Christian Cultural Drift

Re civ decline, my basic story is that a key contribution to the fall of civilizations is plausibly that as a civ gets big, rich, and peaceful, its local cultural evolution process parameters get worse, at least at the culture level. There is typically lower variety, weaker selection pressures, and faster environmental change. So the process goes bad, its cultures drift into maladaption, and the civ falls. Our current civ will plausibly suffer this fate, with the added problem that due to modern cultural activism we also have higher rates of internal cultural drift.

What does this say about Christianity? Early on it was a small sect competing with many others, and the fact that it won against them suggests that it was unusually adaptive then, at least in that context. Then it took over the Roman Empire and most of Europe, and became securely in pace for millennia. And while securely in place, Christianity substantially changed its character many times. So doesn’t my theory suggest that those changes would on average have been maladaptive?

Well first notice that most Europeans didn’t know much about Christian doctrine re how to live ordinary peasant lives until about 1600 or so. Before then Christianity mainly influenced elites, cities, and larger institutions. Also, there was often lots of competition within Christianity; the cultural evolution problem would only be re cultural features that were imposed on everyone in Christianity, allowing little local deviation.

Okay, but Christianity influenced marriage much earlier, from about 1200, promoting monogamy and banning cousins marriage, and that suppressed family clans. Christianity also pushed individualism early on, via consent in marriage and the freedom to write wills, especially donations to the Church. And those wills funded many big monasteries, which slowly took over lots of European land. Also, conflicts between the church and crowns started early and weakly contributed to the lack of a single power taking over all of Europe. (Though note: most of these things didn’t actually change much over the history of Christianity.)

The protestant revolution created more competition among forms of Christianity, but it also induced record high level of religious hostility and destruction. But then the strangest thing happened: after the thirty years war (1648+), Europe suddenly agreed to great religious tolerance, at least among variations on Christianity, inducing world record low levels of religious destruction.

It turns out that religious tolerance, individualism, suppressing family clans, and preventing a single empire, were important enablers of modern capitalism, which enabled the Industrial Revolution. Which seems to have been quite adaptive in many ways, and least on the timescale of a few centuries. So does this show that some pro-adaption process was driving changes in Christianity over millennia? Or did it just get lucky?

I think Europe just got lucky. The accumulation of land by the church, and the increase in religious hostility, seem maladaptive, and suppressing family clans was also probably maladaptive at first. Then Europe got lucky in that religious hostility dramatically (and puzzlingly) reversed, crowns grabbed back most of that church land, and then individualism, suppressed family clans, and no central empire together turned out to be very good for capitalism and industry.

But maybe to get this lucky, Europe needed to make some big changes from prior cultures, and an out-of-control drifting Christian culture is part of what gave Europe the ability to make such big changes. Usually big random changes go badly, but they sometimes allow evolution to make big jumps to new peaks, in ways that wouldn’t be possible without them. Yes, this means maybe we today will also get lucky in a similar way. But don’t count on it.