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.
Thermodynamics, properly applied works for 19 or less molecules; there is just a lot more noise. Yes, that makes things harder. But I very much want to stick with an objective view.
Re: "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."
Cultural components can be individually selected. For example "color" and "colour" behave as though they are cultural alleles. Cultural evolution is not just about selection between entire cultures - any more then DNA evolution is about selection between entire species.
Wouldn't it be easier to direct cultural reform to the already known highly adaptive part of the culture space? We have the closest thing to natural experiments in East vs. West Germany and North vs. South Korea and we can suspect other free market experiments like the United States, etc. are on the same curve: broadly speaking, highly adaptive is something like inversely proportional to government intrusion (or in less ideological and more biological terms, lack of competition).
It seems we just need to find billionaires willing to fund new frontier cities that replicate known highly adaptive components into modern equivalents with a heavy dose of competition to weed out maladaptive systems.
billionaires tend towards more government intrusion to maintain and increase their rent-seeking, if not turn their robber-baron-ishness tendencies into a claim at being monarch or emperor; witness oligarchic Russia with massive government interference in which individual agency is so removed that being in a meat wave seems completely normal (until the reality kills you).
Agree, that free market economies have better living standards, quality of life etc. But not sure that this is always adaptive in the biological sense, as e.g. North Korea has experienced slightly higher population growth rate than South Korea
Sure, but modern South Korea is infected with large government which is a huge confound, so my proposal is instead of pontificating about how to tweak current systems (which also seems like a fool's errand: who's going to listen?), we need to start again with what we know works (i.e. roughly, night watchman state or an approximation of the early U.S.).
The wildcard in culture prediction is technology, the direction of which is largely unknowable. Who in 1935 would have predicted that certain esoteric nuclear properties of certain rare heavy elements would – within 10 years – lead to a device that would forever rewrite geopolitics and culture? Or in 1940 that certain features of electron conduction bands in semiconductors would lead to the transistor, and all that enabled?
It's interesting as a narrative to look backwards and come up with post-facto explanations of why what happened happened. This is what some historians do, as you say. But we have to be humble about our chances of success if we turn that apparatus to the future. It's like the finance talking heads on CNBC, who are great at explaining what happened in the markets yesterday but have no clue what will happen tomorrow (if they did they would be unimaginably wealthy). It's easy to fool yourself into thinking you have predictive insight when in reality you have none.
The following analogy may provide further food for thought: let us imagine our lives as being like a large bathtub containing many small bathtubs. The movement of the water on the surface in the small tubs sometimes accidentally creates a stable structure that maintains itself in the substrate for a certain period of time.
Over time, the movement in the bathtub causes an exchange of the different levels in the water across the 3D world of the bathtub and the small bathtub becomes completely mixed. At the point at which new self-sustaining structures can no longer form or due to external influences, the plug is pulled. This merges the tub into a larger tub with other tubs to re-explore the levels by repeating this with new random self-sustaining structures. This in turn leads to a continuous colonization of the large tub, where eventually the generated tub shares the spatial properties of the large tub. The force to build a self-sustaining structure in this tub, through random movements, can no longer be generated. Assuming that chance in the bathtub is a tautology, a standstill now occurs, as chance can no longer be generated due to the spatial restriction. The resulting calm triggers the next step, which initiates a new coordination of information. Under these conditions, the bathtub is simply tilted into a new dimension. In this new, now for us additional dimension, we can conquer the different levels of this new bathtub again from the now completely new mixing ratios of new information matching with the new information reference with small, targeted movements, random structures and new multi-tubs. But we can also draw on our memories from the old bathtub culture.
The image of the caterpillar from the 2D world, which transforms itself into the new, unknown 3D world through complete saturation and calm, fits here. Why does it do this without having any experience of it? Let's try to negate this upper analogy in order to develop new questions that might take us further.
I would like to emphasize that I am not an expert in this field. This is purely an abstract consideration and should be treated as such and not lead to hasty mistakes.
Germany losing the war wasn't that random, considering it had lost the previous world war, and was still a smaller country with less industrial capacity than the US & Soviet Union. I guess you could consider it random that Hitler chose to go to war with so many countries at once (he hoped to make peace with the UK, but it was predictable based on WW1 that the UK would be unwilling to tolerate him dominating the continent).
“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.”
I think this is very backwards. Historians are trained to dive into the archives and find some individual records or journals of someone of interest to bring to light and analyze (usually from a lens of critical theory or something like it). “Big history” analysis over long timelines was explicitly discouraged as taboo from at least the 1960s as part of the broader postmodernism movement (in my opinion because it tends to contradict Marxist theory). Historians that do big history are the exception. The taboo is starting to break though, which is good.
I think what makes this unique is the absence of falsely imagining one knows what should be done. I'm sure someone has posited the inverse or obverse of the hammer rule, which might state that When the only tool a man likes using is a hammer, he won't see problems that aren't nails. Approaching a problem with awareness of one's lack of tools makes it easier to see it for what it is.
“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. “
Wut?
Couldn’t you just say when environmental context changes, adaptation strategies necessarily change as well, but often fail because the goals aren’t updated to match the new context?
Cultural evolution is a big topic. Even if we confine the subject area to recorded history, that still includes the agricultural and industrial revolutions. During that time the human population density increased a lot - resulting in more "horizontal" meme transmission - and consequently more memes that are deleterious to their human hosts. We also saw the rise of engineering design - a new and important type of evolutionary change that is now making big changes to the planet, and could plausibly lead to large revolutions. Those are different stories from the one told in this post - but they also seem pretty important.
Hi Robin. Don't waste your time covering stuff that's already been done. Have you read Peter Turchin? He has adapted the scientific method to understand historical cycles fairly impressively.
But to return to what you were saying, I think it's very easy to mistakenly see a teleology in human culture that isn't there. We adapt, but to equate that with progress is a mistake. It seems to me and others such as Turchin that we are at the end of a long historical cycle, and much of what we have adapted to will quickly become redundant once there is a rapid change in our immediate social environment. This change is unavoidable due to the maxing out of resource extraction and other social dynamics, such as elite overproduction, that are unsustainable.
It may be that we have grown some cultural or intellectual shoots that are truly novel and will continue on after the imminent collapse, but I think that there are rather fewer of these novelties than we would like to imagine. We are likely to be stuck in growth and collapse cycles for many centuries to come.
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.
Thermodynamics, properly applied works for 19 or less molecules; there is just a lot more noise. Yes, that makes things harder. But I very much want to stick with an objective view.
Ok. I wish you the best in your project.
Re: "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."
Cultural components can be individually selected. For example "color" and "colour" behave as though they are cultural alleles. Cultural evolution is not just about selection between entire cultures - any more then DNA evolution is about selection between entire species.
Wouldn't it be easier to direct cultural reform to the already known highly adaptive part of the culture space? We have the closest thing to natural experiments in East vs. West Germany and North vs. South Korea and we can suspect other free market experiments like the United States, etc. are on the same curve: broadly speaking, highly adaptive is something like inversely proportional to government intrusion (or in less ideological and more biological terms, lack of competition).
It seems we just need to find billionaires willing to fund new frontier cities that replicate known highly adaptive components into modern equivalents with a heavy dose of competition to weed out maladaptive systems.
billionaires tend towards more government intrusion to maintain and increase their rent-seeking, if not turn their robber-baron-ishness tendencies into a claim at being monarch or emperor; witness oligarchic Russia with massive government interference in which individual agency is so removed that being in a meat wave seems completely normal (until the reality kills you).
Thus why I mentioned a frontier city. I agree that simply selectively deregulating will tend to just strengthen or create oligarchies.
Agree, that free market economies have better living standards, quality of life etc. But not sure that this is always adaptive in the biological sense, as e.g. North Korea has experienced slightly higher population growth rate than South Korea
Sure, but modern South Korea is infected with large government which is a huge confound, so my proposal is instead of pontificating about how to tweak current systems (which also seems like a fool's errand: who's going to listen?), we need to start again with what we know works (i.e. roughly, night watchman state or an approximation of the early U.S.).
The wildcard in culture prediction is technology, the direction of which is largely unknowable. Who in 1935 would have predicted that certain esoteric nuclear properties of certain rare heavy elements would – within 10 years – lead to a device that would forever rewrite geopolitics and culture? Or in 1940 that certain features of electron conduction bands in semiconductors would lead to the transistor, and all that enabled?
It's interesting as a narrative to look backwards and come up with post-facto explanations of why what happened happened. This is what some historians do, as you say. But we have to be humble about our chances of success if we turn that apparatus to the future. It's like the finance talking heads on CNBC, who are great at explaining what happened in the markets yesterday but have no clue what will happen tomorrow (if they did they would be unimaginably wealthy). It's easy to fool yourself into thinking you have predictive insight when in reality you have none.
The following analogy may provide further food for thought: let us imagine our lives as being like a large bathtub containing many small bathtubs. The movement of the water on the surface in the small tubs sometimes accidentally creates a stable structure that maintains itself in the substrate for a certain period of time.
Over time, the movement in the bathtub causes an exchange of the different levels in the water across the 3D world of the bathtub and the small bathtub becomes completely mixed. At the point at which new self-sustaining structures can no longer form or due to external influences, the plug is pulled. This merges the tub into a larger tub with other tubs to re-explore the levels by repeating this with new random self-sustaining structures. This in turn leads to a continuous colonization of the large tub, where eventually the generated tub shares the spatial properties of the large tub. The force to build a self-sustaining structure in this tub, through random movements, can no longer be generated. Assuming that chance in the bathtub is a tautology, a standstill now occurs, as chance can no longer be generated due to the spatial restriction. The resulting calm triggers the next step, which initiates a new coordination of information. Under these conditions, the bathtub is simply tilted into a new dimension. In this new, now for us additional dimension, we can conquer the different levels of this new bathtub again from the now completely new mixing ratios of new information matching with the new information reference with small, targeted movements, random structures and new multi-tubs. But we can also draw on our memories from the old bathtub culture.
The image of the caterpillar from the 2D world, which transforms itself into the new, unknown 3D world through complete saturation and calm, fits here. Why does it do this without having any experience of it? Let's try to negate this upper analogy in order to develop new questions that might take us further.
I would like to emphasize that I am not an expert in this field. This is purely an abstract consideration and should be treated as such and not lead to hasty mistakes.
Translated by Deepl.
Germany losing the war wasn't that random, considering it had lost the previous world war, and was still a smaller country with less industrial capacity than the US & Soviet Union. I guess you could consider it random that Hitler chose to go to war with so many countries at once (he hoped to make peace with the UK, but it was predictable based on WW1 that the UK would be unwilling to tolerate him dominating the continent).
This reminds me of Asimov's psychohistory. Are you going to be our Hari Seldon?
“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.”
I think this is very backwards. Historians are trained to dive into the archives and find some individual records or journals of someone of interest to bring to light and analyze (usually from a lens of critical theory or something like it). “Big history” analysis over long timelines was explicitly discouraged as taboo from at least the 1960s as part of the broader postmodernism movement (in my opinion because it tends to contradict Marxist theory). Historians that do big history are the exception. The taboo is starting to break though, which is good.
Okay, I edited that to start with "good historians".
Haha. Ok.
I think what makes this unique is the absence of falsely imagining one knows what should be done. I'm sure someone has posited the inverse or obverse of the hammer rule, which might state that When the only tool a man likes using is a hammer, he won't see problems that aren't nails. Approaching a problem with awareness of one's lack of tools makes it easier to see it for what it is.
Typo nitpicking:
> All of which makes senes.
I think it makes both sense and scenes.
Fixed.
“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. “
Wut?
Couldn’t you just say when environmental context changes, adaptation strategies necessarily change as well, but often fail because the goals aren’t updated to match the new context?
This paragraph was very difficult to parse.
Cultural evolution is a big topic. Even if we confine the subject area to recorded history, that still includes the agricultural and industrial revolutions. During that time the human population density increased a lot - resulting in more "horizontal" meme transmission - and consequently more memes that are deleterious to their human hosts. We also saw the rise of engineering design - a new and important type of evolutionary change that is now making big changes to the planet, and could plausibly lead to large revolutions. Those are different stories from the one told in this post - but they also seem pretty important.
Hi Robin. Don't waste your time covering stuff that's already been done. Have you read Peter Turchin? He has adapted the scientific method to understand historical cycles fairly impressively.
But to return to what you were saying, I think it's very easy to mistakenly see a teleology in human culture that isn't there. We adapt, but to equate that with progress is a mistake. It seems to me and others such as Turchin that we are at the end of a long historical cycle, and much of what we have adapted to will quickly become redundant once there is a rapid change in our immediate social environment. This change is unavoidable due to the maxing out of resource extraction and other social dynamics, such as elite overproduction, that are unsustainable.
It may be that we have grown some cultural or intellectual shoots that are truly novel and will continue on after the imminent collapse, but I think that there are rather fewer of these novelties than we would like to imagine. We are likely to be stuck in growth and collapse cycles for many centuries to come.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/cycles-of-war-empirehtml
I guess that answers everything then.
Great comeback! Touché.