Respect The Social Wild

While most foragers had great respect for nature, our farmer-era ancestors had less respect. To them, the wild was full of danger and evil, best conquered and made part of civilization. Today some estimate 23% of land and 13% of the ocean reman “wild”. But we’ve today also come more to respect that wild as full of adaptive diversity and resilience. Without us, the wild made most all that we value in nature, and it could continue to do so if we left. Tamed nature is usually better suits to our needs, but it is more fragile and must be more managed and maintained by us. We’ve learned to let our tamed be more wild, such as by farming with less pesticides and soil-tilling.

To ancients who saw themselves as civilized, most other humans were also a “social wild”, also best conquered and made part of their civilizations. While the bio wild was accidentally evil in not respecting human norms and values, the social wild was more intentionally evil. Those other human cultures often understood and yet purposely rejected and fought against our civilization’s treasured norms and values. Making it all the more important that they be crushed and assimilated.

Today we now have a main world monoculture, which shares many key norms and values across the world, especially among elites. Yet there still remain pockets of deviation, our remaining “social wild”. And just as the bio wild is an important source of diversity and robust bio adaption, our best theories of cultural evolution say that our social wild is also especially important for the robust health of our future evolution. While we are often pushed by moral fervor to totally crush deviant norms, evolutionary considerations should make us reluctant to do so. We should instead save some diversity.

Afew days ago I did a poll asking “What % of the world do you want where they don’t enforce your treasured norms?” and got a median answer of 3.6%. To see how this varied in detail, I just did many more polls, on 35 particular norms:

Here % is median lognormal fit re “ideal % of world that does not support this norm”, after reading the prompt “There may be tradeoff between good norms & helping cultural evolution via cultures with deviant norms.”. (76-206 responses per norm.) Rows are sorted by this %. The column priority is relative priority (max 100, min 0) in 4-way comparison polls re for which norms “you want smallest % of world to be in deviant cultures that don’t support that norm”. (2709 total responses) For reference, want is poll priority re norms “you most want your society to support”, The marker * indicates that a norm was worded a bit different in want polls. (4234 total responses.)

I found some actual percentages to compare with these results. Roughly 0% of people live where slavery, blackmail, or torture to get evidence is legal, or where free primary education is missing. Roughly 1% live where organ sales are legal. Maybe 1/5 of marriages are arranged, about 1/3 live where military draft is legal, and roughly 2/3 live with some limits on freedom of religion.

Thus while we clearly have substantial deviation from some world monoculture norms, and for some norms many would like to see a lot of variation. But for many other key norms we see most wanting few deviation, and deviations are in fact few. Which bodes badly for cultural evolution re such norms.

Many don’t see this low norm variation as a problem, as they view elites as managing our tamed social world, much like how we humans now manage tamed nature. Such non-worriers see elites talking all the time about which norms are good or bad, and trying to coordinate to change which norms get how much support. And then they see such norms often actually changing in directions soon after celebrated by wide acclaim. Doesn’t that prove that we are monitoring and managing our norms?

While we mostly manage tamed nature to achieve concrete goals like low cost of food production, or low rates of disease infection of humans, our elites mainly just fight for norms they see as morally good, and they mainly gain status by wining fights. As these seem to be at best only weakly correlated with the adaptiveness of these norms for communities, this process isn’t plausibly a substitute for cultural evolution.

Thus we plausibly need either a lot more social wild, or a process of managing them more aligned with adaptiveness.