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- The self-esteem movement of the 1990s didn't have good outcomes, so those practices have been rescinded.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.
I don't at all claim that there hasn't been variation in cultural practices, or that people haven't been making judgements about them and dropping some in favor of others. My claim is that there is a spectrum of how strong are the signals of adaptiveness that people have been getting from their practices, and at the weak end of that spectrum people have been acting as if they have strong signals. They often mistakenly treat an intuition of moral rightness as a strong signal confirming the wisdom of changes.
A lot of those changes you list amount to “we got rich enough to have better options.” Literally zero families thought “it’s good to send my children to work in a factory.” But a lot of families thought “if they work in a factory they won’t starve, which is worse.”
> 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
> 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
Female education is anticorrelated with fertility, and no amount of quality of life can counteract below-replacement fertility. There isn't a measure of Darwinian fitness which shows that to be "enhancing".
The fertility crash is correlated with many factors and is also recent. It's easy to envision pathways where fertility stabilizes above or at replacement and female education remains high. For example, the social norm against non-marital births now drastically reduces fertility in many parts of the world. This YouTuber makes the case for East Asia relaxing its norms against out-of-wedlock births to combat the fertility crash. Hm..., I couldn't find the YouTube video I watched yesterday on this topic, but this academic analysis covers similar ground. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6070151/
Relaxing norms against non-marital births would increase fertility while not sacrificing benefits for children of maternal education.
Regarding Darwinian fitness. Human cultures have long instituted norms that purposefully decreased fertility. In prior eras, many cultures devised indigenous methods of population control, including practices such as child sacrifice or abandonment, or killing of children if all parents and close relatives had died, which helped to keep the population from exceeding carrying capacity.
It doesn't directly target education, but since it shifts the incentives we can expect it would cause more specialization in having children and less in other things.
An a priori reason why we should expect education to reduce fertility is because fertility declines over time, and people invest in education when young in hopes of benefiting in their careers afterward. I suppose if there were a norm for people to have children in their peak fertility years, and focus on education afterward, the latter would do less to reduce the former, but then there would also be fewer years in the workforce with their maximum education.
Births among married couples are higher than among unmarried women basically everywhere, and I'm not aware of any places where never-married women have above replacement fertility.
Abandonment was used when parents couldn't expect to raise that particular child, or if the child had problematic characteristics. The parents still typically had enough children to offset that, bringing their population up to Malthusian limits, at which point they competed with others for limited resource rather than sacrificing their own fitness to benefit others.
Re: No, under medieval manorialism it was common for them to work as servants....
Thanks for sharing this, it helps explain why families were willing to send their kids to factories. From a modern standpoint, factory work is is viewed as qualitiatively different from manorialism because the conditions were so severe and factory owners treated children as disposable, not as servants working in a housefhold. But, for families at the time, it probably seemed like a new variant on what they had long been doing.
When evaluating the harm inflicted on children, comparing industrial factory labor to medieval manorial domestic service reveals differences in the scale, intensity, and nature of the suffering produced.
Child labor during the early Industrial Revolution caused significantly greater aggregate harm.
Manorialism was built on personal, albeit unequal, social relationships within a village. Industrialization scaled up production to an anonymous level. Children were viewed strictly as cheap, expendable tools to maximize profit margins, stripping away community safety nets.
While medieval servitude deprived children of autonomy and formal education, it generally kept them within a human-scaled social fabric. The early Industrial Revolution systematically sacrificed the physical health, safety, and lives of an entire generation of working-class children to fuel economic output.
Servants didn't stay in their village, they frequently went to work for complete strangers. I linked to that blog because she has written a lot on how that caused outbreeding within that side of the Hajnal line, helping to produce "The WEIRDest People in the World" per Henrich.
> The early Industrial Revolution systematically sacrificed the physical health, safety, and lives of an entire generation of working-class children to fuel economic output.
The Darwinian fitness of the society was still high then. It was actually higher in England, which industrialized early, than France, which was undergoing the demographic transition.
Fertility stays high when there is no birth control. We're in a different world now. Children growing up in English households in the 17th to 19th century with 7 to 10 siblings frequently had unhappy childhoods and stunted lives, meaning they labored, ate potates and drank rum from Caribbean can sugar fields, but did not contribute to the intellectual flowering of that period. Living here in the 21st century, I don't see the need to use Darwinian fitness as the sole calculus for determining policies and structuring the way people want to live their lives.
"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?
I wonder whether the non-STEM elite eagerness for change is as much influenced by status as you present.
It seems relatively straightforward that (in West) once reason and culture had taken enough steps to discard religion and monarchy as the sole authorites for morality and on organizing a society, an increasing pace of change followed naturally. That is, elites came along with STEM not due to jealousy but due to inspiration. This goes roughly for 18. - very early 20. centuries.
I think that the changes during that time were supported by exactly what you value, open intellectual inquiry. Discarding such tradition that stood in the way of values discovered by said inquiry was its natural conclusion. It's easier to go away from someplace than to decide which (new) direction is good.
What you describe as elite opinions seems more apt for mid-late 20. and early 21. centuries, where pushing for specific value combinations preferring specific social groups instead made a comeback (including but not limited to nazism, fascism, communism and later identity politics). This, to me, seems less guided by reason going away from a specific set of values (Christianity, monarchy, etc.) and more by the generalized opposition towards tradition you describe.
It was elites discarding religion and monarchy early on, not the masses. And they didn't do this so much because of clear evidence, but rather new moral tastes.
Civilization’s survival is at risk because our modern world celebrates maladaptive evolution as innovation. However, to use Abraham Lincoln’s words, civilization will thrive when we have faith that right makes might (aka, adaptive evolution).
Question: What is science?
Answer: To practice science, use testable logic to interpret empirical (irrefutable) evidence, then subject that logic to rigorous skepticism.
Civilization is struggling to survive because the scientific community behaves as if it does not understand the “science” concept. Civilization will thrive when the scientific community behaves as if it understands the “science” concept.
And then STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) will overtake STEM in status. STEM is like teaching someone who has no place to go how to drive.
For the record, pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Old elites, threatened by STEM, respond by showing they too can innovate. But their innovations have longer time constants so control takes centuries to act. Hanson's Law of social control.
Innovation remains aligned with long-term social viability.
Drift Condition:
A civilisation drifts when:
(Status + Power + Rent + Spiteful Selection)
>
Adaptive Selection
Innovations continue to spread, but no longer because they enhance civilisational fitness.
Original insight:
High Innovation + Slow Feedback = Drift
Extended model:
High Innovation
+
Slow Civilisational Feedback
+
Strong Alternative Incentives
=
Accelerating Drift
Dynamic Sequence:
Technical Success
↓
Prestige of Innovation
↓
Innovation Applied to Culture
↓
Weak Long-Term Feedback
↓
Status/Power/Rent/Spite Selection Dominate
↓
Cultural Mutation
↓
Civilisational Drift
Compact Formula
Civilisational Health (C)
≈
F × Adaptive Selection
────────────────────────────
S + P + R + M
Where:
- increasing F improves correction,
- increasing S, P, R, M accelerates drift when not constrained by feedback.
In one sentence:
Civilisations decline when the selection of cultural innovation migrates from reality-based feedback to prestige-, power-, rent-, and spite-based feedback systems.
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.
I don't at all claim that there hasn't been variation in cultural practices, or that people haven't been making judgements about them and dropping some in favor of others. My claim is that there is a spectrum of how strong are the signals of adaptiveness that people have been getting from their practices, and at the weak end of that spectrum people have been acting as if they have strong signals. They often mistakenly treat an intuition of moral rightness as a strong signal confirming the wisdom of changes.
A lot of those changes you list amount to “we got rich enough to have better options.” Literally zero families thought “it’s good to send my children to work in a factory.” But a lot of families thought “if they work in a factory they won’t starve, which is worse.”
> 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
No, under medieval manorialism it was common for them to work as servants. https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/leaving-the-nest/
> 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
Female education is anticorrelated with fertility, and no amount of quality of life can counteract below-replacement fertility. There isn't a measure of Darwinian fitness which shows that to be "enhancing".
The fertility crash is correlated with many factors and is also recent. It's easy to envision pathways where fertility stabilizes above or at replacement and female education remains high. For example, the social norm against non-marital births now drastically reduces fertility in many parts of the world. This YouTuber makes the case for East Asia relaxing its norms against out-of-wedlock births to combat the fertility crash. Hm..., I couldn't find the YouTube video I watched yesterday on this topic, but this academic analysis covers similar ground. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6070151/
Relaxing norms against non-marital births would increase fertility while not sacrificing benefits for children of maternal education.
Regarding Darwinian fitness. Human cultures have long instituted norms that purposefully decreased fertility. In prior eras, many cultures devised indigenous methods of population control, including practices such as child sacrifice or abandonment, or killing of children if all parents and close relatives had died, which helped to keep the population from exceeding carrying capacity.
I agree relaxing norms against non-marital births would increase fertility. But this seems unlikely anytime soon.
Also relaxing those norms brings its own own pretty serious problems.
Relaxing norms against non-marital births would increase fertility while not sacrificing benefits for children of maternal education.
Single parent households have not proven to be beneficial to the children.
Our host has a proposal to address the fertility crash: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/win-win-babies-as-infrastructurehtml
It doesn't directly target education, but since it shifts the incentives we can expect it would cause more specialization in having children and less in other things.
An a priori reason why we should expect education to reduce fertility is because fertility declines over time, and people invest in education when young in hopes of benefiting in their careers afterward. I suppose if there were a norm for people to have children in their peak fertility years, and focus on education afterward, the latter would do less to reduce the former, but then there would also be fewer years in the workforce with their maximum education.
Births among married couples are higher than among unmarried women basically everywhere, and I'm not aware of any places where never-married women have above replacement fertility.
No, measures were not taken "to keep the population from exceeding carrying capacity". See Robin's former co-blogger https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/group-selectionhtml
Abandonment was used when parents couldn't expect to raise that particular child, or if the child had problematic characteristics. The parents still typically had enough children to offset that, bringing their population up to Malthusian limits, at which point they competed with others for limited resource rather than sacrificing their own fitness to benefit others.
Re: No, under medieval manorialism it was common for them to work as servants....
Thanks for sharing this, it helps explain why families were willing to send their kids to factories. From a modern standpoint, factory work is is viewed as qualitiatively different from manorialism because the conditions were so severe and factory owners treated children as disposable, not as servants working in a housefhold. But, for families at the time, it probably seemed like a new variant on what they had long been doing.
When evaluating the harm inflicted on children, comparing industrial factory labor to medieval manorial domestic service reveals differences in the scale, intensity, and nature of the suffering produced.
Child labor during the early Industrial Revolution caused significantly greater aggregate harm.
Manorialism was built on personal, albeit unequal, social relationships within a village. Industrialization scaled up production to an anonymous level. Children were viewed strictly as cheap, expendable tools to maximize profit margins, stripping away community safety nets.
While medieval servitude deprived children of autonomy and formal education, it generally kept them within a human-scaled social fabric. The early Industrial Revolution systematically sacrificed the physical health, safety, and lives of an entire generation of working-class children to fuel economic output.
Servants didn't stay in their village, they frequently went to work for complete strangers. I linked to that blog because she has written a lot on how that caused outbreeding within that side of the Hajnal line, helping to produce "The WEIRDest People in the World" per Henrich.
> The early Industrial Revolution systematically sacrificed the physical health, safety, and lives of an entire generation of working-class children to fuel economic output.
The Darwinian fitness of the society was still high then. It was actually higher in England, which industrialized early, than France, which was undergoing the demographic transition.
Fertility stays high when there is no birth control. We're in a different world now. Children growing up in English households in the 17th to 19th century with 7 to 10 siblings frequently had unhappy childhoods and stunted lives, meaning they labored, ate potates and drank rum from Caribbean can sugar fields, but did not contribute to the intellectual flowering of that period. Living here in the 21st century, I don't see the need to use Darwinian fitness as the sole calculus for determining policies and structuring the way people want to live their lives.
"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?
I wonder whether the non-STEM elite eagerness for change is as much influenced by status as you present.
It seems relatively straightforward that (in West) once reason and culture had taken enough steps to discard religion and monarchy as the sole authorites for morality and on organizing a society, an increasing pace of change followed naturally. That is, elites came along with STEM not due to jealousy but due to inspiration. This goes roughly for 18. - very early 20. centuries.
I think that the changes during that time were supported by exactly what you value, open intellectual inquiry. Discarding such tradition that stood in the way of values discovered by said inquiry was its natural conclusion. It's easier to go away from someplace than to decide which (new) direction is good.
What you describe as elite opinions seems more apt for mid-late 20. and early 21. centuries, where pushing for specific value combinations preferring specific social groups instead made a comeback (including but not limited to nazism, fascism, communism and later identity politics). This, to me, seems less guided by reason going away from a specific set of values (Christianity, monarchy, etc.) and more by the generalized opposition towards tradition you describe.
It was elites discarding religion and monarchy early on, not the masses. And they didn't do this so much because of clear evidence, but rather new moral tastes.
Civilization’s survival is at risk because our modern world celebrates maladaptive evolution as innovation. However, to use Abraham Lincoln’s words, civilization will thrive when we have faith that right makes might (aka, adaptive evolution).
Question: What is science?
Answer: To practice science, use testable logic to interpret empirical (irrefutable) evidence, then subject that logic to rigorous skepticism.
Civilization is struggling to survive because the scientific community behaves as if it does not understand the “science” concept. Civilization will thrive when the scientific community behaves as if it understands the “science” concept.
And then STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) will overtake STEM in status. STEM is like teaching someone who has no place to go how to drive.
For the record, pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Old elites, threatened by STEM, respond by showing they too can innovate. But their innovations have longer time constants so control takes centuries to act. Hanson's Law of social control.
Here is a tentative theoretical framework, for whatever it may be worth:
Cultural Drift Through Misaligned Selection
================================
Core Principle:
A civilisation remains healthy when innovation is selected primarily by civilisational feedback. >
Drift emerges when innovation is selected by sub-civilisational incentives instead.
Variables:
- I = Rate of innovation
- F = Quality and speed of civilisational feedback
- S = Strength of status incentives
- P = Strength of power incentives
- R = Strength of rent-extraction incentives
- M = Strength of spiteful-mutancy incentives
- C = Civilisational coherence and health
Selection Channels:
Every innovation competes through one or more selection channels:
1. Adaptive Selection
- Criterion: Does it work?
- Feedback source: Reality.
2. Status Selection
- Criterion: Is it novel, prestigious, fashionable?
- Feedback source: Elite approval.
3. Power Selection
- Criterion: Does it increase leverage and control?
- Feedback source: Institutional advantage.
4. Rent Selection
- Criterion: Does it create dependency and intermediaries?
- Feedback source: Resource flows.
5. Spiteful Selection
- Criterion: Does it weaken rivals?
- Feedback source: Relative advantage.
Health Condition:
A civilisation is healthy when:
Adaptive Selection > (Status + Power + Rent + Spiteful Selection)
Innovation remains aligned with long-term social viability.
Drift Condition:
A civilisation drifts when:
(Status + Power + Rent + Spiteful Selection)
>
Adaptive Selection
Innovations continue to spread, but no longer because they enhance civilisational fitness.
Original insight:
High Innovation + Slow Feedback = Drift
Extended model:
High Innovation
+
Slow Civilisational Feedback
+
Strong Alternative Incentives
=
Accelerating Drift
Dynamic Sequence:
Technical Success
↓
Prestige of Innovation
↓
Innovation Applied to Culture
↓
Weak Long-Term Feedback
↓
Status/Power/Rent/Spite Selection Dominate
↓
Cultural Mutation
↓
Civilisational Drift
Compact Formula
Civilisational Health (C)
≈
F × Adaptive Selection
────────────────────────────
S + P + R + M
Where:
- increasing F improves correction,
- increasing S, P, R, M accelerates drift when not constrained by feedback.
In one sentence:
Civilisations decline when the selection of cultural innovation migrates from reality-based feedback to prestige-, power-, rent-, and spite-based feedback systems.