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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> His English is very good, but the concept of inalienable rights, freedom of speech, and freedom to yell at our politicians .. he was intellectually incapable of understanding this, his society had brainwashed him so thoroughly.

I don’t think that’s a charitable or logical framing of his point of view. Unless you’re religious—which the American framers were—“inalienable rights” are an illogical concept. In the state of nature, you are free to say whatever you want, and the people around you are free to beat you to death for it. It’s only when you have a civilized society that the concept of rights makes sense. Roughly speaking “rights” are simply rules society agrees upon for how individuals relate to each other (e.g. private property) or how society as a whole relates to the individual (e.g. free speech). There’s nothing inherent about any arbitrarily selected set of “rights.”

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It’s hilarious watching all the posters tell OP he’s mistaken about a life experience he had.

Hubris abound.

> It’s hilarious watching all the posters tell OP he’s mistaken about a life experience he had.

This is a pretty bullshit reading of the comment you replied to, which was about the nature of "rights" as a social agreement rather than something natural.

To add to your comment, nobody says OP’s experience is incorrect. Instead, the comment thinking4real takes reflexive offence to seeks to explain it, not demean it.

Said comment seized on one phrase, jumped to a conclusion about what the top-level's friend's actual misunderstanding was, and chastized them for not agreeing with their guess. We don't know if the top-level commenter's judgment is correct, but the rest of us certainly don't have enough evidence to be so confident they're wrong.

How is calling someone “brainwashed” a life experience?

People are allowed to have different values and opinions. Hubris is believing western morality is self evidently superior to everything else that exists.

> Unless you’re religious...“inalienable rights” are an illogical concept.

That's an odd claim to make so casually. This is something people can and have argued about for thousands of years, in both directions. One direction is: How can we have values in a world without god(s)? (See: Epicureanism, Kantian ethics, or any other system of secular morality). But the other, equally fair direction is: How can we have values in a world with god(s)? (See: The Euthyphro dilemma and broader problem of evil, the Epicurean paradox, or more recent historical and anthropological analyses of how religions and their institutions are formed and operate.)

I suppose you can play bad-faith semantic games with "inalienable", "right", or "inherent" as words here, but the long and short of it is that this isn't a settled issue. There are good arguments not only that religion is not needed as a foundation for rights, but that religion has not (historically) and cannot (philosophically) provide this foundation.

I didn’t say “God” I said “religion.” “Secular” morality invariably reduces to a system of moral assertions that must be believed but cannot be empirically observed or proven true. To me, that’s just another way of saying “religion.”

For example, what’s Kantian ethics?

> It states that an action can only be moral if (i) it is motivated by a sense of duty and (ii) its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law.

If I autopsy a dead body, am I going to find any evidence of those things in there? Can you empirically prove the categorical imperative?

Moreover, “secular morality” in practice is typically just the moral philosophy of the dominant religion with the supernatural elements removed. My dad isn’t a believer, but thinks choosing not to have children is immoral. Why? Maybe it’s because his parents were devout Muslims and having children is an important obligation in Islam. Similarly, it’s amusing to observe how many professed atheists really just believe in the Christian social gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel) without Jesus.

I’m not saying that’s bad. But you have to understand how deeply intertwined even seemingly secular western thought is with Christianity, and doesn’t easily translate to other parts of the world.

> If I autopsy a dead body, am I going to find any evidence of those things in there?

Sure, they're a few centimeters to the right of the evidence of consciousness, just below the evidence of the Pythagorean theorem.

This sounds glib but isn't. What counts as 'evidence' and how much of it is needed for 'proof' are themselves hotly debated. Empiricism is no more a given than morality.

> Empiricism is no more a given than morality.

And now you’re in woo land. Once you leave the land of empiricism you might as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

In woo land with my homies Poincaré, Gödel, etc. It's almost like the bedrock of knowledge is a deep philosophical question that every discipline strikes sooner or later, once they start digging. There really should be a word for it.

You will get a lot of hate for this but I must admit:

What made Western Europe diverge from places like Russia or Saudi Arabia?

Individuality seems to have been invented and embraced by European and American intelligentsia.

> What made Western Europe diverge from places like Russia or Saudi Arabia?

The Black Death increased labour’s bargaining power right before the Industrial Revolution. It’s a lucky set of quirks that gave Enlightenment-era ideas fertile soil to land on.

The end of the Black Death occurred over 400 years before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

> end of the Black Death occurred over 400 years before the start of the Industrial Revolution

“Right before” was hyperbole. The population, and in particular, labor effects, were nevertheless persistent. Western labor was anomalously expensive.

Why would you double down at this point?

Just admit you were completely wrong and move on. It's fine, I'm wrong a lot too.

> Why would you double down at this point?

Because the thesis holds [1][2]. It’s far from a controversial theory in medieval and developmental economics.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EUoCBAAAQBAJ&oi=...

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C51&q=Bla...

Why would you think you’ve dunked on him when you’re the one who is wrong? The divergence between Europe and the rest of the world began in the 15th and 16th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence. The divergence became massive during the Industrial Revolution, but it was underway long before that.

Because he said that "The Black Death increased labour’s bargaining power right before the Industrial Revolution."

Come on, that's hilariously wrong, and no attempt to walk it back makes it less funny.

Of course, I'm just a bit on edge because I'm writing this post right after the 30 years war has started.

Certainly a respect for the individual played a role. Thomas Hobbes argued for a strong monarch specifically to protect their subjects and their subjects’ property. Other philosophers like John Lock, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill would expand on this and build the classically liberal tradition.

But we also can’t underestimate the impact of: 1) abundant energy sources—initially wood and then coal that could power machinery. 2) a scientific tradition with engineering applications in mind. 3) the Black Plague that let people just drop their scythes and move to the city to become tradesmen and earn a better living. 4) the Common Law tradition placing property rights and the right to contract on near-sacred grounds. 5) Access to abundant fishing off the coast of what became North America.

I don't think there's any one thing we can point to explain the rise of West, it's a confluence of factors that I'm very grateful happened before I was born

6) There are several similar but different societies that shared a common ancestry (with the Romans and Greeks)

This created an intense competition where the best ideas would survive.

As trade grew so did the exchange of ideas in Europe. Different regimes had different views on intellectuals. Famously, Da Vinci and Voltaire had multiple patrons through their lives.

> This created an intense competition where the best ideas would survive.

Claiming they are best because they survive is survivorship bias.

> Claiming they are best because they survive is survivorship bias

No, it’s not. Only measuring survivors is survivorship bias.

Which is what's happening here.

> Which is what's happening here

Not really. It’s saying increases competitive pressure results in a more-competitive output. That’s almost by definition true. Products of competition tend to be fitter than not. If ten fish of a rainbow of colors are introduced to an environment and only the red ones survive, they are fitter. If one looks at the surviving fish and concludes only red fish were introduced to the environment, that is survivorship bias.

>What made Western Europe diverge from places like Russia or Saudi Arabia?

University level international relations courses generally start on the 30years war, I feel it is appropriate for that to be considered "the rough start" of "honest to god modernity" yeah

Western individualism, like nearly every other aspect of western culture, has its roots in Christianity. Europe had already diverged long before the “intelligentsia” you’re talking about.

> What made Western Europe diverge from places like Russia or Saudi Arabia?

Joseph Henrich says it’s the medieval church’s prohibition on cousin marriage, which dissolved the strong kinship bonds that dominate the rest of the world. He has a book on the subject called The WEIRDest People In The World which is good.

Wow sounds interesting! Thanks for the recommendation.

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