Social Cohesion and Freedom

Inchoate is perhaps the best word to describe my sustained interest in the notion that somehow we can characterize the complexity of interactions using a standardized grammar or toolkit. Sometimes small pebbles of coherence emerge from this interest, like work on characterizing the complexity of grammars for generating neural networks or interesting music production systems (after great effort, moderate diversity and connectedness is not surprisingly a requirement for both of them!)

Still, I remain a student of the general theme and so am intrigued when people like David Sloan Wilson characterize the role of religion in social cohesion as providing unique evolutionary advantage at the group level (Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society). While arguing about group dynamics in evolutionary circles is somewhat heretical, Wilson paints a picture that once again uses language like diversity, prediction, connectivity and social support.

From some cross-over of libertarian and paleo-conservative thinking, comes another intriguing data point from The American Conservative. Yes, that’s Pat Buchanan’s magazine. Pat regularly brings up the notion of “balkanization” both in reference to the Balkans as an example of a geopolitical mess, and as a broader metaphor for the problem of diversity in modern societies, so it is not surprising to see his magazine latching onto Robert Putnam’s discourse on changing American civic involvement (Bowling Alone) and related research on the potential drivers for civic strife.

The TAC article by Steve Sailer is somewhat fragmented, jumping around through some sloppy generalizations about ethnic identities (Hispanics and Italians don’t build large organizations because they only trust extended families, for instance), and dipping into wag-the-dog-style political fervors driven by a common enemy. It ends with some minor discussion of how both religion and mandates can improve cooperation between people, with the latter example being the Army limiting career advancement among officers who discriminate.

Now I suspect Sailer and Buchanan consider this grist for a policy mill that aims to reduce immigration to the US (or perhaps be simply more selective about it), but in some ways it works against their more cherished cause of small government and limited government because, given an uncooperative, pluralistic and diverse population, one remaining channel to achieve grander visions is through government action. Government and law become the conduits for coordination by transforming distrust in others into (perhaps grudging) acceptance of institutions. Even Sailer admits as much in noting that:

In America, you don’t need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law.

So I suspect that we have achieved a stalemate of sorts, with the benefits of diversity (I’ll just start with my restaurant options today and leave it at that…) balanced against less social cohesion, but perhaps propped up by institutions that are trusted enough that we are not always suspicious of corrupt abuses of power. That seems like a gentle enough substitution for a civil religion to me, with a more subtle organizing physics that preserves the freedom to think outside the confines of any monolithic pattern of ideation.

Swarms and Social Cybernetics

David Sloan Wilson, in his spectacular Darwin's Cathedral, does an in-depth analysis of Korean-American Christian Churches in the Houston area. Newly arriving immigrants, some with only a few hundred dollars in their pockets, use the church as a transitional community asset that supports them through jobs, business development, loans and other benefits. Many second generation children complain that their parents have only the church and other church members as their community, even after twenty or thirty years.

Wilson's analysis also points to some of the relatively simple mechanisms that are used to try to keep church members actively involved. Every Sunday, for instance, there is a flier placed in mail boxes assigned to each member. After the service, the church staff contacts any parishioners who failed to pick-up their flier, giving them a clear attendance record.

Wilson never uses the term "cybernetic" to describe the pushes and pulls that are needed to keep a community actively engaged, especially communities that expect tithes and human capital, but that was the term that kept popping up as I read through his slim manifesto. I visualized a swarm of points in space orbiting each other in close formation. Occasionally a point would break away and start to orbit into another group, only to be pulled back to the original center of gravity by attractive forces (incentives) combined with shame forces (disincentives). The steam governor at work in sociology. The tighter knit or more extreme the ideas, the stronger those attractive forces.

A New York Times article shared similar thoughts. In it, a Harvard Law prof went through a Conservative Jewish Yeshiva and went on to a do great things. When he went back to a wedding of an old friend from school, the subsequent wedding photos did not show him. He had been literally erased from the photos. The reason: he had been accompanied by an Asian American girlfriend. The motivation was to remove the record of his failure to abide the expected rules, thereby both shaming him and eliminating any temptation for other young men who might see the photo and start thinking outside the Hassidic box, so to speak. Defeating free thinking and Hellenism prevented assimilation once. Defeating Asian chicks is a comparatively minor self-correction.

But could such qualitative social forces as shame and sense of belonging be given a quantitative reality that helps describe the rate of change of social and religious groups over time? We might be able to use group membership counts and look at correlations between the subjective opinions of group members as to the attitudes of other group members as a proxy for the cohesion mechanisms or memes in the group. Wilson does a bit of this when he reviews a survey of the orthodoxy of different religious groups as gauged by a random sample of religious scholars.