Modern Culture Trends
I’ve written lots on specific centuries-long culture trends, and also on their plausible drivers. But let me now try to pull that together, into an overall summary of as many trends as I can find, organized by their likely strongest drivers. I see six key drivers.
1. Learn - We learn more about our world.
We’ve learned to doubt magical or supernatural events and processes, making our world seem less enchanted and transcendent. We more trust science and professional experts, relative to religion, tradition, and power. Such experts nnow more publish their info, instead of keeping it secret. Learning of germs, we’ve focused our purity rituals on germ cleaning. Learning more about mental interiors, these have become more central to our fiction and our moral ideals, and we’ve become more tolerant of the mentally ill. As medicine is now more effective, we use it more.
2. Econ/tech - We find more tech, and grow our economies.
Clocks let us be more punctual, while new systems of measurement and naming let us find and compare things more widely. We buy more stuff instead of making it, and work more at jobs, first men and then women also. We are less wary of private property, interest, and market prices. We live more densely, travel further, and move home more to get better jobs, so we know our neighbors less. We talk to and get more news from further away, are more open to change, and give more status to innovation. We less interact with, rely on, and feel obligated to kin.
Our organizations are larger, and more often for-profit. Our more capable governments take on more roles, including protecting us from many harms. With more reliable law, we settle fewer disputes personally, and our more complex world has more complex rules. Our kids do less work and more school, as that helps shape and train them for modern jobs. School makes our thinking more reductive, abstract, and analytical, and less holistic and dialectical. Formal insurance, via both the market and state, makes us safer, and displaces family and neighbor risk-sharing.
3. Egalitarian - We more avoid creating or accepting inequality.
We avoid suggesting people are less valuable due to their family, age, gender, race, class, sexual preference, colony status, or disability status. We avoid norms, rules, and official choices that depend directly on such features. We repudiated slavery, colonialism, inherited aristocracy, and formal gender rules. We’ve replaced monarchy with democracy, prefer juries to judges in law, and are more sympathetic to rebels against authority. We try to treat nature and animals more respectfully.
4. Lazy/selfish/myopic - We more do what takes less effort or discipline.
We work less, leisure more, wait longer to marry, and have fewer kids then, using contraception as desired. We have fewer norms and rules that limit words, clothes, and interactions, and we less celebrate self-control. We are more sexually promiscuous, and more accepting of diverse sexual practices and recreational drugs. We less push individuals to sacrifice for communities, are more pacifist and less war-like, and we choose more privacy and personal space. We seek comfort, happiness, and fun more than honor, duty, and achievement.
5. Signal - We do more than is otherwise cost-effective, to look better.
We over-insure, do way too much medicine, make stuff too safe, punish too little, and avoid punishing physically, all to show that we care. We do too much school, and over-clean, to seem smart, conscientious and conformist. We over-consume, to show off wealth and identities. We follow fashion, and see too much art and news, to seem smart and well-connected. We invest more in fewer kids, to make better looking kids. We seek variety, and avoid sameness, to show authenticity, creativity, wealth, curiosity, and courage. We make overly-complex rules and regulations, to seem smart.
6. Other Enjoy - We do what we enjoy, even if that isn’t adaptive.
We choose our own marriages, instead of having them arranged, with mates of more similar ages. Our work gives us more meaning and satisfaction. We consume far more fiction and music. We over-eat, and let our personalities be more gendered. With fewer huge disasters, we less seek religion’s comfort. Being rich makes us feel high status, and so we try to be leaders via paternalism, governance, and cultural activism.
Notice that while the first two drivers more plausibly result in adaptive changes, the last four drivers less plausibly do so, more plausibly resulting from increased wealth plus relaxed selection pressures. I intend to edit this as I learn more; did I miss key trends or drivers?
We do less of what replicates us and more of what replicates information (culture), and its carriers (technology and entertainment). The symbiosis between humans and culture is beginning to work against us. https://www.jurajkarpis.com/moneyisstatusmemory/
A slight rewrite of the trends you identify:
1. Learn - We learn more about our world.
We experience the world less, but think we know more about it through the outpourings of ‘experts’ and the media. We have forgotten the wisom of the past that recognised that understanding is more important than knowledge.. We have replaced what we are taught is magical or supernatural by a new mythology, which we deceive ourselves into believing is rational and ‘scientific’, We have changed our religion to a new one, the priesthood of which is the ‘expert’, a religion which is no less intolerant of heterodoxy than the old religions’ Replacing the demons of old with a new demon, the germ, we destroy the rich ecosystems inside, on and around us and are oblivious to the harm this does to our health, harms for which that false god, Medicine, has no curese, only ever more expensive ‘management’ while prevention and cure would be accomplished by eating real food, but not too much, being more active, being dirty, having contact with humans, animals, soil. We have changed that to which we are intoleran, but are no less intolerant.
2. Econ/tech - We find more tech, and grow our economies.
We are ever more dependent on technology and the stae, less self reliant. Lawnmowers make us incapable of mowing a lawn with a scythe, calculators make us incapable of adding two numbers together. AI will soon abolish the ability to think.
Schools no longer produce school-leavers capable of a long read, of writing coherently, or even of preparing a nutritious meal, let alone growing the ingredients.
The school-leavers of the post-industrial world are fit only for the b***s**t jobs of corporate or government bureaucracies, or being dangerously narrow technocratic ‘experts’ writing brainless regulations. Real work- actually growing or making things, becomes the preserve of migrants from parts of the world which still live in reality.
3. Egalitarian - We more avoid creating or accepting inequality.
We have replaced the idea of equal opportunity by one of equal outcome, regardless of ability or effort. Believe that we are egalitarian while accepting an identity ideology to which is intrinsic that persons are entitled to special treatment by virtue of ethnicity, religion, self-assigned gender, etc. We think that diversity on the basis of these superficial identities is more important than differences in thinking. We disparage, cancel, shu, those who dare to express heterodox views..We delude ourselves into thinking that we have repudiated slavery, while many, are still in wage, debt or tax slavery; colonialism, while most of the Global South is still in poverty due to an extractive neocolonialism without any of the benefits such as good governance peace and law which accrued unde the old regime. We have replaced the rule of Law in either monarchies or republics by bureaucratic oligarchies acting under the guise of democracy.
4. Lazy/selfish/myopic - We more do what takes less effort or discipline. [Agree]
We work less, leisure more, wait longer to marry, and have fewer kids then, using contraception as desired. We have fewer norms and rules that limit words, clothes, and interactions, and we less celebrate self-control. We are more sexually promiscuous, and more accepting of diverse sexual practices and recreational drugs. We less push individuals to sacrifice for communities, are more pacifist and less war-like, and we choose more privacy and personal space. We seek comfort and happiness, over honor and achievement.
5. Signal - We do more than is otherwise cost-effective, to look better. [Agree]
We over-insure, do way too much medicine, make stuff too safe, punish too little, and avoid punishing physically, all to show that we care. We do too much school, and over-clean, to seem smart, conscientious and conformist. We over-consume, to show off wealth and identities. We follow fashion, and see too much art and news, to seem smart and well-connected. We invest more in each kid, for better looking kids. We seek variety, and avoid sameness, to show authenticity, creativity, wealth, curiosity, and courage. We make overly-complex rules and regulations, to seem smart.
6. Enjoy - We do what we enjoy, even if that isn’t adaptive.
We do what we are told will be enjoyable, even if it isn’t, and are under pressure to pretend to enjoyment. A majority are trapped in b***s**t jobs without meaning, but under great social pressure to be part of the ‘team’ and pretend that it is meaningful. We consume far more fiction (but mostly of the passive visual type, rather than the written word, which requires more active engagement) and music. We let our personalities get more gendered (whatever that means). With fewer huge disasters (really!), we less seek the comfort of religion. Even as absolute poverty decreases, the wealth gap increases, and many who are not in absolute poverty still feel unjustly poor.