Nature, Culture, Or Law?

To get your child potty trained, I see three approaches:

• Nature - Leave toilets around, let kid see you using them, and figure it out.

• Culture - Emphasize how much your respect toilet users, and look down on others

• Law - Make rules with rewards and punishments that encourage toilet use.

To get kids to learn science, we have similar options:

• Nature - Leave science books and gadgets around where kids might find them

• Culture - Show them how much you respect science and folks who know it

• Law - Force the kid to take science classes

Similarly, we might have tried to stop racism by keeping law and culture race-blind, and waiting for people to figure out that the races aren’t really that different. Or we could have made culture strongly disapprove of racism, while law stayed race-blind. Or we could/did make rules and laws that directly promote “down” races against “up”. 

On fertility, we could leave our shared laws and macro culture alone, and wait for natural selection to kick in, maybe in a few centuries. (Or let full capitalism make industrial orphanages to fix it all sooner.) Or we could try to move culture to be more supportive of fertility. Or we could change laws to more directly directly encourage fertility, such as by paying parents a transferable fraction of kids’ future tax payments. 

The fixes that I’ve thought of for cultural drift fall into these same three categories. 

NATURE - First, we could sit back and wait for civilization collapse to induce strong enough variety and selection pressures, at least temporarily. As the next civilization rises, it might also then drift, collapse, and be replaced, in a long repeating cycle until some civ stumbles onto a better fix. Spreading across the stars will ensure more variety, though the civ at each star might still repeatedly rise and fall. And Malthusian AIs/ems may revive sufficient variety and selection, if they can also break free of bio-human cultural dominance.

CULTURE - Second, we could join the usual fights over directions of shared cultures, to move them toward more adaptive corners of the vast space of possible cultures. We’d also need to move them to become much more reluctant to change afterward, including wariness of the sort of cultural activism we’d have just used to induce these moves. Oh, and if this only happens in one part of Earth, we’d also need to move this part’s culture to be very insular, strongly resisting influences from other parts.

We have several options for adaptive corners to move culture. We could try to induce a deep multiculturalism, a full capitalism, or an explicitly evolutionary-selfish set of key values. A RETVRN to some adaptive pre-1800 culture set is also possible. But to be workable, all options need to be generalized to allow for changing tech and context.

LAW - Third, we could try to use the power of law and governance to fix cultural drift. We might either empower a hard-to-remove autocrat who pinky-swears, for real this time, to fix the problem. Or we might institute a futarchy-form government whose outcome measure to be maximized puts substantial weight on a long term goal that conflicts with a big consequence of drift, such as civilizational collapse. If this goal were treated as sacred, we might be proud of related sacrifices, and less likely to overturn this system when suffering under its unpleasant policies. For example, a futarchy might put weight on when ten million humans live in space, when we have colonies at other stars, or when we achieve cheap practical immortality. 

Of course, as in other policy areas, a governance fix can’t work without sufficient cultural support, both to get it started, and to maintain it against inclinations to drift. Even so, we often think we see advantages in getting stuff done with weaker cultural support, via adding in law/rule/governance rewards and penalties. With this approach, culture can induce a fix with a weaker less-permanent consensus, that is less well informed about what exactly needs to be done.  

I lean libertarian, but I gotta say I’m so worried about cultural drift (and fertility) that I’m tempted there by at least some of the law/governance approaches.