Cultural evolution could still be a loose explanation for how cultural forms displace each other over time, when conscious cause-and-effect thinking is an insufficient explanation.
Modernity’s displacement of many indigenous cultures is a classic example. While we can acknowledge on a moral level that the ongoing genocides of indigenous cultures are horrific, we can also acknowledge that they were made possible by cultural forms among the conquerors that gave them a military edge over their rivals. While it may be that Tukanoan culture was and is a “nicer place to be” than modern Colombia and Brazil, optimizing for a pleasant cultural existence is not the same as optimizing for maximum cultural spread.
We can try to identify the most widespread cultural forms, assume that their size indicates that something about them may help their culture to replicate itself, and ask what that reason may be. With manioc consumption, we might say that its spread into Africa is because it’s a more convenient crop to satisfy calorie needs than the alternative. African peoples who adopt it and are thereby saved from a famine will survive; those people who reject it and succumb to a famine will not; and the culture of manioc will thereby spread due to “cultural evolution.”
This hypothesis suggests some interesting other phenomena as well.
Why do some cultural forms seem to persist in spite of tremendous utilitarian pressure to adopt a new cultural form that would raise the status or wealth of a group of people?
Well, perhaps there are cultural forms that tend to thrive particularly among the most low-status or relatively poor people, due perhaps to some quirk in human psychology. If that cultural form is attractive to such people, it would survive even better if it tends to keep them poor and low-status, either by directly making them poor and low-status, or causing them to engage in behaviors that tend to have that effect. Call it a “poverty virus” or a “poverty meme.”
So “cultural evolution” isn’t just an hypothesis to explain why the most dominant cultures tend to spread, and it seems unwise to assume it means that technological or cultural advances are typically the result of blind stumbling in the dark rather than conscious experimentation. It’s an explanation for why any culture, no matter how small or toxic, might persist. It points toward cultural ecosystems, cultural niches, cultural food chains.
Traditionalism certainly fits within this dynamic. Cultures that threw out traditional knowledge would, even today, tend to die out. But even if we can find many examples of cultures that failed to prosper due to experiments that proved unhelpful, does this suggest that rationality was a net harmful force in traditional cultures?
I don’t think so. Experimentation is a risk/reward question. Sometimes, a culture is going to take an experimental risk, and it will end disastrously, bringing the culture down with it. But if, on net, experimentation has a net positive risk/reward ratio, then experimentation is overall helpful. We can’t determine that experimentation and rationality would historically “get you killed” just by listing examples of hypothetical situations in which that might have been true.
Experimentation and rational thought is incompatible with traditionalism. Nor is blind tinkering responsible for indigenous technological advances listed in Scott’s review of TSOOS.
Rationality and deliberate experimentation is how that traditional knowledge accumulated in the first place. I know that in indigenous cultures, there’s a conscious recognition that traditional knowledge is a real, meaningful source of practical guidance. Traditionalism and rationality go hand in hand.
Follow-up:
Cultural evolution could still be a loose explanation for how cultural forms displace each other over time, when conscious cause-and-effect thinking is an insufficient explanation.
Modernity’s displacement of many indigenous cultures is a classic example. While we can acknowledge on a moral level that the ongoing genocides of indigenous cultures are horrific, we can also acknowledge that they were made possible by cultural forms among the conquerors that gave them a military edge over their rivals. While it may be that Tukanoan culture was and is a “nicer place to be” than modern Colombia and Brazil, optimizing for a pleasant cultural existence is not the same as optimizing for maximum cultural spread.
We can try to identify the most widespread cultural forms, assume that their size indicates that something about them may help their culture to replicate itself, and ask what that reason may be. With manioc consumption, we might say that its spread into Africa is because it’s a more convenient crop to satisfy calorie needs than the alternative. African peoples who adopt it and are thereby saved from a famine will survive; those people who reject it and succumb to a famine will not; and the culture of manioc will thereby spread due to “cultural evolution.”
This hypothesis suggests some interesting other phenomena as well.
Why do some cultural forms seem to persist in spite of tremendous utilitarian pressure to adopt a new cultural form that would raise the status or wealth of a group of people?
Well, perhaps there are cultural forms that tend to thrive particularly among the most low-status or relatively poor people, due perhaps to some quirk in human psychology. If that cultural form is attractive to such people, it would survive even better if it tends to keep them poor and low-status, either by directly making them poor and low-status, or causing them to engage in behaviors that tend to have that effect. Call it a “poverty virus” or a “poverty meme.”
So “cultural evolution” isn’t just an hypothesis to explain why the most dominant cultures tend to spread, and it seems unwise to assume it means that technological or cultural advances are typically the result of blind stumbling in the dark rather than conscious experimentation. It’s an explanation for why any culture, no matter how small or toxic, might persist. It points toward cultural ecosystems, cultural niches, cultural food chains.
Traditionalism certainly fits within this dynamic. Cultures that threw out traditional knowledge would, even today, tend to die out. But even if we can find many examples of cultures that failed to prosper due to experiments that proved unhelpful, does this suggest that rationality was a net harmful force in traditional cultures?
I don’t think so. Experimentation is a risk/reward question. Sometimes, a culture is going to take an experimental risk, and it will end disastrously, bringing the culture down with it. But if, on net, experimentation has a net positive risk/reward ratio, then experimentation is overall helpful. We can’t determine that experimentation and rationality would historically “get you killed” just by listing examples of hypothetical situations in which that might have been true.
Experimentation and rational thought is incompatible with traditionalism. Nor is blind tinkering responsible for indigenous technological advances listed in Scott’s review of TSOOS.
Rationality and deliberate experimentation is how that traditional knowledge accumulated in the first place. I know that in indigenous cultures, there’s a conscious recognition that traditional knowledge is a real, meaningful source of practical guidance. Traditionalism and rationality go hand in hand.