Our Slapdash Cultural Change

Our culture—the values we hold, the norms we follow, the virtues we admire —shapes nearly every aspect of our lives. Cultural norms determine how we raise children, structure relationships, pursue careers, and find meaning. When these norms shift, the effects spread across billions of lives for generations. Yet the process by which we change our culture seems alarmingly inadequate to the task at hand.

Consider how cultural change actually happens. Many people notice what they see as problems with existing norms. Some discuss these with friends. But only a few—perhaps a handful per significant cultural shift—successfully articulate a compelling alternative that spreads widely, usually via youth movements. These “cultural entrepreneurs” write the essay, give the talk, or create the art that reframes how we think. They are the bottleneck through which nearly all cultural innovation must pass.

Who are these bottleneck people? They tend to be writers, academics, journalists, and creators—those with platforms and communication skills. They’re generally well-educated and economically secure enough to take reputational risks. They’re often in their late twenties through forties, young enough to feel friction with existing norms but old enough to be heard. They’re insiders enough to have credibility but outsiders enough to have something new to say.

The problem is not with these individuals per se, but with the staggering mismatch between the difficulty of their task and the resources they bring to it. Evaluating and redesigning cultural norms is an extraordinarily complex undertaking. It requires understanding how a proposed change will interact with dozens of other cultural elements, how it will affect diverse populations in varied contexts, and what second and third-order consequences might emerge over at least decades, maybe even centuries. It demands knowledge of history (why do current norms exist?), cross-cultural perspective (how have others solved this?), and systems thinking (what are the hidden dependencies?).

Yet the typical cultural entrepreneur spends perhaps a few hundred hours thinking about their proposal. They write an essay, maybe a book. They discuss ideas with friends who share similar backgrounds and perspectives. There’s rarely systematic investigation of how the proposed norm change worked in other contexts, rigorous consideration of edge cases, or serious engagement with the strongest counterarguments. The thinking that goes into reshaping cultural norms affecting millions is often less thorough than what a committee might spend redesigning a corporate office.

This wouldn’t necessarily be problematic if cultural entrepreneurs were selected for wisdom, breadth of knowledge, or careful systems thinking. But they’re not. They’re selected for persuasiveness—the ability to craft compelling narratives that resonate emotionally. They succeed by coining memorable phrases and pointing to patterns that “click” for readers, not by rigorous analysis.

Their reasoning tends to be analogical rather than logical, working through evocative examples rather than formal arguments. It is more intuitive than academic, more humanities than STEM. Terms stay deliberately vague to maximize applicability. It is anchored more strongly in strong moral intuitions than in fundamental issues of cultural adaptiveness. And while all this is what allows ideas to spread, it means success in the cultural marketplace correlates weakly with validity.

We’ve seen this play out in recent history. Advocates of “following your passion” in career choice articulate real problems with soul-crushing conformity but neglect how this interacts with credential inflation and student debt. Proponents of radical authenticity identify genuine costs of self-monitoring but underestimate the exhaustion of constant emotional exposure. Champions of optimization and efficiency capture real waste but miss the essential functions of slack and redundancy. In each case, articulate people identify legitimate problems and solutions that resonate—but lack the time, tools, or perspective to adequately map the full terrain.

This creates a disturbing dynamic: cultural change is both quite consequential and greatly under-theorized. We invest more careful analysis in designing a smartphone than in redesigning norms that will shape how millions of people live. The bottleneck people are doing only a small fraction of the thinking that the task actually requires, yet their proposals can reshape society within a generation or two.

What makes this especially concerning is the absence of local feedback mechanisms. By the time we can clearly see the consequences of a cultural shift, the change has already diffused widely and become entrenched. There’s no recall process for bad cultural innovations, no systematic post-mortems, no institution charged with learning from mistakes.

We seem to face a structural problem in how human societies adapt. Our process for allowing cultural innovations to emerge and spread—relying on articulate individuals to notice problems and propose alternatives—may be fundamentally inadequate for the complexity of its task. Plausibly resulting in the problem that I’ve been highlighting for a few years now: maladaptive cultural drift.

The ancients suffered this problem less, as their societies were simpler, with lower rates of change of all sorts. And they could more rely on their much higher levels of cultural variety and societal selection pressures to filter out their worst mistakes.

Maybe cultural change is too important to leave to the happenstance of who can write a compelling essay. It seems that cultural conservatives, who have long warned against changing culture too much too fast, were roughly right. But alas, just doing what they suggest today can’t fix most of our past mistakes. What can we do?

It seems we must find a way to create more systematic analytic processes for evaluating proposed norm changes. I’ve suggested one. Until we do, we seem likely to suffer continued cultural decay, plausibly resulting in the decline and replacement of our dominant world civilization, following by a continuing rise and fall of civilizations.