I’ll try to clarify my point about costs. Earlier, you said my criticism of conservatism doesn’t go through because there’s a broader process at work, namely “optimality based on opportunity cost,” where “the strategy with the lowest cost (by whatever measure is politically survivable—wheels within wheels) prevails whether or not the actor is capable of ratiocination.” And as you said, ‘You don't have to call it "Natural Selection" to understand that what works will stay and what doesn't will not.’
My question about the literarily of costs outside of economics was meant to get at the possibility that this broader process can become so overstretched that it’s no longer plausible, or its utility would be based on implicit metaphorical connections to the special cases (to natural selection and capitalism). Of course, you answered the question about teleology with exemplary naturalism. Natural developments are all “dumb” and unintended, as you said. But is your broader evolutionary process so broad that it applies not just to economics and biology but to physics and cosmology? Are there optimality, strategies, and costs in the evolution of solar systems, on that broader kind of evolution you posited?
If so, that could count as a reductio ad absurdum: you’d have reduced your naturalism to absurdity by entailing neo-Aristotelian teleology. Or your broader account wouldn’t be as fundamental as the accounts of the economic or biological competitions that would ground the metaphors on which your broader model would depend. Are there “costs” involved in how atoms evolve to form molecules? Do they evolve in an “optimal” way, according to laws which act as “strategies,” under the circumstances (namely the mindlessness of nature)? What does “cost,” “optimal,” and “strategy” mean, in that case?
If, however, you want to limit the talk of costs, optimality, and strategies to the cases in which there are thinking beings at work, then I don’t see how you’ve gotten around my objection that, in practice, conservatism reduces to social Darwinism.
Which brings me finally to how we should think of “social Darwinism.” Broadly, as Britannica says, this special Darwinism is the view that “human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin perceived in plants and animals in nature.” So politics and economics are really about the survival of the fittest. This is a special case of political realism: we set aside morality, theology, and all illusions of higher values, and look at society as though people were just animals in the wild, subject to natural selection.
In short, this is the view that natural selection accounts not just for biological traits, but for cultural ones. It means there’s no crucial difference between people and animals. Thus, the question of who “deserves” to rule makes as little sense in human affairs as it does in the wild. The systems are all amoral, or morality is epiphenomenal.
And what I’m saying is that, despite all the theological and libertarian distractions, conservatism reduces to that supremely cynical and misanthropic attitude. By contrast, liberals, humanists, socialists, and progressives deny that personhood and culture are so easily or usefully reduced to animality and to natural selection. That’s the crucial difference between conservatives and liberals.
You seem to want to have it both ways. You talk in quasi-Darwinian terms about how culture develops according to that broader process of applying strategies for reaching non-normative optimality. But you also suggest that this makes sense of the faith that the arc of history bends towards justice. Just here, though, you make this curious statement: “The rules for ascension are the environmental imperatives of political natural selection.”
What intrigues me is your reference there at the end to “natural selection.” That looks precisely like a corroboration of my analysis that conservatism reduces to social Darwinism. You’re saying that even in the search for justice, it’s all just natural selection? Why call this natural rather than social or political selection? Isn’t the difference that the search for the best political constitution is at least partly intelligently designed?
Maybe you misspoke or I’m misreading your point, but the question can be put plainly: Do you think sociology, politics, and economics reduce to evolutionary biology?
I take it your answer will be that there’s a broader evolutionary process at work in all these cases, a process which might be the subject of game theory. And that would complete the circle and take me back to the earlier question of whether that broad theory is indeed independent of the special cases.
