Betrayed By Culture
Like most humans ever, I love my culture. Its food, clothes, festivals, songs, stories, news, monuments, inspirational speeches, all of it. Deeply. They bring tears to my eyes, and comfort to my soul. I want to assume, as have most humans ever, that the mere fact that my culture exists suggests that it will probably do well by me. And the fact that it seems especially envied and celebrated raises my hopes further.
I also love my family, and would be deeply hurt to learn that they had betrayed me, such as by hurting me lots to achieve small gains for them. But even if that were to happen, my culture tells me stories of how many have survived such things, and went on to thrive. And I believe such stories, as I love and trust my culture.
But what if it were my culture that were to betray me? Such as by sacrificing me for its greater good, or by being unusually dysfunctional. Even then I might give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I should lose for its greater good. Or maybe its dysfunction is a random unpredictable mistake; it was trying its best, and can’t always win. We are eager to forgive those we most love.
However, what if I came to believe that a key part of my culture had long been unusually broken, making quite predictable mistakes, and wasn’t able to accept corrections? What if, to the extent that I could find anything like objective standards by which to judge cultures, I found mine to just be objectively worse than most adjacent ones? In this case, I might just take the usual approach: look away, remain loyal, and just deny that there could be any objective standards by which to judge.
It turns out that, since I’ve learned about cultural drift, I do in fact see my culture as broken. But for some reason I can’t or won’t look away. And I struggle to express to you just how very betrayed and adrift I feel as a result. I’ve lost my trust in something that I’ve implicitly and deeply loved and trusted. I will stay loyal to my loved ones, but I can’t stay loyal to my culture, including its key norms and status markers.
I have long enjoyed questioning conventional wisdom. But I’ve almost always done that locally, by questioning each claim while assuming I can still rely on most other conventional wisdom. Yet the more “load-bearing” is a claim, or the larger the set of claims one tries to question at once, the fewer other claims one can rely on. At some point one risks being “lost at sea”, without anchors to support effective questioning.
Cultures embody a lot of our conventional wisdom. So it seems especially dizzying to try to doubt one’s culture. (At least the shared norms that are hard to vary within one’s culture.) Yes, I can still rely on solid academics results, and on features that human cultures have long shared. So it does seem possible. But it also seems very hard. And lonely; most everyone around me deeply believes in our shared culture, and isn’t eager to doubt big chunks of it.
Interestingly, the “modernism” cultural movement was full of folks who felt united by a feeling that they couldn’t trust their prior inherited culture, and needed to search for replacements. They succeeded at achieving artistic creativity and innovation, and high status, but not so much at finding trustworthy cultural replacements.
Since then we have come to celebrate as our greatest heroes the parade of cultural activists who successfully won cultural fights to change our culture in their preferred directions. But these changes do not seem to be better re, and are plausibly worse re, the most important available objective criteria by which we can rate cultures, namely biological adaptation.
We are by now quite far adrift at sea; we can no longer see the shore. Being no longer in denial about that fact is some progress, but it is still cold and empty out here. We do have food stocks in the hold, and a few stars to navigate by, at least when clouds clear. So we are not in immediate danger. But even so we remain in deep peril.
Beautifully put. I feel similarly about our culture although I don’t remember ever really particularly trusting our culture. For as long as I remember I’ve had this vague sense that things weren’t as they should be. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to put my finger on more and more of the issues thanks in no small part to writers such as yourself.
You refer to biological adaption as the available objective criterion by which we can rate cultures. I want to ask what you mean by that. If a criterion's being "objective" has to do with how reliably different people will agree on who's doing well and who's doing poorly by the criterion, then there are lots of objective criteria, but we mostly don't care about them. E.g., it's an objective matter how tall buildings are. You could judge cultures by how tall their tallest buildings are, or how tall their buildings are on average. So I assume by "objective" you don't just mean easy to judge, but something else. But then I wonder in what sense biological adaptation could be an objective criterion for judging cultures.
Stick with the individual case, rather than the social one. Imagine someone who has no desire to have children, and who doesn't help his biological relatives reproduce. You could tell this guy: "your life is going poorly by the one available objective criterion for a life well-lived: inclusive fitness!" It's hard for me to see why he should be moved--if he doesn't care about getting copies of his genes into the next generation, realizing that his lifestyle isn't well-calibrated to do that seems like it needn't bother him at all. Richard Dawkins made this point nicely way back in "The Selfish Gene."
I don't see how things are all that different when we scale up from the individual to the social/cultural level. If our culture doesn't value biological adaptiveness, then someone whose most basic values come from our culture may be unmoved upon learning that our culture is not fit, in cultural-evolutionary terms. It might matter derivatively--if you like your culture's values, then learning that it's not fit from an evolutionary perspective is reason to think it won't stick around, so people won't be around to promote those values in the future. So you might think that everybody has reason to want their culture to be fit, whatever *other* values they have. Is that the idea?