Very interesting as always. The point about long term ignorance works not only for the future but also the past. People don’t take into account how arduous and complex the road to civilization was. They assume our current state is natural.
But, if our unconscious violent reflexes make us misadjusted to the modern world, it’s also true that our conscious expectations make us completely unprepared for the savagery of the old one. Almost everyone calling for aggressions would be lost if we went back to the law of the jungle.
Regarding long term strategies and the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, maybe you can confirm but I remember reading that tit-for-tat with a bit of forgiveness (to account for noise in the signals) was the best strategy -which shows how important candid cooperation is.
One small nitpick about the quote: “c’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute” is usually attributed to Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe although sometimes to Joseph Fouché (in his biography by Stefan Zweig)
Thanks for the note about the quote, I'll check it out! For the tit for tat, it is actually not the "best" strategy. It is just a very effective one, which is surprising given its simplicity. The best strategy depends on the starting point (e.g. initial distribution of strategies). That being said, effective strategies seem to share the features identified by Axelrod in tit for tat: niceness, forgiveness, and not being pushovers.
This is an interesting text, but in my view it does not distinguish appropriately between personal and collective violence, and between institutional and insurgent violence. In particular, the comment on Burke and the French Revolution seems to me too much on the conservative side. The fact is that Ancien Regime elites opposed adamantly reasonable demands, and their institutional violence (including foreign intervention) contributed decisively to the spiral of violence that ensued. Arno Mayer, in his book "The furies", has countered this conservative narrative in a very clever way. We like it or not, actually existing liberalism required a one-hundred year violent dismantling of the Ancien Regime and its injustices and inequalities. It is hard to think about a realistic historical alternative to this (Burke did not tell us, I think), and it is surprising that modern liberals "repress" the very material conditions of what allowed them to become historically hegemonic.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I should be clear that I am not claiming that violence is never politically effective. As I noted in a footnote, the assassination of authoritarian leaders has sometimes produced sustained democratic openings (Jones & Olken, 2009). The case for fantasies of violence being a delusion is particularly strong in peaceful liberal democracies, where institutionalised channels exist to manage conflict. It is much less so in autocracies, where oppressed groups may have little to lose in resorting to violence.
In relation to the French Revolution, an overly conservative reading in the Burkean style, where violence is seen as irrational chaos, would be wrong. At the same time, I don't think that the violence it unleashed was just a reaction to repression, as in suggested by Mayer’s (2000) counter-argument. Revolutionary violence arose from the progressive collapse of legitimacy and shared norms, fuelled by mistrust, fear of conspiracy, and the erosion of political compromise. A key aspect of the process was not elite violence but mismanagement by Louis XVI of the fiscal and political crisis. I believe this view is more in line with modern historiography's conclusion. Revolutionary actors came to operate in an environment filled with fear and suspicion, where each side believed the other was plotting betrayal (Tackett, "The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution", 2015). Violence escalated as cooperation between groups disintegrated, pushing actors into maximalist positions (Andress, "The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution", 2005).
That is not a quote by Napoleon, but rather a quote about Napoleons reign. Bonaparte accused the Duke of Enghien of conspiring against him. The Duke was convicted in absentia, seized from his home, dragged to a moat by the side of the castle and shot near a grave already dug for him. Aristocrats were all appalled. Napoleons chief of police, Fouche, said of the execution - “it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake”.
As was pointed out on my Bluesky thread, political violence has actually worked pretty well for the political right: the assassination of Rabin, the (ultimately successful) Trump coup in 2021, the murder of Matteotti, many more examples. But the appeal of leftwing violence is a delusion and a snare.
Thanks for this well justified analysis as usual. I concur with the argument that political violence is really ineffective in our modern world. And it also makes sense that that it is even less effective than it might have been in the past for all of the reasons you say.
However, I disagree with the (implied, though not stated) thesis that it used to be effective in the "environment of evolutionary adaptiveness." I've proposed a different account, based on the central role that relationships play in our lives. You can read it in detail on my page but I don't want to self-promote so I'll state the relevant parts here.
Human minds are, for very good evolutionary reasons (which I know you have also talked about), very sensitive to their status in relationships. "Who thinks they are better than me, who respects me as an equal, who is treats me as their superior." This kind of thinking precedes consciousness of "group" or "tribe" or any kind of politics, or any practical understanding of institutions that can "punish" or reward. You can see it with young children, especially siblings. Who is allowed to give whom advice about a video game? It can lead to a huge fight!
The specifically intolerable state of mind I am proposing is: "they [other party] don't think I am worthy of their respect." Not love, affection -- respect. By this I mean, that I am "taken seriously," that my motives and potential for action "weigh" on the mind of the other.
This is important because _respect_ is something you can earn back with harmful actions. Israel loathes and vilifies Hamas after October 7, but they definitely take them more seriously.
In this way, the provocation to a "worse" outcome -- escalating violence -- that is totally impractical is a risk worth taking. In sloppy colloquial terms, many people would rather be murdered because they are seen as a "threat" than simply forgotten about and left to starve because they aren't "worth considering.' I'm not an evolutionary biologist or anthropologist but you get the idea.
I think best evidence of this is the feeling of "spite," which I posted about months ago. People even do spiteful things to get retribution against dead people, where there is no possible material benefit. But there is a psychic benefit of 'proving" to your imagination of that person that they were wrong. The exact evolutionary story is beyond my expertise, but the basic idea is that our wiring to focus on theories of mind through relationships creates this elaborate "psychodramatic" instinct for retaliation that really has nothing to do the material situation we are in at all.
This is a helpful piece. The one thing I would add to the Kirk quote about “when people stop talking we get violence” is that we should consider whether we should be talking so much all the time about everything. Sometimes it may help to talk less. We have a surplus of talkers and scarcity of listeners. I genuinely doubt that anyone's ever changed anyone's values using verbal persuasion. But if you let people talk, they can sometimes talk themselves into a new perspective on the values they set out to defend, regardless of the quality of the arguments. That's also the problem with the "prove me wrong" approach that Kirk brought to college campuses. It was a gimmick, not a real forum for intellectual and moral development, unfortunately.
Very interesting as always. The point about long term ignorance works not only for the future but also the past. People don’t take into account how arduous and complex the road to civilization was. They assume our current state is natural.
But, if our unconscious violent reflexes make us misadjusted to the modern world, it’s also true that our conscious expectations make us completely unprepared for the savagery of the old one. Almost everyone calling for aggressions would be lost if we went back to the law of the jungle.
Regarding long term strategies and the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, maybe you can confirm but I remember reading that tit-for-tat with a bit of forgiveness (to account for noise in the signals) was the best strategy -which shows how important candid cooperation is.
One small nitpick about the quote: “c’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute” is usually attributed to Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe although sometimes to Joseph Fouché (in his biography by Stefan Zweig)
Thanks for the note about the quote, I'll check it out! For the tit for tat, it is actually not the "best" strategy. It is just a very effective one, which is surprising given its simplicity. The best strategy depends on the starting point (e.g. initial distribution of strategies). That being said, effective strategies seem to share the features identified by Axelrod in tit for tat: niceness, forgiveness, and not being pushovers.
This is an interesting text, but in my view it does not distinguish appropriately between personal and collective violence, and between institutional and insurgent violence. In particular, the comment on Burke and the French Revolution seems to me too much on the conservative side. The fact is that Ancien Regime elites opposed adamantly reasonable demands, and their institutional violence (including foreign intervention) contributed decisively to the spiral of violence that ensued. Arno Mayer, in his book "The furies", has countered this conservative narrative in a very clever way. We like it or not, actually existing liberalism required a one-hundred year violent dismantling of the Ancien Regime and its injustices and inequalities. It is hard to think about a realistic historical alternative to this (Burke did not tell us, I think), and it is surprising that modern liberals "repress" the very material conditions of what allowed them to become historically hegemonic.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I should be clear that I am not claiming that violence is never politically effective. As I noted in a footnote, the assassination of authoritarian leaders has sometimes produced sustained democratic openings (Jones & Olken, 2009). The case for fantasies of violence being a delusion is particularly strong in peaceful liberal democracies, where institutionalised channels exist to manage conflict. It is much less so in autocracies, where oppressed groups may have little to lose in resorting to violence.
In relation to the French Revolution, an overly conservative reading in the Burkean style, where violence is seen as irrational chaos, would be wrong. At the same time, I don't think that the violence it unleashed was just a reaction to repression, as in suggested by Mayer’s (2000) counter-argument. Revolutionary violence arose from the progressive collapse of legitimacy and shared norms, fuelled by mistrust, fear of conspiracy, and the erosion of political compromise. A key aspect of the process was not elite violence but mismanagement by Louis XVI of the fiscal and political crisis. I believe this view is more in line with modern historiography's conclusion. Revolutionary actors came to operate in an environment filled with fear and suspicion, where each side believed the other was plotting betrayal (Tackett, "The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution", 2015). Violence escalated as cooperation between groups disintegrated, pushing actors into maximalist positions (Andress, "The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution", 2005).
Thanks a lot, Lionel, for such a detailed answer. I’ll check out the references on the French revolution.
That is not a quote by Napoleon, but rather a quote about Napoleons reign. Bonaparte accused the Duke of Enghien of conspiring against him. The Duke was convicted in absentia, seized from his home, dragged to a moat by the side of the castle and shot near a grave already dug for him. Aristocrats were all appalled. Napoleons chief of police, Fouche, said of the execution - “it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake”.
You are totally right. I actually misremembered when writing about it as I had used that quote before. Will correct it.
US American culture supports violence to resolve personal slights, unlike civilised cultures.
As was pointed out on my Bluesky thread, political violence has actually worked pretty well for the political right: the assassination of Rabin, the (ultimately successful) Trump coup in 2021, the murder of Matteotti, many more examples. But the appeal of leftwing violence is a delusion and a snare.
Thanks for this well justified analysis as usual. I concur with the argument that political violence is really ineffective in our modern world. And it also makes sense that that it is even less effective than it might have been in the past for all of the reasons you say.
However, I disagree with the (implied, though not stated) thesis that it used to be effective in the "environment of evolutionary adaptiveness." I've proposed a different account, based on the central role that relationships play in our lives. You can read it in detail on my page but I don't want to self-promote so I'll state the relevant parts here.
Human minds are, for very good evolutionary reasons (which I know you have also talked about), very sensitive to their status in relationships. "Who thinks they are better than me, who respects me as an equal, who is treats me as their superior." This kind of thinking precedes consciousness of "group" or "tribe" or any kind of politics, or any practical understanding of institutions that can "punish" or reward. You can see it with young children, especially siblings. Who is allowed to give whom advice about a video game? It can lead to a huge fight!
The specifically intolerable state of mind I am proposing is: "they [other party] don't think I am worthy of their respect." Not love, affection -- respect. By this I mean, that I am "taken seriously," that my motives and potential for action "weigh" on the mind of the other.
This is important because _respect_ is something you can earn back with harmful actions. Israel loathes and vilifies Hamas after October 7, but they definitely take them more seriously.
In this way, the provocation to a "worse" outcome -- escalating violence -- that is totally impractical is a risk worth taking. In sloppy colloquial terms, many people would rather be murdered because they are seen as a "threat" than simply forgotten about and left to starve because they aren't "worth considering.' I'm not an evolutionary biologist or anthropologist but you get the idea.
I think best evidence of this is the feeling of "spite," which I posted about months ago. People even do spiteful things to get retribution against dead people, where there is no possible material benefit. But there is a psychic benefit of 'proving" to your imagination of that person that they were wrong. The exact evolutionary story is beyond my expertise, but the basic idea is that our wiring to focus on theories of mind through relationships creates this elaborate "psychodramatic" instinct for retaliation that really has nothing to do the material situation we are in at all.
Feel like this should be obvious after October 7th. Guys, are Hamas closer to achieving their goals than they were before October 7th?
This is a helpful piece. The one thing I would add to the Kirk quote about “when people stop talking we get violence” is that we should consider whether we should be talking so much all the time about everything. Sometimes it may help to talk less. We have a surplus of talkers and scarcity of listeners. I genuinely doubt that anyone's ever changed anyone's values using verbal persuasion. But if you let people talk, they can sometimes talk themselves into a new perspective on the values they set out to defend, regardless of the quality of the arguments. That's also the problem with the "prove me wrong" approach that Kirk brought to college campuses. It was a gimmick, not a real forum for intellectual and moral development, unfortunately.
If you want to fortify someone's position on a topic, debate them about it. If you want to weaken their position on a topic, listen to them.