Culture Drift Predicts Decadence

Babies are naturally pretty selfish, lazy, and present-oriented. So adults train and push kids to acquire habits and norms that will get them to invest in the future, and play well with others. When adults don’t do this, kids become “spoiled”. 

Left to their own devices, and assured that this will long continue, most workers will slack off from their job, and find ways to rest or entertain themselves. Bosses and incentives are needed to push them to be productive.

The boss of a firm division tends naturally to try to increase that division’s budget, increase its performance metrics, please its boss, decrease his or her pain and effort, and maybe also have some fun. Many easy-to-find ways to achieve these naturally come at the expense of other parts of the firm, firm customers or suppliers, or the future of the firm. It is usually much easier to find promising selfish myopic choices, compared to noticing how actions effect others or the future. So it is the job of higher bosses, and firm culture, to get them to notice. 

If firm bosses suddenly became much less effective at this job, then we’d expect a trend toward more selfish myopic division choices. Similarly, if a firm’s environment started to change faster, the first instinct of divisions would be to look for selfish myopic adaptations, as these are easiest to find. If faster change made it harder for bosses to adapt their oversight, then we expect a less well-coordinated firm, which less promotes its own future. We expect a similar outcome if the firm’s cultural adaption process finds it harder to adapt to faster change.

Whole firms and other orgs can also make selfish myopic choices at the expense of other orgs and their future. While many see government interventions as primarily driven by a need to discourage such choices, government policy is often driven by other priorities. Government agencies within a nation, and different nations, can also act selfishly, and fail to promote their future. Better culture can help here.

In our large societies, a key role of cultural values, norms, and status markers is to induce us all to cooperate better with each other, and to not to neglect our future. And if such cultural features were encoded very abstractly, they might not need to change much to accommodate changing tech and social conditions. But in fact they are not usually encoded very abstractly, and so require substantial reworking to apply well to changing conditions.

We all find it easy and natural to choose selfishly and myopically; our culture and institutions must work to get us to do otherwise. When rapidly changing social conditions make prior cultural norms less relevant for current conditions, old norms do less well at promoting cooperation and investments in the future. And it takes time to find new norms that work as well for our new conditions. 

If a few centuries ago culture was pretty adaptive, but since then we’ve seen great falls in cultural variety and selection pressures, and increases in internal rates of cultural change not driven by or aligned with selection pressures, then we should now be suffering from cultural drift re norms and behaviors that are hard to vary within cultures. In this case, what sort of changes should we expect to see as a result?

One kind of expected change is random walks, drifting away from adaptive zones. Another is a return to a more natural forager-like cultures, in the absence of the selection pressures that turned foragers into farmers. This can help explain trends in democracy, slavery, leisure, fertility, and travel. 

The arguments I gave above suggest that a third kind of change we should expect to see from cultural drift is “decadence”, by which I mean norms increasingly tolerant of myopia, laziness, and pleasure, and less encouraging of social coordination. Rich parents have long worried about letting wealth “spoil” their kids, and we should now also worry that our increasing wealth is spoiling us all. 

Thus fast rates of change in tech and social conditions, combined with a weak cultural selection process, predict that we are becoming more “decadent”, i.e., less effectively investing in our future, less effectively coordinating with others, more lazy, and more pleasure-oriented. And I think that prediction is roughly born out. 

We now push less for conformity to traditional norms, and more tolerate and even celebrate defiance of many pro-coordination norms, such as anti-crime and pro-work-org norms. We work less, are more promiscuous, and consume more entertainment. We invest less in fertility, and more in education, which is at our margins a poor investment. We less promote and more hinder innovation. We are less ready to die in war for our community. And we are in less awe of religion and other sacred things larger than ourselves.