Yay Adaptivist Activists

DNA evolution takes place both within and between species, with the between part mattering more for long-term innovation. Similarly, human cultural evolution also takes place at two levels: within and between cultures, with the between part also mattering more. A civilization-threatening cultural drift likely results from the four key parameters of the between level of this natural selection process changing from good to bad over the last few centuries: selection pressures, variety, context change, and internal change.

On reflection, out of these four parameters the one that seems most promising to improve soon is that last one, the rate at which our shared cultural features, and especially of our global elite monoculture, change due to internal processes that don’t seem very aligned with adaptive pressures. And for well over a century the core driver of this process has been: activism. We reserve some of our highest honors for activists who lead and inspire groups that push and advocate for changes to our cultures, and such activism has in fact caused much higher rates of cultural change. (More than is induced by tech change.)

A key cause of this rise of activism seems to have been the rise of youth cultures, due to mass attendance of high school and college. Each new cohort of students acquired unusual abilities, passions for, and rewards to coordinating to push for cultural changes. A new cohort could use that ability either to support existing adult hierarchies, to support activist movements of recent student cohorts, or to spin off its own new movement. As that last option gave new cohort leaders more opportunities for advancement, it was often chosen, leading to new cultural movements about every six years. (Six years has also been the average period of the business cycle.)

In cultural conflicts between generations over the last century or so, the older generation only wins in the long run ~2% of the time. So youth movements have plausibly been the main driver of internal cultural change.

As our world is changing fast today, we should want to see adaptivist activists, who try to adapt our cultures to the fast changing conditions of our world. But we should be much more wary of other kinds of activists, such as those who try to change our values, as those changes are less plausibly adaptive. A simple ancestor test: could our ancestors of a century or two ago have been persuaded to make a changes as a way to better achieve its values? If yes, this is more plausibly an adaptive change.

In a sample of 25 of the biggest activist movements in the last two centuries, the main reason activists gave for their proposed changes was: changing values 17 times, something new learned about the world five times, a changed world twice, and something new learned about values once. In only one of those cases (drug deregulation) did they push for experiments to see what would work best. And many movements that explained themselves in terms of a changed world (environmentalism, anti-nuclear-power, me-too, consumer protection, anti-smoking) actually seem to me mostly about changed values; our ancestors would not plausibly have supported the proposed changes if they were in our situation.

This makes sense, as youths feel less expert at judging the world and how it has changed, relative to judging their feelings on what morals feel right. When their elders disagree with them there, young folks tend to explain that as older folks becoming corrupted with age, or lacking the energy to stand up for what’s right. So youth movements gravitate to pushing for less-plausibly-adaptive value changes.

Youth-movement-driven non-adaptive activism is thus plausibly the main driver of one of the four key cultural evolution parameters that have gone bad. And compared to the other three parameters of selection pressure, cultural variety, and context change, this one seems to me easier (though far from easy) to change, and to inspire folks to want to change it. Which leads me to focus now on this as a way to move people to fix cultural drift.

In principle, one solution would be to prevent high school and college age youths from socializing with each other. Alas, while ending such schools and pushing kids into earlier jobs might have worked a century ago, today we’d also need to keep them from socializing via social media. And ending high school seems crazy hard to achieve.

A more promising approach seems to me to grow a cultural adaptivist activist movement to in general promote adaptive, and resist maladaptive, change. And more specifically to convince older folks, who are now much more numerous than youth due to rising lifespans and falling fertility, to defer much less to youth re cultural changes, and to be especially wary of value change activism.

Yes, this does seem a big ask, and yes even changing this one of the four key cultural evolution parameters may not be enough to fix cultural drift. But if we can’t even change this, the larger goal of fixing cultural drift does look hopeless. Best then to just accept that our civ will fall and be replaced by folks like the Amish and Haredim, who will discard much of what we cherish about our current world monoculture.

Some have complained to me that the concept of “adaptive” seems to them too vague to be the basis of a social movement. But it is a core concept in evolutionary biology, a academic field that has been quite well accepted and established for well over a century. Yes, it can be hard to decide in specific cases which design features are more adaptive, but some cases are pretty clear, and our world is full of conceptually clear concepts that are often hard to estimate in particular cases.

I see two practical ways to ground the “adaptive” concept for social application, one anchored in the past, the other in the future. The past anchor is tied to the ancestor test I described above: ask if our ancestors from centuries ago could have been convinced to adopt the change, using their values. Distrust proposed changes that fail this test. And perhaps also revert already adopted changes that fail it.

The future anchor is to, as I’ve previously suggested, adopt a more effective form of governance, such as perhaps futarchy, tied to a big explicit future goal that conflicts with civilization collapse, which would most likely result from maladaptive cultural drift. (Such as immortality or space colonization.) This approach assigns to market speculators the tasks of figuring out the connections between adaption and specific policies. So the rest of us don’t actually have to see those connections very clearly.

So can we jumpstart an adaptivist activist social movement to distrust and resist youth-movement value-changing activism, if it does not meed the ancestor test, and/or to adopt a governance mechanism tied to a metric at odds with civilization collapse? I don’t know, but these seem to me options worth exploring.