Good Norms, Evil Engines

Sometime in the last few million years, our ancestors began to get better brains, use tools and weapons, speak language, and live in larger groups in a wider range of environments. A big key to all this was cultural natural selection. Though at first DNA and cultural evolution often pushed in different directions, the fact that culture could drive change so much faster let culture tame DNA, and induce it to make us especially plastic and receptive to culture.

Early on, sufficient brains, culture, weapons, and language let us create social norms, i.e., “good” and “evil”. (I use scare quotes to point to social concepts that may not guide my choices.) At first, our main use of norms was to suppress the often violent internal competition that had previously limited feasible primate group size. Our norms said to help and share, and not hit, threaten, brag, or form subgroup coalitions. “Good” was following moral instincts and prestige incentives to take collective actions and enforce norms to prevent dangerous competition, while “evil” was conspiring in the shadows to compete for power, often by evading norm enforcement.

Funny thing though, while norms did help foragers avoid the worst scenarios of destructive conflict, foragers actually evolved more due to selection pressures that favored doing “evil” well, compared to “good”. That is, foragers mostly got smarter by learning to pretend to do “good” for the whole group while actually conspiring with allies to compete. Non-violently, but fiercely and cleverly. And this has been a consistent historical trend: our strongest selection pressures, inducing the most evolution, have long appeared in relatively “evil” harsh, destructive, norm-violating areas of life, relative to areas we see as driven more by “good”. Our evolutionary engines tend to be “evil”, not “good”, which is why “good” has found it so hard to defeat “evil”, even when everyone gives it such enthusiastic praise.

For example, before humans, predatory animals grew bigger more innovative brains, compared to prey animals and plants. Human foragers evolved more from hidden politics and competition than from cooperating to do “good”. In the farming era, war most drove cultural evolution, even though war was quite destructive, and made us do things we usually consider quite “evil”. In our industrial era, capitalism has driven evolution more than anything else, even though it is widely considered close to “evil” due to selfishness, competition, creative destruction, and defiance of sacredness. Today “social Darwinists”, who try to make their nations or groups win at Darwinian competition (either DNA or cultural), are now widely seen as max evil.

However, just as the stronger force of culture tamed the weaker DNA force, these harsh “evil” areas of life with stronger selection pressures have often tamed “good” areas. For example, collective forager talk and norm enforcement habits evolved to be manipulatable by covert political coalitions. (Just as in the politics of most small orgs today.) In the farming era, religions and norms evolved to support and not oppose wars. And in the early industrial era, capitalist pressures induced norm changes in many areas of life, to allow more money and capitalism there. “Good” behavior tends to become a hypocritical cover for “evil” forces.

However ~1900 competition between nations became a stronger selection force, with nations more controlling and limiting both capitalism and culture. And since WWII, activist-driven rapidly-changing culture has surged in strength, coming to control and limit both nations and capitalism. Over the entire industrial era, areas of life not run by capitalism and under strong conformity pressures, have plausibly come to suffer from cultural drift into maladaption due to a lack of sufficiently powerful evolution. Eventually, such maladaption will plausibly get fixed by “evil” capitalism, with its stronger power, vitality, and selection pressures, taming conflicting forces of “good”, and then inducing norms that allow a wider use of capitalism.

But before then we may suffer a long painful transition period after which much of what we cherish about our civ may be lost. For example, our civ might fall to be replaced by insular fertile subcultures like the Amish, with future civs maybe also rising and falling several times. Even human level AI doesn’t directly solve cultural drift, though the fact that capitalists now make, own, and shape AIs offers hope of a faster cleaner transition to an AI world where capitalism runs most everything.

Why has culture been able to defy and limit capitalism so well over the last few centuries? I’ve suggested that weak cultural selection pressures have allowed a drift back to forager habits and attitudes, which DNA makes still more natural than farmer alternatives. Our increased wealth, health, and peace now makes us unusually willing and able to indulge forager-style moral preferences.

The usual forager view is this: we must coordinate via norms and governance to prevent dangerous competition from undermining our precious stable shared human values. For foragers in a small band, the dangerous competition came from sub-band coalitions. And all my life I’ve heard futurists say something similar, except that for them the envisioned dangerous competition has come from capitalism, genetic engineering, population explosion, or AI.

However, as our culture’s shared values today are not at all stable, but instead have long been drifting into maladaption, they are not so precious. Creating a “good” world government to control “evil” competition in their name thus seems a bad plan. The only way to long preserve anything unusual about our civilization (e.g., open inquiry) is to bind it into an adaptive cultural package. And as capitalism is now our most powerful adaptive engine, that means a package where capitalism runs most everything. (Other fixes seem variations on this.) Such as via large-scale for-profit governments, capitalists paying parents to invest in profitable kids, letting sacred capitalists invest in sacred ventures, or letting foundations reinvest all returns to drive interest rates down to growth rates.

Once “evil” capitalism has tamed the “good” norms of culture, we will still have norms that we enforce, norms which may on average mitigate real harms from excess competition. But which mostly allow strong selection pressures to keep our descendants adaptive. And which, if we are lucky, preserve some of what we today find precious in our civ.