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Five Slogans Re Cultural Drift
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I’m wondering how well I might organize my cultural drift messages around a few key slogans. Consider the following slogans as placeholders for better worded versions.
Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. But such Darwinian evolution fails without sufficient variation or selection pressures, or if the context changes too fast. A few centuries ago we were fine; the world had 100Ks of peasant cultures, most facing frequent wars, pandemics, and famines, in an economy that took a millennia to double. But then we merged peasants into a hundred or so national cultures, and then those into just a few world cultures, all of which got so rich, healthy and peaceful that they almost never die. Also, the world economy now doubles every twenty years, fifty times faster than before. So now we are likely in trouble.
Every cultural feature has a min scale at which it can vary; below that scale, people have to do it the same. We are doing fine re features that can vary at small scales, but in trouble re features that set game-theoretic equilibria, and so can only vary at large scales. Features of corporate culture are small enough, but global features are not. Our actions are nested in goal hierarchies, and our most troubled cultural features correspond to basic goals, near key values and morals, which are hard to vary locally as cultures punish moral deviants.
A reasonable response to evolution failing re our more basic goals would be to become conservative about changing them. Allow changes to means, which can easily vary at small scales, but not to the ends which direct such means. That is, change hows but not whys. Alas, humanity moved the other way. At the dawn of “modernity”, the status jump that STEM (including business) fields had won via innovation inspired non-STEM fields like art, religion, philosophy, politics, etc. to also embrace innovation. Even though they mostly didn’t see enough data to pick adaptive changes.
Embracing a folk morality, our most celebrated heroes are now the cultural activists who cause the greatest changes to values and morals. As a result, we are decaying into maladaption far faster than we otherwise would. The clearest example of such decay is falling fertility; peak world babies/yr was in 2016, and world population will start to fall in ~30yrs, after which STEM innovation rates will grind to a halt.
The Amish and Haredim double in number every twenty years; the Amish have done so for over a century. Christians took over the Roman Empire by doubling every twenty years for 300yrs, and these new insular religious subcultures seem similarly on track to replace our main world civilization. If you like what these subcultures stand for, and they let you join or influence them, then you can win. That is like folks on a ship heading for an iceberg, who get off onto lifeboats. The rest of us, in contrast, must grab the helm, to turn the ship of world culture, or go down with that ship.
Thankfully, human extinction seems unlikely. But the world might lose many key features of today’s world culture that were rare in prior cultures. Like democracy, pacifism, gender equality, anti-kid-beating, or open intellectual inquiry. If you want such features to last long into the future, well past your lifetime, you’ll need to mix them into adaptive cultures. As only adaptive cultures last.
We won’t be able to save much of our current culture, as much of it is likely maladaptive. Such as the proximate causes of fertility decline: long inflexible school paths, gender equality, capstone marriage, intensive parenting, distant grandparents, urbanization, and loss of religion. It is like if an invading army came to your city, and you had one hour to pack one suitcase, then leave. You’d think carefully about what to pack, but you couldn’t take much. Me, I most want to save open intellectual inquiry.
Our civilization may fall so far as to fragment, and restart strong selection via big wars, famines, and pandemics. Which could restart evolution, allowing a new world civilization to rise. But unless we find new ways to get key info re how to adapt, besides mass death and fragmentation, Earth civs may keep falling and rising indefinitely. Even getting human level AI won’t solve our culture evolution problem.
I see three promising approaches: (1) let capitalism run most all life areas, (2) run small groups by speculative market estimates of future group adaptive success, or (3) run big groups by such price estimates of achieving big goals in conflict with civilization collapse, like when do 1M people live in space. The first two approaches face strong headwinds of widespread sentiment against both capitalism and Social Darwinism.
All three approaches require strong selection among market traders, who produce the info that can let groups stay adaptive without their frequent death or division. We will need to learn to direct cultural change, as we today direct many kinds of innovation. Maybe start by using markets to guide corporate cultures away from maladaption.