Why Modernist Value Changes?

Standard decision theory says that basic values should be constant, and not change when you learn new things about the world. But humans are not like that; we often change our basic values in response to changes around us. For example, in the last few centuries many things have changed, and we humans have in response changed many of our values.

That is, the modern era has been historically unique not only in its levels of travel, trade, talk, tech, wealth, and growth rates, but also in its culture. Most ancient societies were small, isolated, slowly changing, conservative about change, wary of outsiders, and pretty fully accepting of their cultural inheritance of norms, values, status markers, etc. Cultures changed, but mostly slowly and outside of the view of the individuals in them.

However, in the modern era, first among “modern” Western elites, and later most everyone, we’ve come to greatly doubt and reject many of our inherited cultural traditions. We have not only allowed our cultures to change fast, we now reserve our highest respect for cultural activists who cause even faster cultural change. And the scales of our cultures have greatly increased, from peasant villages to nation-states to a world elite monoculture.

The scale, scope, and speed of these changes seem unprecedented. To better understand them, I collected 16 possible causes, asked polls re which ones people thought mattered more, and also asked six LLMs to rank them as causes. (Yes polls of historians would be better, but I can’t afford that.)

I split the causes into 10 pushes and 6 pulls. Pushes just make people more likely to change old values and norms, while pulls also suggest more particular directions for new values and norms. Here are the push causes, each with its poll priority out of 100 max:

• 100 Atheism - Traditional values and norms were mixed up with supernatural beliefs that many came to doubt.

• 85 Rationality - An increasing openness to and confidence in using rational analysis to pick values and norms.

• 44 Fashion - Key elites visibly changed their values and norms, and so others changed to keep up with those fashions.

• 43 Generality - Many old norms seemed tied to particular physical & social contexts, and seemed less relevant in new contexts.

• 39 Innovation - As they’d recently found big innovations in tech, & business practices, why not expect that also in values and norms?

• 37 Reliability - Traditional authorities made claims on both facts and values; doubts re their fact claims led to doubt re their value

• 24 Variety - People became more exposed to foreign and historical cultures with different values and norms.

• 10 Ugliness - Many particular old norms and values explained as driven by ugly motives, e.g., pride, laziness, prejudice.

• 08 Alignment - It was suggested that traditional authorities pushed values that benefited them as a class at others' expense.

• 04 Origins - People became more aware of the random detailed processes that caused traditional values and norms.

And here are the pull causes:

• 82 Adaptiveness - Traditional values and norms seen as less functional in new contexts re making societies win.

• 25 Suffering - Traditional values and norms were seen as resulting more often in human and other suffering.

• 18 Psychology - New models of human minds, relative to old, were seen as more at odds with strongly enforcing traditional norms.

• 16 Happiness - Traditional values and norms seen as less functional in new contexts re making people happy.

• 00 Honesty - Old value, norm stances said to be less honest or authentic relative to what people actually feel.

• 00 Authenticity - Traditional values and norms seemed more in conflict with natural human feelings and inclinations.

Note that pushes add up to 2.8 times as much total priority as pulls. The following table gives rankings from those polls, from ChatGPT o3, and from an average of six LLMs, and also correlations between these rankings. The top section does all this for push causes, while the bottom does it for pull causes.

Note that while GPT agrees more with polls on pull cause rankings, all LLMs disagree a lot with polls. LLMs agree much more with polls re pull cause rankings.

The above scores suggests the following story. The biggest thing that happened was the first: traditional authorities lost status while reasoners and innovators gained status. Western elites first, and then everyone, lost confidence in inherited culture as described by traditional authorities, and gained confidence in their ability to reason out and innovate new values and norms.

This status change plausibly happened because lots of big innovation raised the status of winning societies, and reasoning skills became much more important for individual success. Fights between various elite types also plausibly contributed to this change.

The second thing that happened was smaller but still big. Even though reasoners and innovators diverged and didn’t agree much re their suggested value and norm changes, some societies in the world seemed like clear winners at the time. So the rest of the world tried to copy the many parts of winner culture that they credited for its success. This has been the clearest cause of an overall direction of cultural change in the world.

The third thing that happened was going on at the same time as the second, but was slower and less obvious. Within winner societies culture was also changing, somewhat in the directions of avoiding suffering, promoting happiness, less strictly enforcing norms, fitting better with natural human feelings, and letting people be more honest about what they felt. I’ve previously summarized these trends as a drift from farmer to forager values and attitudes, and also as drift toward natural human laziness, selfishness, and myopia.

Overall, we might see our big modern mistakes as first over-crediting reason for innovation, compared to data from practice, and second not realizing that our increased cultural scales gave more data to help innovation of stuff that can vary within cultures, like tech and business practices, but less data to promote innovation of shared cultural features like values and norms.

Seeing that we were doing better at the former types of change, and crediting that to reason, made us mistakenly more willing to listen to reason about the latter type of proposals for change. Which has put us on the road to maladaptive cultural drift.