Assuming, because it's a prediction, that when you say "I predict cultural evolution should eventually select for..." you mean "should" as in "is likely to" and not "would be morally correct to", I think you're wrong.
Cultural evolution would act on cultures, in the way evolution acts on organisms. No individual culture benefits (in terms of maximizing practitioners) from spinning off competing cultures instead of trying to retain practitioners.
There's no selection pressure for a "Frodo gene" (which compels its owner to save the world by sacrificing themselves, thus having no offspring), even if everyone would be better off if Frodos existed. And there will similarly be no selection pressure for this, even if it's better.
So this isn't likely to happen without a plan for creating this norm, and retaining this norm, despite selection pressures against.
If you did mean it in the "is morally correct to" sense, then I think the next steps would be figuring out what that plan looks like.
Imagine a culture of composed of traits A B C D and E. Now imagine E is unfit. A cultural offspring that accepts A B C and D but rejects E will have higher chances of survival and will benefit most traits of the original culture. So it's beneficial to most of the original culture to tolerate this new one.
The original culture does not benefit by tolerating this, the original culture dies off as adherents move to the new culture.
But this is the standard kind of cultural evolution, not the multiculturalism that, if I've understood correctly, Mr. Hanson is talking about.
The important thing to note is that "unfit" in this context is not "good for society" it is "good for gathering or maintaining adherents". Often these things coincide. You could imagine a norm of "you must tase yourself once a day" being both bad for society, and likely to stop people from joining or staying in the culture.
But they don't always. One example might be free speech. If you restrict free speech, you can stop would-be heretics from learning any heresy in the first place. This is good for more adherents, but bad for society, since free speech leads to innovation and then to prosperity.
The problem is that a dominant culture with anti-free-speech norms can drive any pro-free-speech variants to extinction before their greater innovation manages to take off.
Thus, we want cultural tolerance to allow long term things to show their gains before dying out. Also, larger variation explores the solution space faster.
But as in biological evolution, most mutations are deleterious. It's harder to build a better culture. And long term beneficial solutions may be bad in the short term, so it's hard to tell a "this culture will be good in 5 decades" from a "this culture will continue to suck", before the 5 decade mark.
Thus, multiculturalism needs to tolerate bad (and unfit) cultures, too. And evolution is generally unkind to unfit things. Thus my thought that energy needs to be put into this to work against the gradient.
You have a good point that the present tendency toward de facto monoculturalism might be dangerous for us humans in a very long-term evolutionary perspective. Since it implies laying just one (cultural) egg in the basket. A diverse cultural portfolio seems like a more prudent strategy to meet the future.
But here is the thing, or rather, things:
Cultures today, unlike in the past, live in the shadow of states. And for a variety of reasons, states are unlikely to tolerate much diversity about the aspects of culture that really matters, i.e. deep interpersonal matters. Deep interpersonal matters are stuff like the relationship between men and women; the relationship between parents and children; the tolerance of various types of sexual behavior; the use of interpersonal violence (or threat of such violence) to settle disagreements; the acceptance of private ownership to things or to people.
Examples of deep cultural diversity with regard to the above that was widespread globally in the not-too-distant past, but is giving way to deep monoculturalism, as “modernity” is increasing its global dominance: Sex with underage children; forced sex; killing daughters that have sex before marriage; tolerance of incest; arranged marriages; widows voluntarily entering the funeral pyre of their husbands; hard corporal punishment of children; slavery; ritual killings; denying education to women; punishment or killing of homosexuals; pogroms. The list is longer, but the above suffices to illustrate deep cultural diversity.
In short, I do not think a call for “live and let live”, or (somewhat weaker) “I will help you build and live in your culture as long as it is separate from my own” will have any success in today’s world. Due to the existence of states, boosted by the ongoing revolution in communication technology. Like it or not, monoculturalism about deep cultural matters is our likely future.
The Emergence of a Universal Hedonistic Culture from a Universal Evolutionary Convergence to Ethical Hedonism
It seems apparently maximally moral for humanity to strive to control and optimize its cultural evolution according to universal ethics in order to create a maximally benevolent universal culture. Thus any memetic divergence from this maximally benevolent universal culture would be a divergence from universal ethics and would be repressed and any memetic alignment to the maximally benevolent universal culture would be an alignment to universal ethics and would proliferate.
In other words, cultural entities that create significant suffering or are boring should be repressed proportionally whereas cultural entities that create joy without causing suffering should be preserved, cherished, and spread proportionally.
This hedonistic mechanism of cultural evolution describes a model of cultural evolution which supposes that humanity will ultimately hedonistically determine which cultures will proliferate and which cultures will decline through a process of agents generating and selecting memes with an emergent collective goal of maximizing the enjoyment and virality of the set of memes that comprise and are generated based on global culture.
There must even be a universal moral imperative to refine this global mechanism of cultural evolution to be better over time by legally requiring enjoyment and truth checking or generating AI to check or generate all communications between all members of humanity if all civilizations would be destined to maximize morality and pleasure.
A decent documentary on a cult / not-a-cult that has so far not self-destructed. I wonder if their choice of a deliberately fictional prophet / figurehead had anything to do with that, as a method for avoiding the temptations of power.
It's not clear this selection should happen in a relatively "full" world. Indeed, I thought your point about the problem with global culture is that long term selection actually selects for suppression of all cultural changes (at least until things get bad enough the system breaks).
Even if we succeed in inducing more cultural variety, we still face the problem of weak cultural selection. So there isn't now much selection against cultural change.
One of the big advantages of cultures over organisms (other than bacteria) is horizontal meme transfer. Hence the ingroup/outgroup/far group trio. Your nearest rivals (siblings, descendants, ancestors) are the ones you're competing with. Your distant strangers are the ones you can borrow exotic ideas from once in a while.
Also, very similar cultures in similar circumstances are the only ways selection can act on specific dimensions of difference instead of a big messy blob of a thousand differences.
I would like that world, but cultural evolution doesn't care about what's good for the world.
I have my doubts that the norms you're talking about are adaptive in a world of competing cultures. I'm not even sure they're realistically possible. Maybe in a world with more frontiers than we have now, but my sense is even with frontiers parent cultures want subordination from colonizers/pioneers. Do you have examples of cultures that are close to what you describe?
Wouldn't this cultural pattern already be widespread if this was true?
I agree that successful cultures need norms for stability and for flexibility at the same time, but I don't think that means the specific deep multiculturalism you're proposing is adaptive. I think if it was we'd see cultures or institutions that look somewhat similar now, and I don't see them.
We've had cultural competition and evolution as long as we've had cultures. I would agree that the nature of that competition has changed over time, especially in the modern era, but I am not confident at all about what that means for the next 500 or 10000 years.
> The theory argument here is simple and clear.
If I understand it correctly, I don't find it persuasive. You are describing one way that the opposed values of stability and flexibility could be balanced, and saying selection pressures must push toward that specific scenario. But there is more than one way to balance cultural stability and flexibility, and it's also possible that this balance won't be strongly selected for at all, with other considerations being more important.
You write of insiders becoming outsiders but wouldn't they still have a strong connection to their original culture? And we can reasonably assume that the new cult will have a lot of the same ideas as the old. Wouldn't it just be an offshoot?
Religious schism results in distinct, somewhat antagonistic groups that have only a few differences; but they care a lot about those differences. Are they strongly connected or weakly connected?
Even though there are notorious instances where people killed each other for such differences, (Shia vs. Sunni, Catholic vs. Protestant etc.) in the context of this conversation where we're talking about the long term I believe they're strongly connected. Nations and people with sectarian differences have, especially in modern times, cooperated more than they've fought, as far as I can tell.
I'm at a loss for how to facilitate the evolution of new cultures. I believe we should allow movement between cultures and the creation of new cultures but for those cultures to converge in sufficiently different directions there probably needs to be a level of isolation for some medium to long term amount of time. I'm not sure how this can be achieved in our high tech always connected global society. It's like we've evolved to seek and crave connection and we've been too successful at fulfilling that instinct and it's having unintended consequences.
I imagine that 10 offshoots would vary enough to be differentiated. Plus as time goes on in these insular cultures they will continue to develop and diverge.
deep multiculturalism means looking at how diversity arises and is maintained despite the same processes throwing up intolerant one-ist options, one can look at Mary Douglas et al perceptions of risk as one relative structuralism to do this via individual/group choices, but this does not account for the urge to world in the first place (the OP displays this urge in the phrase "But the world also needs…" which is also a should as well as a need. see https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
"But the world" see ... revisiting the difference in my usage of 'moral urge', 'worldbuilding' and 'to world' https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/worlding-on-saturday-morning.html crossposting https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worlding-on-saturday-morning
Assuming, because it's a prediction, that when you say "I predict cultural evolution should eventually select for..." you mean "should" as in "is likely to" and not "would be morally correct to", I think you're wrong.
Cultural evolution would act on cultures, in the way evolution acts on organisms. No individual culture benefits (in terms of maximizing practitioners) from spinning off competing cultures instead of trying to retain practitioners.
There's no selection pressure for a "Frodo gene" (which compels its owner to save the world by sacrificing themselves, thus having no offspring), even if everyone would be better off if Frodos existed. And there will similarly be no selection pressure for this, even if it's better.
So this isn't likely to happen without a plan for creating this norm, and retaining this norm, despite selection pressures against.
If you did mean it in the "is morally correct to" sense, then I think the next steps would be figuring out what that plan looks like.
See my added to the post. DNA evolution has already induced species to support creating new species.
Imagine a culture of composed of traits A B C D and E. Now imagine E is unfit. A cultural offspring that accepts A B C and D but rejects E will have higher chances of survival and will benefit most traits of the original culture. So it's beneficial to most of the original culture to tolerate this new one.
The original culture does not benefit by tolerating this, the original culture dies off as adherents move to the new culture.
But this is the standard kind of cultural evolution, not the multiculturalism that, if I've understood correctly, Mr. Hanson is talking about.
The important thing to note is that "unfit" in this context is not "good for society" it is "good for gathering or maintaining adherents". Often these things coincide. You could imagine a norm of "you must tase yourself once a day" being both bad for society, and likely to stop people from joining or staying in the culture.
But they don't always. One example might be free speech. If you restrict free speech, you can stop would-be heretics from learning any heresy in the first place. This is good for more adherents, but bad for society, since free speech leads to innovation and then to prosperity.
The problem is that a dominant culture with anti-free-speech norms can drive any pro-free-speech variants to extinction before their greater innovation manages to take off.
Thus, we want cultural tolerance to allow long term things to show their gains before dying out. Also, larger variation explores the solution space faster.
But as in biological evolution, most mutations are deleterious. It's harder to build a better culture. And long term beneficial solutions may be bad in the short term, so it's hard to tell a "this culture will be good in 5 decades" from a "this culture will continue to suck", before the 5 decade mark.
Thus, multiculturalism needs to tolerate bad (and unfit) cultures, too. And evolution is generally unkind to unfit things. Thus my thought that energy needs to be put into this to work against the gradient.
You have a good point that the present tendency toward de facto monoculturalism might be dangerous for us humans in a very long-term evolutionary perspective. Since it implies laying just one (cultural) egg in the basket. A diverse cultural portfolio seems like a more prudent strategy to meet the future.
But here is the thing, or rather, things:
Cultures today, unlike in the past, live in the shadow of states. And for a variety of reasons, states are unlikely to tolerate much diversity about the aspects of culture that really matters, i.e. deep interpersonal matters. Deep interpersonal matters are stuff like the relationship between men and women; the relationship between parents and children; the tolerance of various types of sexual behavior; the use of interpersonal violence (or threat of such violence) to settle disagreements; the acceptance of private ownership to things or to people.
Examples of deep cultural diversity with regard to the above that was widespread globally in the not-too-distant past, but is giving way to deep monoculturalism, as “modernity” is increasing its global dominance: Sex with underage children; forced sex; killing daughters that have sex before marriage; tolerance of incest; arranged marriages; widows voluntarily entering the funeral pyre of their husbands; hard corporal punishment of children; slavery; ritual killings; denying education to women; punishment or killing of homosexuals; pogroms. The list is longer, but the above suffices to illustrate deep cultural diversity.
In short, I do not think a call for “live and let live”, or (somewhat weaker) “I will help you build and live in your culture as long as it is separate from my own” will have any success in today’s world. Due to the existence of states, boosted by the ongoing revolution in communication technology. Like it or not, monoculturalism about deep cultural matters is our likely future.
I agree this is a big ask, and thus a long shot. But, alas, none of the possible solutions look much better.
The Emergence of a Universal Hedonistic Culture from a Universal Evolutionary Convergence to Ethical Hedonism
It seems apparently maximally moral for humanity to strive to control and optimize its cultural evolution according to universal ethics in order to create a maximally benevolent universal culture. Thus any memetic divergence from this maximally benevolent universal culture would be a divergence from universal ethics and would be repressed and any memetic alignment to the maximally benevolent universal culture would be an alignment to universal ethics and would proliferate.
In other words, cultural entities that create significant suffering or are boring should be repressed proportionally whereas cultural entities that create joy without causing suffering should be preserved, cherished, and spread proportionally.
This hedonistic mechanism of cultural evolution describes a model of cultural evolution which supposes that humanity will ultimately hedonistically determine which cultures will proliferate and which cultures will decline through a process of agents generating and selecting memes with an emergent collective goal of maximizing the enjoyment and virality of the set of memes that comprise and are generated based on global culture.
There must even be a universal moral imperative to refine this global mechanism of cultural evolution to be better over time by legally requiring enjoyment and truth checking or generating AI to check or generate all communications between all members of humanity if all civilizations would be destined to maximize morality and pleasure.
Thanks for spurring this article, Robin.
"Universal Evolutionary Convergence to Ethical Hedonism" would be convergence to a global monoculture.
...or perhaps more accurately described as convergence to a global meta-monoculture.
A decent documentary on a cult / not-a-cult that has so far not self-destructed. I wonder if their choice of a deliberately fictional prophet / figurehead had anything to do with that, as a method for avoiding the temptations of power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlB5DKTwd9Y
Thank you for your work on developing solutions for this critical challenge of our time, Dr. Hanson.
I wrote a response to it on behalf of my start-up society, the Spacers Guild.
https://spacersguild.substack.com/p/on-the-interstellar-commonwealth
It's not clear this selection should happen in a relatively "full" world. Indeed, I thought your point about the problem with global culture is that long term selection actually selects for suppression of all cultural changes (at least until things get bad enough the system breaks).
Even if we succeed in inducing more cultural variety, we still face the problem of weak cultural selection. So there isn't now much selection against cultural change.
One of the big advantages of cultures over organisms (other than bacteria) is horizontal meme transfer. Hence the ingroup/outgroup/far group trio. Your nearest rivals (siblings, descendants, ancestors) are the ones you're competing with. Your distant strangers are the ones you can borrow exotic ideas from once in a while.
True, that makes you less hostile to very different co-existing rival cultures.
Also, very similar cultures in similar circumstances are the only ways selection can act on specific dimensions of difference instead of a big messy blob of a thousand differences.
I would like that world, but cultural evolution doesn't care about what's good for the world.
I have my doubts that the norms you're talking about are adaptive in a world of competing cultures. I'm not even sure they're realistically possible. Maybe in a world with more frontiers than we have now, but my sense is even with frontiers parent cultures want subordination from colonizers/pioneers. Do you have examples of cultures that are close to what you describe?
But this stance is good for the particular culture.
You are saying so, but I'm not convinced.
Wouldn't this cultural pattern already be widespread if this was true?
I agree that successful cultures need norms for stability and for flexibility at the same time, but I don't think that means the specific deep multiculturalism you're proposing is adaptive. I think if it was we'd see cultures or institutions that look somewhat similar now, and I don't see them.
Cultural evolution is a new thing in the world, so not very advanced and subtle. The theory argument here is simple and clear.
We've had cultural competition and evolution as long as we've had cultures. I would agree that the nature of that competition has changed over time, especially in the modern era, but I am not confident at all about what that means for the next 500 or 10000 years.
> The theory argument here is simple and clear.
If I understand it correctly, I don't find it persuasive. You are describing one way that the opposed values of stability and flexibility could be balanced, and saying selection pressures must push toward that specific scenario. But there is more than one way to balance cultural stability and flexibility, and it's also possible that this balance won't be strongly selected for at all, with other considerations being more important.
You write of insiders becoming outsiders but wouldn't they still have a strong connection to their original culture? And we can reasonably assume that the new cult will have a lot of the same ideas as the old. Wouldn't it just be an offshoot?
Religious schism results in distinct, somewhat antagonistic groups that have only a few differences; but they care a lot about those differences. Are they strongly connected or weakly connected?
Even though there are notorious instances where people killed each other for such differences, (Shia vs. Sunni, Catholic vs. Protestant etc.) in the context of this conversation where we're talking about the long term I believe they're strongly connected. Nations and people with sectarian differences have, especially in modern times, cooperated more than they've fought, as far as I can tell.
I'm at a loss for how to facilitate the evolution of new cultures. I believe we should allow movement between cultures and the creation of new cultures but for those cultures to converge in sufficiently different directions there probably needs to be a level of isolation for some medium to long term amount of time. I'm not sure how this can be achieved in our high tech always connected global society. It's like we've evolved to seek and crave connection and we've been too successful at fulfilling that instinct and it's having unintended consequences.
I imagine that 10 offshoots would vary enough to be differentiated. Plus as time goes on in these insular cultures they will continue to develop and diverge.
There appears to be strong incentives against insularity these days. Maybe that's a good thing, I don't know.