Wisdom on the Topic of cultural evolution
Quotations
All the World's Cultures Now Available to Us
During the last 30 years, we have witnessed a historical first: all of the world’s cultures are now available to us.
…for the first time, the sum total of human knowledge is available to us–the knowledge, experience, wisdom and reflection of all major human civilizations–premodern, modern and postmodern–are open to study by anyone.
Ancient ethnic sores belching fire
The complications of this diversity can be overwhelming. Ancient ethnic sores are belching fire while transnational companies linked by satellites conduct their business oblivious to the feudal past below.
The Arc of History
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
Authentic cultures
We still talk a lot about ‘authentic’ cultures, but if by ‘authentic’ we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences.
The Awesome Power of Culture
Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.
Belief is the end of Observation
What you do is you have an idea, and you hold it in your mind as long as it’s useful. And then when it turns out not to be useful, discard it. But the idea of clinging to belief as a basis for your life – which is what most people do – is terrifying, because belief is the end of observation. You believe something, you stop seeing everything else. Clearly, that is not desirable. And yet it’s the way most people live.
Between-group selection became the primary evolutionary force
Our ancestors found ways to suppress disruptive competition among individuals within groups, so that between-group selection became the primary evolutionary force. This favored group-level coordination in all its forms, including the transmission of learned information across generations.
the biological evolution of Homo sapiens was usurped by socio-cultural evolution
Many biologists and social scientists have noted that with the development of human culture, the biological evolution of Homo sapiens was usurped by socio-cultural evolution. The construction of artificial environments and social structures created new criteria for selection, and biological fitness was replaced by ‘cultural fitness’, which is often different for different cultures and is generally not measured by the number of offspring. Moreover, the mechanism of socio-cultural evolution is different from the model of biological evolution that was proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and refined by many others. In essence, socio-cultural evolution is ‘Lamarckian’ in nature – it is an example of acquired inheritance, as described by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) – because humans are able to pass on cultural achievements to the next generation.
The brightest goat in the herd
As any farmer knows, it’s usually the brightest goat in the herd that stirs up the most trouble, which is why the Agricultural Revolution involved downgrading animals’ mental abilities. The second cognitive revolution, dreamed up by techno-humanists, might do the same to us, producing human cogs who communicate and process data far more effectively than ever before, but who can barely pay attention, dream or doubt.
Changing the World
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Chaos and Mediocrity
Is this one legacy of the sixties? That after flinging open the doors to a world previously known only at the margins of society, the pioneers would move on, leaving the masses to add drugs to the myriad forces pulling our society towards chaos and mediocrity?
— Joe Boyd
Counter-Culture's own values and aesthetics decayed
Beneath the surface, the progressive sixties hid all manner of unpleasantness: sexism, reaction, racism and factionalism. It wasn’t surprising, really. The idea that drugs, sex and music could transform the world was always a pretty naïve dream. As the counter-culture’s effect on the mainstream grew, its own values and aesthetics decayed. The political setbacks of the coming years grabbed the headlines while the dilution of ideals happened more quietly, but nonetheless vividly for those who noticed.
— Joe Boyd
Cultural, as opposed to biological, evolution
Our capacity, through language, to manipulate the mental world and so deal imaginatively with the world of experience has been a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in giving humans the overwhelming advantage over other species in terms of cultural, as opposed to biological, evolution.
Culture can be either mutualistic or predatory
Culture can be either mutualistic or predatory – that’s our choice as a society. We can choose to create societies that prioritize what we consider good.
Cultures as a kind of mental infection
Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses, live inside the body of their hosts. They multiply and spread from one host to the other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes even killing them. As long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of its host. In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They multiply and spread from one host to another, occasionally weakening the hosts and sometimes even killing them. A cultural idea – such as belief in Christian heaven above the clouds or Communist paradise here on earth – can compel a human to dedicate his or her life to spreading that idea, even at the price of death. The human dies, but the idea spreads. According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend to think). Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.
The Discomfort of Thought
As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Egocentric Existence
Both the authoritarian and the submissive develop standards which they feel will insure them against threat, but these are very raw standards. The submissive person chooses to get away with what he can within the life style which is possible for him. The authoritarian chooses to do as he pleases. He spawns, as his raison d’être, the rights of assertive individualism. These rights become, in time, the absolute rights of kings, the unassailable prerogatives of management, the inalienable rights of those who have achieved positions of power, and even the rights of the lowly hustler to all he can hustle. This is a world of the aggressive expression of man’s lusts openly and unabashedly by the ‘haves,’ and more covertly and deviously by the ‘have nots.’
The entire pageant of human history
Once we become attuned to it, the entire pageant of human history, starting approximately 100,000 years ago, can be seen as evolution at high speed, made possible by the transmission of learned information across generations. Our departure from Africa and colonization of the rest of the planet; our ability to inhabit all climatic zones and dozens of ecological niches as hunter-gatherers; our ability to grow food as farmers; the advent of writing, and the exploitation of fossil fuels were all made possible by the generational transfer of information.
The Eternal Struggle for Human Rights
The existence and validity of human rights are not written in the stars. The ideals concerning the conduct of men toward each other and the desirable structure of the community have been conceived and taught by enlightened individuals in the course of history. Those ideals and convictions which resulted from historical experience, from the craving for beauty and harmony, have been readily accepted in theory by man – and at all times, have been trampled upon by the same people under the pressure of their animal instincts. A large part of history is therefore replete with the struggle for those human rights, an eternal struggle in which a final victory can never be won. But to tire in that struggle would mean the ruin of society.
Evolutionary success and individual suffering
This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.
The Extent of Freedom in All of its Dimensions
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.
Fear of Missing Out
Modern humanity is sick with FOMO – Fear of Missing Out – and though we have more choice than ever before, we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose.
The Fragile Constructs of History
Perhaps the greatest cognitive barrier we face in making sense of the world is that we have come to view certain realities as part of a “natural order” that will remain unchallenged. In fact, many “fundamental truths” that we take for granted are simply the fragile constructs of history and could shift radically in the decade ahead.
From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose.
The historical trajectory of violence
The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood. What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity – of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason and science? So much depends on how we understand the legacy of this transition: whether we see our world as a nightmare of crime, terrorism, genocide, and war, or as a period that, by the standards of history, is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence.
History is something very few people have been doing
These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Homophobia
An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more evolved, more developed, more adequate. And so let’s get that part out of the way right now: homophobia in any form, as far as I can tell, stems from a lower level of human development – but it is a level, it exists, and one has to make room in one’s awareness for those lower levels as well, just as one has to include third grade in any school curriculum. Just don’t, you know, put those people in charge of anything important.
Human imagination more than biological reality
There is little sense, then, in arguing that the natural function of women is to give birth, or that homosexuality is unnatural. Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define manhood and womanhood reflect human imagination more than biological reality.
If the future of humanity is decided in your absence...
In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. We might not even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Most of us can’t afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history does not give discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is unfair: but who said history was fair?
I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out. But this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich – small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
I must study politics and war
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Inextricably Linked in Freedom
The originators of jazz were only two generations removed from slavery. They were victims of rigorous forms of segregation that routinely and institutionally denied their humanity. So freedom was much more than a word to them. These pioneering musicians were exuberant about exhibiting this newfound personal freedom through their art. But they were also excited about hearing other people do the same thing. They understood that all were inextricably linked in freedom, just as they had been inextricably linked in bondage. And it wasn’t theory; it was life as they lived it.
Institutions must advance and keep pace with the times
I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions, but … laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Levels of Development
To grasp what is involved with levels or stages, let’s use a very simple model possessing only 3 of them. If we look at moral development, for example, we find that an infant at birth has not yet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions: this is called the preconventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self-absorbed. But as the young child begins to learns its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the postconventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex or creed, which is why this stage is also called worldcentric.
Thus, moral development tends to move from ‘me’ (egocentric) to ‘us’ (ethnocentric) to ‘all of us’ (worldcentric)–a good example of the unfolding waves of consciousness.
Luxuries tend to become necessities
One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.
The Makers of Things
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
Man's nature is an open, constantly evolving system
The error which most people make when they think about human values is that they assume the nature of man is fixed and there is a single set of human values by which he should live. Such an assumption does not fit with my research. My data indicate that man’s nature is an open, constantly evolving system, a system which proceeds by quantum jumps from one steady state system to the next through a hierarchy of ordered systems.
Merely Thoroughly Outrageous
He made the discovery with a certain amount of relief, since it took him at least out of the region of pure fantasy and into the merely thoroughly outrageous, with which as a modern he was by now more or less familiar.
Moral Religion
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples’ lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.
Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis
Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.
Myths are stronger than anyone could have imagined
Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.
Never Knew Cocaine to Improve Anything
I listened in the studio control room as musicians’ modes of consciousness-alteration proceeded from grass, hash and acid to heroin and cocaine by the 1970s. All but the latter could, on occasion, provide benefits, at least to the music. I never knew cocaine to improve anything…. I suspect that the surge in cocaine’s popularity explains – at least in part – why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.
— Joe Boyd
No single natural way of life for Sapiens
The Heated debates about Homo sapiens‘ 'natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
Only a Human Being
I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.
The only dependable things are humility and looking
Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather is coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.
Our long-term personal and societal goals
Furthermore, as we have seen for genetic evolution, what’s adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word isn’t necessarily good or right in the normative sense. Genetic evolution often results in adaptations that are good for me but not for you, or us but not them, or good over the short term but not the long term. The behaviors that we adopt by open-ended learning have all the same limitations. If anything, behavioral adaptations are even more shortsighted than genetic evolution because the immediate costs and benefits of our behaviors are more perceptible to us than the long-term consequences. You might want to lose weight, but your mind is causing you to dip your hand into the next bag of Doritos. You might want peace on earth, but your mind is causing you to do what it takes to beat out your competitors for a promotion at the office. A lot of cleverness will be required to align our learning abilities to our long-term personal and societal goals.
Our Social Order Now in a State of Permanent Flux
Over the last two centuries, the pace of change became so quick that the social order acquired a dynamic and malleable nature. It now exists in a state of permanent flux.
Our species does represent a new evolutionary process
As we are increasingly coming to realize, our species does represent a new evolutionary process — cultural evolution — that far surpasses cultural traditions in other species. This capacity for cultural evolution enabled our ancestors to spread over the globe, inhabiting all climatic zones and dozens of ecological niches. Then small-scale societies — “tiny grains of thought”" — coalesced into larger and larger societies over the past ten thousand years. Human activities now rival other living processes and non-living physical processes in shaping the earth and atmosphere….
Push Outward
Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
Religions are great bushy trees
In short, religions are great bushy trees that evolved, and continue to evolve, by cultural evolution.
Sixties Surpluses of Money and Time
The atmosphere in which music flourished then had a lot to do with economics. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium…. In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time.
Friends of mine lived comfortably in Greenwich Village, Harvard Square, Bayswater, Santa Monica and on the Left Bank and were, by current standards, broke. Yet they survived easily on occasional coffee-house gigs or part-time work. Today, urbanites must feverishly maximize their economic potential just to maintain a small flat in Hoboken, Somerville, Hackney, Korea Town or Belleville. The economy of the sixties cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs and rethink the universe.
— Joe Boyd
The system has been shaping and reshaping our minds
For thousands of years the system has been shaping and reshaping our minds according to its needs. Sapiens originally evolved as members of small intimate communities, and their mental faculties were not adapted to living as cogs within a giant machine. However, with the rise of cities, kingdoms and empires, the system cultivated capacities required for large-scale cooperation, while disregarding other skills and aptitudes.
These principles have no objective validity
The two texts present us with an obvious dilemma. Both the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence claim to outline universal and eternal principles of justice, but according to the Americans all people are equal, whereas according to the Babylonians people are decidedly unequal. The Americans would, of course, say that they are right, and that Hammurabi is wrong. Hammurabi, naturally, would retort that he is right, and that the Americans are wrong. In fact, they are both Wrong. Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.
This Highest Kind of Religious Feeling
The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints.
Those who tolerate or encourage evil
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
Thralls to group instincts
Maybe bees and ants don’t mind being thralls to group instincts but people, I feel, do. And so the question that human beings must ask is, “How do I live my own life and survive, even prosper, while sharing the load of the greater culture?”
The time-worn yoke of their opinions
He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.
The Toxic Mix of Religion and Tribalism
The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.
An ultracultural species is born
Domesticating a wolf brain or an ape brain is impressive. But when you domesticate a human brain – this is when the real magic begins. An ultracultural species is born. A unique type of friendliness must have evolved in our species that allowed for larger group sizes, higher population densities, and more amicable relations between neighboring groups that in turn created larger social networks. This encouraged the transmission of more innovations between more innovators. Cultural ratcheting went from slow and sporadic to fast and furious. The result was exponential growth in technology and the emergence of behavioral modernity.
— Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods
A vast repository of information learned and passed down from previous generations
With this perspective, you can begin to think of yourself as not just a product of your genes, and not just a product of your personal experience, but also as one of many members of your culture who collectively contain a vast repository of information learned and passed down from previous generations. This makes you part of something larger than yourself. The information has not just been passed down, but it has also been winnowed through the generations, leaving us with a set of beliefs and practices that helped us to cohere as groups.
We have the capacity to envision a better future and make it a reality
Many people interpret the invisible hand concept as saying, we should just take our hands off the steering wheel like there’s nothing we should do. I don’t agree with that. Humans aren’t designed to accept the world as is, so to just say “whatever” is denying what makes us thrive as a species. More than any other creature on Earth, we have the capacity to envision a better future and make it a reality. We are askers of the question, “What kind of world do we want?” And perhaps even more importantly, we can ask the follow-up question, “How do we build that?”
Why study history?
So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
You have your position because of the events of history
No matter where you stand, no matter how much popularity you have, no matter how much education you have, no matter how much money you have, you have it because somebody in this universe helped you to get it. And when you see that, you can’t be arrogant, you can’t be supercilious. You discover that you have your position because of the events of history and because of individuals in the background making it possible for you to stand there.