More Random Than We Realize
I’ve previously posted on how US foreign policy, and how left vs right ideologies, both seem less coherent that most expect them to be. I’ve also posted on how we expect social norms to be simpler and more widely agreed on than they actually are. There are also literatures suggesting that people expect more coherence than there actually is to be found in legal systems, artistic genres, corporate cultures, and product brands.
From these I posit a general tendency, at least within our cultures, to see a great many kinds of cultural units as much more coherent than they actually are, at least on larger scales, and thus to be better explained than they actually are by a small number of core dimensions and choices.
Our limited mental abilities weakly predict that we over simplify many things. Near-far theory more strongly predicts over-estimation of coherence for things seen in far mode, but the opposite for near mode. However, my theory of the sacred suggests that we try to see stuff in far mode, even when it would otherwise be near, when we want to bond with others over shared views of them. And that bonding aspect does seem to apply to most of these, plausibly explaining our over-estimation of coherence for them.
If you saw a person, or a company, as at heart a relatively simple thing, with a few key styles and values, then if they were once successful you might expect them to continue to be successful if they preserved their core, unless the world around them changed greatly. And if something was going wrong with them you’d expect that to be due to one of those few big features in that core going wrong.
However, the more you see a person or company as a large collection of rather randomly collected factors, many of which change all the time, the less you will see prior success (or failure) as predicting future success, and the harder it to be to diagnose failure when it happens. So to believe in the future success of ourselves, and our groups, and in our ability to diagnose problems, we try to see them as more coherent than they are.
I think this helps explain our common overconfidence in ourselves and the groups that we bond to and via, and also our grasping at single factor theories of their problems. I think it also helps explain why it is so hard to see cultural evolution and drift.
Our best theories say that our cultures are pretty random collections of cultural features. Yes, cultural patterns consistent across space and time are hard won insights from eons of natural selection, but recent variations are mostly blind explorations of the vast nearby space of possible cultures. But we could not so passionately and loyally embrace our cultures if we saw them as that random. So we instead presume that they are relatively coherent. Which would make their health easier to predict via tracking only a few features, and their problems easier to diagnose in the same way.
Our deep capacities for rationalization are of great help here. Even though cultures can seem on the surface like they have many diverse features, we are skilled at telling stories about how these all follow from a much smaller number of deeper dimensions. And the more comfortable we are with our cultures, and the better our intuitions predict their details, the more easily we assume their essential simplicity.
Traditional cultures were quite wary of changing anything substantial. But once the West saw the great power and wealth from allowing more change in tech and minor social practices, we were tempted to allow rapid change in many things, and to hope that we could manage that change. And the more we saw our world as full of many complex technical choices, but only a few important background cultural choices, the more that seemed feasible. We’d just track those few cultural parameters to make sure they didn’t go bad, while reaping the huge rewards to big changes to tech etc.
However, while our cultures feel coherent to us, in truth they are huge collections of pretty random features, and we’ve been allowing a great many of them to change greatly, even features common across time and space in traditional cultures. It is not actually possible to reliably tell if our cultures have been decaying by just tracking a few key cultural features. And so we may have actually been suffering from substantial maladaptive cultural drift.
Western culture may be unique in its high degree of systematization and the resulting over-simplification, because "Western thought" is more-or-less synonymous with "thought descended from Plato".
Or, Western culture may be unique in its high degree of over-simplification, because Western technology advanced a long enough time ago that Westerners no longer need to make fine distinctions to cope with everyday life, e.g., predicting the weather or the buffalo herd migration, but have made life much more uniform and predictable. Crossing 5th Avenue is much simpler than crossing a river. People who grow up in a very predictable environment will never learn to recognize the details needed to make the predictions they no longer need to make. Learning algorithms see those as noise and compress them out. If you start looking for crucial concepts most people don't have, you'll be surprised what you find.
For instance, most people have no conception of probability; they really don't know what mean if you say there's a 30% chance of rain, and can't reason from "smoking has a 30% chance of killing you" to "I shouldn't start smoking". I used to think they were just willing to take the risk; but after talking to enough people about it, I found they really don't understand the concept of a thing having a probability. They think either it will happen, or it won't; and can't see any way that their behavior could change that.
I am just now reading Albion's Seed (Fischer) - and so your description of randomness resonated with me. Fischer traces 4 vastly different cultures (from 4 different parts of England) that were implanted into America. When I think of what makes up the American "culture" I know - it consists of parts of each of these 4. But only parts. The really striking thing to me is when you consider a list of the original cultures individually (Puritan New England, Cavalier Virginia, Quaker Pennsylvania, Borderlanders of Appalachia), they are each an incredibly random assortment of cultural items and habits that do not seem to fit a coherent whole at all - although presumably it seemed coherent to them. What we have now - although it seems somewhat coherent to me - is, of course, just what survived from those cultures.