A Cognitive Model of Modernity (part 1)

This post is part 1 of a series.

1 Introduction

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is surprisingly effective against a range of ailments, including depression and insomnia. It’s based on the insight that our emotions don’t just irrationally come out of nowhere. They follow our thoughts, our beliefs about reality. To correct the ailment, you trace back to the beliefs that are driving it (like “things will never get better”). You can then challenge them with different beliefs (like “I do better when I prepare”).

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been taking a cognitive approach to calming our secular politics. In a striking phrase, Lukianoff says universities have been performing “reverse CBT” on their students: teaching them unhealthy beliefs about reality like “Life is a battle between good people and evil people” and “Always trust your feelings”.

This project is in line with that approach. I’m trying to do something complementary to Haidt and Lukianoff, but taking it further back the historical chain to identify the six core beliefs that have been driving modernity as a whole since the 1600s. It’s a cognitive model of modernity.

These six core beliefs have been so influential because they are epistemological
”meta beliefs” that form our intuitions about knowledge, evidence, and burdens of proof. In other words, the six core beliefs determine how certain we can feel about all other beliefs. They create four distinct categories of belief, each having a different kind of certainty:

1. objective truths of math, science, and physical properties—where dissent is irrational (e.g., it is irrational to deny that 2+2=4, or that this weighs 5 pounds).

2. secular moral panic beliefs, like “the Holocaust happened” or “the N word should not be used”—where dissent is indecent.

3. “private” or “individual” beliefs, like one’s choice of partner, coffee, or religion—where dissent is rational and decent, hence no force may be used to impose them on others.

4. sub-panic matters of government procedure, like jury trial votes and legislation—where dissent may be rational and decent but is nevertheless overriddable with force when the proper procedures are followed.

This is a curiously fragmented epistemology, which traces largely back to John Locke. These four categories are its four tectonic plates, with uncanny fault lines between them that account for much of modernity’s incoherence. This fragmentation was set in motion by the arrival of universal physics equations in the 1600s, that created a new and much more narrow standard of what objective truth looks like.

This fragmentation has had enormous practical impact on our moral beliefs. For example, we can define the “major league morality” of person X as the set of beliefs X considers it indecent to disagree with. By this standard, Christianity is clearly a minor league morality today, since Christians themselves think it’s fine for their neighbor to be Hindu or atheist—but not fine for their neighbor to deny the Holocaust or use the N word. Our “major league morality” is comprised of such secular moral panics now (e.g., over racism or anti-Semitism or abortion)—and the six core beliefs explain why this replacement has occurred.

Because the four epistemic categories impart sharply different degrees of certainty and aggression to their beliefs, our fragmented modern epistemology can be conveniently visualized on diagrams by putting certainty on a Y axis and aggression on an X axis. This enables a sort of visible architectural schematic of modernity, exposing its underlying structure. I’ve found these diagrams helpful in a few ways. First, they make otherwise vague abstractions seem tangible and concrete, enabling a sort of visual intuition about them. They’re also helpful for visualizing historical developments with arrows and highlighting, as in “this epistemic chamber was added circa 1840”. I also find them helpful “diagnostically” like a sort of X-ray, as in “this now unoccupied dark region shows how our modern thinking is warped in one particular way”. I have no idea if other principled visualizations of modernity like this exist, but if you’re aware of any please let me know.

I’ve been working on this project about half time for the last five years. I read back to original sources like Hobbes and Locke, and from there to more obscure authors like Paul-Henri Thiry, William Wollaston, Samuel Hopkins, Robert Owen, William Channing, Theodore Parker, Octavius Frothingham, and Joseph Henry Allen. I’ve been presenting iterations of the model to academic friends since 2019. As the model has felt more presentable, I’ve been sharing it more publicly over the past year.

2 Explaining weirdness

Here are some features of modernity that seemed rather strange to me, once I noticed them. As with cognitive therapy, I think the weirdnesses can be traced back to specific core beliefs:  

1 The schizophrenic divide between two opposite faces of modernity. There’s a calm utilitarian face of modernity that sees life as about optimizing our happiness, and an angry puritanical face that thinks life is about obeying moral imperatives to behave decently. The calm face champions free speech as a truth-vetting process that leads to more rational outcomes, while the angry face sees wrong speech as a harmful contagion to be suppressed. The calm face is the system designed by Locke circa 1690, based on five core beliefs. The angry face is a partial collapse of that system discernible by 1840, with the breakout of the sixth core belief. I call this breakout the “Jurassic Locke” event, after Jurassic Park. Sort of like the movie, Locke’s ingenious panic containment system failed—and a new apex moral predator is now permanently on the loose.

2 Our entrapment in endless political panics that function as litmus tests of human decency. I don’t think medievals could have related to this at all: political positions as a primary tests of character. The most prominent such test at the moment is Israel vs Hamas, but the more usual tests are our panics over racism, misogyny, LGBT-phobia, climate, gun violence, abortion, and so on. Locke would have been appalled by this permanent state of outrage since it tends to erode the rule of law over time, but our Jurassic system runs on it. Medievals thought it was indecent to hold the wrong religious view: “Our neighbor is Jewish or Muslim?! Not OK!” We moderns think it’s fine to hold the wrong religious view, but holding the wrong political view is another matter. As one early Jurassic Unitarian wrote around 1840: “Are you a Slavery Man, or an anti-Slavery Man?” It was a test of your decency as a person, as are all of our political panics. We’ve traded religious absolutes for political absolutes. Locke had dissolved religious absolutes into a tolerant pluralism. He got away with this because the core beliefs say religion isn’t real, in the way science is real; perhaps baptism and hell are just spiritual placebos. But we can’t extend that tolerant pluralism to politics because political harms are real: instead of hell, we deplore white supremacy; instead of heterodox baptism, we deplore abortion. Outrage migrates to where it can take hold. Jurassic Park’s tagline was “Life finds a way”. Jurassic Locke’s would be “Outrage finds a way”.

3 The uniquely elevated moral gravity of abortion, for conservative Christians. If heaven and hell are real, isn’t it at least a little odd that Christians will picket an abortion clinic but never an atheist group? Conservative Christians and progressive atheists seem like opposites, but they share the same six core beliefs—and the logic of those beliefs is fundamentally secular. The beliefs say we’re allowed to morally panic over grand secular harms like killing babies or racism, but not over grand supernatural harms like diverting people from eternal salvation. Except for a kooky fringe, we all inhabit the same modern moral architecture now, formed by the six core beliefs. We simply differ in some respects on the specific beliefs we slot into each of its four chambers.

3 Historical schematic of the core beliefs (“hacks”)

The core beliefs are laid out in their historical progression here. I call them “hacks” because they’re just half-conscious but powerful intuitions about reality that hack our brains; they’re not fully logical and they tend to disintegrate when carefully scrutinized.

There are not 6 but 8 hacks shown here, because two were unique to Hobbes and we don’t rely on those. Locke “won” in the West, and our post-Christian Western modernity descends through him:

Secular authoritarian states today like China follow Hobbes:

At least in caricature, theocratic states like Saudi Arabia have apparently sidestepped the modernity hacks altogether:

4 Hacks summary

Here’s a brief summary of the hacks: 6 in the Locke path, 2 unique to Hobbes.

A theme of this cognitive model is that as we moved forward into modernity, each new core belief made some sense at the time, yet each was also illogical and incomplete in some respects too. Over time, the illogic accumulated and we’ve ended up with a system that has quite a bit of internal tension and incoherence.

This table only covers how each hack made some sense at the time; modernity’s tensions and incoherence will be covered in a separate section later.

The two unique to Hobbes:

ASIDE: Hobbes is not vulnerable to Jurassic Locke because his sovereign controls religion and moral panics. Jurassic Locke says the status quo is indecent, which is effectively treason per Hobbes’ NoDissent Hack. Hobbes’ sovereign would therefore crush it to maintain order. See China.

5 The Mechworld Hack

The hack that sets modernity in motion is the Mechworld Hack. It’s based on the now-powerful intuition that reality is ultimately just tiny bits of matter blindly following mathematical laws. Let’s call this the “mechworld” model of reality for short.

What cemented this in our minds is the spectacular success of the physics equations that began arriving in the 1600s: Kepler c 1609, Galileo c 1638, Newton 1687, etc.

Materialism had always been around in intellectual background: Democritus taught everything was atoms c 400 BC. But adding exact equations to the mix was something new under the sun. It elevated materialism from one philosophical model of reality, competing with others on equal terms, to something that transcends philosophy and becomes more like Science itself: something that anyone can experimentally confirm to several decimal places.

As a cognitive model, this makes some sense of the Enlightenment and its timing. Faced with this new data about reality (universal physics equations that work), it was rational for thinkers to tilt toward the mechworld model as a compelling description of reality. Our gut intuitions about the world shifted accordingly. Biblical miracles went from legitimizing witnesses of God, to dubious violations of the equations.

Hobbes (1588-1679) got his mechanistic model of reality direct from Galileo himself. Hobbes visited Galileo in Italy in 1636, where the Pope had him under house arrest. Hobbes would go on to spend ten years working on a book entirely about logic, math, and physics called De Corpore (On the Body) (1655). Check it out: it gives a sense of how deeply Hobbes was thinking about mechworld. He covers humanity in the “Physics” section, under “Of Sense and Animal Motion”.

Hobbes saw his political theory as an extension of this mechanistic model. His great political work Leviathan (1651) opens with this mechanistic vision of humanity:

For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?

The mechworld model takes off as a cultural force after Newton’s equations (1687): a watershed. Planets and falling apples follow the exact same equation?! Mind-blowing. Mechanical models of humanity proliferated. In 1770, the ferocious French atheist Paul-Henri Thiry (pen name “Mirabaud”) published an influential book called Le Système de la Nature (The System of Nature): a very mechworld title. He was later a figure in the French Revolution.

The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects …

Thus man is a being purely physical...submitted to the necessary, to the immutable laws [of Nature] that she imposes on all the beings she contains ... Man's life is a line that Nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth: without his ever being able to swerve from it even for an instant. .. his ideas come to him involuntarily ... he is unceasingly modified by causes ... He is good or bad—happy or miserable — wise or foolish— reasonable or irrational, without his will going for anything in these various states.

Here's Robert Owen, one of the “utopian socialists” derided by Marx, writing in 1813. Fascinating guy: he plowed the profts from his British textile mill into the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, which failed a few years later.

The will of man has no power whatever over his opinions; he must, and ever did, and ever will believe what has been, is, or may be impressed on his mind by his predecessors and the circumstances which surround him. It becomes therefore the essence of irrationality to suppose that any human being, from the creation to this day, could deserve praise or blame, reward or punishment, for the prepossessions of early education.

The “French Newton”, Pierre-Simon Laplace, gave this famous summation of mechworld, which he had been talking about since the 1770s:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Napoleon famously asked Laplace where God fit into his model. Laplace replied, “I have not had need of that hypothesis.”

Less known is that Nietzsche echoes and even intensifies Laplace in his Human, All Too Human (1878):

At the sight of a waterfall we think we see in the countless curvings, twisting and breakings of the waves capriciousness and freedom of will; but everything here is necessary, every motion mathematically calculable. So it is too in the case of human actions; if one were all-knowing, one would be able to calculate every individual action, likewise every advance in knowledge, every error, every piece of wickedness. The actor himself, to be sure, is fixed in the illusion of free will; if for one moment the wheel of the world were to stand still, and there were an all-knowing, calculating intelligence there to make use of this pause, it could narrate the future of every creature to the remotest ages and describe every track along which this wheel has yet to roll. The actor's deception regarding himself, the assumption of free-will, is itself part of the mechanism it would have to compute.

Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” is an application of this mechworld model: with infinite time a configuration must repeat, at which point everything loops.

As I discovered early period sources like Thiry (1770) and Owen (1813), I was struck by how thoroughly mechworld had been internalized before Darwin. His Origin of Species (1859) was just icing on an already-baked mechanical cake. The equations did the baking. I suspect modernity owes more to Newton than the usual suspects of Darwin, Marx, and Freud.

We can debate whether it was equations alone that popularized reductive materialism; we could also cite influences like the scientific empiricism of Roger Bacon (c 1220-1292), the materialist side of Descartes (1596-1650), and even the development of mechanical clocks (c 1360) and such, which Hobbes would liken to mechanical human beings in Leviathan. But I think the general takeaway is clear: a rising scientific materialism was shifting our intuitions about reality, and universal physics equations in particular were super-impressive and something new under the sun.

ASIDE on Machiavelli (1469-1527): Machiavelli predates the modern physics equations I stress, yet he’s often cited as the base of a modernist chain that extends forward through Hobbes and Locke. Does this undercut my equations-centric model? Hopefully not. In The Atomic Prince: A Lucretian Interpretation of Machiavelli (2018), Dhruv Jain argues Machiavelli was also a materialist: an Epicurean materialist. Lucretius had summarized Epicurean materialism in a 7,400 line poem called De Rerum Natura (c 50 BC)—and Machiavelli was so taken with this work that he copied the entire thing by hand. And the earliest polemic against Machiavelli accused him of being an Epicurean! Evidently Machiavelli reached our mechworld materialism a little early, via the classical materialism of Democritus -> Epicurus -> Lucretius. If the equations hadn’t come along to ratify Machiavelli’s materialist worldview, he might barely register on our intellectual radar now: he might just be an historical footnote about how the Renaissance revival of classics spawned even a few oddball Epicureans.

6 Mechworld splits objective truth from “everything else”

The success of the equations set up a new standard for what objective truth looks like: it’s something amenable to complete proof (like math) or experimental verification by anyone (like science). Hence we moderns now think that our beliefs about math, science, and physical properties can be objectively true—while all our other beliefs are somehow less than objectively true.

This new divide pulls the rug out from under several types of belief that had previously seemed essential for any human community: particularly moral rules (like “murder is wrong”), and the supernatural frameworks that had legitimized and enforced such rules (like a God who punishes sin even when no one is watching).

This new “Mechworld vs Everything Else” divide is so taken for granted today we hardly notice it, but it leaps out when we ask certain questions. For example: What will space aliens probably agree with us about? Modern answer: They’ll presumably agree with us on math, science, and physical properties—but it’s naively anthropomorphic to assume they’ll agree with us on topics like religion or morals.

The aliens may be ahead of us on science, but we’d be converging toward the same perfect set of equations for the same physical reality. But under shadow of the equations now, we no longer think there is a parallel moral reality we all converge toward. There’s nothing for such a moral reality to be “made out of”, in an atomic universe; it’s all just atoms. Moral rules like “murder is wrong” aren’t inscribed on cosmic tablets; they’re cultural norms we develop as part of evolutionary biology path. They may be adaptive, but it’s a category error to imagine they can be true or false. We humans think it would be bad and wrong for aliens to exterminate humanity, but the aliens may disagree—and unfortunately there’s no way to objectively settle the matter, in the way math and science can be settled. If we take the mechworld model of reality seriously, then math, science, and physical properties are real, and “Everything Else” gets mechsplained away as merely the result of prior conditioning.

This is a sharp break from the medieval era, when “Everything Else” beliefs such as “God exists” and “murder is wrong” were seen as statements of fact about reality, not fundamentally different in kind from mechworld-compatible facts like “2+2=4” or “salt dissolves in water”.

Christians who profess belief in the Bible today now do so under shadow of this new epistemic chasm between mechworld and “Everything Else”. They implicitly accept a new Lockean order where believers must behave as if their religion is one of a number of interchangeable placebos—since per the mechworld view of reality, that’s all religions are. Post-equation Chrsitian believers don’t stone adulterers or burn heretics. They don’t treat the rejection of Christianity as reflecting badly on one as a person, so they won’t shun a neighbor for being Hindu or atheist. They don’t expect a church prayer group could prove Christianity by praying for supercollider particles to veer right for an hour. All this diffidence and deference would be rather curious if Christians thought their faith was objectively true in the way science and math are true. Pre-equation medievals had that kind of faith, but we moderns don’t, do we? If hell is objectively real and heretics are leading thousands to it, why shouldn’t we consider using at least a tiny bit of force to deter them? Pretty much every religion in history had thought using some degree of force to defend their faith was sensible— until the equations arrived. Under shadow of the equations now, it’s as if our faith in the supernatural has been pushed into a separate cognitive box where different rules apply.

As an analytical tool, I think it’s helpful to say modernity has created a new epistemic stance we apply to beliefs like religion. Believers can still believe it, in a way, but only within tight limits consistent with the radically reduced probability we assign to it of being objectively and demonstrably true. It will never be certain enough to burn heretics over now, for example. We belittlingly call these “private” or “individual” beliefs today—and they’re completely different from the objective truths of math, science, and physical properties. It’s like we have two entirely different epistemic stances in our holster, and we pull out one or the other depending on the kind of belief we’re considering.

7 Four epistemic stances

What this project is trying to do, is tease out the new epistemic stances of modernity like these, that were created in wake of the equations. I just called out two: (1) the stance we apply to “objectively true” beliefs about math, science, and physical properties; and (2) the radically different stance we apply to “private” beliefs like religion.

But are there just these two? I think there are four that stand out as especially important and controlling. They strike me as sharply and demonstrably different from each other, because they impart four distinctly different degrees of certainty, and four distinctly different degrees of aggression.

By “aggression”, I mean a sort of activity level, ranging from: (1) absolute inertness, where the belief imparts no motivation to any activity (no impetus); to (2) the belief motivating some sort of activity short of using force against others (no force), to the belief justifying judicious force against others (as via governmental procedures); to (4) the belief justifying mob force (like getting people fired, deplatforming, ending relationships, etc).

By “certainty” I don’t mean a subjective self-reported inner certainty. I mean an extroverted outward certainty, observable in how holders of the belief treat dissenters. For example, do we treat those who disagree with the belief as irrational, as indecent, or as both rational and decent?

1. We treat those who disagree with mechworld truths as irrational. Math, science, and physical properties simply “are what they are”. When someone disagrees, our instinct is to slow down and patiently explain the proofs to them more clearly, til they get it. If they still don’t get it, we may bemusedly shrug our shoulders. We don’t get righteously angry at them (as we do with moral panics).

2. We treat those who disagree with our religion quite differently, as both rational and decent. When we learn our neighbor is Hindu, we don’t slowly explain the proofs of Christianity to him so he’ll “get it” and convert. Nor do we shun him a bad person: we strongly feel one can be both rational and decent when rejecting Christianity.

3. A third epistemic stance is engaged when someone violates a secular moral panic, as in denying the Holocaust or using the N word. Such a person is indecent for denying the prevailing beliefs on these; their character is bad. We don’t slowly explain the proofs of how the Holocaust happened, or of how racism is a problem and the N word especially. We recoil, we suppress relations, and we signal something is wrong with them as human beings.

4. A fourth epistemic stance is brought to garden-variety matters of government-type policy, short of moral panic: this generally includes our jury trial votes, and our positions on sub-panic policy issues like copyright. We feel we can properly override dissent on such issues when the official procedures are followed, even though our opponents may be rational and decent. We think rational and decent people can hold differing positions on copyright, but not on whether the Holocaust happened. But note these epistemic stances are specific to individuals, however—so if person X feels it’s indecent to hold a contrary position on copyright, then by definition that issue for him is in the previous “panic” category, and not here.

And so collating these varying degrees of certainty and varying degrees of aggression we get these four epistemic stances. Argue with me please, if you think these stances aren’t really there. To me, they seem quite real and palpable—almost even obvious, once you see them.

And they seem quite distinctively modern in their boundaries: something new under the sun, formed in response to the equations. I feel totally unqualified to enumerate the epistemic stance(s) of pre-Enlightenment medievals, but I’m sure their stance(s) had different boundaries. For example, medievals certainly were permitted to morally panic over supernatural claims like witchcraft and heresy. I’m also pretty sure they didn’t have our modern boundary on “objective truth” as limited to just math, science, and physical properties; they also thought at least equally solid truths could be derived from philosophy and divine revelation.

We find ourselves with these four stances now, which are four modern ways of believing. These are the epistemic stances we keep in our holster, and pull out depending on the kind of belief we’re considering:

(To avoid lengthening the narrative I’m putting a lot of fairly important detail in tables like these, which I hope are more digestible than masses of text. So if you want the full story or you’re unconvinced by something, try clicking these tables to zoom them into readability. They might help, or they might not. If they don’t, email me or comment.)

If we moderns in fact have these four new epistemic stances, it raises the question why we arrived at these. And why do they impart these very particular degrees of certainty and aggression? The answer is in the six core beliefs. The six core beliefs make sense of the epistemic stances; they’re what make the stances seem intuitively reasonable to us. The specific degrees of certainty and aggression can be found in the substance of the core beliefs: they’re part of their substantive rationales. See below (Section 11).

8 The need for buffering, as motivating the last five hacks

As covered above, modernity’s first core belief was the Mechworld Hack.

This mechworld model is so toxic on contact to the beliefs we need to live, that all the remaining hacks are there to buffer and blunt our awareness of it.

If you believe the mechworld model is true and you rigorously apply it, you will adopt a tough epistemic SKEPTIC stance toward all Everything Else beliefs, in a way that drains them of any motivating impetus to act on them. Here are some examples across three especially important categories:

I just want you to fix this killing relativism in your mind, because we need it to understand the “why” behind all the other hacks. Mechworld will mechsplain away all beliefs except those in the privileged mechworld category (math, science, and physical properties). Hence we need new intuitions that cause us to not think about mechworld in certain situations: intuitions that make mechworld feel irrelevant or overly quibbling in these contexts. These new intuitions are the five remaining hacks.

To demonstrate to you that we need something like this hacks model to explain our modern beliefs, let me give you a little puzzle to think about.

The most typical reductive move of the mechworld model is its ad hominem “conditioning” mechsplanation: “you believe X not because X is true or good, but because it’s how your neurons got twisted by their prior conditioning”. This is the caustic free radical that corrodes our moral beliefs, as shown in the table above.

The puzzle is this: why does this conditioning mechsplanation land so differently, depending on the kind of belief it’s attacking? It feels completely natural to apply this “conditioning” perspective to certain beliefs, while other beliefs seem practically immune to it.

For example, we find it very natural to see religions through a conditioning lens: “You believe religion X largely because they grew up in an X family or country; if you grew up in a Y family or country, you’d probably be religion Y. This suggests our religious beliefs are largely a random product of our prior conditioning.” While modern believers can continue to believe X despite this argument, they admit it’s a reasonable perspective—and one that tends to cut against X being demonstrably true, and in favor of a tolerant pluralism toward Y. For sake of argument, let’s say this represents a 30% corrosion of belief in X, as experienced by believers.

But when we apply the exact same conditioning argument to something like our taboo against racism, we get a completely different result. We don’t accept this relativizing perspective at all. It’s like 0% corrosion. Picture it: “If you grew up in the Old South you’d support slavery, and if you grew up in Old India you’d support the caste system. This suggests our taboo against racism is largely a random product of our prior conditioning.” Most any normal person today would want to push back strongly against this argument. We’d say things like “But the South was wrong about slavery, and they needed to see that!” We might also attack the person who raised it: “Why are you framing it like this? Are you trying to justify slavery?!”

Do you feel how completely different this is, from the response of a modern believer to the “religion is conditioned” argument? A modern Christian will not insist: “But Muslims are wrong about God, and they need to see that!” Nor will they attack the one who raised it: “Why are you framing it like this? Are you trying to justify atheism?!” This is the difference between 0% corrosion and 30% corrosion. It’s very stark, isn’t it?

Our feisty 0% corroded defense of anti-racism gives us some inkling of how strongly medievals believed their religious orthdoxy—before the equations arrived.

What this cognitive model is trying to do, is systematically enumerate and explain the uneven corrosion caused by mechworld. This uneven corrosion is what created our fragmented four-stance epistemology, and this epistemology in turn explains a lot of the weirdnesses and incoherence of modernity.

There’s a master schematic in Section 11 below that (I think) explains the puzzle. Anti-racism is in one epistemic chamber (shielded by a strong hack), while religions are in a different epistemic chamber (shielded by a weaker hack). To me, the puzzle must be explained, and I think this schematic gives a satisfying explanation.

But before you can understand that schematic, I need to explain the second hack.

9 The PPPH Hack: primary buffer against mechworld

Modernity’s primary shield against that corrosive mechworld rigor is the PPPH Hack: the second core belief of modernity. To orient you, we are now here on the historical progression:

We need to clearly understand the PPPH Hack because the remaining hacks all rely on it so heavily. The Romans used concrete for their grand public architecture; we moderns use PPPH for our grand moral architecture.

Medieval moral judgments were driven by a Virtue/Sin/God/Satan (VSGS) reality matrix. Modernity replaces that with a Pleasure/Pain/Power/Harm (PPPH) reality matrix.

A “moral reality matrix” is a concise summary of the most important internal and external facts that drive our moral judgments (in the cognitive behavioral sense). For medievals, Virtue and Sin were the most important internal realities, and God and Satan were the most important external realities; together, these provided the essential framework for their moral judgments.

Under shadow of the equations and the new mechworld model of reality, however, the previously solid Virtue/Sin/God/Satan matrix began to shift from unquestionable reality, to disputable opinion. At some point certainty becomes low enough that we become unwilling to use force over our beliefs: e.g., are you willing to burn a heretic over the nature of the communion host? And so a substitute had to be found.

For us moderns, that substitute is the Pleasure/Pain/Power/Harm matrix (PPPH). Pleasure and Pain are now the most important internal realities, and Power and Harm are the most important external realities. “Power” is any real configuration of matter that helps a creature (health, wealth, intelligence, etc). “Harm” is any real configuration of matter that hinders a creature (disease, deprivation, etc). Unlike Virtue and Sin, Pleasure and Pain are shared with animals so they’re not priestly inventions. And while Virtue and Sin are debatable, one can hardly deny a creature is feeling Pleasure or Pain. Power and Harm are likewise real, and instrumental to optimizing a creature’s Pleasure and Pain.

Classical materialists like Epicurus made this same shift to hedonics; it’s the natural bunker to retreat to, when chased by reductive materialism. Highfalutin towers of knightly chivalry get toppled, but “it feels good” has a very low center of gravity.

In addition to PPPH feeling far more solid than VSGS in an atomic universe, PPPH also lets us smuggle in the kind of value judgments that mechworld would normally neuter (see Section 8: “The need for buffering”). The crucial PPPH value judgment is this: “Even in an atomic universe, isn’t it better to have more pleasure and less pain? More power and less harm?” That seems like a pretty safe and almost unremarkable claim, doesn’t it? But so much depends on it now. As Hobbes and Locke grasped early on, we needed to shift our moral architecture to sit atop this more solid PPPH footing. The old architecture was built atop a foundation of supernatural revelation—and as Hobbes and Locke could see, mechworld was going to be zapping the hell out of that, literally. Heaven too.

The old supernatural foundation was roughly this: God gave demonstrable proofs of His power we have eyewitness testimony to (parting of Red Sea, Christ’s resurrection, etc); He dictated moral rules for us (like the Ten Commandments), and He gave us reasons to behave well (like heaven and hell). But physics equations rationally tilted out intution away from this model: miracles would be going from legitimizing witnesses of orthodoxy, to dubious violations of the equations. Priests don’t turn the communion bread into Christ’s body; holy relics don’t cure disease; prayers might do nothing. And so the old foundation was going to be falling apart, as the implications of mechworld filtered out to intellectuals and then the masses.

Hobbes and Locke got to work: they retrofitted as much of the old system with PPPH rebar as they could, since the old supernatural beams would be buckling. Murder isn’t wrong because God said so and hell awaits the murderer; it’s wrong because it hurts aggregate PPPH (societal chaos if murder is not punished). Religion isn’t justified because it’s true, but because it’s an effective instrumental placebo for keeping PPPH civil order.

Hobbes took this PPPH secularism in an authoritarian direction, by arguing the sovereign must have the power to impose a religion or there will be PPPH chaos and civil strife (the Order Hack). Locke took it in a libertarian direction by arguing that trying to regulate religions would harm overall PPPH by enabling an overly powerful/intrusive government (the Rights Hack). But the logic of both was fundamentally secular, which was critical since otherwise their systems would be dissolved by mechworld. PPPH needs to shelter everything now; everything needs to be wrapped in it. It’s our fundamental moral building material now (like concrete for the Romans).

If you doubt this PPPH wrapping is really controlling for us moderns, consider the conservative Christian focus on abortion. Conservative Christians are one of the least-modern modern groups, and they would certainly place VSGS above PPPH in their own minds. Yet how do they behave? They picket abortion clinics (real PPPH harm), while treating their atheist and Hindu neighbors as rational and decent people (less real VSGS harm).

There’s a lot more to say about the PPPH Hack, and some of that is here. As covered in more depth there, the shift to PPPH was remarkably blatant. Hobbes and Locke were so blatant about it, each proposed a universal theory of human motivation based on PPPH. Hobbes called it “felicity”, that we all selfishly seek; Locke called it “happiness”. And so, in their systems, Mother Teresa was seeking pleasurable feelings of obedience and good conscience, as she toiled in the slums. In other words, she was hedonically selfish like the rest of us. Is this a really satisfying model of what motivated her, or is it a bit too cute? But that’s a theme of this cognitive model: each core belief makes some sense, yet each core belief is also illogical and incomplete in some respects too. I’m trying to move things along here, but see that long post for more on this hack, including some aspects of its illogic.

10 Hacks in action

Now that you have the basic gist of the Mechworld Hack and PPPH Hack, you can see how the remaining four hacks operate. They all rely on the PPPH Hack for their shielding against the Mechworld Hack. Using PPPH as raw material, they all present reasons we should take a more relaxed epistemic stance to some category of “Everything Else” belief that would otherwise get zapped by mechworld rigor.

This table shows how the various hacks shield different types of beliefs. Someone rigorously applying the mechworld model will adopt the SKEPTIC stance on the left (black color), and the task of the Hacks is to shift that person to a moral relaxed epistemic stance (blue colors).

If we think of the Mechworld Hack as emitting a killing radiation, the hacks are like cognitive sunblock. Darker blues = stronger protection, which enables higher degrees of certainty and aggression.

The REFEREE and ENFORCER epistemic stances may seem similar since they both use force to punish harms, but they’re quite different. Consider the vastly different way we treat “regular” homicides (about 25,000/yr in the US) vs hate crime homicides (about 150/yr in the US). Almost all of us give REFEREE stance to regular homicides: we accept 25,000/yr as normal background for a nation of 330 million. Attempts to decrease that number would be evaluated along utilitarian cost/benefit lines; we don’t think the right number is anywhere near zero since that would be prohibitively expensive in both police budgets and loss of civil liberties. But many of us bring the entirely different epistemic stance of ENFORCER to hate crime homicides. Under the ENFORCER stance, 150/yr is an intolerable indecency that should be driven to zero by an urgently needed campaign of anti-hate education, awareness-raising days and months, and LGBT non-profits like the HRC and Equality CA. Utilitarian cost/benefit calculations feel inappropriate and off point for hate crimes.

Locke 1.0 was a basically utilitarian framework within which everyone selfishly pursued their own PPPH; this gave us the utilitarian REFEREE and BELIEVER stances. Jurassic Locke 2.0 runs on the sharply different logic of absolute moral imperatives to behave decently, where the selfish pursuit of one’s interest is a potentially horrifying deviation from minimum basic decency: e.g., selfishly clinging to one’s white or male privilege. Because the 2.0 ENFORCER stance frames issues in terms of moral abomination (“do you agree or disagree with this atrocity?”), the cool utilitarian tradeoffs of Locke 1.0 are irrelevant. This tension between Locke 1.0 and 2.0 is striking, and one of the logical incoherences created by modernity’s simultaneous embrace of the six core beliefs.

11 Modernity hacks schematic

Now that you see how hacks operate to shift our epistemic stance, this master schematic of the cognitive model should make some sense.

The Mechworld Hack creates a new and privileged category of beliefs on the left (gray): the objectively true facts of math, science, and physical properties. “Everything Else” (orange) must now seek the cognitive sunblock of hacks (blue). Beliefs that can’t find a sheltering hack get zapped into extinction (black): i.e., beliefs like burning heretics, and the divine right of kings. The only way supernatural beliefs can now survive is by getting the protection of the NoHarm Hack, and to get that protection they need to renounce force. The problem with the extinct beliefs (black) is they have a supernatural rationale yet they insist on using force, hence they get no sunblock and get burned to a crisp by mechworld.

Put differently, their use of force triggers greater scrutiny: i.e., a different epistemic stance. Use of force means these are no longer “private” beliefs, so we hold them to a higher standard. It was fine for churches to teach their private dogma, but as soon as these imply a need to burn people over them, the modern SKEPTIC stance will be triggered: “Whoa, if you’re using force now, you must prove to us that your iffy supernatural dogma of Baptism or Trinity or Atonement is objectively true.” And of course that fails, since no “Everything Else” belief can be proved in the way science is proved. And so the belief goes extinct. Only a kooky fringe hold the extinct beliefs now: e.g., Christian “Reconstructionists” who want to stone adulterers and homosexuals. How quaintly horrifying: using force over supernaturally revealed Scripture alone, without some bright secular harm to justify it!

The core beliefs are what establish these conceptual boundaries, like “are you using force?”. This is largely how Locke thought about these things, so it’s how we think about them too. Distinctions like “force” may seem rather illogical: either a belief is true or it isn’t, regardless of whether it’s a so-called “private” belief. That’s why these are “hacks”: they shift our epistemic intuitions but don’t bear much logical scrutiny.

12 Four chamber diagram

The four epistemic stances create four chambers, each holding a different type of belief. We moderns agree on the chambers themselves and their boundaries; we just differ in some respects on the specific beliefs we slot into each chamber.

Say the jury on a drunk driving case includes a jazz-loving Buddhist progressive (“Al”), and a classical-loving conservative Christian (“Cal”). Al may put “jazz is awesome” and “Buddhism is true” in his Private chamber (BELIEVER stance), “the driver is guilty” in his Policy chamber (REFEREE stance), and “we should honor pronouns” in his Panics chamber (ENFORCER stance). Cal may put “classical is awesome” and “Christ is King” in his Private chamber, “the driver is innocent” in his Policy chamber, and “abortion is murder” in his Panics chamber.

We can visualize the four chambers with a diagram like this, with certainty on the Y axis and aggression on the X axis:

Extinct beliefs like burning witches are gone, so they have no chamber here; they’re outside modernity and outside the diagram. The “no impetus” degree of aggression extends slightly into Private because there are certain supernatural beliefs that impart no impetus to action, like the Christian tradition that “the tax collector’s name was Matthew”. Most modern Christians think it is rational and decent to doubt Matthew’s existence, so that belief can’t be in their Mechworld chamber.

We can also draw the hacks that create the chambers on the same diagram, like an X-ray showing the structural beams that support them:

The PPPH Hack runs along the bottom not because it’s lower certainty, but because it provides the foundation for the Hacks above it. PPPH is their raw material; their arguments all rely on Pleasure, Pain, Power, and Harm as being real and worth optimizing.

We can picture the four epistemic stances as shielding their chambers with different relational “surfaces” that reflect how they treat dissent:

COMPREHENDER: literally “concrete” truths of math and science, so solid we don’t need to feel defensive

BELIEVER: as smooth and inoffensive as possible: “please ignore me as harmless placebo”

REFEREE: moderately studded with some judicious tit-for-tat pushback: “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time”

ENFORCER: bristling with caustic antibodies for actively zapping any indecency in the vicinity

Hobbes’ system is similar in structure since he shares the Mechworld, PPPH, and Harm Hacks with Locke. But Hobbes extends the Harm Hack in an authoritarian direction with his Order Hack, which says the Sovereign must wield decisive civil and religious authority or chaos and civil war can ensue (with religion as instrumental placebo for maintaining civil order).

Hobbes shrinks Locke’s Private chamber to Loyal Private: in addition to eschewing civil force, his subjects must also eschew public dissent. Again, see China.

To develop some visual intuition for the four-chamber Locke diagram, here are a few issues projected onto it:

13 Four Treadmills

Are these four chambers actually real? Do they really control anything? In their favor, there seem to be four corresponding treadmills of endless activity. Could we almost say these are the four great enterprises of modernity?

Their goal of endless progress feels peculiarly modern. Can you imagine trying to tell a medieval focus group they should expect ever better scientific principles, ever greater happiness, ever better government, and ever finer decency standards? That just wouldn’t compute, would it? Science is what it is, life isn’t about happiness, our rulers are divinely appointed, and God has already laid down our moral standards; we don’t expect ever-new ones.

And so the beliefs on each treadmill are in constant churn. But where the cognitive model can help here, I hope, is by showing what’s fixed and constant amid this flux: i.e., that the lanes themselves are fixed. They’re bounded by the levels of certainty and aggression specific to their corresponding chambers—as defined by the six core beliefs (see Section 11). For example because the nature of science and math is what it is in our minds, we know that whatever their new discoveries, it will always be irrational to deny them, and they will always impart no impetus to our actions (because they can’t contain value judgments). Likewise we can’t predict the precise issues the Harvard faculty will be panicking about in 2040, but we know they’ll consider disagreement to be indecent, and mob force to be justified.

Broadly speaking Locke tends to shift focus from substance to procedure—and we can also observe that the procedures for each lane seem at least semi-fixed as well: e.g., math and science discoveries are vetted in journals with Nobel type prizes awarded; new laws are added per votes and a constitution; and new moral atrocities seem to be rolled out by an assembly line structure (generally starting with college faculties and proceeding from there to non-profits and media platforms like the NY Times).

When you step back and think about these four treadmills constantly humming, it can feel like you’re in the innermost engine room of modernity: four massive turbines driving a continual accumulation of more scientific knowledge, a continual striving for greater personal happiness, a continual agglomeration of new laws and regulations, and a continual roiling by new moral emergencies.

The model may also shed some light on why each lane has that gentle but endless slope up. This seems attributable to the Lockean privatization of the supernatural and transcendant (per the NoHarm Hack). Without them, we can’t enforce belief in fixed political destinations like the 613 laws of the Old Testament or Islam’s Sharia. We can’t support fixed destinations for humanity like heaven or hell, or the Second Coming. We attempted secular equivalents to heaven early on (e.g., utopian socialists), but these collapsed under weight of reality.

With all that off the table, what can we still believe in? We can still plausibly imagine things getting a little better from here. This modest claim won’t trigger the harsh mechworld SKEPTIC stance. And if incremental improvement is possible, why shouldn’t it continue indefinitely? We can’t give overly specific plans now because that would trigger SKEPTIC stance. But we can vaguely imagine our modest treadmill steps today are part of a grand upward journey. We might say indefinite progress is the closest secular equivalent to heaven—and that progressives are the party of secular heaven, approached incrementally in small non-triggering steps.

In any event, we moderns seem firmly installed on these four treadmills. If we changed our six core beliefs, the treadmills would change.

14 Incoherence fault lines

If our modern epistemology really has been illogically fragmented into these four chambers, then we’d naturally expect a lot of modernity’s internal tensions and incoherence to  run along the fault lines between them.

And I think that’s what we see. This table compactly summarizes many of modernity’s internal tensions, and they all seem naturally expressible in terms of the four “tectonic plates”: either it’s a tension between different plates, or it’s an internal tension affecting the entirety of a single plate (suggesting the plate was the right unit for the issue):

15 Hobbes and Locke as hack exploiters

Under this cognitive interpretation, the specific arguments Hobbes and Locke gave were less important than the fact their resulting systems were supported by the hacks.

Both relied on some kind of “social contract” argument; I won’t belabor it here but these are famously strained. But the fact their arguments were less than airtight didn’t matter. They delivered what was needed for a modernity under shadow of the Mechworld Hack, which was a moral system that:

1. relied on secular philosophical argument rather than supernatural revelation.

2. exploited the new common sense hunches that Pleasure Pain Power and Harm are real and worth optimizing (PPPH Hack), and that real harms like murder justify some kind of civil government to punish them or everyone’s PPPH will suffer (Harm Hack).

3. provided some kind of backwards compatibility for supernatural Christianity.

A system like this was something new under the sun. Hobbes and Locke have been so enduringly influential not because their specific arguments were so bulletproof, but because they covered these bases.

The backwards compatibility was essential because their 17^th century audience was overwhelmingly Christian. A system that began “First, adopt atheism” was a non-starter. But how do you provide such a prominent space for the supernatural, within the confines of a fundamentally secular system?

Locke pulled it off by giving a utilitarian PPPH justification for a Private chamber, where Christianity could run as a sort of app as long as it relinquished force (Rights Hack, NoHarm Hack). Hobbes pulled it off by allowing the sovereign to impose a religion as an instrumental placebo, to better keep secular PPPH order (Order Hack, NoDissent Hack). The Hobbes approach was backward compatible with (and gave a secular theoretical justification for) the Peace of Augsburg (1555) form of Christian order, which said cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion). The Locke approach was backward compatible with the tolerant liberalizing trend in Britain of increasing denominational pluralism (and gave a secular theoretical justification for that).

I’ll shift to talking entirely about Locke here, since his was the path taken by modernity. While the Harm Hack intuition is what ultimately justified his civil government, it also presents a problem in that harms are amorphous. A libertarian observer sees harm in restricting freedom of association, a social justice observer sees freedom of association as enabling harms like racism and sexism, and a Marxist observer sees harm in the private ownership of capital. The Harm Hack can’t adjudicate these conflicts in a principled way since it’s just a vague intuition about secular harm. Hence it’s difficult to create firm and lasting boundaries with these Hacks, of the type Locke was trying to establish with his natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

For example Locke seems to have wanted to ban Catholics and atheists from his umbrella of Private toleration, on theory that Catholics won’t obey the local rules since they owe civil allegiance to Rome, and atheists won’t obey the rules without fear of hell. But even though these were solid secular harm-based arguments. they were soon overturned anyway—by other secular harm-based arguments. Instead of the secular harms to society caused by unscrupulous Catholics and atheists, we just shift our perspective to the secular harms caused to Catholics and atheists by Locke’s intolerance. One person creates a principle by focusing on one kind of secular harm, another person dissolves that principle by focusing on another kind of secular harm.

This amorphousness of secular harm is one of the fundamental characteristics (and shortcomings) of our modern moral architecture. The old supernatural VSGS material was great at creating fixed boundaries, like the 613 laws of the Old Testament. But that material had lost its structural integrity, thanks to the equations. The new PPPH material doesn’t buckle under the weight of mechworld, but it has new idiosyncrasies of its own, like the amorphousness of its all-important secular Harm.

16 Detethering

Secular harm can dissolve other secular harm so it appears weak and unstable in a sense, yet it’s still much stronger than everything else. When Hobbes and Locke assert a secular harm, you can only oppose it with another more inflammatory secular harm. You can’t oppose it with supernatural religion or abstract philosophy, because thanks to the equations these have been Privatized. We no longer think religion and philosophy are the kinds of things that can be objectively true, in the way math and science are true. Hence they get only the BELIEVER epistemic stance, where dissent is rational and decent and no force is allowed (NoHarm Hack).

Hence a chasm has opened between religion/philosophy on the one hand, and our secular moral panics like racism and sexism on the other. The panics exist on the much higher epistemic plane that gets ENFORCER stance, where dissent is indecent and mob force is allowed (Panic Hack).

This gap “detethers” our secular moral panics from the religious and philosophical principles that could previously moderate them.

We can picture our modern panics as flailing about and often conflicting with each other, because there are no neutral philosophical principles to impose a comprehensive model of reality on them. (Or rather, any neutral philosophical principles are merely “Private” beliefs down in the Private chamber, which neuter them and make them silent and deferential in face of the Panics raging above).

For example, many Americans have simultaneously embraced both the misogyny and transphobia panics, despite their conflicting models of reality. A birth-assigned male named John says “I feel like a woman”. Jen, a feminist, asks “What does that feel like?” John: “I feel softer, less competitive, more nurturing; as a child I was drawn to ballet and cooking, not model trucks and football; I even like pink and not blue…” Jen would dismiss all that as just patriarchal social conditioning: “Why can’t women be competitive and play with trucks? Why can’t men be nurturing and cook and do ballet? And don’t get me started on pink and blue!” Jen would see John as simply a good example of the more even distribution of personality traits a feminist society should create. So there is this basic tension between the gender essentialism of the trans movement, and the feminist blank slate. Yet millions support both panics simultaneously.

We moderns resolve the tension by not attempting to resolve it. If John says he feels like a woman, we simply side with him: “How dare you deny his identity?” If Jen says pink and blue are social conditioning we should stop, we side with her too: “Yes, baby clothes manufacturers should be forced to use a unisex color palette.”

The problem comes when John and Jen are directly at odds and it’s impossible to side with both, as in the trans vs TERFs conflict. TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) invoke the misogyny panic: they say women’s safe spaces are being invaded by faux-female men. Trans women invoke the transphobia panic: they say excluding them from female-only gatherings is hateful discrimination that may drive them to suicide. Both believe these things at the ENFORCER level of certainty (where dissent is indecent), so both are willing to use mob force (boycotts, petitions, ending relationships, etc).

Detethering means they are unable to adjudicate or moderate this conflict with the kind of broader principles that a religion and/or systematic philosophy would provide, because any such religions and philosophies have been privatized.

Pre-modernity, the Bible was believed with the highest “dissent is irrational and/or indecent” degree of certainty: it was all God’s word. While this included incitements to moral panic (like texts about witches), it also included moderating teachings to counter-balance such panics (like love your enemies, forgiveness, mercy, absolution, and the motes in our own eyes). All of these texts, the witches and the mercy, were theoretically believed up at that ENFORCER degree of certainty. While the existence of the mercy teachings was certainly not foolproof for preventing panics, they still provided moderating brakes that calmer heads could point to, and that extremists might be haunted by. In addition to moderating conflicts like this, the Bible could also help adjudicate them: e.g., by providing some “dissent is irrational and/or indecent”-level principles of gender.

This tethering moderation and adjudication is now gone, because the equations demoted the entire Bible to BELIEVER stance, where dissent is rational and decent (NoHarm Hack). The witches and the mercy both got privatized. Jurassic Locke replaced the witches only, not the mercy, up at that top tier of certainty. High-certainty panics over witches and heretics got replaced by high-certainty panics over secular harms like racism and sexism. But there is no corresponding elevation of modern mercy or moderation teachings up to that high tier, because mercy and moderation make no sense in face of grand secular harms. We can forgive racist police officers after they stop brutalizing black communities. Premature mercy and moderation just facilitate the terrible ongoing harm.

The same detethering has occurred with respect to non-scientific philosophy, like Stoicism and Aristotle’s ethics. These philosophies offered coherent models of reality and human nature that inherently included balancing and moderating influences. These have also been privatized down to the BELIEVER degree of certainty where dissent is rational and decent (NoHarm Hack). Thanks to the equations, we no longer think such philosophies are the kind of thing that can be objectively true, in the way science and math are true.

This detethering is hiding in plain sight, in Locke’s epistemology. Implicitly, his system says believe whatever you want down in the Private chamber, since there’s no way for the Magistrate to adjudicate such beliefs anyway. It’s only when some secular harm occurs that things get real and the Magistrate should leap into action. Our panics simply follow this epistemology: the harms are real, the comprehensive theoretical constructs are unresolvable placebos. Locke’s epistemology is inherently detethered.

Against this modern detethering, I think of something like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, painstakingly worked out over hundreds of years. While there were certainly panics in various directions over the Trinity’s details, all sides had faith there was an actual truth of the matter to be found—and that this truth could be checked for consistency against a more comprehensive reality including both the Bible and philosophical reason.

Detethering is a modern epistemic deformation, that makes it impossible for us to pursue integrated non-scientific reality models like the Trinity up at the “dissent is irrational and/or indecent” level of certainty. Hence we have no wider reality model to adjudicate or moderate our secular panics.

This epistemic deformation is visible on the four-chamber diagram, as a new dark region above the Private and Policy chambers:

As you can see on the diagram, it’s like a bite has been taken out of the broad-ranging certainty of the prior medieval model. This bite is a zone of lost or abandoned certainty. Such a high degree of certainty is no longer possible for the kinds of beliefs that reside in the Private and Policy chambers.

We moderns can still believe in mechworld realities with the COMPREHENDER epistemic stance, where dissent is irrational (Mechworld Hack). But that covers only the very narrow range of content in the leftmost Mechworld chamber: i.e., math, science, and physical properties. All of our moral realities are now distributed among the three chambers to the right (Private, Policy, and Panics)—and the Panics chamber now stands alone there, as the only one chamber that can impart an ENFORCER degree of certainty to its beliefs, where dissent is indecent.

If we moderns had the medieval faith that some such reality existed (as with the Trinity), both sides of the trans vs TERFs debate would be trying to work out some comprehensive model of sex and gender that would settle all the outstanding questions one way or the other (as with the Trinity). Are trans women women at all? Are they women in some respects but not others? Are there mental traits that are innately more present in women or men on average, even without societal conditioning? Are such differences (if any) good things to be celebrated, or bad things to be minimized?

The two sides would probably develop competing models that overlapped in some ways, and differed in others. But the very attempt to create a comprehensive model would tend to moderate both sides. If trans people were forced to admit trans women were not women in all respects, they might be more willing to accept some limits on trans women in sports or in women’s spaces. If feminists were forced to admit some degree of innate gender traits, they might be more willing to accept more men than women in fields like engineering, without this being entirely the result of discrimination and conditioning. It’s a lot easier to fully panic if you don’t have to integrate facts outside your narrow panic loop of “these particular harms are outrageous (and let’s ignore all the rest)”.

But we moderns intuitively feel such comprehensive models are not worth the bother: we’d never get everyone to agree on all the little issues—not even on our own side—because there’s no way to objectively resolve them in the way science can be resolved. And all the little micro decisions we’d make on the issues won’t matter anyway when the next emotional panic event comes along: “Oh my gosh, the TERFs did this terrible thing to trans women at this event”, or vice versa. It won’t matter if the terrible thing is actually not so terrible according to micro-decision 14(g). Because no one thinks these micro-decisions have actual teeth. Our perception of oppressive harm in the moment will always sweep aside whatever niggling theoretical constructs we come up with. They’re essentially just scraps of paper that sounded good to some committee in the moment, while panics are flesh and blood.

Locke never intended this chaos of competing secular panics (Jurassic Locke), but this seems an inevitable result of his relativizing epistemology. Locke thought he could create solid boundaries to prevent such panics. His natural rights to life, liberty, and property would largely resolve the trans vs TERFs conflict, for example. Both sides have freedom of association, and the TERFs aren’t actually harming the trans by excluding them from their private gatherings.

But Locke created these natural rights by using the Harm Hack that sits atop the PPPH Hack. “Isn’t it really bad, in a secular way, for someone to take your property or force you to do something?” That makes us nod yes, but our confidence is not permanent. As we said above, harms are amorphous. Locke saw harm in restricting freedom of association, a trans activist sees freedom of association as enabling harms like anti-trans discrimination, and a Marxist observer sees harm in the private ownership of capital.

The PPPH Hack says only pleasure, pain, power, and harm are ultimately real; this relativizes away the kinds of theoretical constructs that could put principled limits on secular harm. We don’t think the Bible or Aristotle’s ethics or Stoic philosophy can ever be real enough to justify using force over them: they’ve been dissolved by mechworld and the equations. Secular harm isn’t dissolved, but without such now-dissolved theoretical constructs, it’s amorphous. Amorphous enough to justify multiple competing panics with inconsistent premises.

17 Shrinkage etc

I’m pausing here. If you’ve read this far and don’t want to wait for the next “book” installment, some prior posts that would make sense to read now are:

Shrinkage, which is another epistemic deformation that is the flip side of Detethering;

The Jurassic Locke transition that occurred around 1840, in a more detailed narrative.

Maltruism and Propositional Polymaltruism: some suggested names for our new major league morality.

Thanks for reading and please give me your thoughts!