Novelists are sleeping on Amish Sci-Fi.
To read George Mason economist Robin Hanson lately one would conclude maybe 90% of all science fiction we have ever enjoyed is wrong in a very fundamental way.
No, I’m not talking about taking on artificial intelligence, spacefaring, aliens, laser guns, Dyson spheres or time travel. It goes deeper.
Robin Hanson’s recent speculations point to a future that belongs to the Amish (or maybe the Hasidic)(or both)(I’m going with the Amish though because I have shopped at a minimum of several Amish farm stands). The future belongs to the Amish because they are reproducing at a healthy rate, while those of us in the mainstream wealthy West are not.
So, if nothing changes, the Amish will rise and the rest of America will fall.
Yet science fiction generally depicts a future where the nations who will be rich then look a lot like the nations that are rich now. Their future people’s provenance in an historical lineage that goes back to ancient Greeks. Its characters have been filtered in their youth through a series of educational institutions. In science fiction they wear lapels. And heels.
But that’s not right, in Hanson’s model. The typical white or silver of the classic astronaut suit should be re-imagined as a severe black. The form-fitting space suits of the female spacefarers will need a reconsideration as well. How might we add some modesty to interstellar attire? What’s the space helmet equivalent of a bonnet?
And what’s the NASA guidance on beards? The spaceman of that future will need follicular affordances.
Science fiction is fundamentally about the next possibilities, but it’s flat-footed on the real shift. What might be possible in the next hundred years could be considerably less interesting than the who that might be exploring those possibilities. They might have names like Abraham and Jacob and Leah. They might speak in an old-timey way. They might push engineers to get some ponies onto Mars (even just a few).
Science fiction has been negligent on what Hanson makes look like a real possibility, that the nascent genre of Amish Sci-Fi will, according to our subject, look prescient, though it might only be our great-great or even great-great-great grandchildren who really see that.
Maybe!
It might sound like I’m making fun of the idea here, but in truth I think Amish Sci-Fi is a provocation on the way to making a useful larger point on the state of the West.
Or, maybe it would be better to say that the possibility of an Amish future will be a consequence of the pointlessness of the present West.
If you assume the following two statements are true, then the third statement is also certainly true.
If the fertility rate of the U.S. and Europe remains the same for, say, the next 200 years.
And if the fertility rate of the Amish remains the same over the same period.
Then the Amish will supersede the contemporary West as the dominant population on two continents.
Of course a lot can happen in 200 years, and you probably don’t care about 200 years from now very much anyway. Most people don’t. As Hanson might say, you are likely to highly discount the future.
But what he’s pointing at here is that it is very strange that fertility has fallen as it has.
And if you take a 20,000-foot view of our modern world and feel something is amiss, if things feel off, if it feels like living isn’t so good as it could or should be, I submit (and Hanson would also submit) that the cause of that unease has the same root as the drop in fertility.
The root of all of that is values drift.
Values, Hanson argues, have become unmoored from consequences. Without consequences, values in a population can change rapidly in a way that might be intellectually or emotionally justifiable, but lead to large-scale declines for the population revising its values. As Hanson puts it, values can become maladaptive.
In what follows, I’m going to offer a different perspective on what values even are. Then I will give a few examples of the consequences of value drift, including but not limited to the fertility rate crash. After that, I will explain what Hanson argues has caused these values to break loose. And, finally, I’m going to persuade you to care about value drift, because it affects your life right now.
Indeed, it matters now even if the most serious consequences of values drift won’t be felt for perhaps another century. Maybe two!
All of this is based on a series of blog posts that Hanson has been writing here on Substack going back to 2018. And I’ve read them.
So everything that follows is at least through the lens of Hanson’s work.
If it ends up getting distorted in any way, that’s either my misunderstanding,
an attempt to illuminate one of his ideas or
a simplification of language (that sometimes sacrifices succinctness for precision).
And then, at the end, I’m going to veer into my own spin on why I think his ideas are urgent (and I think it will be clear which parts those are once we get there).
If you feel great about the state of America, about the state of the West in general, then quit reading now. This essay isn’t for you. But if you fantasize about a day when the progeny of the Enlightenment have been extinguished, well please don’t look away, because I hope you will find this infuriating.
But first let me just say who this Robin Hanson guy is. He’s stepped into quite a few controversies over the years, because he’s a provocative thinker, one who just genuinely enjoys ideas. He’s waded in on topics like emulated human minds, the prognosis for AI, how status-seeking orchestrates almost everything we do and why we haven’t observed E.T. in the sky quite yet.
His colleague, Tyler Cowen, wrote of Hanson that “those of us who speak regularly with Robin know how brightly his star blazes. He’s a truly original and important thinker in a way that few are.”
And, lately, he’s working to persuade us all that we should care about the fact that our value system got set adrift and whether or not we can ever drop anchor somewhere safe again.
On the simplest level, values are just what we care about most. At the end of your schooling, do you choose to move back to your little hometown, because you care about family? Or do you choose to go to the big city, because you care about opportunity?
They are personal choices that express a value. The things we value often conflict.1 It’s not unusual for someone to say they care both about family and opportunity. That’s why it’s important to look at what people actually do.
And though these are individual choices, people tend to copy each other more than individuals realize, so the values we act on at a population level have demographic effects. Preferences show up in the census.
Globally, there’s an ongoing comparative study of values across civilizations, called the World Values Survey. They look at the really big picture ones.
Do people lean more on traditional authorities (elders, religious leaders) or secular ones (scientists, movie stars)?
And do they care about survival (economic security, law enforcement) or do they care about self-expression (freedom, alternative lifestyles, open borders).
Here in the States, we are extremists globally for our views about freedom of speech. So long as a person doesn’t cause anyone to get materially hurt, we tend to think, a person should be able to say whatever they want. This isn’t even really a value in Europe in anything like the same way, and it’s for sure not a value in Asia.
American freedom of expression is likely one of the reasons everyone watches our movies, listens to our music, and, if everyone doesn’t use our tech, well, they copy it.
But Asia, particularly China, has an intellectual lineage in Confucius. You could say he’s the Asian Aristotle. And Confucius was much less about curiosity, much more about hierarchy and order.
And hierarchy has its perks! After all, China has done pretty OK!
In Asia, they can really execute. They can put up cities fast. They can pump out products with high quality, at scale. They may not invent, but they optimize.
At rush hour, no one has to scream in Japan for people to move to the center of the train car so everyone can get onboard. They just do it.
In the West, we are underfoot, because we are each so very special. Asians see the structure in society, so they see each other. That kind of order, though, isn’t crazy about heretics running around questioning the establishment.
Asia just optimizes differently.2
Hanson would call this effect of two approaches that seem different but nevertheless each have solid outcomes locally optimal equilibria. In each place, lots of people live in a way that reflects a set of values. Because, on balance, most people live as if the given value is worth prioritizing, it’s easier for neighbors to make guesses about what their neighbors will do, which makes it easier to make more complementary moves on the infinite game of life.
And here’s where I’m going to flip the script on how to think about values.
Values, Hanson would say, aren’t instantiations of some higher truth about Justice or The Good.
Values are much more mundane than that. Values are just coordination mechanisms.
They are a way of collaborating with strangers for mutual benefit. And we coordinate best around common goals. And the goals of a people at any given time are a product of its values. All those other things — the clothes, the food, the art, the lingo — they all reinforce those fundamental values.
What does this people want?
Values are the common ground on which we can do business.
And, for that matter, get down to business.
And by “get down to business,” I mean making babies.
Which, by the way, Westerners aren’t doing, not like we were.
But the Amish are! Those sexy bastards.
Get it, Amos.
Which brings us back to that value whose evident decline grabbed Hanson’s attention.
We used to value family. In much harder times, we made babies.
We don’t so much anymore. (Though in some ways we value them more)(it’s gotten weird). The upshot of whatever precisely is happening is that we aren’t having enough children to keep the population from shrinking.
Hanson really brought this home for me when he pointed one particular shift:
Once upon a time, people got married and started a family right away, because family was a cornerstone of life.
People wait longer now, though, until they feel economically ready and stable enough in their career. This makes it a capstone. (yes, the premise of Idiocracy.)
And when child-rearing moves later in life, it’s a lower priority, it’s less valued. People might say: “Look, I value family as much as my grandparents, it’s just that... etc etc etc.” Those are just words, though, and they don’t show up at census time. When people delay having kids in favor of higher priorities, they have fewer. Some never get around to having any.
Nothing quite reveals preferences like the order in which people do things.
Throughout these essays, Hanson reminds readers that humanity’s superpower is learning from each other. If I hunt with just a sharpened stick, but you tie a sharpened rock to your stick and get more kills, I have a brain that’s smart enough to sharpen a rock.
We share learning. It made us the alpha species. It’s an amazing talent, at least as long as we copy adaptive behaviors, but these days we are copying each other doing all kinds of crazy things without the foggiest notion of what the downstream effects might be.
We are copying each other like mean girls at the mall, shopping for prom dresses.
Allow me a small audit of other kinds of drift:
A new podcast called Street Fight digs into how homelessness became common in the U.S., explaining that vagrancy once simply wasn’t tolerated across most of the country. Since the 80s, though, the courts and public sentiment have been making more and more accommodations for living on streets.
Obviously there’s some portion of the public that prefers this lifestyle. When it was harder to live that way, fewer people did it. When it becomes easier, it will naturally be more commonplace.
This goes hand-in-hand with communities essentially tolerating certain kinds of crime.
Families and friends don’t get together like they used to. Derek Thompson just wrote a post about this that seemed to go somewhat viral, but we’ve all known it for a while. Everyone’s lonely but everyone also has social anxiety. We all want people to come when we invite them, but we also want the latitude to flake indiscriminately without any consequences.
I grew up saying the “Pledge of Allegiance” every day in Elementary School. The daily practice has been diminishing though, if it’s not quite gone. Still, more and more, love of one’s country is viewed as cringe now.
But with no one going to church, either, it’s no wonder there’s a crisis of meaning. We like to think of ourselves as individuals, but even us hardy Americans generally need someone else pointing us to purpose. If a citizenry has no allegiance to the church and no affection for the state, what will show them a way?
The feed?
The cause Hanson points to for values drift is so far outside any of our experience that we would never come to it looking at our own autobiography.
Our framers’ era national values were forged in an era when peoples and civilizations were in direct, lawless competition with each other and with nature. When war, disease, famine or natural disasters — blind chance! — could wipe a people out. The groups that coordinated themselves around values that outcompeted neighboring groups either took the others’ resources or absorbed their people.
In Hanson’s framing, when the plurality of people over a given hunk of land become aligned over a common set of shared values and learn to coordinate around those values, the next test is whether or not they have picked a good set. Eventually, the people coordinating around one common set of values will run up against another group coordinating around another set. Maybe they will compete for resources? Or maybe they will compete in trade? Or maybe they will just fight?
Whatever it is, the competition will test the competing sets of values, the competing cultures. The most adaptive values will win. The confrontation is feedback. Without feedback, values can change any old way.
A successful group will name itself. It will be a tribe. Later on, people outside that group will know its name. It will be a people. Maybe even a nation.
Eventually, that group with its adaptive set of shared values will become recognized widely by others, maybe even feared.
It will be a culture.3
That’s what a culture is, Hanson says. It’s not rituals or art or customs or architecture or levels of formality or clothing or food.
It’s not even language. Not really.
Culture is a big coordination mechanism.
I’m going to be honest. I held off using culture for a long long time in this essay on purpose. Hanson would have dropped it earlier, but I wanted to pull you along with a slightly less loaded word — values — before we got to this point.
It was a little bit of a trick, but I copped to it.
We cool?
Culture is just what you get when a group of people sticks to a set of values long enough to tell stories about them.
Let’s think about how values can innovate.
If, say, there was a tribe that said: You know, all these little gods aren’t really selling us. Actually, we suspect that there’s one big God.
So we found that big God, and guess what that big God told us? He told us to stop sacrificing children to any kind of god! Sacrificing children is now forbidden! So we won’t!
Just like Madonna, we’re keeping our babies.
One could see how that people might have an immediate advantage over competing tribes, right?
Though if there really had been little gods that really, really rewarded child sacrifice, then the tribe that opted to eschew the practice would be in trouble. But lo and behold: The tribe that didn’t kill its children turned out to outperform.
The innovation proved adaptive.
But today, particularly in America, we are so big and so rich we can shield ourselves from bad decisions for a very long time.
For example, we all know that our national debt has become much greater than the annual GDP, and we know what happened in Germany. But we are so rich that you and I might not live to see the consequences, even if we know the day is coming.
And we know.
But when the reckoning is so far out that no one alive when the mistake gets made lives to see its consequences, that’s no kind of feedback.
So, if you’re with me so far, that
the decisions we make reveal preferences, and
those preferences are defined by values,
But also that if decisions become divorced from outcomes,
then reality will no longer regulate changes in values.
Once changes become decoupled from near-term material outcomes, values can drift until the long-term becomes too late.
Values drift because discipline about them is no longer maintained by the tribe living at the other end of the valley.
And it isn’t. Values have been drifting every which way.
Real talk: There’s only like 350,000 Amish. Hasedim are about the same size. There’s well over a billion of the rest of us Westerners. That’s a big gap.
I’m going to confess that, over the course of two centuries, it’s of course possible that a population could, like, 3,333X (I guess), but it also seems like, I don’t know... Hey, maybe some other things could totally happen over a length of time that amounts to the whole history of our country over again? Life comes at you fast!
Maybe the sci-fi future won’t actually be Amish? Just spitballing.
Nevertheless, the real question is still what will the future look like? Will it be our cultural ancestors at the helm? Hanson proposes that it will only be so if the West gets feedback back.
Hanson has proposed a few scenarios under which values could again become anchored to actual feedback systems. They all sound unpleasant. Max capitalism is one. Another is the West essentially breaking up into warring factions. That would do it. Who wants to push that button, though?
If life stays pretty much like it is now, though, why should anyone really care?
My take: Because the general sadness brought on by the meaning crisis that pervades society right now — the piles of antidepressants people are taking, the hours of pointless scrolling, the failure to form relationships — is all downstream of values drift.
The Great Super Walmart Bargain Bin of Lifestyles has been tried and found wanting.
Right now, the USA does not have an idea any longer. It lacks an intention. A gosh darn telos.
And without a purpose, we find ourselves asking: What are we doing here? And if we can’t find a good answer to that question, then we start shoving around each other and trying to grab as much as we can for as long as we’re here. Because what else is there to do?
The USA has always been special. Hannah Arendt argues this point convincingly in one of her last books, On Revolution, where she makes the case that the real genius of America is devising the legitimacy of the state, not from religion, not from mysticism, but from a document written via negotiation and debate, by men.
We’re a people founded on a piece of paper, The Constitution, a sheet full of ideas.
Our first idea was to escape the tyranny in Britain, and that became establishing a republic.
But we’ve had other ideas. The next one was to prove ourselves on the vast American frontier, to manifest our destiny. And then it was to overcome Communism. But, since then, we’ve not had much to do other than to be rich and to get richer. We haven’t had an intent, as a nation.
We are a very rich nation, but we didn’t get rich by chasing the shininess of gold. We got rich being the light, shining the way.
If we unify around something else, something much greater, something literally higher, it will do so much more for the people struggling here and now than a million more culture war fights about the best things to do for the least fortunate among us.
Because they all need to know what to do with themselves too.
I’ve seen the t-shirt: “All who wander are not lost.” OK, but everyone adrift is.
And it will be easy to see if and when we do manage to get back in line with our nature and each other. When that hour comes, our neighbors will be excited once again about the fundamentals of life.
It really is as simple as this: You know something is wrong when a nation is rich, safe and well-fed, and it still doesn’t want to reproduce itself; when it would rather scroll a phone, pop a pill, hit a needle and wait to die.
And there is another frontier. Just look up.
A friend said to me recently that when she hears people tell her that they just never feel horny, she thinks: Seriously? That means you’re depressed. Quit making excuses for it and deal with the fact that you’re depressed.
Look, I know there’s all kinds of socioeconomic reasons people cite for why they aren’t having babies. It’s all very complicated. The way things are now — etc. There have been studies.
But our people are depressed. They are not horny. If anything, we’re more terrified of the consequences of [[checks notes]] creating fellow life than we are of looking forward to a future with more life.
That’s depressing, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
How much Zoloft do you think is circulating out on the Amish farms?
Theirs might not be the number to ring if you’re “looking for a good time,” exactly, but their carriages are full.
The Amish get down. Someone’s having a good time.
What are we missing that they aren’t?
The usurper in your pocket
Paul Kingsnorth's book, Against The Machine, diagnoses the present malaise, putting the blame not just at the feet of technology, but a technological system that causes men to act like machines.