Morally Full Of Ourselves

What happens to cultures when selection pressures weaken while pressures to change remain due to cultural activism and environmental changes? One simple possibility is a faster random walk into maladaption. Another is a more directed return to ancient human nature in the form of increased laziness, selfishness, and myopia, or in the form of switching from farmer to forager attitudes and styles, which predicts more leisure, art, travel, democracy, promiscuity, and less fertility and religion.

But I’ve been neglecting another option, which I outlined four years ago: a lack of selection pressures not correcting for ways human behavior is context dependent, combined with key modern context changes. More specifically, we may all have mistakenly inferred that we have high relative status today due to our high absolute modern wealth, and so now all act like we are high status:

Assumption that evolution had humans estimate their relative status vis their absolute income/wealth predicts many trends and unique styles of the industrial era, including rising lifespans, lower fertility, falling violence, more school, more effort into art/travel/invention/etc., and much more. …

predicts … declining rates of violence and conflict, less war, and widening moral circles. … increasingly take on far views, relative to near views … high status naturally try to invest more in rising even further in status. … sports, combat, poetry, music, art, crafts, travel, scholarship, invention, etc … range and variety in … abilities, … predicts more school, …

tempted to invest less in immediate fertility in order to gain in status, which could help them or their children later become a high status “king” or “queen”, a role that could then allow much higher fertility later. … track more news, and to talk more, more visibly, and more politically. It induces us to make and push more behavior recommendations, and to try harder to govern everything …

more expect to be prophets, priests, monks, martyrs, and activists, but less to be the prototypical attendee of religious services, the meek supplicant to whom religion offers comfort and meaning in their hard life. And in fact we are more moral, more morally critical, seek more to be prophets and activists, but less attend church. … high in status discount the future less. (More)

Several LLMs find this thesis plausible and well supported by evidence. It predicts more travel and leisure, lower discount rates, investing more in fewer kids, nuclear family households, more signaling efforts, more diversified activities, and wider social connections and moral concerns.

In this post, I want to focus on the moral consequences of this process, as those have out-sized impacts on key processes of cultural drift.

In the ancient world, people tried to live morally, and helped to define and enforce moral norms for their immediate associates. But the tasks of defining and enforcing morality beyond one’s immediate associates was mostly left to elites: gods, kings, priests, lords, etc. Such elites attended to the moral health of the communities to which they had strong ties, but not so much to more distant communities. And elites rarely had much reason to make big changes in how their community defined morality.

Strongly interacting communities, when large like cities, sometimes broke into competing factions, usually defined in terms of material factors like ethnicity, family, age, gender, profession, region, and wealth. In such cases, many individuals defined themselves via their relevant group memberships. Sometimes destructive factional conflict induced norms of tolerance, wherein choices re shared communal spheres were not to be made overtly to favor conflicting group identities.

At some point universalizing religions arose, and sought to convert outsiders, often recruiting the entire population to such conversion efforts. This made ordinary people move involved in defining and enforcing the morals of larger communities, and inducing more frequent changes to such things. But only regarding the entire cultural package that was their religion.

When such religions fragmented into competing factions, ordinary people were often recruited into promoting factions, but again as entire communities promoting entire religion packages. In Europe, conflicts between religious factions became so destructive as to induce a new norm of tolerance of religion. This added to prior European norms discouraging family clans as an overt basis for choices in shared communal spheres. These helped Europe to have unusually productive economies.

In our modern world, trade, travel and talk now happen on much wider social scales, and religion has declined, being replaced by many diverse unpackaged more-frequently-changing opinions on moral norms. Furthermore, we are all now rich, and so plausibly all see ourselves as like ancient high status elites, for whom it made more sense to get involved in larger scale issues. So in addition to moving to democracy, so that we can all get more involved in wider governance decisions, we all also get more involved in defining and enforcing our many specific moral norms. (Which makes us more paternalistic.)

Thus while most ancient folks only got involved in very local governance issues, and defined and enforced moral norms only for their immediate associates, we modern folks get more involved in not only larger scale governance, but also in larger scale morality. We think, talk, and organize to favor some and oppose other wider morally-colored actions and cultural movements.

Two promising approaches to reducing cultural drift are to shame and discourage cultural activism, and to encourage a deep multiculturalism: tolerance of more variety of deep cultural differences. Alas, our modern status-induced eagerness to weigh in on everyone’s moral choices gets in the way of these fixes. We are reluctant to give up asserting our status by joining cultural activism movements, and by expressing our disapproval of cultures that adopt moral norms substantially different from our own.

As our political and cultural factionalism becomes increasingly severe, you might think we’d want to adopt new tolerance norms, wherein choices re shared communal spheres are not to be made overtly to favor particular cultural factions. But I see almost no appetite for this anytime soon.