Unleashing the Power of Cultural Evolution for Universal Flourishing
Summary
Over time, life evolves, from biological evolution in the last few billion years to accelerating cultural evolution in the last few millennia. Cultural evolution is a special and particularly interesting kind of evolution. Over time, we experience technological, religious, philosophical, and other changes in what can be called cultural evolution. In the last few centuries, this evolution started to speed up and make life much better for the average person. Now, at the leading edge of this unprecedented trend of progress, this evolution is going awry as we become complacent and even nihilistic. In this time of creeping nihilism, striving for progress through the purposeful evolution of culture is a grand, meaningful mission for humanity.
Cultural Evolution, So Far
In the modern era, cultural evolution began to speed up, introducing the idea and then the expectation of perpetual progress. Evolution has been proceeding for billions of years, but we feel it now. Cultural evolution is a new kind of evolution that has taken off in the last few centuries. Until then, evolution had happened slowly, without being well understood, much less consciously influenced, by any of its unwitting participants. Things just gradually changed.
In the last few centuries, something special happened. As technological, scientific, and moral progress began to speed up, a big, radical idea emerged among some Enlightenment thinkers: the idea of steady, inevitable human progress. Humans could make their lives much wealthier, safer, and more peaceful with scientific, technological, and moral progress. These Enlightenment thinkers foresaw culture rapidly evolving in the coming centuries. It was a crazy, Pollyanna-ish idea, but it happened, on a global scale. Against all odds, against the edicts of a thousand tyrants, it largely proceeded according to these optimistic dreamers’ plans. Cultural evolution was planned and executed.
Picture Enlightenment philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, writing about the unlimited progress ahead of humanity, doing his best to contribute to that progress, while being hunted by the French Revolutionary government. He was feeding the flickering light of an explosion of progress he knew he would see little of. He was soon captured by the French revolutionary government and died shortly afterward (hat tip to Jason Crawford for the anecdote in his excellent We need a new philosophy of progress - Big Think).
In those days, people were truly excited about the idea of progress. They were committed to it. They would die for it, like Condorcet. They saw themselves as participants in a grand story of progress, of the liberation and enrichment of humankind. Against all odds, their fairy tale came true on a global scale.
Evolution Gone Awry
At least for now, that story of the gradual progress of prosperity and freedom seems to be dying. People don’t believe in it anymore. They’re cynical. For the first time in the last few centuries, we in the West don’t see a frontier to boldly venture into. We are turning inwards, to fighting with each other, instead of venturing forth into new frontiers.
The slowing of growth results in the historically novel idea of positive-sum growth being replaced with the pre-modern assumption of no growth and endless zero-sum competition for wealth and status. Zero-sum status and wealth redistribution games have started to replace positive-sum innovation and wealth creation games. It’s a reversion to the pre-modern norm of no hope beyond grabbing power from your enemies and crushing them. There is no concept of everyone doing better because perpetual economic growth is now, once again, considered a dangerous fairytale. Innovation is mocked as a scam. Western culture is evolving in the wrong direction.
Our Challenge: Mastering Cultural Evolution to Break Through Stagnation
We need to reclaim the story and agenda of growth and progress. We need a sequel to the story of the Enlightenment. The obvious problem with undertaking such a project is that we just don’t have as bad of problems as past generations did. How do you inspire the person who really has it pretty good? How do you light a fire under someone with a nice car, a satisfactory house, and a good career?
You show that they can have much more: a flying car, work that feels like play, and ever-increasing time and location freedom. You show that in the process of getting much more, they can create something even better for the following generations. You show how paradise can be created in every corner of the globe through human empowerment. And you show how that is not a weird sci-fi idea, but the ever-fuller realization of a dream that human beings have always cherished, the dream of a much better life for us and our descendants.
Sounds great, but can we really accomplish that? In the Western world, it feels like everything is stuck in place. How can we create this wonderful world when we can barely build anything besides software in the largest, most innovative economy in the world? First, we need to understand how we got stuck. Then we can get to work on rising out of this morass.
How We Got Stuck
Cultural evolution has reached a bottleneck. The nations that have been leading the way in innovation in the last few centuries have either quit on the progress game (Europe) or are seriously considering it (the US).
The EU just doesn’t get innovation. The US federal government has mixed feelings. The American states that have fostered much innovation are increasingly hostile to it (see California). Broadly, large political units in rich countries eventually become complacent, decadent, and indifferent or hostile to innovation, technological progress, and growth. Large, centralized bureaucracies seem to take on a life of their own as they scale, beyond the control of the society they are supposed to serve. Citizens become disengaged from gargantuan states that are unresponsive to their input.
Dynamism gets pushed to the margins. The baton is passed to outsiders. In the US, the centers of wealth and dynamism led by New York, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles are pushing dynamism out. They lead, and they will always lead, the thinking goes, so they can take that status for granted and treat true innovators like parasites. The most famous example might be Elon Musk being driven to move SpaceX from California to Texas. There are also recent examples of entrepreneurs, investors, and large companies relocating to Florida.
How Progress Accelerated Historically
Europe is thought to have been the location of the takeoff of rapid cultural evolution largely due to its unique geography. It is made up of the weirdly shaped Western end of Eurasia. This area had enough proximity for cultural exchange with great civilizations in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and East Asia, but enough barriers to not be subsumed into any of them.
Barriers are needed because large, relatively stable empires tend to stifle innovation in order to preserve the power of the ruling elite. At the same time, connection to these large civilizations is helpful because of the useful adaptations that can be imported. The list is long for Europe: gunpowder, Arabic numerals, and many more.
Similarly, internally, Europe had populations that were geographically divided enough to encourage the existence of many distinct nations, but with enough proximity and passages (land and sea) to allow cultural exchange. There is a long history of controversial innovators escaping to safe havens in neighboring nations.
So some key conditions for cultural evolution are:
Many small, distinct units of social organization to increase the number of adaptations that are discovered
Contemporary examples include Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and American federalism.
Well-connected units of social organization
Modern transportation and the Internet ensure that this steadily increases.
How to Accelerate into a More Dynamic Future
So, given these assumptions, how can we accelerate progress now? We can optimize for cultural evolution. To do that, we can increase variance by decentralizing governance. There are a wide range of approaches to achieving this.
The Network State is an increasingly popular new idea. The idea is that large nation-states are gridlocked and stagnant, and small, nimble, purposeful new societies can revive innovation. The call is for allowing a thousand cloud-first, land-last experimental societies to bloom (or fail). Let a thousand small, purposeful societies with varying degrees of sovereignty and autonomy form, compete, and evolve. They would be interconnected by ever-improving transportation and communication technology. We would go from the current oligopoly of complacent incumbent nation-states to a vibrant marketplace of competitive governance service providers. They would compete to create the best experience for citizen-customers.
A less extreme version of this vision of decentralization might be to just focus on reform at a more local level. In the US, there is a huge amount of competition to change the federal government, but state, local, and county politics might be relatively neglected. Even in the city that seemed most committed to cultural rot, San Francisco, reformers have recently succeeded in recalling a despised District Attorney and the most extreme members of the school board.
Either way, we might be headed for a profoundly diverse world, where you could choose the life of a traditionalist Catholic, an ultra-libertarian transhumanist, or a social justice activist. It would be a freer world enabling every kind of person to live in their ideal society. Instead of suffering anomie and alienation, each person would be engaged in creating and developing their own idea of the ideal society. The way to universal human flourishing does not converge on a single global government, it branches out into a thousand paths to a thousand paradises.