Culture As A Cruel Master

Some things are said to be good servants but bad masters. Consider applying this warning to culture. 

Culture is humanity’s superpower; it is what makes humans so much more capable than other animals. When we know what outcomes we want, but not how to get them, culture helps us find and copy associates better at getting those outcomes, and then collectively improve our abilities. 

For example, if we want to catch fish, then we can see who is best at fishing, and copy how they fish. As we all keep doing that, we all get better at fishing. And much faster than if DNA evolution were instead adding such abilities. This is a crazy powerful tool for getting outcomes when we can see who is getting them better, and guess which of their behaviors plausibly contributes to getting those outcomes. 

However, not only does culture help us get more stuff we want, culture also tells us what we want. We are built to eagerly copy not only the means, but also the ends, of our prestigious associates. So culture is our master, and not just our slave. And being a pretty crude system, culture can go pretty wrong; I’ve argued that our world is now suffering seriously maladaptive cultural drift. 

Not only is culture now a strong master, it also seems a rather cruel one. A standard depiction of a cruel boss or master is one who assigns impossible tasks, or gives vague and contradictory descriptions of desired outcomes or constraints. All so that this master can berate and punish subordinates no matter what they do. Examples include Simon Legree from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miss Watson from Huckleberry Finn, and real slaveowners described by Frederick Douglass in his autobiography.

I realized that culture is a cruel master when I tried to think about how to apply futarchy to the problem of cultural drift. A futarchy-based world government tied permanently to simple stable outcome measures like population, energy use, or total willingness to pay for stuff made (i.e., GDP) over the coming centuries would probably work fine to avoid cultural drift. But many would object that this would get too many value tradeoffs wrong; we care about many other things besides these simple metrics.

However, a futarchy tied to complex expressions of the values of today’s world culture, updated every few years when those values changed, would plausibly just drift with culture, and not oppose cultural drift. Futarchy for smaller scale units, like nations, would additionally have to find ways to express a dislike of changes in those units induced by external influences, such as immigrants or foreign cultures. That is, it needs a way to measurably distinguish future versions of itself more versus less true to its cultural roots. Which seems hard.

To prevent cultural drift, we’d want some static expression of our values that we will not change as culture drifts, and which we still accept as roughly describing what we want out of our cultures. And it is very hard to see what these could be. Yes, in principle it should be possible to measure anything, but this does looks hard. So here is a way our culture masters won’t even clearly tell us what they want. They will just berate us when they want, no matter how we behave. Culture is a cruel master indeed.