I’ve been traveling a lot for six weeks; one more week to go, then I’ll stay home for a while. In that time, I’ve given many talks, including two on cultural drift (to be posted soon), a topic I’ve continued to read and think lots about. I feel a bit out of practice writing now, and I’m struggling with how to tell you about all the changes in my thinking.
I guess the biggest thing I want to say now is that the cultural drift thesis seems rich with implications for history and current affairs. But these implications may be a lot of work to tease out, and I fear I’m likely not very well qualified to this work. However, let me at least outline the task here.
Good historians generally try to explain what has happened to humans in time, using all the promising social models and abstractions they can find. Instead of focusing on explaining the details of individual lives, they naturally prefer to focus on explaining large scale patterns of behaviors, only considering individual details in a few especially important cases. All of which makes sense.
Looking at history through the lens of cultural evolution, we note that we want to categorize all this human behavior in terms of the biological concept of “adaptation”. That is, we want to say which of these behavior patterns are more (vs less) prone to win out against rival patterns, and to enable correlated behaviors and DNA to also win out against rivals. The more adaptive patterns should tend to win out in history, and be expected to win out in the future.
However, tracing out which patterns we should expect to win in the long run seems really hard. We should of course try anyway. But it might help to start with a somewhat easier task: assigning relative weights to different causes of pattern changes. After all, we should expect the changes caused more by selection to be more adaptive, and others to be at more risk of being maladaptive.
For this purpose, the most important type of change is, of course: direct selection. Some behaviors cause associated hosts to live or die, reproduce or not, grow or decay in resources, be eagerly or reluctantly emulated, etc. Usually via war, famine, disease, or fertility differences. The patterns we see as growing more due to selection are also those we expect to be more adaptive, and to become more common in the future.
When our environments change, that often induces a second key cause of change: conditional adaptations. Plants and animals long ago evolved habits of changing their behavior with time of day, day of year, or cycle in life. Brains allowed for far more of that conditionality, and human brains even more so. For example, human and other animal behaviors plausibly vary in standard ways with density, disease provenance, mortality rates, associate relatedness, sex ratio, and resource wealth.
In addition to directly executing simple inherited conditional adaptations, our brains also let us calculate more complex context dependent adaptations. To do this, brains have some goals that they seek to achieve, and they try to calculate what behaviors are more likely to achieve those goals in the current environment.
Changes caused by conditional adaptations should be expected to be adaptive if those tendencies are actually still adaptive. But contexts may have changed to make them less adaptive. Calculated behaviors can change when environments change, when goals change, or when calculation strategies change. As it is packages of goals and calculation strategies that are selected together, changing calculation strategies while holding goals constant is often maladaptive.
An important category of conditional adaptation is: cultural learning. Cultural evolution was made feasible by a human capacity to copy the behaviors of others, together with heuristics on who is worth copying on what when. The first heuristic was probably to just copy the high status, but with time humanity collected many more specific and stronger heuristics. When such heuristics are adaptive, their cultural learning applications will also on average be adaptive. But maladaptive status markers can lead to maladaptive copying of high status behaviors.
Finally, many rivals in conflicts are tied to packages of cultural elements, packages which rise or fall when those rivals win or lose their conflicts. For example, World War II was the most culturally influential event of the twentieth century. Yet the rise of Hitler to run Germany and Germany losing the war were pretty random events. So the big cultural changes caused by that war are also pretty random changes, and thus mostly not adaptive. Cultural activists also often seek glory via leading culture change crusades, but which of the rivalrous movements win out can be pretty random.
To summarize, selection should pretty consistently make culture more adaptive, as should cultural learning using strong heuristics. Cultural learning with crude heuristics, and conditional adaptations, should also tend to be adaptive, so but less consistently so. Finally conflicts among rivals will mostly be random, but may weakly tend in selective directions.
Note that if culture starts out at a pretty adaptive location in culture space, and then moves due to substantially random forces, it should on average move to less adaptive places, even if those change forces have a weak selective tendency. This is because culture space can be high dimensional, with highly adaptive locations taking up only a tiny fraction of the space.
And that’s the hard, but maybe not maximally hard, problem of describing history in cultural evolution terms. If we can identify the relative weights of different kinds of forces changing different aspects of culture, we can guess which ones are getting more vs. less adaptive. Which might help direct our efforts at cultural reform.
Quote: “World War II was the most culturally influential event of the twentieth century. Yet the rise of Hitler to run Germany and Germany losing the war were pretty random events. So the big cultural changes caused by that war are also pretty random changes”
…could not agree more. We still live in the shadow of WW2.
And that shadow has become more visible over the decades, instead of gradually fading away.
One reason for the shadow of WW2 remaining more important than anything else in the present cultural environment is that all our global institutions stem from WW2. The United Nations and its many affiliate organizations. The World Bank and the regional development banks. The IMF. The WTO. The European Union. This institutional legacy continues to shape our world.
Another reason is the gestalt-like quality of the core narrative of WW2. The narrative resembles the script of 90 percent of all Hollywood movies: 1) Bad guy meets good guy. 2) Bad guy almost defeats good guy. 3) Good guy defeats bad guy.
One does not have to be a Jungian to see the tremendous force of this narrative on the collective imagination. WW2 has entered the collective mythos in a way more powerful than any other past or present war, including the end of the Cold War. The archetypical narrative means that its cultural reverberations may last for centuries, perhaps even for a thousand years. If so, any idea that can be remotely associated with the Third Reich will not only remain tainted for a long time – the taint will become stronger across time.
For example, some countries maintained quasi-forced sterilization of people with some types of disabilities even as late as the 1960s before the shadow caught up with them. Such policies are totally beyond the pale now. The same is increasingly the case world wide with discrimination of gays, or of people with skin colors different from North Europeans, or gender discrimination. “Woke” ideology is yet another manifestation. Illustrating the ramping-up, rather than the fading away, of this long cultural shadow. It is a development I am happy with, child of the postwar culture as I am, but there is no denying the randomness that has produced this poswar culture.
All of this illustrates the importance of randomness when observing large-scale, longue durée cultural change. It is fascinating. It is also humbling for those who would attempt to predict where humanity is heading.
I commented something like this before but without response. Evolution is a statistical process that occurs in large populations. We see adaptation arise in a way analogous to how the laws of thermodynamics arise from statistical mechanics. When it comes to cultural evolution the population size is much smaller and the selection pressure diminishes as culture becomes more advanced. Cultural evolution may make sense for the Neolithic period when presumably there are a large number of small groups trying to survive. Maybe cultural evolution could be said to have produced well adapted cultures that thrived and became large civilizations. But in the civilizational period when the world is dominated by maybe 10 or 20 or fewer very influential cultures, I don’t see how any subsequent developments can be explained by any statistical or selection mechanisms. The laws of thermodynamics break down when you only have 20 molecules (or even a few thousand). Selection pressure is also diminished because a civilization making maladaptive changes is much less at risk of dying than is a small band of Neolithic proto-farmers or an individual with a mutated genome.
Instead, I think the best option is to drop the “adaptive” or evolutionary language for civilizational development and simply define the qualities that we think make a civilization stronger or better and proceed on a historical evaluation of civilizations based on this selected criteria. The criteria can be reasonably (but not perfectly) objective. Yes, that sounds more like value judgements and less like science, but it is more honest and humble about the limitations of science, and amounts to the same thing.