Four Awakenings

We start our lives focused on the concrete immediate narrow world around us in space, time, social distance, and abstraction. We slowly learn to navigate this and then larger worlds, but mostly unconsciously and non-deliberately. Then at some point we start to become more consciously aware of a much larger social world.

One part of this larger world that we learn about is its important explicit structures. We often call these “the system”. A world of institutions: schools, markets, firms, governments, laws, etc. At first, we study this world out of curiosity, or to turn it to our advantage, or at least keep it from hurting us.

But then some of us have a first awakening; we start to think about and join discussions on which variations of this system might be better overall, and how we might coordinate to induce such changes. Such discussions often turn to analysis that focuses on how different structures might induce different behaviors that better achieves our shared values. These discussions are often rather technical, and often take place in special institutions like journalism, think tanks, and academia. Here we “awaken” in the sense of realizing that we can be deliberate about something we had accepted implicitly. Once awoken, we become “policy wonks and analysts” who engage in policy debates.

Another part of this larger world that we learn about at some point is that it has not just explicit structures, but also implicit cultures, i.e., shared norms and values, expressed in and thus greatly influenced by the arts and entertainment. As with institutions, we first study culture out of curiosity, to turn it to our advantage, or to keep it from hurting us.

But then some of us have a second awakening (which for many happens before the first). Here we realize that can think about and join groups who push changes not mainly to our institutions, but to our cultures. We don’t have to just accept our culture, but can deliberately try to change it. These groups do more emotional expressing and bonding, and less technical discussion and analysis. Good taste, eloquence, and artistic ability matters more here. Folks here tend to see disagreements over institutions as really cultural fights in disguise, as it seems so obvious to them what are the best institutions, given their values. Once awoken this way, we become “cultural or political activists or warriors”.

After a period of participating in or observing policy discussions about institutions, some come to see the meta institutions within which such discussions tend to take place as especially important, and thus promising places to seek reform. Which can bring a third awakening, wherein people focus on analyzing and discussing how to deliberately reform meta institutions, those within which we most discuss and analyze and coordinate to change our other institutions. Like academia, the news media, and politics. This happened to me when I studied philosophy of science, and explored hypertext publishing and then prediction markets. If institutions matter a lot and their reforms are greatly limited by poor meta institutions, meta institution reform could plausibly pay huge dividends.

The fourth awakening is the least common, as it is very hard to see your norms and values, the ones by which you evaluate all three of cultures, institutions, and meta-institutions, as shaped by a process that could go wrong, and thus should be tracked and if broken deliberately fixed. But some do come to see their norms and values as the product of a powerful process of cultural evolution, a process that is not just old but also strongly acting now, even over the course of their lives. And that if this process goes wrong, they can’t entirely trust their inherited norms and values.

Those who have experienced the second awakening are tempted to frame all problems of culture as problems of not deliberately choosing the right culture. And so they see all cultural fixes as deciding on and then promoting good cultural elements. They find it hard to imagine that such fixes might be only temporary, if the underlying process by which culture changes is broken.

But if not via pushing better cultural contents, how can we change and fix the process of cultural change?