Moral Compromise

Yesterday, I talked on cultural drift, w/o slides, for 90min (~1/2 time in Q&A) to 75 smart engaged elite teens. Happily, they seemed to mostly understand me, suggesting that I’ve found sufficient ways to explain the issue at their level.

However, their most common objection, by far, suggests a big conceptual obstacle to motivating people to try to solve this problem: they were quite reluctant to question their culturally-inherited morals. Many expressed horror at the idea of allowing or even encouraging cultural variety that deviates from their confident moral stances on war, slavery, democracy, gender-equality, corporal punishment, higher education, medicine for all, etc. Sure, Hitler added variety, but we wouldn’t want that, right?

Toward the end, and talking to a few after, I think I made some progress framing the problem this way:

If you were part of a team in a sports, artistic, or business competition, and found that your team was consistently losing to rivals, and so likely to end or disband soon as a result, you’d have to carefully consider in what areas your team was willing to revise its behavior. Yes, if you compromised in all areas, adopting whatever changes seemed to work for your rivals, maybe you wouldn’t stand for anything, so why not just quit, or join rival teams? But if your team were not willing to adapt or compromise in any areas, it should accept that it would likely lose, and just enjoy what time it has left.

Until we find a way to end or control cultural evolution, insufficiently adaptive cultures will eventually go away and be replaced by others. So if it seems that your culture might soon be losing to rival cultures, you can refuse to change anything and gamble that appearances are deceiving, or maybe just enjoy your time remaining. Or you can instead make a bet on how many areas of change are sufficient to give you a fighting chance.

Yes, picking just one or two modest areas in which you refuse to change probably won’t cut your success chances by that much. But the more areas you pick, the worse your chances will get. So if you want a decent chance at saving your most precious moral norms, you’ll have to be open to compromising on many others. Such as by allowing and even encouraging subgroups who deviate on those norms, to see if such deviations might be more adaptive.

Cultural evolution rewards adaptiveness, and yes you likely care about other stuff besides adaptiveness. (Stuff that prior cultural evolution told you to care about - there is no other source for such concerns.) But sufficient adaptiveness is a prerequisite to your culture (and its descendants) existing or having influence over the long run. So until we replace cultural evolution with some other process, you must attend sufficiently to adaptiveness. And compromise in order to do so. Even about morals.

Related: Keep Your Identity Small