What Culture Can You Trust?

Star Wars came out when I was 17, and made a big impression on me; I loved it. It wasn’t until years later that I noticed it didn’t bother to offer evidence that the Empire was worth overthrowing. The movie instead relied on dozens of standard tricks to get viewers to just assume its view. (Andor later filled this gap.) We humans are plausibly adapted to be vulnerable to such tricks, to help us assimilate to cultures we are born in, and stay aligned with those cultures as they change.

The process by which cultures change doesn’t seem to be that different from the process by which we all assimilate to them. Various people make various bids for cultural influence, via songs, stories, essays, art, etc., and we all let ourselves be more influenced by the ones we judge to be more prestigious, according to current standards of prestige. And those standards include winning popularity contests; Star Wars was more popular than expected, and thus gained more prestige and influence than expected.

All of which suggests that we are really rather gullible re prestigious culture. Which should make you worry: which cultural variants can you trust? That is, should you just naively embrace all that most around you embrace, or hold higher standards?

In the long run culture changes via selection, as some variants promote evolutionary success more than others. (Here “culture” is just behavior we copy from others.) So one thing to trust is variants that won out many centuries ago, when most of the world faced pretty strong cultural selection pressures. Trust ancient stable features of human culture.

Another thing to trust is variants that won out more recently, but where personal adoption of variants doesn’t face much social resistance, such as via norms or conformity. As most kinds of tech and business practices fall in this category, you can trust most of that.

The kinds of cultural variants to worry about are those that a) face substantial social resistance, and thus require large groups of people to adopt them together, and b) have only won out in the last few centuries, when selection pressures were weak, variance small, and internal cultural drift rates high.

Of these variants, the most trustworthy are probably those that were carried along to success by winning cultures. Over the last few centuries a few cultures have had far more success than others in influencing the world. That probably reflects good things about them. So features that were rare centuries ago, but common early on in the cultures that came to win, and are now common due to them winning, those are more likely to be adaptive features. Like maybe freedom of religion, speech, and commerce?

Among common cultural features today, the most suspect are values and norms that must be shared by many, but which arose in the last few centuries, and thus probably didn’t arise mainly via cultural selection. Most such changes were pushed by cultural activists, and won due to some activists winning out over others to control widely shared social pressures. So most “modern” norms and values seem suspect.

Some changes can be plausibly attributed to a random walk in culture space. Such changes are plausibly maladaptive, though adaptive changes may be mixed in with these. But many other changes are more plausibly attributed to predictable drifts that result from a loss of prior selection pressures.

For example, culture plausibly overruled natural human tendencies to be selfish, pleasure-oriented, and present-oriented. So a relaxation of such pressures plausible causes a maladaptive reversion to a “decadent” focus on selfish immediate pleasure. Similarly, farming era culture plausibly overruled prior forager tendencies, and then a loss of selection pressures as we got rich allowed a reversion to forager habits and attitudes. This plausibly explains at least parts of trends toward democracy, leisure, and travel, and away from religion, fertility, slavery, and war. We can only judge such changes to be adaptive if we can independently find grounds to see them as now adaptive, even though they were not so during the farming era.

I accept that all this seems like pretty bad news. Like you, I have been deeply attached emotionally to my culture, including a great many things that arose in the last few centuries. For example, I’ve long been pretty libertarian, but now must admit that our world monoculture today is most libertarian on social issues, while the heritage of our winning cultures from centuries ago was mostly libertarian on commerce, not social issues. So I have to distrust our social libertarian impulse as not obviously adaptive, at least compared to the sorts of social meddling common in cultures centuries ago.

The reason to care about our civ declining and being replaced by other rather different cis, like say the Amish or Haredim, is that we cherish something about our culture. But we don’t have to worry so much about losing clearly adaptive cultural features; our descendants would value them, or rediscover them. So, alas, the features we are most likely to worry about losing are also the features where we have to worry about their adaptiveness. Making our priorities unclear.

Added 1Jan: Our least trustworthy cultural habits are likely those that encourage us to make further cultural changes not disciplined or driven by selection. For example, the recent change to encourage and celebrate trans changes, especially among the young, seems especially unlikely to be adaptive. In contrast, changes to things that already changed since the era of high selection effects, such a move toward deregulation after a prior era of moving toward regulation, seems less risky.