Be careful what you wish for. The only process we have for mediating culture change like this that is proven to work is religious doctrine. Operationally what you're proposing is a theocracy. You can STEM-ify it with econ professors and the like instead of mullahs but it's still a theocracy. Theocracies do tend to have high fertility, but I personally wouldn't want to live in one.
Also I think you give too much credit to the journalists and academics and agitators for initiating social change. In truth their job is like that of politicians: To read the room and stay half a step ahead of where the bulk is moving. It's a status game and you're inverting causality to put these people in control.
I am inclined to agree with your broader point, though, about culture change being potentially maladaptive. I don't know there's a fix, though, short of "let tomorrow's culture solve tomorrow's problems."
I think most of your readers (including me) agree with your diagnosis of the problem: That we're drifting into cultural norms that are better adapted to the wants of individuals than to the needs of society overall. And the emergence of a world monoculture isn't helping.
The tricky thing is what to do. My own view is we want to encourage healthy inter-civ competition. That is however at odds with post-war geopolitical ideas, as well as standard economic theory for how to stimulate growth through free trade, immigration, regional specialization, common markets, harmonized regulations, and globalization of companies and ideas. But just as in firms there is often a difference between short- and long-term optimization, we should ask this at the macro level. Here's a concrete question: Is the EU overall ahead because of economic integration between member states? Or is its recent economic malaise a direct result of it?
I fully agree Jack. Also Robin,s theory assumes top-down effects only. I suspect a lot of cultural change is bottom-up, i.e. monkey see, monkey do. More pronounced in the age of video. Most people dont read essays.
Digital media as the great leveler. Culture is now all about the masses. Before we had ‘high culture’ to aspire to for status. With that gone, it’s money.
A good example might be UBI. I would guess that on a scale of 1-100 with 100 as ideal and 1 disastrous, UBI would have to have less than 20 to likely be removed once entrenched. If it has a 50/50 chance of being positive that makes it a losing change to make
It's possible that doing conscious large scale tests might improve on this situation. Assign various groups a different form of UBI, with it being known to them that it will be for life, and perhaps also for their children. Something similar would have allowed us to track the happiness and well being of people living with no fault divorce without jumping into the deep end
I really appreciated this paragraph (among others): 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.
An example is the fears about kidnappings that began with faces of children on milk-cartons in the 1980s and spread to include a fear of stranger danger, such that by the early 2000s, a parent was neglectful if their 8 year old crossed a few streets to ask a neighboring child to play. But if you read parenting guides from the 1970s, this is an expected achievement of 6-year-olds!
Many cultural commentators have since criticized over-protection as preventing children from manageable challenges, which then feeds into the rise of anxiety and depression in chidlren, teenagers and young adults. (Almost every year one student in one of my classes has an official note from disability services that their social anxiety may impact regular class attendance.)
The Atlantic had an analysis of this 10 years ago (approx), documenting the pathways that created the view of childhood in a middle or upper-middle class subperb as a dangerous place. Those authors have produced the statistics showing that children have never been safer in the history of humanity when venturing away from home.
The reality is now that the biggest danger for our children (after accidents) is suicide. But, as Hanson says, the cultural shift has now happened, and parents who want a more free-range approach (or want their children to have the freedoms they recall hearing about in an earlier era), face an uphill battle of peer and state (DCF) criticism for being bad and/or neglectful parents.
I forgot to add -- overprotection by parents allows them to virtue-signal to other parents... so signalling is at the heart of the zeal for exaggerated solicitation. Overprotection is costly signalling, because one needs the time and resources to monitor children tightly; either one's own time (stay-at-home mother) or the money to hire nannies; also consumerism (purchasing baby monitors etc).
Signalling is a power grab because it boosts the reputation and status of the successful signaler. A lot of maladaptive cultural trends may be driven by signalling needs.
What if the concept of local minimum could be part of common knowledge? Scientific knowledge eventually becomes part of general knowledge. My hope for the future is increasing scientific literacy; continuing the project that began in the early 20th century with widespread public education, what James Flynn said happened when the average person 'put on scientific spectacles.'
Cultural change does not happen thanks to those people. Cultural progress is very gradual and evolutionary at its base -- see Secret of Our Success, or Scott Alexander's review of it, for more details.
The cultural entrepreneurs are the "harbingers" -- but their own essays and art are downstream of the cultural climate that consists of regular people; and even after the art/essay is released, how much it would resonate with people and actually get them to change their norms depends on the climate. Cultural change happens in a massively distributed fashion in middle school scuffles, over bar counters, in Discord servers, and during Thanksgiving dinners. A marginal intellectual mostly codifies and "canonizes" insights that are already present and known and used in practical life. The amount of effort they put into it is minuscule -- but it's a minuscule fraction of the total effort put into it by "culture in general".
It's faster, but it's still gradual and decentralized and not purely reliant on cultural entrepreneurs. Even propagandists and advertisers have to move the needle within the local Overton window.
Granted that present methods for instituting cultural change are not very well planned out, it is so obvious that a more orderly method would work better? Consider the analogy with natural selection: it works in a maximally slapdash way, throwing random changes into the world and seeing what survives. But perhaps you prefer an analogy with selective breeding. Nobody should expect natural selection to generate, say, turkeys with breasts so large they can hardly waddle. Breeders can and have generated exactly that, though. And they did so using very well-thought out processes.
We've broken the natural selection process of cultural evolution that was our superpower. We'll have to find a replacement, or break today's civ enough for it to revive.
I broadly agree with this, but I wonder what exactly the *enforcement* of better cultural governance would look like. We can, for example, stop government agencies from putting a non-binary gender option on IDs, but can we stop people from talking themselves into identifying as non-binary and then living in accordance with that belief (thereby still giving the maladaptive meme a whole bunch of influence over how people live)? It's not obvious what the mechanism there would be -- or, rather, it seems like any mechanism that could plausibly work would be *extremely* heavy-handed.
One thing you hear from a lot of liberals (I'm thinking of Ezra Klein and Matthew Sitman in particular) is that arguing with illiberal people is frustrating because they often won't just come out and say which rights they want to take away. Maybe this is the sort of thing you have in mind; if so, that's fine, but I would be interested to hear you either be explicit about that, or explain why you think such measures wouldn't be necessary.
A better world of cultural change might well be less libertarian. But until we know better what that looks like, couldn't say in which particular ways it might be.
I think there's a much less legible and more interconnected process here - the feedback about who becomes culturally influential is HEAVILY dependent on what direction they're pushing, and how it fits into the audience's readiness for that direction of change.
There's no free will - it's all culturally and physically determined. Or maybe there is a bit of un-caused intentionality, but it's not as clear as "think about what we want, and make that popular", it's more "make some minor changes that seem good at the time, see what unexpected and unintended consequences occur, repeat." Shift the fractal viewport by a small amount, sometimes it's a small change, sometimes it's huge. But it's rarely what you expect.
Or is your thesis here mostly "culture is too important to be left to the people"?
You're assuming that these cultural entrepreneurs are empowered to induce any cultural change they wish. That's not the case; recipients of the message will only accept the change if it makes sense to them as well. They are not puppets.
In other words you're again discounting the importance of people's individual senses of reason. Ideally, society engages in an open discussion where everyone shares their point of view and decides for themselves what makes sense, and this tends in the long run towards towards a better society that most people prefer over others.
The real problem is when the cultural entrepreneurs decide it's fine to outright lie to people, as we've seen with Trump. This corrupts the open discussion; people who have been deceived about the facts cannot effectively use their sense of reason.
To have someone checking your work improves the chance you get the right answer, even if that person isn't as good as you. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" goes the saying.
It works for any situation where checking an idea or argument for consistency and justification is easier than coming up with it. Also works in situations where checking may also be hard, but more easily distributed - where you can check each inferential step of the argument in isolation from the other steps, for instance.
Art and the artist don't wait, they create. As to direction, who knows? Arendt wrote it's more the ascent of Mankind than ascent of Man. Nietzsche and Lenin had their fun.
It's simply the end of the age of myth and storytelling. Stories and any simplistically causal explanations no longer offer maps for aiding planning. It's time for a new format.
I feel that you are overlooking the very strong "bottum-up" influences on culture. And very few people will read essays in the future. Maybe some stuff filters down from the academy, but I suspect more drifts up from the streets.
There is a very strong "monkey see, monkey" do component of culture which your analysis seems to neglect entirely..
I agree with the people who are wary of your apparent desire to direct culture from above, it does smack of "trust the experts" hubris. COVID is the best recent example of top-down cultural change, and I dont believe the public health experts covered themselves in glory there, despite all their years of specialist training and expertise. Or perhaps politicians were responsible for the fiasco, but that is still an argument against top-down cultural shift.
Some trends are clearly self-limiting.within a generation. People who voluntarily sterilize themselves before reproducing are not going to pass on much of their "culture".
I agree that cultural changes can occur based on journalists or charismatic spokespeople taking actions for their individual career goals ("writing a compelling essay"); but cultural changes also occur due to some people with some power (of some type) wanting more power. An example is: ICE becoming a poorly governed militia; this youtuber makes links to larger sociological phenonmena
Fortunately culture is not to be changed by anyone who can write a persuasive essay, thanks to *cultural inertia*. And even successful entrepreneurs of cultural change often succeed only in producing short-lived *fads*.
If you are right, that cultural change from now on will be pure *drift*, a rigid conservatism is called for. But maybe you are too pessimistic about our capacity for *adaptive* changes in culture.
Two notable changes in the U.S.: the end of Jim Crow and the integration of women into the workforce. Were these maladaptive? The change in sexual mores was consequent on the availability of contraception. Maybe it was maladaptive, but the old mores could not have persisted; the change does not seem a case of *drift*.
What would you say to Marxists who can reasonably claim that they have been working within a systematic analytic process for evaluating and guiding cultural change for 125 years?
In the beginning of the 20th century this wasn't obvious, and Marxism was held in much higher regard. Its thorough failure is one of the main reasons that systematic approaches in general became discredited.
There is no ‘both sides’. It’s a conquest, not a war. What disorganized resistance exists can’t identify and coordinate around uncontrolled communication and decision making nodes.
Be careful what you wish for. The only process we have for mediating culture change like this that is proven to work is religious doctrine. Operationally what you're proposing is a theocracy. You can STEM-ify it with econ professors and the like instead of mullahs but it's still a theocracy. Theocracies do tend to have high fertility, but I personally wouldn't want to live in one.
Also I think you give too much credit to the journalists and academics and agitators for initiating social change. In truth their job is like that of politicians: To read the room and stay half a step ahead of where the bulk is moving. It's a status game and you're inverting causality to put these people in control.
I am inclined to agree with your broader point, though, about culture change being potentially maladaptive. I don't know there's a fix, though, short of "let tomorrow's culture solve tomorrow's problems."
I'm hoping that at least some of you care about what that future culture will be like.
I think most of your readers (including me) agree with your diagnosis of the problem: That we're drifting into cultural norms that are better adapted to the wants of individuals than to the needs of society overall. And the emergence of a world monoculture isn't helping.
The tricky thing is what to do. My own view is we want to encourage healthy inter-civ competition. That is however at odds with post-war geopolitical ideas, as well as standard economic theory for how to stimulate growth through free trade, immigration, regional specialization, common markets, harmonized regulations, and globalization of companies and ideas. But just as in firms there is often a difference between short- and long-term optimization, we should ask this at the macro level. Here's a concrete question: Is the EU overall ahead because of economic integration between member states? Or is its recent economic malaise a direct result of it?
I fully agree Jack. Also Robin,s theory assumes top-down effects only. I suspect a lot of cultural change is bottom-up, i.e. monkey see, monkey do. More pronounced in the age of video. Most people dont read essays.
Digital media as the great leveler. Culture is now all about the masses. Before we had ‘high culture’ to aspire to for status. With that gone, it’s money.
A good example might be UBI. I would guess that on a scale of 1-100 with 100 as ideal and 1 disastrous, UBI would have to have less than 20 to likely be removed once entrenched. If it has a 50/50 chance of being positive that makes it a losing change to make
It's possible that doing conscious large scale tests might improve on this situation. Assign various groups a different form of UBI, with it being known to them that it will be for life, and perhaps also for their children. Something similar would have allowed us to track the happiness and well being of people living with no fault divorce without jumping into the deep end
I really appreciated this paragraph (among others): 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.
An example is the fears about kidnappings that began with faces of children on milk-cartons in the 1980s and spread to include a fear of stranger danger, such that by the early 2000s, a parent was neglectful if their 8 year old crossed a few streets to ask a neighboring child to play. But if you read parenting guides from the 1970s, this is an expected achievement of 6-year-olds!
Many cultural commentators have since criticized over-protection as preventing children from manageable challenges, which then feeds into the rise of anxiety and depression in chidlren, teenagers and young adults. (Almost every year one student in one of my classes has an official note from disability services that their social anxiety may impact regular class attendance.)
The Atlantic had an analysis of this 10 years ago (approx), documenting the pathways that created the view of childhood in a middle or upper-middle class subperb as a dangerous place. Those authors have produced the statistics showing that children have never been safer in the history of humanity when venturing away from home.
The reality is now that the biggest danger for our children (after accidents) is suicide. But, as Hanson says, the cultural shift has now happened, and parents who want a more free-range approach (or want their children to have the freedoms they recall hearing about in an earlier era), face an uphill battle of peer and state (DCF) criticism for being bad and/or neglectful parents.
Yes, over-protection of kids seems a maladaptive cultural trend.
I forgot to add -- overprotection by parents allows them to virtue-signal to other parents... so signalling is at the heart of the zeal for exaggerated solicitation. Overprotection is costly signalling, because one needs the time and resources to monitor children tightly; either one's own time (stay-at-home mother) or the money to hire nannies; also consumerism (purchasing baby monitors etc).
Signalling is a power grab because it boosts the reputation and status of the successful signaler. A lot of maladaptive cultural trends may be driven by signalling needs.
Great analysis. We ALl get stuck in a local minimum because no one wants to look like a careless parent.
What if the concept of local minimum could be part of common knowledge? Scientific knowledge eventually becomes part of general knowledge. My hope for the future is increasing scientific literacy; continuing the project that began in the early 20th century with widespread public education, what James Flynn said happened when the average person 'put on scientific spectacles.'
Cultural change does not happen thanks to those people. Cultural progress is very gradual and evolutionary at its base -- see Secret of Our Success, or Scott Alexander's review of it, for more details.
The cultural entrepreneurs are the "harbingers" -- but their own essays and art are downstream of the cultural climate that consists of regular people; and even after the art/essay is released, how much it would resonate with people and actually get them to change their norms depends on the climate. Cultural change happens in a massively distributed fashion in middle school scuffles, over bar counters, in Discord servers, and during Thanksgiving dinners. A marginal intellectual mostly codifies and "canonizes" insights that are already present and known and used in practical life. The amount of effort they put into it is minuscule -- but it's a minuscule fraction of the total effort put into it by "culture in general".
For the last century cultural change has not at all been very gradual - it has been fast.
It's faster, but it's still gradual and decentralized and not purely reliant on cultural entrepreneurs. Even propagandists and advertisers have to move the needle within the local Overton window.
Granted that present methods for instituting cultural change are not very well planned out, it is so obvious that a more orderly method would work better? Consider the analogy with natural selection: it works in a maximally slapdash way, throwing random changes into the world and seeing what survives. But perhaps you prefer an analogy with selective breeding. Nobody should expect natural selection to generate, say, turkeys with breasts so large they can hardly waddle. Breeders can and have generated exactly that, though. And they did so using very well-thought out processes.
We've broken the natural selection process of cultural evolution that was our superpower. We'll have to find a replacement, or break today's civ enough for it to revive.
I broadly agree with this, but I wonder what exactly the *enforcement* of better cultural governance would look like. We can, for example, stop government agencies from putting a non-binary gender option on IDs, but can we stop people from talking themselves into identifying as non-binary and then living in accordance with that belief (thereby still giving the maladaptive meme a whole bunch of influence over how people live)? It's not obvious what the mechanism there would be -- or, rather, it seems like any mechanism that could plausibly work would be *extremely* heavy-handed.
One thing you hear from a lot of liberals (I'm thinking of Ezra Klein and Matthew Sitman in particular) is that arguing with illiberal people is frustrating because they often won't just come out and say which rights they want to take away. Maybe this is the sort of thing you have in mind; if so, that's fine, but I would be interested to hear you either be explicit about that, or explain why you think such measures wouldn't be necessary.
A better world of cultural change might well be less libertarian. But until we know better what that looks like, couldn't say in which particular ways it might be.
I think there's a much less legible and more interconnected process here - the feedback about who becomes culturally influential is HEAVILY dependent on what direction they're pushing, and how it fits into the audience's readiness for that direction of change.
There's no free will - it's all culturally and physically determined. Or maybe there is a bit of un-caused intentionality, but it's not as clear as "think about what we want, and make that popular", it's more "make some minor changes that seem good at the time, see what unexpected and unintended consequences occur, repeat." Shift the fractal viewport by a small amount, sometimes it's a small change, sometimes it's huge. But it's rarely what you expect.
Or is your thesis here mostly "culture is too important to be left to the people"?
The process we have is causing more harm than help. We need to find something else.
You're assuming that these cultural entrepreneurs are empowered to induce any cultural change they wish. That's not the case; recipients of the message will only accept the change if it makes sense to them as well. They are not puppets.
In other words you're again discounting the importance of people's individual senses of reason. Ideally, society engages in an open discussion where everyone shares their point of view and decides for themselves what makes sense, and this tends in the long run towards towards a better society that most people prefer over others.
The real problem is when the cultural entrepreneurs decide it's fine to outright lie to people, as we've seen with Trump. This corrupts the open discussion; people who have been deceived about the facts cannot effectively use their sense of reason.
I agree that these entrepreneurs are constrained by their customers. But that just makes this whole process even like likely to track adaptiveness.
To have someone checking your work improves the chance you get the right answer, even if that person isn't as good as you. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" goes the saying.
That only works to find small errors, not bad architectural choices.
It works for any situation where checking an idea or argument for consistency and justification is easier than coming up with it. Also works in situations where checking may also be hard, but more easily distributed - where you can check each inferential step of the argument in isolation from the other steps, for instance.
Think of it this way: people buy if it sounds good. If it isn't good that means it's hard to reverse because it will still sound good
Art and the artist don't wait, they create. As to direction, who knows? Arendt wrote it's more the ascent of Mankind than ascent of Man. Nietzsche and Lenin had their fun.
It's simply the end of the age of myth and storytelling. Stories and any simplistically causal explanations no longer offer maps for aiding planning. It's time for a new format.
I feel that you are overlooking the very strong "bottum-up" influences on culture. And very few people will read essays in the future. Maybe some stuff filters down from the academy, but I suspect more drifts up from the streets.
There is a very strong "monkey see, monkey" do component of culture which your analysis seems to neglect entirely..
I agree with the people who are wary of your apparent desire to direct culture from above, it does smack of "trust the experts" hubris. COVID is the best recent example of top-down cultural change, and I dont believe the public health experts covered themselves in glory there, despite all their years of specialist training and expertise. Or perhaps politicians were responsible for the fiasco, but that is still an argument against top-down cultural shift.
Some trends are clearly self-limiting.within a generation. People who voluntarily sterilize themselves before reproducing are not going to pass on much of their "culture".
I don't see the participants in futarchy markets as "from above". Anyone can play.
I agree that cultural changes can occur based on journalists or charismatic spokespeople taking actions for their individual career goals ("writing a compelling essay"); but cultural changes also occur due to some people with some power (of some type) wanting more power. An example is: ICE becoming a poorly governed militia; this youtuber makes links to larger sociological phenonmena
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw9VwypDsHU
> They tend to be writers, academics, journalists, and creators—those with platforms and communication skills
Also politicians. Or do culture-changing politicians almost always merely repeat/enact the ideas of others (eg political theorists)?
Fortunately culture is not to be changed by anyone who can write a persuasive essay, thanks to *cultural inertia*. And even successful entrepreneurs of cultural change often succeed only in producing short-lived *fads*.
It we could imagine cultural change being even faster, which would be worse.
If you are right, that cultural change from now on will be pure *drift*, a rigid conservatism is called for. But maybe you are too pessimistic about our capacity for *adaptive* changes in culture.
Past changes don't seem to have been adaptive on average over the last century. Why would that suddenly change?
Prosperity has grown over the last century. Why the negative judgment?
Maybe prosperity would have increased even more without the cultural changes of the last century, but that is far from clear.
Two notable changes in the U.S.: the end of Jim Crow and the integration of women into the workforce. Were these maladaptive? The change in sexual mores was consequent on the availability of contraception. Maybe it was maladaptive, but the old mores could not have persisted; the change does not seem a case of *drift*.
What would you say to Marxists who can reasonably claim that they have been working within a systematic analytic process for evaluating and guiding cultural change for 125 years?
I doubt that the changes Marxists push for correlate much with adaptiveness.
In the beginning of the 20th century this wasn't obvious, and Marxism was held in much higher regard. Its thorough failure is one of the main reasons that systematic approaches in general became discredited.
You’re losing me here Robin. This is a conquest, not a cultural change. If we succeed at emancipating ourselves that will be obvious.
If you focus to much on the cultural war, you'll miss the fact that all sides are drifting into maladaption.
There is no ‘both sides’. It’s a conquest, not a war. What disorganized resistance exists can’t identify and coordinate around uncontrolled communication and decision making nodes.