The ancient world respected tradition, and was wary of most kinds of change. In contrast, our modern world looks down on tradition, and celebrates most change as innovation. And this, alas, will be our downfall. Hopefully some civ after ours will learn this key lesson: you should only innovate as fast as you get feedback on the changes that you try.
With most technology and business practices, we can see most of their key consequences pretty locally and pretty fast. So we can get a lot of data fast, and can reject most of them as bad ideas, but accumulate the rare winners. In contrast, many changes in norms, morals, and other key parameters that distinguish our game-theoretic equilibria set the health of entire cultures, health that may not be revealed for decades or centuries. It thus makes far more sense to be accepting and even eager for innovations in the former areas, compared to the latter areas. Alas, our modern burst of enthusiasm for innovation has not made this key distinction.
For the last few years I’ve focused on a simple story of how key parameters for the evolution of (not in) cultures have changed from healthy to unhealthy over the last few centuries. We’ve seen a great fall in variety and selection pressures, and a great rise in the rate of change of context. But on reflection these changes just don’t seem to me to be enough to explain just how fast our the health of our cultures have decayed over the last few centuries. Why are things going so bad so fast?
Our modern world greatly celebrates abstraction, and some degree of increased abstraction of our norms, etc. has been forced by our merging and mixing many previously distinct cultures. Even so, one story I’ve considered is that our norms, etc. are actually encoded at far more specific levels than we like to pretend. And very specifically-encoded norms might plausibly decay much faster as contexts change.
But in fact, many of the key norms, etc. that have changed a lot in modernity seem rather well described at pretty abstract levels. Consider new norms against slavery, religion, and corporal punishment, and for democracy and a wider range of sexual preferences. Or consider key new norms causing fertility decline, like capstone marriage, intensive parenting, and longer educational paths. None of these seems to suffer greatly from insufficient abstraction.
Thus it should have been quite feasible over the last few centuries to embrace a great deal of change in technology and business practices, while mostly retaining prior cultural attitudes toward government, trade, gender, war, marriage, sex, work, inequality, etc. What happened instead is that once some places seemed to achieve great success by making big changes to the former areas, elites in the latter eagerly and purposely switched from trying to preserve prior practices in the latter areas, to aggressively trying to change them. While they explored many new directions, the one thing they all agreed on was that they didn’t want to stay with prior traditions.
At the time, philosophy, poetry, and the arts had long been the highest status intellectual areas, but many were gaining great status via their large changes to science, tech, and business practices. That is, STEM (+ business) was threatening to overtake non-STEM in status. So non-STEM elites switched to embracing change. They claimed to be able to find innovations in their areas that were at least as fundamental and important as STEM changes. They gave high status to those among them who generated the most intriguing and compelling big changes in their areas.
Or course they haven’t found concrete data showing that their new art, politics, and morals made for healthy cultures over the long term. Even so, they managed to jumpstart our new modern era of rapid changes to such things. And once most young elites were in high school and college creating their own new youth cultures, this new cultural activism and innovation process sped up even more. And this, even more than the big bad modern changes to the three other key parameters of the evolution of cultures that I’ve previously focused on, seems to me the main reason why modern culture is going bad so fast.
One can easily list many changes in cultural norms over the last couple hundred years where there's been time for feedback, and that cultural change was stopped and practices returned to prior traditions or were altered in new directions, possibly to explore more of the problem space. Examples include:
- Wet nursing that began with nobles, spread to elites, and then almost everyone. It's a damaging practice because it prevents mothers from caring for their own children and prevents parent-child attachment. That practice died out, even though it became normative for a majority of parents in Europe for a few hundred years.
- Child labor in the industrial cities during the first 100 years of the Industrial Revolution was widespread. But, people rapidly saw that this was not normative, because children were being supervised by strangers. Children as factory workers was a novel practice and contrasted with children helping on a family farm or in a family business; the practice that had been the norm in traditional societies. This feedback, of experimenting with child labor and seeing its harm, led to the grassroots movement to change this practice. Once there was enough wealth following European industrialization for families to survive without children's income, the practice of children working in factories was outlawed.
- The self-esteem movement of the 1990s didn't have good outcomes, so those practices have been rescinded.
- Giving toddlers, preschoolers, children, and teens wide-open access to screens was curtailed after a mere 5 to 7 years of that experiment.
- After divorce became widespread, there was a practice of giving mothers full custody, and fathers were relegated to every other weekend. Over the decades, depriving children of access to their fathers was shown to be bad for children, and a new practice emerged of almost mandatory 50/50 custody by the courts and by experts and child welfare advocates. So, the negative ramifications of a cultural practice were observed, and changes were implemented to increase human thriving.
- When gay couples became vocal about wanting to marry and raise children, there was initially a huge outcry against that, consistent with the longstanding heteronormitivity. That's part of patriarchy, partly because tight cultural norms are necessary to ensure group coordination when there's little information visible and the culture benefits from widespread conformity. Whereas cultures with loose social norms are able to be more flexible and allow variation. Once cultures were wealthy enough to permit the flexibility of variation and cultures had enough technology and tools to conceptualize new ways of living, gay and lesbian couples came to be celebrated. There was a good 10 to 15 years when people accepted that it was okay to be gay, but they were adamant it wasn't okay for gay couples to raise children. Over a couple of decades, research and everyday observation found that gay couples were able to raise healthy and thriving children, and so the prejudices against gay couples having children were rescinded for the good of society. This increase in gay parenting represents an increase in global cultural variability, since previously, gay parents were disallowed globally, although Hanson claims that cultural changes currently mostly represent a decrease in variation.
-When universities and colleges were formed in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, the organizers of those institutions initially wanted to follow the tradition of not granting education to women, following longstanding practices of keeping women out of the public sphere. Over several hundred years, many saw the adverse consequences of disallowing women to participate in higher education. Over many decades, a major cultural push emerged to change these long-standing practices that prevented women from accessing education. In technological societies, women's education is fitness-enhancing for the culture at large, because maternal education is correlated with fostering a technically competent workforce, and also delivers a wealth of benefits for children's health and overall development, thus decreasing mortality and increasing quality of life measures. These practices toward including women have increased global cultural variation, again going against Hanson's claim that cultural changes decrease variability.
- Many of the changes I talked about above are exclusive to the Western world and to advanced technological societies, but it's easy enough to name global practices that have changed. There have been explorations, and people have seen the benefits, and those changes have then spread and become normative. One example is the decrease in cousin marriages. Cousin marriages compromise fitness. Many cultures separately, at different times over the last 1,000 years, have instituted norms against cousin marriage. European countries have had norms against this for several hundred years, even going back, in some European countries, a thousand years. Different Chinese regimes variously instituted policies against cousin marriage over the last thousand years, culminating in strict bans when the Communist Party took over in the early 20th century. Multiple peer-reviewed studies and comprehensive epidemiological datasets detail the measurable health and reproductive improvements that occur when cousin marriages are reduced or prohibited. But because cousin marriages consolidate the power of a family, the practice persists despite inbreeding depression. When change to the practice of cousin marriage does happen, it's always in the direction of forbidding cousin marriage, that is, repudiating the older tradition of allowing cousin marriage. This change is on-going right now in the 21st century. There's a lot of pushback in Arab and Islamic-majority countries to halt the long-standing tradition of allowing cousin marriage, and the frequency of cousin marriage is decreasing, with fitness benefits following. Now, Hanson has talked a lot about what he claims is the loss of cultural variability and a move towards homogenization of cultures, which he says is bad because, without variation, you can't have selection. I agree that the demise of cousin marriage is an example of loss of cultural variation; however, cousin marriage decreases fitness, so, as cultures move in this direction of minimizing variation by agreeing to minimize cousin marriage, they are increasing fitness. [And by cousin marriage we really mean pair-bonding and having children, not marriage per se.]
I and probably anyone can go on and on identifying ways that cultures of the last couple hundred years experimented by exploring new parts of the problem space, getting feedback when things didn't work, and changing their practice. Or, as in minimizing cousin marriage, when changes were fitness-enhancing, resolutely fixating on that change and promulgating it where possible.
Historically, cultures were averse to change because people couldn't see the space of possibilities clearly enough to know what kind of change to try or what kind of change might be an improvement. Cultures evolved what is called "tight social norms," which include resistance to change, as Hanson explained in his post. But people and cultures, due to technology, literacy, and tools for aggregating knowledge, are able to stand on the shoulders of giants. They're able to climb up high and look out over the whole chessboard rather than just seeing the adjacent pieces on the playing board. With better perspective and more information, it's possible to find ways to enact new changes and then explore the ramifications.
Contemporary cultures have been exploring different parts of the multidimensional space that constitutes the norms for coordinating selfish agents to cooperate together. When those new norms and cultural practices don't solve problems or cause new problems, then those norms and practices are altered. Alterations are either back to prior norms or to explore additional parts of the problem space defined by possibilities to coordinate individual behavior with group cooperation in a given ecosystem with a specific history.
"The ancient world respected tradition, and was wary of most kinds of change. In contrast, our modern world looks down on tradition, and celebrates most change as innovation. And this, alas, will be our downfall. Hopefully some civ after ours will learn this key lesson: you should only innovate as fast as you get feedback on the changes that you try."
Well said.
How does this line up with your view that efficiency is sacred?