21st Century Civilization Curriculum

The intended format for the curriculum is weekly small group discussions over two months. Each week, all participants should read the four main readings in detail (and can optionally read any of the supplementary readings). I recommend that group discussions are scheduled for 1.5 hours each week; and also that, at the end of each session, four people volunteer to each lead the discussion of one of the following week’s readings. 

An alternative approach is to host longer sessions and have participants read then discuss each of the readings in turn in the session itself. If you do so, I recommend scheduling sessions of 2 or 2.5 hours and skipping the fourth reading each week.

However, everyone should feel free to approach the curriculum however they find most useful (and ideally report back on what works and what doesn’t).

The main goal for this week is for participants to get to know each other and form shared intentions about what they want discussion sessions to look like. I recommend spending the first third of the session talking about where each person is coming from and what they want to get out of the curriculum.

In terms of the content: like many of the topics covered in this curriculum, Western culture is far too wide-ranging to summarize in a single week. These four readings merely touch on a few of its core components: individualism, secular governments, an internal locus of self-control, a progress/innovation-oriented mindset, and impartial justice systems. 

Main readings:

1. Book review: Inventing the Individual (Whitney)

2. Book review: The Germans (Moses)

3. The Spread of Improvement (Howes) (only up to end of page 11)

4. The Birth of Impersonal Exchange (Greif) (only up to the end of page 228)

Supplementary readings:

1. Book review: The Ancient City (Psmith)

2. Book review: The WEIRDest people in the world (Hugh-Jones)

3. Book review: The Enlightened Economy (Glaeser)

4. The British War on Slavery (Tabarrok)

5. The Shortest History of Europe (Hirst) (only chapter 1)

6. Sociogenesis of the Antithesis Between Kultur and Zivilisation in German Usage (Elias)

This week’s readings lay out the hypothesis that many key aspects of Western civilization have decayed. The first three readings explore three key issues on which the modern West has declined: free speech, crime, and scientific integrity. The last reading discusses South Africa, which (along with Zimbabwe) is the Western country in which civilizational decay has progressed furthest.

Main readings:

1. There is no Liberal West (Lyons)

2. Murder as a Measuring Stick (Arctotherium)

3. The Academic Culture of Fraud (Landau-Taylor)

4. Book review: South Africa’s Brave New World (Psmith)

Supplementary readings:

1. New York Times Resignation Letter (Weiss)

2. The Full Story of the FAA’s Hiring Scandal (Woodgrains)

3. My IRB Nightmare (Scott Alexander)

4. The DDOS Attack of Academic Bullshit (Landau-Taylor)

5. Live Players and Institutional Reform (Burja)

6. South Africa’s Racketeer State (Thomas)

7. Zimbabwe’s Trauma (Andrews)

This week’s readings lay out the hypothesis that the character of western governments has transformed over the last century, with vast bureaucracies gaining extensive power. The first two readings explore two of the pieces of legislation which most expanded bureaucratic powers in the US since World War 2: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The latter two readings focus on explaining the rise of managerialism in general.

Main readings:

1. Book Review: The Origins of Woke (Alexander)

2. Escape from Quicksand: A New Framework for Modernizing America (Howard)

3. The Birth of the Administrative State (Pestritto) (only first half, up to the start of the section on Frank Goodnow)

4. James Burnham's Managerial Elite (Klein) (starting from the section on Defining Managerialism)

Supplementary readings:

1. The Hollow Men II (Cummings) (especially Part II: Four Stories)

2. Book Review: The Managerial Revolution (Haywood)

3. Understanding the Managerial Revolution (Renn)

4. The bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis (Buterin)

5. The New Ruling Class (Andrews)

6. The China Convergence (Lyons)

7. The Law that Ate the Constitution (Andrews)

This week’s readings zoom out from domestic politics in the west to look at broader geopolitical and economic dynamics. The first reading outlines and defends Trump’s nationalist foreign policy. The second explores how conflicts between ethnic majorities and elite minorities play out in many countries across the world. The final two readings tie together politics and macroeconomics, in particular exploring the relationship between state power and control of currency.

Main readings:

1. The Trump Doctrine (Anton)

2. Sixth Annual Grotius Lecture: World on Fire (Chua)

3. The Debtor’s Revolt (Hoffman) (only last 3 sections, starting from Early Centralization of American Monetary Policy)

4. Book review: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations/The Question Of Separatism (Fortier-Dubois) (only sections II and III)

Supplementary readings:

1. Industrial Greatness Requires Economic Depressions (Landau-Taylor)

2. America’s $175 Trillion Problem (Srinivasan)

3. A Techno-Industrialist Manifesto (Slodov)

4. How to become President of China (Wang)

5. The crisis of authority (Seir)

6. The use of knowledge in society (Hayek)

7. Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know (Sustrik)

This week’s readings describe the political dysfunctions discussed in previous weeks in sociological terms. The first reading introduces the concept of the “consensus of power”, under which everyone is trying to predict what everyone else predicts that everyone else predicts … that everyone else supports. The second and third readings characterize the experience of attempting to follow a consensus, and the psychological harms of doing so, within corporations and Nazi Germany respectively. The final reading characterizes the opposite of consenses: evaluation procedures which are “locally valid”.

Main readings:

1. Elite Coordination via the Consensus of Power (Ngo)

2. Quotes from Moral Mazes (Moskowitz) (only up to section H: The I in Team)

3. On Drama (Constantin)

4. Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization (Yudkowsky)

Supplementary readings:

1. On commitments to anti-normativity (Taylor)

2. Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror (Wang)

3. On Pessimization (Ngo)

4. Our Revolution's Logic (Codevilla)

5. Guilt, Shame and Depravity (Hoffman)

6. The Comprachicos (Rand)

7. Excerpts from a larger discussion about simulacra (Hoffman)

In the face of the many challenges discussed in the previous weeks, there’s no fixed set of interventions that we can trust. Instead, we will need to make decisions flexibly and wisely, while avoiding deceiving ourselves or giving in to base motivations. In other words, we need to build communities in which people can be trusted to embody key virtues, both in their personal lives and in their political lives. These kinds of high-integrity communities can avoid falling prey to the groupthink dynamics discussed in week 8, while still coordinating in response to the technological changes discussed in week 9.

The first two readings this week focus on characterizing such virtues and what it takes to develop them—especially the masculine virtues that have long been in decline.

The third reading gives a game-theoretic explanation for how high-integrity people who take principled stands can achieve much more than we intuitively expect.

The final reading of the curriculum, by the great Solzhenitsyn, is about no longer lying: a key step towards living virtuously in an unvirtuous society.

Main readings:

1. Don't Learn Value From Society (Tivy)

2. Masculinity at the End of History (Gasda)

3. Power Lies Trembling (Ngo)

4. Live Not By Lies (Solzhenitsyn)

Supplementary readings:

1. The Inner Ring (Lewis)

2. Love of a Nation (Lyons)

3. Secrets (Ellsberg) (especially pages 262-295)

4. What Makes a Man (McPherson)

5. Final Statement in Court (Navalny)