Mundia & Modia: The two worlds in which we live

We humans live in two worlds. One world, I call Mundia, is the world of
immutable laws, e.g. gravity, electromagnetism, and supply and demand –
it
is the world that we see when we look out at the natural landscape. The
other world, I call Modia, is the world of social relationships, e.g.
love,
hate, admiration, envy, loyalty, and gratitude – it is the world that
we see when we look out at the social landscape.

I believe that, while all of us live in both worlds, most of
us live in
one world much more than the other: we are Mundians or Modians, not
both. Mundians look out at the world and see the natural landscape;
Modians, the social landscape. This fact explains a lot of phenomena
that have puzzled me for a long time. At the most basic level it
explains this: when faced with a problem, what is the heuristic that we
use for solving it? Mundians use a naturalistic model, while Modians
use a sociological model. The nature of these two models is very
different, often leading to very different answers.

Mundia: The world is made of immutable laws. We can
successfully
manipulate the world by learning them. Over the course of our lifetime,
we can gradually build up our knowledge of the world – our knowledge
never goes out of date. We might get something wrong, and have to
update our understanding of things, given new information, but the
underlying world that our knowledge describes is fundamentally
unchangeable; there is no such thing as old-fashioned knowledge.
Moreover, the same is true for society as a whole: over thousands of
years, we have gradually built up a knowledge of the world’s immutable
laws, and the best way for an individual to become knowledgeable is to
learn this collective
wisdom. If something is unknown, or if there is some disagreement about
the way things are, the
way to resolve it is to understand things better; whether by
experimentation or by reason. The facts speak for themselves.

Modia: The world is made of relationships between people. We
can
successfully manipulate the world by figuring out who is powerful, or
by becoming powerful ourselves. We must learn to be responsive to
people in the right way, or to act in a way which will elicit the
response we want. How we look, dress, how we express ourselves, and
even the opinions that we hold, are all
factors in interpersonal relationships. Since power relationships are
always changing, this world, unlike Mundia, is continually shifting,
and knowledge about the world quickly goes out of date. Intelligent
Modians use their wits to develop an acute sensitivity to the
Zeitgeist. They must know whether to support the powerful, in the hopes
of being raised by association, or perhaps rebel in the hopes of
joining (or starting) a new power center. They must know who, and what,
is in or out, since a faux pas can lead to immediate loss of status.
Finally, for the most part, the world of Modia, unlike Mundia, is a
zero-sum-game: one person’s gain is another’s loss. Status
relationships can never be win-win.

Now, you might think that Mundia and Modia are non-overlapping
magisteria. If only they were! I will give you an example of how they
are not: the anthropogenic global warming debate. I am not,
personally, knowledgeable enough about this issue to have an informed
opinion about it. Most likely, neither are you. But, there is a good
chance that you have an opinion, informed or not, and might even
believe it very strongly! So how did you form your opinion? The answer
most likely depends on whether you are Mundian or Modian. A
Modian would say: “Obviously, there is anthropogenic global warming,
all the right people believe it! There is consensus among the experts!”
A Mundian would say, “Even
though there is a consensus among experts on this issue, there are some
experts who disagree. How do we know they are not right? Only a few
decades ago the experts were warning about global cooling. Minority
views have often overturned the scientific consensus. Not enough time
has passed to come to a conclusion. The jury is still
out.” Note that I’m not saying anything about the truth value of
anthropogenic global warming! Only about the heuristic that we use to
make decisions when we are not well-informed.

You might also notice that being pro-AGW is generally
associated with
the political left, while being anti-AGW is associated with the right.
I don’t much like the terms “left” and “right” as political
descriptions (“liberal” and “conservative” are even worse) because to
most people they imply ideology. I don’t believe that ideology is
consistent over time. When I look at the ideology of the left or right
a hundred years ago, and look at it now, I don’t see much continuity.
Issues that the left or right supported a hundred years ago seem to
have no relationship to issues that they support today.
When I look at policy I see even less continuity. The continuity that I
do see is
the difference between Mundia and Modia.

Why is it that Hollywood tends to be leftist, while farmers
tend to be
on the right? It is because success in Hollywood depends on
successfully manipulating people, while farmers must manipulate nature.
You can make a list of professions, and easily see that the more Modian
they are, the more left-leaning they tend to be, and the more Mundian
they are, the more right-leaning. Thus people who work in the media
tend to be on the left, and engineers tend to be on the right. Business
people
tend to be on the right, because they are judged by objective standards
of profit and loss. But those business people whose success depends on
understanding fashion tend more to the left. Wherever you see objective
standards, you see Mundians; wherever the the standards are subjective,
Modians.

All human institutions tend to become Modian over time, for
the simple
reason that they are made up of people. The more subjective the
criteria for success, the more Modian the organization will become.
Those institutions that have little or no exogenous criteria for
success, like government, academia, or the non-profit sector, will
inevitably come to be dominated by Modians, whatever their explicit
goals
may be. Businesses, which must make a profit to survive, are not immune
to this tendency. Though they have exogenous criteria for success, it
is a difficult task to propagate the objective criteria for success
down through
the ranks – at each level of decision making there will be some degree
of subjectivity, and by the time we reach the bottom rank, decisions
might be completely Modian. But in the business world, there is some
good news for
Mundians: those businesses that become too Modian will fail.

Mundia and Modia explain why people tend to move rightwards as
they
age. We are all born Modians, knowing nothing about the world, but
trusting our parents to inform us. Later we learn from our teachers,
and our peers. It is usually perfectly clear who has the right opinions
in our society, and we accept their opinions as fact. But as we move
away
from the orbit of our parents, an interesting thing happens. We become
acutely aware of the social hierarchy of our peers. It often becomes
clear that the high-status opinions in this society are different,
often diametrically
opposed, to those of our parents. Which do we choose? Most of us still
don’t have a well-formed inner model of the world from which to make a
Mundian decision, but most of us value highly our status among our
peers, so it’s an
easy choice: we abandon the opinions of our parents, and embrace those
of our peers.

As we age, we gradually learn more about Mundia. Its immutable
nature
means that our knowledge about it is cumulative. Occasionally, we learn
things that seem to contradict what we thought we knew, and we have to
reconsider our ideas, but the direction is always forward. Nothing of
the sort happens in Modia, at least on a macro scale. Opinion-makers
are always changing. Intellectual fashions go in and out of style. To a
Modian, it seems natural to keep up with the latest fashion, and they
are instinctively swept along. But a Mundian soon becomes
disillusioned; the world is
supposed to be immutable! When our personal experiences of the world
contradict its social messages, Mundians rebel.
And so, they gradually move to the right.

You might have detected above my own personal bias. I am, I
admit, a
Mundian. But I do not believe that Mundians are always right, nor is
Modia an illusion. In fact, Modia is probably more important than
Mundia, even to Mundians! Mundians crave social success and status no
less than Modians, and usually
more than they crave success in farming, or building bridges that won’t
fall down. A typical Mundian mistake is to assume that success in
Mundia will naturally lead to success in Modia. It might, but it might
not. A successful movie star will always be more popular than a
successful businessman. I also think that Modia is important in its own
right, especially on the micro level of interpersonal relations. On the
macro level, marketing is part of life, for better or for worse, and
it’s an important skill. In the arts, why not? Viva la Modia! Why not
enjoy it?

The problem comes when you use Modian skills to solve a
Mundian
problem, or vice versa. Everybody knows that Modian skills won’t keep
your bridges from falling down, but we still choose bridge-builders
partly, at least, for Modian reasons. Everybody knows that truth isn’t
a popularity contest, but we still tend to view a recent scientific
consensus as truth, and call dissenters deniers. Conversely, Mundia
won’t help you get along with your spouse, your co-workers, or make you
popular.

In then end, we humans live in two worlds: Mundia and Modia.
Enjoy the
difference.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at September 18, 2014 02:37 PM
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