Modernism, in the fine arts, [is] a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression … felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention.
While I intuitively feel “cultural drift” is a fruitful concept, it is unclear to me what it is, apart from a catch-all concept for all types of changes where one cannot immediately see “ok these cultural ideas & practices are obviously adaptive for the organism”.
The concept is inspired by the concept of “genetic drift”. And when evolutionary theorists use this concept, it seems to me that they often use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card. When they face some queer behavior in an animal or some queer type of antlers or whatever that does not seem to represent any evolutionary advantage, some theorists throw up their hands and say: “Well, what we observe can simply be the result of genetic drift”.
Which is true, it can be! Genetic drift is real. But it is also a lazy type of explanation. The fun part of evolutionary theory is to consider strange behaviors or strange body morphology as a puzzle (in the Kuhnian sense), and then to attempt to solve that puzzle by suggesting (and testing) hypotheses why whatever is observed, may actually be adaptive after all. (Example: Amotz Zahavi explaining gigantic antlers on some deer as the evolutionary outcome of a partly runaway signals arms race.)
Likewise, to jump too fast to the suggestion that an observed change in human culture is due to (random) cultural drift, rather than by changes in the environment that actually make the new cultural practice/behavior adaptive for the organism (in ways we yet have to find out), seems to me – well - a bit lazy perhaps….
…don’t get me wrong: there are good reasons to assume that cultural drift, as well as genetic drift, are real processes taking place in the world. But we should not jump to them as explanations of observed behavior before first considering less random-based alternative explanations.
For example, the dominance of “modernism” and later “post-modernism” in art and architecture is not due to cultural drift, but due to the Nazis losing the Second World War. Culturally, we are still living in the shadow of the outcome of that war. Nothing “random” there, once you factor in that the Nazis lost. If they had won, “Entartete Kunst” would highly likely still be a minority thing, and neo-imperial architecture a la Speer would be the order of the day.
Be that as it may. My main/theoretical point is that “cultural drift” is a bit vague as a concept. Further specification of what the concept signifies/what goes on according to it, is needed.
It is a mistake to put too much weight in one's concepts on ease of measurement or identification. As Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
polscistoic assumes “cultural drift” implies randomness, but of course human movements like Postmodernism take place in a historical context, often purposefully driven by a dominant subsection of elites. How do you think about this? Should we assume you mean randomness in terms of causation, or do you just mean drift as in the selection gradient is not steep, allowing deviation in non-adaptive directions.
I feel the same when reading about your concept of ‘cultural drift.’ I get that sometimes cultural changes are non-adaptive. The logic is similar to why genetic changes might be non-adaptive. Putting aside whether genetic drift is a good theory in biology, it will be useful for (most readers, I guess) if you could spell out your theory in greater detail. This should address why I should buy your explanation of post-modernism. It is simpler, more elegant, does it predict other things that the current explanation(s) does not? More generally, what is missing is a model explaining when a cultural change X is likely to be non-adaptive due to cultural drift rather than other factors, such as historical events. I am afraid that currently, it feels like reading a long and vague Introduction to a paper that may be promising.
I’ll put a parenthesis around the rather local “why does Modernism exist” puzzle, and instead mention (also related to Julian’s comment) that “partly run-away signal arms races” a la Zahavi is one of a limited number of specific hypothesis worth considering also when it comes to explaining puzzling human behavior (“puzzling” from an evolutionary perspective).
For example, signalling theory (here: evolutionary signal arms races) may explain why genuine (Kantian) altruists exist. (Their existence is one of the classic Kuhnian puzzles related to humans.)
The emergence of genuine altruism can be modelled (since Julian asks for models) as an outcome tied to the evolutionary advantage of being trusted by others. (Cue concepts like internalized reputational concerns, pseudo-self-binding strategies in situations of asymmetric information, etc.).
…I mention this not to trail off from the topic, but as an example meant to illustrate how “real” hypotheses, based on theoretical reasoning, rather than an appeal to random “cultural drift”, usually leads to more exiting research questions when faced with apparently (at-first-sight) maladaptive human traits. Including culturally changing traits.
Agreed, what is necessary is a theory of which changes are most likely not to be disciplined by selection. You might answer that for some reason it has become more likely to have changes not disciplined by selection. But then what is the source of increased cultural drift?
Also, why is a new art form (Modernism, say) maladaptive for those that produce it? After all they were taking risk and innovating or status seeking. This is not necessarily a bad evolutionary strategy. So, how exactly you define maladaptive change in the first place?
Finally, how is what you are saying different than concepts in game theory such as coordination failure that would also account for maladaptation of societies? What are the new insights that I gain by thinking in terms of cultural drift?
I don't see where you argue that modernism is *bad*. To call it "drift" suggests it is bad, and not a legitimate response to social problems.
As you say, modernism is motivated by disillusionment with prior ideals. By the timeline, these ideals that the early Modernists rebelled against were Victorian-era ideals. This would only be bad if those prior ideals were actually all good. Are you claiming that Victorian-era ideals were all good?
A culture that has rejected prior ideals, and not found something to replace them with, is plausibly dysfunctional. Most cultures have ideals they embrace, as that is adaptive.
That is adaptive *provided that the environment in which the culture is operating* is sufficiently similar. In some cases, we *should* expect cultural changes to *need* to be faster in a more rapidly changing world, and our world *is* changing (by our own hands) much more rapidly than in the past.
Rejection of prior ideals is sometimes pure fashion, and likely to be maladaptive. Sometimes it's a gambit to gain or maintain status and prestige for its own sake, and so likely maladaptive for the larger society. Other times it's driven by a recognition that the already-present-and-often-known flaws of the prior ideals are becoming untenable in a changing context. In that case, it's only maladaptive to the extent we fail to seek and choose changes that comport with the more current context's needs.
Yes, Postmodernism in the 20th century, and the Critical Theories that sprouted from it are very consciously a rejection of all values and ideals, even the idea of truth. It was/is taking a sledgehammer to culture and delighting in the wreckage. Hard to imagine how the result could be more adaptive than the culture that brought us symphonies and airplanes.
Modernism was full of ideas on what to replace Victorian ideals with. Even if it wasn't, it's okay and good to point out a problem with something even when you don't have a solution yet.
Victorian sensibility in particular was full of elaborate styles, customs, and taboos that had no plausible link to anything practical, while being immensely cruel to the underclasses.
I'm pretty sympathetic to this cultural drift idea generally... but I do have to say there is something a bit jarring about reading your question:
When modernists sought new values, what signs did they use to infer that they had problematic/broken values, which needed replacing?
...jarring because it just seems really salient to me what modernists were reacting to historically - to name just some of them:
1) The alienation brought about through industrialisation.
2) Rapacious colonialism.
3) A LOT of war on a scale never seen before.
It's pretty understandable that experiencing these massive changes would result in some sort of challenging of old ideals. I mean - it could just be that these elites were living distally from the selective pressures that would inform their value selection - and that this is the cause of their nihilism. But to me it seems far simpler to say the more proximate cause is the historical reality they were reacting to - and they documented it minutely. It's all there in Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises etc.
You critique modernism for not providing a replacement. In their defence I would say that it takes a while to figure these things out - generations. Things progressed deeper into nihilism and absurdity with post-modernism but now more recently a set of replacement values, an optimism and answer, has emerged with the meta-modern movement - which I won't summarise. But if you haven't looked into that - I'd be interested to know your thoughts on it. IMO, it is ironically much more symbolically indicative of cultural drift. That the hero chooses sincere feeling in the face of contingency and absurdity exactly describes cultural drift.
(If you want a quintessential meta-modern narrative - watch Everything Everywhere All at Once - it is an absolutely perfect transposition of the Campbellian Hero's Journey into a meta-modern variant. Really extraordinary.)
Can we formulate predictions re: cultural drift as for how the global culture will develop, particularly on whether some values are more resilient to drift than others, in the absence of insularity? That is: what selection pressures exist that aren't based on survival/adaptivity, but on the ev.psych/sociopsych. architecture of humanity?
For example, intuitively it would seem to me that values which feed on evopsyc. cognitive shortcuts might be more resilient. So, values such as (signaling) equality or equity, will to compete for resources and boo-outgroup.
Particularly, I'd be interested in the possibility that cultural drift might likely not affect all locations of global culture equally (as living conditions differ due to historical, economical, political and language differences), and that it might end up in fact creating more or less insular/resilient subcultures/values as a part of the drift.
If such local minima re: "drift gradient" are stable enough, there might be enough inertia against total drift. Obviously the trends that got you interested in the first place are at odds with this (wishful) interpretation; still, I do think it's a line worth exploring as it might provide clues as for what options might work to solve the issue.
> Second, invention and innovation more generally became very prestigious, as they were correctly credited for most modern success. So cultural elites sought to lead and join innovative cultural movements containing as many prestigious elements as possible.
This explanation credits cultural elites with appreciating that innovation has brought success in other domains. I don't deny that cultural elites could sometimes be moved by such appreciation. But what do you think of the following alternative explanation, which doesn't require elites to recognize the value of innovation in other domains?
Technology made it easier to reproduce many traditionally high-status features of art (such as realism). But this was possible only if the feature had been high-status for long enough that people had figured out how to produce it mechanically. Once technology made enough high-status artistic features cheap to produce, elite artists had to move the goal posts, which they could do only by innovating. Otherwise, their elite status would lose its exclusivity. In particular, elite artists had to find styles that (1) high-status patrons liked, but that (2) were too new to have been mechanized yet. Of course, once it became routine for elite artists to innovate, artistic innovation itself became requisite for high status.
(However, this innovation is constrained by the requirement that it not give the impression to high-status patrons that the artist is *ignorant of* or *unable to meet* the previous high-status standards.)
The idea isn't that people just happened to choose to raise the priority of innovation relative to other ways of competing for status.
The idea is that old styles, which used to confer status, stopped doing so, because technology made it too easy to approximate those styles too closely in the eyes of too many people.
Once the production of a style could be sufficiently well approximated with technology (and cheaply so, due to economies of scale), elites *had* to innovate, or else they lost their exclusive claim on elite status. They had to find new styles, styles for which there wasn't already an industry prepared to churn out good-enough approximations.
Of course, anyone can make up a random new style. But elite artists are better-positioned to find a new style that will be attractive to contemporary elite patrons and which doesn't inadvertently signal incompetence according to prevailing standards.
Once elite artists have been innovating for a while (because they're forced to, or else be lost in the crowd), then maybe innovation itself becomes associated with elite status in its own right. At that point, innovation naturally rises in priority as a site of competition for status.
But, in my story, that's just a secondary effect. It's not the primary means by which technology made elites start valuing tradition less and valuing innovation more. The primary means was this: If you didn't innovate, eventually you would be invisible in a sea of technologically enabled copycats. Only innovators survived.
One of the funny things about modernist poetry (and other literature) is just how attached it was to the tradition. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were immersed in classic poetry. Just think of the quotations in the Waste Land, the *obsession* with Dante, Shakespeare, etc. Eliot himself said, "the new culture shall flower on the stem of the old." The summary you provide is reasonably representative of what critics think, but not necessarily a good assessment of what was really going on. For example, what does it mean for Eliot to look for "new modes of expression" when he writes so often in iambic verse, the standard mode of English poetry? Pound even referred to modernism as a "renaissance". I wrote on my Substack, "Eliot’s whole poetics is to make the dead live." If anything, literary modernism's break with the past was far less dramatic than Wordsworth's, under whose shadow almost all literature still lives.
Sure but poetry is always innovative. Johnson said, “the essence of poetry is invention.” (I don’t remember the year—1750s?) The claim that modernism was a break with the past is what is over stated. Wordsworth was a bigger break in 1798!
Modernism as an example of maladaptive cultural drift makes sense to me, especially since it coincided with a time when much art started appearing "ugly" to the general public. Earlier, representational art reinforced societal values and was widely appreciated, but this stopped being necessary. A new dynamic emerged: elite-driven innovation and status competition led to abstract, fragmented art that alienated common people. This perhaps resembles Fisherian runaway selection, where traits (often ornamental or non-functional) become exaggerated due to social selection, even if they lose practical value. As elites sought prestige, they increasingly valued innovation and abstraction, creating a feedback loop that pushed art to become more abstract and less accessible. The old constraints—making art functional and appreciated by broader society—no longer applied.
On another note, I do not remember you addressing how your cultural drift thesis fits with your earlier writing on foragers versus farmers. Do you now see the revival of the "forager mindset" as a product of maladaptive cultural drift?
While I intuitively feel “cultural drift” is a fruitful concept, it is unclear to me what it is, apart from a catch-all concept for all types of changes where one cannot immediately see “ok these cultural ideas & practices are obviously adaptive for the organism”.
The concept is inspired by the concept of “genetic drift”. And when evolutionary theorists use this concept, it seems to me that they often use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card. When they face some queer behavior in an animal or some queer type of antlers or whatever that does not seem to represent any evolutionary advantage, some theorists throw up their hands and say: “Well, what we observe can simply be the result of genetic drift”.
Which is true, it can be! Genetic drift is real. But it is also a lazy type of explanation. The fun part of evolutionary theory is to consider strange behaviors or strange body morphology as a puzzle (in the Kuhnian sense), and then to attempt to solve that puzzle by suggesting (and testing) hypotheses why whatever is observed, may actually be adaptive after all. (Example: Amotz Zahavi explaining gigantic antlers on some deer as the evolutionary outcome of a partly runaway signals arms race.)
Likewise, to jump too fast to the suggestion that an observed change in human culture is due to (random) cultural drift, rather than by changes in the environment that actually make the new cultural practice/behavior adaptive for the organism (in ways we yet have to find out), seems to me – well - a bit lazy perhaps….
…don’t get me wrong: there are good reasons to assume that cultural drift, as well as genetic drift, are real processes taking place in the world. But we should not jump to them as explanations of observed behavior before first considering less random-based alternative explanations.
For example, the dominance of “modernism” and later “post-modernism” in art and architecture is not due to cultural drift, but due to the Nazis losing the Second World War. Culturally, we are still living in the shadow of the outcome of that war. Nothing “random” there, once you factor in that the Nazis lost. If they had won, “Entartete Kunst” would highly likely still be a minority thing, and neo-imperial architecture a la Speer would be the order of the day.
Be that as it may. My main/theoretical point is that “cultural drift” is a bit vague as a concept. Further specification of what the concept signifies/what goes on according to it, is needed.
It is a mistake to put too much weight in one's concepts on ease of measurement or identification. As Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
polscistoic assumes “cultural drift” implies randomness, but of course human movements like Postmodernism take place in a historical context, often purposefully driven by a dominant subsection of elites. How do you think about this? Should we assume you mean randomness in terms of causation, or do you just mean drift as in the selection gradient is not steep, allowing deviation in non-adaptive directions.
I just mean change not driven or disciplined by selection. Needn't have mean zero.
I feel the same when reading about your concept of ‘cultural drift.’ I get that sometimes cultural changes are non-adaptive. The logic is similar to why genetic changes might be non-adaptive. Putting aside whether genetic drift is a good theory in biology, it will be useful for (most readers, I guess) if you could spell out your theory in greater detail. This should address why I should buy your explanation of post-modernism. It is simpler, more elegant, does it predict other things that the current explanation(s) does not? More generally, what is missing is a model explaining when a cultural change X is likely to be non-adaptive due to cultural drift rather than other factors, such as historical events. I am afraid that currently, it feels like reading a long and vague Introduction to a paper that may be promising.
On average changes not disciplined by selection are maladaptive. Yes, it is much harder to say exactly which ones.
I know of no other explanation of Modernism to compare mine to.
I’ll put a parenthesis around the rather local “why does Modernism exist” puzzle, and instead mention (also related to Julian’s comment) that “partly run-away signal arms races” a la Zahavi is one of a limited number of specific hypothesis worth considering also when it comes to explaining puzzling human behavior (“puzzling” from an evolutionary perspective).
For example, signalling theory (here: evolutionary signal arms races) may explain why genuine (Kantian) altruists exist. (Their existence is one of the classic Kuhnian puzzles related to humans.)
The emergence of genuine altruism can be modelled (since Julian asks for models) as an outcome tied to the evolutionary advantage of being trusted by others. (Cue concepts like internalized reputational concerns, pseudo-self-binding strategies in situations of asymmetric information, etc.).
…I mention this not to trail off from the topic, but as an example meant to illustrate how “real” hypotheses, based on theoretical reasoning, rather than an appeal to random “cultural drift”, usually leads to more exiting research questions when faced with apparently (at-first-sight) maladaptive human traits. Including culturally changing traits.
Agreed, what is necessary is a theory of which changes are most likely not to be disciplined by selection. You might answer that for some reason it has become more likely to have changes not disciplined by selection. But then what is the source of increased cultural drift?
Also, why is a new art form (Modernism, say) maladaptive for those that produce it? After all they were taking risk and innovating or status seeking. This is not necessarily a bad evolutionary strategy. So, how exactly you define maladaptive change in the first place?
Finally, how is what you are saying different than concepts in game theory such as coordination failure that would also account for maladaptation of societies? What are the new insights that I gain by thinking in terms of cultural drift?
I don't see where you argue that modernism is *bad*. To call it "drift" suggests it is bad, and not a legitimate response to social problems.
As you say, modernism is motivated by disillusionment with prior ideals. By the timeline, these ideals that the early Modernists rebelled against were Victorian-era ideals. This would only be bad if those prior ideals were actually all good. Are you claiming that Victorian-era ideals were all good?
A culture that has rejected prior ideals, and not found something to replace them with, is plausibly dysfunctional. Most cultures have ideals they embrace, as that is adaptive.
That is adaptive *provided that the environment in which the culture is operating* is sufficiently similar. In some cases, we *should* expect cultural changes to *need* to be faster in a more rapidly changing world, and our world *is* changing (by our own hands) much more rapidly than in the past.
Rejection of prior ideals is sometimes pure fashion, and likely to be maladaptive. Sometimes it's a gambit to gain or maintain status and prestige for its own sake, and so likely maladaptive for the larger society. Other times it's driven by a recognition that the already-present-and-often-known flaws of the prior ideals are becoming untenable in a changing context. In that case, it's only maladaptive to the extent we fail to seek and choose changes that comport with the more current context's needs.
Yes, Postmodernism in the 20th century, and the Critical Theories that sprouted from it are very consciously a rejection of all values and ideals, even the idea of truth. It was/is taking a sledgehammer to culture and delighting in the wreckage. Hard to imagine how the result could be more adaptive than the culture that brought us symphonies and airplanes.
Modernism was full of ideas on what to replace Victorian ideals with. Even if it wasn't, it's okay and good to point out a problem with something even when you don't have a solution yet.
Victorian sensibility in particular was full of elaborate styles, customs, and taboos that had no plausible link to anything practical, while being immensely cruel to the underclasses.
I'm pretty sympathetic to this cultural drift idea generally... but I do have to say there is something a bit jarring about reading your question:
When modernists sought new values, what signs did they use to infer that they had problematic/broken values, which needed replacing?
...jarring because it just seems really salient to me what modernists were reacting to historically - to name just some of them:
1) The alienation brought about through industrialisation.
2) Rapacious colonialism.
3) A LOT of war on a scale never seen before.
It's pretty understandable that experiencing these massive changes would result in some sort of challenging of old ideals. I mean - it could just be that these elites were living distally from the selective pressures that would inform their value selection - and that this is the cause of their nihilism. But to me it seems far simpler to say the more proximate cause is the historical reality they were reacting to - and they documented it minutely. It's all there in Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises etc.
You critique modernism for not providing a replacement. In their defence I would say that it takes a while to figure these things out - generations. Things progressed deeper into nihilism and absurdity with post-modernism but now more recently a set of replacement values, an optimism and answer, has emerged with the meta-modern movement - which I won't summarise. But if you haven't looked into that - I'd be interested to know your thoughts on it. IMO, it is ironically much more symbolically indicative of cultural drift. That the hero chooses sincere feeling in the face of contingency and absurdity exactly describes cultural drift.
(If you want a quintessential meta-modern narrative - watch Everything Everywhere All at Once - it is an absolutely perfect transposition of the Campbellian Hero's Journey into a meta-modern variant. Really extraordinary.)
Can we formulate predictions re: cultural drift as for how the global culture will develop, particularly on whether some values are more resilient to drift than others, in the absence of insularity? That is: what selection pressures exist that aren't based on survival/adaptivity, but on the ev.psych/sociopsych. architecture of humanity?
For example, intuitively it would seem to me that values which feed on evopsyc. cognitive shortcuts might be more resilient. So, values such as (signaling) equality or equity, will to compete for resources and boo-outgroup.
Particularly, I'd be interested in the possibility that cultural drift might likely not affect all locations of global culture equally (as living conditions differ due to historical, economical, political and language differences), and that it might end up in fact creating more or less insular/resilient subcultures/values as a part of the drift.
If such local minima re: "drift gradient" are stable enough, there might be enough inertia against total drift. Obviously the trends that got you interested in the first place are at odds with this (wishful) interpretation; still, I do think it's a line worth exploring as it might provide clues as for what options might work to solve the issue.
> Second, invention and innovation more generally became very prestigious, as they were correctly credited for most modern success. So cultural elites sought to lead and join innovative cultural movements containing as many prestigious elements as possible.
This explanation credits cultural elites with appreciating that innovation has brought success in other domains. I don't deny that cultural elites could sometimes be moved by such appreciation. But what do you think of the following alternative explanation, which doesn't require elites to recognize the value of innovation in other domains?
Technology made it easier to reproduce many traditionally high-status features of art (such as realism). But this was possible only if the feature had been high-status for long enough that people had figured out how to produce it mechanically. Once technology made enough high-status artistic features cheap to produce, elite artists had to move the goal posts, which they could do only by innovating. Otherwise, their elite status would lose its exclusivity. In particular, elite artists had to find styles that (1) high-status patrons liked, but that (2) were too new to have been mechanized yet. Of course, once it became routine for elite artists to innovate, artistic innovation itself became requisite for high status.
(However, this innovation is constrained by the requirement that it not give the impression to high-status patrons that the artist is *ignorant of* or *unable to meet* the previous high-status standards.)
There were lots of other ways to compete for status besides raising the priority on innvation.
The idea isn't that people just happened to choose to raise the priority of innovation relative to other ways of competing for status.
The idea is that old styles, which used to confer status, stopped doing so, because technology made it too easy to approximate those styles too closely in the eyes of too many people.
Once the production of a style could be sufficiently well approximated with technology (and cheaply so, due to economies of scale), elites *had* to innovate, or else they lost their exclusive claim on elite status. They had to find new styles, styles for which there wasn't already an industry prepared to churn out good-enough approximations.
Of course, anyone can make up a random new style. But elite artists are better-positioned to find a new style that will be attractive to contemporary elite patrons and which doesn't inadvertently signal incompetence according to prevailing standards.
Once elite artists have been innovating for a while (because they're forced to, or else be lost in the crowd), then maybe innovation itself becomes associated with elite status in its own right. At that point, innovation naturally rises in priority as a site of competition for status.
But, in my story, that's just a secondary effect. It's not the primary means by which technology made elites start valuing tradition less and valuing innovation more. The primary means was this: If you didn't innovate, eventually you would be invisible in a sea of technologically enabled copycats. Only innovators survived.
One of the funny things about modernist poetry (and other literature) is just how attached it was to the tradition. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were immersed in classic poetry. Just think of the quotations in the Waste Land, the *obsession* with Dante, Shakespeare, etc. Eliot himself said, "the new culture shall flower on the stem of the old." The summary you provide is reasonably representative of what critics think, but not necessarily a good assessment of what was really going on. For example, what does it mean for Eliot to look for "new modes of expression" when he writes so often in iambic verse, the standard mode of English poetry? Pound even referred to modernism as a "renaissance". I wrote on my Substack, "Eliot’s whole poetics is to make the dead live." If anything, literary modernism's break with the past was far less dramatic than Wordsworth's, under whose shadow almost all literature still lives.
I can believe that they were actually less innovative than they claimed. But still everyone has been talking a lot about innovation being important.
Sure but poetry is always innovative. Johnson said, “the essence of poetry is invention.” (I don’t remember the year—1750s?) The claim that modernism was a break with the past is what is over stated. Wordsworth was a bigger break in 1798!
Modernism as an example of maladaptive cultural drift makes sense to me, especially since it coincided with a time when much art started appearing "ugly" to the general public. Earlier, representational art reinforced societal values and was widely appreciated, but this stopped being necessary. A new dynamic emerged: elite-driven innovation and status competition led to abstract, fragmented art that alienated common people. This perhaps resembles Fisherian runaway selection, where traits (often ornamental or non-functional) become exaggerated due to social selection, even if they lose practical value. As elites sought prestige, they increasingly valued innovation and abstraction, creating a feedback loop that pushed art to become more abstract and less accessible. The old constraints—making art functional and appreciated by broader society—no longer applied.
On another note, I do not remember you addressing how your cultural drift thesis fits with your earlier writing on foragers versus farmers. Do you now see the revival of the "forager mindset" as a product of maladaptive cultural drift?
The drift toward foragers styles was enabled by weakened selection pressures, which would otherwise have prevented that drift.