I’m wondering how well I might organize my cultural drift messages around a few key slogans. Consider the following slogans as placeholders for better worded versions.
1. Adaptation Needs Variation, Selection, & Stability
Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. But such Darwinian evolution fails without sufficient variation or selection pressures, or if the context changes too fast. A few centuries ago we were fine; the world had 100Ks of peasant cultures, most facing frequent wars, pandemics, and famines, in an economy that took a millennia to double. But then we merged peasants into a hundred or so national cultures, and then those into just a few world cultures, all of which got so rich, healthy and peaceful that they almost never die. Also, the world economy now doubles every twenty years, fifty times faster than before. So now we are likely in trouble.
Every cultural feature has a min scale at which it can vary. We are doing fine re features that can vary at small scales, but in trouble re features that set game-theoretic equilibria, and so can only vary at large scales. Corporate culture features are small enough, but global features are not. Our actions are nested in goal hierarchies, and our most troubled cultural features correspond to basic goals, near key values and morals, which are hard to vary locally because cultures punish moral deviants.
2. Change Hows, Not Whys
A reasonable response to our evolution failing re our more basic goals would be to become conservative about changing them. Allow changes to means, which can easily vary at small scales, but not to the ends which direct such means. That is, change hows but not whys. Alas, humanity moved the other way. At the dawn of “modernity”, the status jump that STEM (including business) fields had gained from innovating inspired non-STEM fields like art, religion, philosophy, politics, etc. to embrace innovation. Even though they mostly didn’t see enough data to pick adaptive changes.
Since then, our most celebrated heroes have been the cultural activists who cause the greatest changes to values and morals. As a result, we are decaying into maladaption far faster than we otherwise would. The clearest example of such decay is falling fertility; peak world babies/yr was in 2016, and world population will start to fall in ~30yrs, after which STEM innovation rates will grind to a halt.
3. On a Ship In Peril, Steer It Or Leave It
The Amish and Haredim are now doubling in number every twenty years; the Amish have done so for over a century. Christians took over the Roman Empire by doubling every twenty years for three centuries, and these new insular religious subcultures seem similarly on track to replace our main world civilization. If you like what these subcultures stand for, and they let you join or influence them, then you can win. That is like folks on a ship heading for an iceberg, who get off onto lifeboats. The rest of us, in contrast, must try to turn the ship of world culture, or go down with that ship.
4. Survival Is A Package Deal
Thankfully, human extinction seems unlikely. But the world might lose many key features of today’s world culture that were rare in prior cultures. Like democracy, pacifism, gender equality, anti-kid-beating, or open intellectual inquiry. If you want such features to last long into the future, well past your lifetime, you’ll need to mix them into adaptive cultures. As only adaptive cultures last.
5. Let Bets Die In Our Stead
Our civilization may fall so far as to fragment, and restart strong selection via big wars and pandemics. Which could restart adaptive evolution, allowing a new world civilization to rise. But unless we find new ways to drive adaptation besides mass death and fragmentation, our civilizations may keep falling and rising indefinitely.
I see 3 new ways: let capitalism run most all life areas, run small groups by speculative market estimates of future group adaptive success, or run big groups by such price estimates of achieving big goals in conflict with civilization collapse. All three ways rely on strong selection among market traders creating information that lets groups stay adaptive without their death or division. Yes this looks hard, but let’s start to try, maybe first by using such markets to guide corporate cultures away from maladaption.
here is my genetic analogy for Hanson's argument: Imagine an animal species inhabiting a very isolated small island of hills and swales, with considerable variation in vegetation and microclimate. Different places initially favor somewhat different adaptations. Then the species develops an extraordinary ability to reconstruct its own surroundings. It can regulate temperature, securely provide water, and create the food it prefers (e.g. to some degree: beavers). So more successful pops begin to expand. Gene exchange further erodes differences among local populations. The island’s topography remains, but its biological significance diminishes. Selection has not ended; it increasingly operates within a common environment created by the species itself. Air conditioning in Singapore and heating in Toronto are modest human equivalents. Now all directional change in the gene pool is mainly drift.
The danger appears when a prolonged drought, a novel predator, or some failure of the constructed environment exposes a vulnerability now shared across the island. That can drive an adaptive change (which will also eventually end in drift) or the shock causes extinction.
Over the last few centuries, the greatest extinction rates by far are with small island pops, well adapted locally, but without the variation needed to respond to eg the introduction of rats or a novel disease..
Ultimately the problem that both Fukuyama and Hanson identify is that once a set of traits is so successful that it has homogenized a finite area, then the selective process that drove its success will wither via subsequent drift.
"At the dawn of “modernity”, the status jump that STEM (including business) fields had gained from innovating inspired non-STEM fields like art, religion, philosophy, politics, etc. to embrace innovation."
I don't agree with that narrative for art, and am skeptical about it in the other domains.
In politics, the great innovation of the US Constitution, which applied the Enlightenment idea of government as a machine made of many parts interacting to produce outputs via distributed decision-making (an analog of free markets), rather than the old notion of a government as strictly hierarchical, came before the advances in STEM that it enabled.
I'm skeptical of the idea that philosophy became innovative in response to STEM. The story of 19th and 20th century continental philosophy was mostly reactionary, fighting bitterly against STEM the whole way, in an attempt to undo the Enlightenment, with the exception of the logical philosophers, who were eliminated by the Nazis when they ruled continental Europe.
In art, the Italian Renaissance began pretty precisely in 1300, when Giotto began developing perspective, individual characters with emotions, and pretty much the whole gamut of Renaissance painting techniques. Dante wrote *Inferno* in 1321. The technological renaissance could be said to have begun in Italy in 1300, when the clock, eyeglasses, accurate maps, and a host of other inventions; but da Vinci and and Galilei came centuries later.
Art was much more innovative throughout the 19th century than the 20th. 20th century art looks like it was innovative because the artifacts look very different; but they are all alike in all adhering to the Platonic theory that art can't communicate meaning, and so all you can do is invent new styles in which to communicate nothing. 120 years of abstract art is the opposite of innovative. /We are still making squares and calling it great art./
It's even worse than that. Most famous 20th-century painters got famous for one particular painting, and so continued churning out copies of the same painting or concept for much of the rest of their lives, e.g., Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Pollock, Ryman, Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, On Kawara, Roman Opalka, Jasper Johns, Peter Halley, & Sean Scully. So it's absurd for modern art to claim to value innovation.