Some Thoughts on Culture, For the Benefit of Reducing Fear

Cultures are being disrupted and are changing — it is natural to grieve for what once was, but we must accept that it is happening and our powerlessness to stop it lest fear and violence result

I wrote the first version of this article as a response to the Christchurch Terror Attack and its aftermath. My hope — now, as it was then — is that a deeper understanding of why many individuals are seemingly in fear of “cultural loss” can serve as the first step toward addressing those fears and preventing violence.

What is a culture? A culture is a way of living and we have one because it’s efficient.

The dictionary definition of a culture is that it is the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society. That’s what a culture is, but not why we have them. One critical purpose of a culture is to provide a way of living. For this purpose, a culture can be thought of as an operating system for living a life — the “deep code” upon which we run our “programmes” for understanding, thinking, deciding, and doing [1].

We use culture in this way to be more efficient.

Firstly, it enables efficient decision-making. A culture encapsulates effective ways of living for a given context into “social wisdom” that enables each of us to make reasonably good decisions within that context without spending too much time or effort. For example, in the context of a harsh environment where communal effort is required to ensure survival through winter, it is more efficient to possess a culture that values communal effort over individual effort than to analyse the rationality of participating in the harvest every autumn.

Secondly, it enables efficient interpersonal interactions. Understanding and reaching agreement with others is easier when we have a similar way of understanding, thinking, deciding, and doing to the people around us. Humans are social animals so this benefit of culture is hugely valuable.

What is happening to culture? It is being disrupted by the increasing pace of change.

The concept of culture I have just described is undergoing a disruption. Most cultures have developed within a stable context of some kind — a relatively unchanging environment and population of individuals. This has enabled cultures to optimise for both of those key efficiency benefits — decision-making efficiency and interpersonal efficiency.

However, the type of stable environments that develop and optimise cultures have been swept aside by the increased pace of change of science, knowledge, and technology in recent centuries. This can be described as an accelerating change of context.

We have been through the first phase of cultural impact of this disruption — the imposition of culture. Simply, this was the use of scientific and technological advantages to acquire the resources of another society and to impose a colonising culture. This had always happened on smaller scales but became a true disruption when technology allowed it to reach a global scale.

Having undergone that, we are only now beginning to experience the second phase of cultural impact of this disruption — the insufficiency of culture. Never before have so many of us lived in a context to which our culture is not optimised. Never before have so many of us interacted so frequently with individuals whose culture is not our own. Pre-colonisation, those were rare experiences. During colonisation, these were the experiences of the colonised. Now, they are states experienced by all. Put together, we are all losing both the decision-making and interpersonal efficiencies of culture on which we are accustomed to rely.

What’s happening as a result of cultural disruption? It is driving cultures into one of two types — adaptive and homogeneous.

We can see that cultures are reacting to the loss of efficiency by trying to re-optimise in different ways.

Broadly speaking, rapid change in context appears create a stronger trade-off between adaptability and homogeneity, between decision-making efficiency and interpersonal efficiency. In stable contexts, cultures were able to provide both decision-making efficiency and interpersonal efficiency benefits. In unstable contexts, cultures appear to be forced to choose between them.

In the context of rapid change, some cultures appear to be attempting to re-optimise for decision-making efficiency by focusing on adaptability [2]. A culture that is adaptable to rapid changes in context is not able to be as homogeneous. To be able to generate effective new ideas requires a range of perspectives and ways of thinking. To be able to follow up on better new cultural ideas without wasting too much time and effort following up on bad ones requires both progressives (eager to change culture) and conservatives (eager not to) to engage in productive debate. This adaptability benefit means individuals in this culture are able to make better decisions with lower mental effort in a rapidly changing context, but at the cost of lower efficiency of interpersonal interaction — difficulty understanding each other, our differing motives, our varied reasonings. Some individuals experience these things as “culture wars”.

In the context of rapid change, some cultures appear to be attempting to re-optimise for interpersonal efficiency by focusing on consistency and homogeneity [3]. A culture that is consistent despite rapid changes in context is increasingly unable to provide effective decision-making heuristics. To be able to maintain homogeneity requires a willingness to make decisions that are not optimal to an experienced context. This requires a culture to value either abdication of decision-making to an authority or the creation of an alternative, unchanging context to align decision-making to (for example, an afterlife). This consistency benefit means individuals in this culture are more homogeneous and are able to relate interpersonally more easily and reach understanding and agreement with lower mental effort in a rapidly changing context, but at the cost of lower efficiency or effectiveness of decision-making — difficulty accepting new ideas from outside the culture and difficulty addressing actual, unavoidable change. Some individuals experience these things as “cultural stagnation”.

Cultures that are not able to optimise for either benefit are at risk of disappearing altogether, caught in the middle ground as individuals and groups unconsciously seek cultures with higher utility.

So, what are the potential implications of divergence into different cultural types? For individuals, stress and fear.

Implications at the individual level are relatively straightforward and may be broken down into two categories — own-culture implications and other-culture implications.

In the own-culture category, the primary implication of cultural divergence on individuals is that they may feel left behind.

An individual whose personal inclinations lie on the consistency-seeking end of their own cultural spectrum will experience their culture as moving away from them if it increasingly prioritises adaptability. They will not want to be “left cultureless” (because having a culture is adaptive) nor will they want to change (because it requires significant mental effort to do so). Rather, they will wish to be able to prevent their culture from becoming more diverse and inconsistent.

The opposite is also true. An individual whose personal inclinations lie on the adaptability-seeking end of their own cultural spectrum will experience their culture as moving away from them if it increasingly prioritises homogeneity. They will wish to be able to prevent the culture from becoming more conformist and consistent.

In both cases, these wishes will be fruitless. An individual cannot prevent their culture from adapting in one way or another to larger forces. These individuals will begin to feel that they are losing their culture, and this will cause stress and fear.

In the other-culture category, the primary implication of cultural divergence on individuals is that they may feel more threatened by other cultures.

An individual in an increasingly homogeneous culture sees less-and-less to identify with in cultures becoming less homogeneous and more adaptive. Not only that, but relationships may form between members of the adaptive culture and relatively adaptive individuals within the homogeneous culture who wish to prevent its increasing conformity. These relationships may be viewed as a threat to the homogeneous culture.

The opposite is also true. An individual in an increasingly adaptive culture sees less-and-less to identify with in cultures becoming more homogeneous and less adaptive. And they may see immigration of individuals’ possessing a highly homogeneous culture as a threat to their adaptive culture. Perceived threats, as always, generate stress and fear.

And from stressed and fearful individuals, violence.

In sum, relative to cultural equilibrium, there will be many more individuals who wish their own culture would not change and many more individuals who see other cultures as wrong and threatening. Both of these states create stress and fear because they cannot be prevented. Stress and fear combined with powerlessness begets dislocation.

This is accelerated as non-confirming cultural opinions are typically shamed — homogeneity-preferring individuals in an increasingly adaptive culture are increasingly likely to be told they’re bigots or reactionaries and adaptability-preferring individuals in an increasingly homogeneous culture are increasingly likely to be told they are traitors or heretics. Individuals feel shamed, betrayed, and alone. They find other individuals who feel shamed, betrayed, and alone and a “bubble” forms. In the absence of feedback from anyone outside the bubble, mutual radicalisation takes place and violence is the ultimate result.

How can violence as a consequence of cultural divergence be avoided? By taking a lesson from grief.

Because cultures are a human creation, much of humanity operates under the misconception that cultural change can be subject to human control. This is not true. Significant cultural change cannot be prevented any more than we can prevent the cycle of life and death. And, as with death, it creates a feeling of loss and a need to grieve.

Drawing on the first and last stages of grief suggested by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross[4], I suggest two actions to promote effective grieving.

Firstly, we can build awareness — a widespread recognition that a period of rapid, unstoppable, and disruptive change is occurring. While the scale of the change itself may remain a source of fear, it is human nature to be less fearful of a situation once it is better understood. To that extent, I hope this article is useful.

Secondly, we can promote acceptance — widespread recognition that the current process of cultural divergence is the inevitable result of the course of history and the time we live in. It is bigger than any individual or nation. Similar to evolution in living beings, cultural change is a never-ending process of optimisation that no-one can control. The ultimate arbiter is context. A culture will always eventually adapt to its context and an individual will always eventually adopt the culture of their context.

Cultures are being disrupted. Cultures are changing as they re-optimise. This affects us all. It is natural to grieve for what once was. To grieve well — to avoid grief that builds into negative emotion and violence — we must not deny that it is happening and must accept our powerlessness to stop it.

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[1] I have broadly leveraged a memetic model of culture.

[2] Not surprisingly, the cultures that were already more oriented this way i.e. cultures with a stronger orientation towards the primacy of the individual e.g. “the west”.

[3] Not surprisingly, the cultures that were already more oriented this way i.e. cultures with a stronger orientation towards the primacy of the group and/or authority figures e.g. many indigenous, Asian, or strongly religiously influenced cultures.

[4] Kubler-Ross, D., & Kessler, E. (2014). On grief and grieving. Simon & Schuster.