and you must provide a credible signal that you like it so that the host will not be offended; merely saying that you like it will not cut it. So you will need to go for seconds and layer on the praise). Here the concrete action required of you is typically a willingness to denounce others when they fail to say the same thing, but it may also involve bizarre pilgrimages, ostentatious displays of the dictator’s image, etc. The cult of personality thus has three benefits from the point of view of the dictator (aside from stroking his vanity).

When everybody lies about how wonderful the dictator is, there is no common knowledge: you do not know how much of this “support” is genuine and how much is not, which makes it hard to organize against the dictator and exposes one to risks, sometimes enormous risks, if one so much as tries to share one’s true views, since others can signal their commitment to the dictator by denouncing you. This is true of all mechanisms that induce preference falsification, however: they prevent coordination.

What makes cults of personality interesting, however, is that the more baroque and over the top, the better (though the “over the top” level needs to be achieved by small steps), since differences in signals of commitment indicate gradations of personal support of the dictator, and hence give the dictator a reasonable measurement of his true level of support that is not easily available to the public. (Though you have to be willing to interpret these signals, and not come to actually believe them naively).

Finally, a cult of personality can in fact transform some fraction of the population into genuine supporters, which may come in handy later. In a social world where everyone appears to be convinced of godlike status of the leader, it is very hard to “live in truth” as Havel and other dissidents in communist regimes argued.

To be sure, in order for a cult of personality to work, you must start small, and you must be willing to both reward (those who denounce) and punish (those who do not praise) with sufficient predictability, which presents a problem if control is initially lacking; there must be a group committed to enforcement at the beginning, and capable of slowly increasing the threshold “signal” of support required of citizens. (So some dictators fail at this: consider, e.g., Mobutu’s failures in this respect, partly from inability to monitor what was being said about him or to punish deviations with any certainty). But once the cult of personality is in full swing, it practically runs itself, turning every person into a sycophant and basically destroying everyone’s dignity in the process. It creates an equilibrium of lies that can be hard to disrupt unless people get a credible  signal that others basically hate the dictator as much as they do and are willing to do something about that.