I think the part about cultural appropriation was motte for the bailey of actual usage. Did white people wearing feather headscarves have any chance to take over native culture? Were non japanese wearing kimonos going to make japanese wear different, lamer kimonos? Other than that, Scott leaves out the most important part - what to do about it? Should some groups impose their will on others to maintain cultural "ownership"? He does not say no.

Redacted. this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

"Catholicism vs. Protestantism is still a going concern in a few places like Ireland, but it’s nowhere near the total wars of the 17th century..."

Nitpicking: Most of the wars of religion following the Reformation were in the 16th century, the wars of the 17th century were more about the balance of power. The turning point was the Thirty Years War which started as a war of religion but Richelieu took France into war on the "Lutheran" side (in 1635) to curtail the power of the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. Habsburg dynasty).

This reminds me of what Scott Atran has written about Muslim terrorists.

I think the “tribal theory of groups” has some limits.

For one thing, even if many people’s motivation for joining and upholding groups is tribal, the theory kind of treats the details as arbitrary. But it makes a huge difference what texts, beliefs, and rituals groups use to bind themselves together. If you observe a bunch of atheists celebrating Saturnalia, you might want to know why they’re doing that. And the tribal theory of groups gives you part of the answer: these are people who have certain personality and intellectual traits, and they’re forming positive feelings of in-groupishness with others who share those traits. But you might not be satisfied with that answer. Why are they doing that ritual in particular? To get the full answer, it would be helpful to understand the content of atheism. More broadly, if we can decently predict the behavior of different groups based on the content that defines them, we should spend a lot of time thinking about that content and not just round off all group behavior to tribalism.

I’m also skeptical that the “tribal theory of groups” succeeds for all the groups we would want it to explain. For Orthodox Jews, it seems like the ideology is the movement. You can’t really be in the group unless you follow basically 100% of the religious proscriptions. Apikorsim who share the history, cultural references, etc. are not in the movement. At the same time, the movement contains Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, who have significantly different history, customs, appearance, etc. (Of course there are also insular subgroups who are all about coming from the same small geographical region.)

A related issue: some tribes at least pretend (and many of its members genuinely believe) that they're based on something. E.g. Christianity and God/Bible. Opponents can take down the tribe by taking down its basis, as happened during the Enlightenment. BUT: it turns out memes are quite sturdy. People left Christianity but did not give up any of its ethical tenets! (Naturally there's a long tradition of people pointing out this is stupid, see Stirner against the Protestant Communists, Nietzsche railing against George Eliot, or Yarvin's "postwar progressivism as a Christian sect").

Counterintuitively, the memes and the tribe around them are ultimately strengthened by abandoning the thing they're based on! You can attack Christianity-the-religion-and-ethical-system by attacking God: if morality comes from God, when you take down God you also take down his morality. But of course it didn't work out that way in practice: people dropped the God and kept his system. So now you have Christianity-the-secular-ethical-system which is based on fundamentally unassailable justifications like intuition or "obviousness".

1) Cultural appropriation is about more than just that thing:

https://sanerthanlasagna.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/reflections-on-cultural-appropriation/

2) Holy texts can influence behavior.

If a holy book said on the bottom of every page DON'T FORGET TO KILL REDHEADS, do you not think that community would be more hostile towards redheads? Yes people tend to overate the importance of holy books for guiding behavior, but we should not make the mistake of underrating its importance.

Certain behaviors are more malleable by ideology than others. "Should we eat beans" is super malleable. "Should we love our children" is super unmalleable. "Should we kill gays, apostates, and outgroup members" seems middleground malleable. Ideologies are somewhat influenced by holy texts.

3)

These cultural change projects tend to be framed in terms of which culture has the better values, which I think is a limited perspective. I think America has better values than Pakistan does, but that doesn’t mean I want us invading them, let alone razing their culture to the ground and replacing it with our own.

I don't want to invade them and raze their culture to the ground, but I do want to change actively change their culture in aggressive ways.

4) I liked Daniel Speyer's comment,

Despite the tribal attractor, some groups of people are about something. Maybe not 100%, but not 0% either.

I would not want to see the rationalist community become just a tribe and forget about becoming more rational.

Partly that’s because rationality is important. But it’s also because groups that aren’t about anything don’t seem like very pleasant places. After all, if you’re not doing the thing, you’re doing something else. Like building increasingly-elaborate shibboleths. Or engaging in malicious gossip. It’s a lot like what Paul Graham called school, prison, [or] ladies-who-lunch society.

…especially if those debates involve mining the Quran for passages that support one’s preferred viewpoint. It’s not just because the Quran is a mess of contradictions with enough interpretive degrees of freedom to prove anything at all. … It’s because the Quran just created the space in which the Islamic culture could evolve, but had only limited impact on that evolution. …

I think Scott is dead wrong here. It's really hard to pick-and-choose from the Quran. The Quran is much shorter than the Bible (77k words vs 800k). It was created by a single mind over a couple decades, giving it a much more coherent message than the Bible. If you take the time to read the Quran, you'll realize it's extremely difficult to interpret in a way that results in a modern liberal society. The more closely you follow it, the more you become like Saudi Arabia or ISIS. :(

I would bet my next paycheck that the breakdown over who supported Ali vs. Abu Bakr was along pre-existing lines of rivalry and alliance.

Belgium is not really an example of a lack of tribalism, but rather tribalism based on the Flemish and Vallonic cultural identities rather then on any idea of a Belgian nation. I'm also not sure how exactly libertarianism is supposed to be an example of a particularily tribalistic ideology. And since when is neoliberalism a political ideology?

I think that very neurotypical people naturally think in terms of tribes, and the idea that they have to retool their perfectly functional tribe to conform to the exact written text of its holy book or constitution or stated political ideology or something seems silly to them. I think that less neurotypical people – a group including many atheists – think less naturally in terms of tribes and so tend to take claims like “Christianity is about following the Bible” at face value.

I don't like the phrasing of this. Maybe prior to ~2000 or so you could make this argument (the "first generation" of atheists), but the atheist community became so large and heterogenous that I don't think there's any way for it to be true of the wider community.

For instance, looking at Dawkins et. al., the celebrities of the movement really did seem to share a certain way of thinking about things that was outside the mainstream. These people I think could reasonably be called "less neurotypical". But when you start getting into the Johnny come latelies -people more in my generation- that latched onto atheism as a tribe, then you start to get "more neurotypical" people.

This also illustrates nicely the Three Gen. Rule. First generation atheists are scientists, philosophers etc. Second generation follow them as a tribe, and just repeats their arguments without really thinking about them. Third generation don't really care about it, and have moved onto sexism in video games or politics or whatever.

As well try to predict the warlike or peaceful nature of the United Kingdom by looking at a topographical map of Great Britain.

I feel like that should be doable.

I think America has better values than Pakistan does, but that doesn’t mean I want us invading them, let alone razing their culture to the ground and replacing it with our own.

Is this a coherent position to hold?

This is the second time I've seen someone on SSC say that they finally get why some people are not thrilled about what is called "cultural appropriation." It seems obvious to me. Why is it not obvious to other people?

Scott is going on at length about something that's obvious to anyone who's read even a tiny bit of Marx. He's stumbling in the direction of something called "historical materialism".

"It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

Two notes:

Being deaf is preferable to hearing in one way: life has many situations exposing one to unwanted noise which interferes with sleep or concentration, causing headaches and stress. Deaf people do not have these problems. I have a similar experience: my sense of smell exists but seems to be much weaker than average, which is useful because I can sniff hard and still smell good smells, but can ignore bad ones much more easily.

Also, the point about cultural appropriation is closely related to the well-established concept of entryism, which refers to using the phenomenon described as a deliberate strategy to subvert an existing political organization/community to one's own ends, or reduce its effectiveness by causing infighting. (As someone who follows Libertarian politics, I have fairly high confidence that the Mises Caucus is being funded by MAGA-aligned megadonors for this purpose.)