Hard Vs. Soft Culture Fixes

Our civilization depends on many key systems, such as for electricity, water, sewage, communication, transportation, news, law, education, marriage, elections, and regulations. We depend so much on such systems that we are reluctant to consider big changes to them, for fear of breaking them. We have specialists who track their effectiveness, and warn us if they show problems. Yes, some over-warn, to attract more resources to their systems. 

However, we have almost no specialists who track or warn us on one key system, and also little wariness of big changes to it. This is our system of cultural values, which tells us our widely shared values and norms, and then changes them over time. Oh sure, we have many who fight to cause changes in particular directions, and warn us that others oppose them. But few who look to the health of this system.

I’ve recently been trying to warn you all that this evolutionary system, based largely on copying values of prestigious associates, has far less variety and far weaker selection pressures than centuries ago, yet now has far larger rates of change, most of which can’t plausibly be adaptive. So our cultural value systems are now plausibly drifting into maladaption, and falling fertility seems a clear sign of this problem. 

For fertility fall, we can distinguish hard fixes like giving parents transferable rights to fractions of kid tax payments, from soft fixes like encouraging more movies, music, and literature that celebrates fertility and disapproves of its absence. (Or giving up and allying with likely victors.) The difference is that we can better coordinate around trying to achieve a hard fix, by advocating particular actions, checking who explicitly supports them, verifying when such actions have been implemented, and then tracking their progress. For soft fixes, in contrast, we find it far harder to tell how much they actually happen, how much others really support them, or how much progress they have caused. 

For the deeper problem of maladaptive culture, soft fixes include various ways to try to encourage more variety of culture value, to more discourage its change, to weaken the power of prestige, or to replace culture-made values with other more adaptive and stable value sources. Alas, culture is widely and correctly seen as a soft topic, where it is hard to be precise and collect clear data. So such efforts seem quite hard to measure or track, and thus hard to credit allies for support, or to judge action effectiveness. Yes, they might eventually work, even so, but they seem hard to plan, strategize, or make deals regarding. And so I now can’t find much more to say about them.

A harder fix to maladaptive cultural values is to induce more war, disease, and poverty, to induce stronger selection pressures. This would in essence try to prevent the looming civ collapse that maladaptive culture seems likely to cause in a few centuries, by making it happen sooner instead. Which seem cures worse than the disease. They are at least cures I’m unwilling to embrace now.

Which leaves me one last hard fix to consider:

A large region might authorize a futarchy government based on some particular value that is in conflict with allowing great culture drift and dysfunction, and then resist making changes to this officially declared value. In which case we have good reason to expect that such a region would in fact avoid drift, dysfunction, and collapse. … Simple materialistic values may fail to inspire sufficient respect and allegiance to get people to resist changing them in response to disliked policy choices or outcomes. Taking a cue from my work on the sacred, we might want to choose a value that people can more easily treat as sacred, but which also seems incompatible with great culture drift and decline. After all, people are willing and even eager to sacrifice quite a lot for values they see as sacred. (more)

To explore this possibility, I collected 32 possible monumental projects, and did polls asking “which … seems closest to best able to inspire & unite big % of world in quest to achieve it.” Here is their priority ranking (relative to 100 max):

So more people living off Earth and much lower mortality seem clear top winners. The next set of three are close to each other: space elevator, stars colonized, and low world poverty. Option fall rapidly after that. So, might we create a political coalition strong enough to support adopting a form of governance explicitly tied to such a metric? This seems a long shot at the moment, but still more promising than other known hard fixes.