Cultural evolution is arguably just as fascinating as biological evolution (if not more so), with new ideas and behaviors stemming from the same kinds of natural selective pressures that lead to new species along with their novel morphologies and capacities. And as with biological evolution where it, in a sense, takes off on its own unbeknownst to the new organisms it produces and independent of the intentions they may have (with our species being the notable exception given our awareness of evolutionary history and our ever-growing control over genetics), so too cultural evolution takes off on its own, where cultural changes are made manifest through a number of causal influences that we’re largely unaware of, despite our having some conscious influence over this vastly transformative process.
Alongside these cultural changes, human civilizations have striven to find new means of manipulating nature and to better predict the causal structure that makes up our reality. One unfortunate consequence of this is that, as history has shown us, within any particular culture’s time and place, people have a decidedly biased overconfidence in the perceived level of truth or justification for the status quo and their present world view (both on an individual and collective level). Undoubtedly, the “group-think” or “herd mentality” that precipitates from our simply having social groups often reinforces this overconfidence, and this is so in spite of the fact that what actually influences a mass of people to believe certain things or to behave as they do is highly contingent, unstable, and amenable to irrational forms of persuasion including emotive, sensationalist propaganda that prey on our cognitive biases.
While we as a society have an unprecedented amount of control over the world around us, this type of control is perhaps best described as a system of bureaucratic organization and automated information processing, that gives less and less individual autonomy, liberty, and basic freedom, as it further expands its reach. How much control do we as individuals really have in terms of the information we have access to, and given the implied picture of reality that is concomitant with this information in the way it’s presented to us? How much control do we have in terms of the number of life trajectories and occupations made available to us, what educational and socioeconomic resources we have access to given the particular family, culture, and geographical location we’re born and raised in?
As more layers of control have been added to our way of life and as certain criteria for organizational efficiency are continually implemented, our lives have become externally defined by increasing layers of abstraction, and our modes of existence are further separated cognitively and emotionally from an aesthetically and otherwise psychologically valuable sense of meaning and purpose.
While the Enlightenment slowly dragged our species, kicking and screaming, out of the theocratic, anti-intellectual epistemologies of the Medieval period of human history, the same forces that unearthed a long overdue appreciation for (and development of) rationality and technological progress, unknowingly engendered a vulnerability to our misusing this newfound power. There was an overcompensation of rationality when it was deployed to (justifiably) respond to the authoritarian dogmatism of Christianity and to the demonstrably unreliable nature of superstitious beliefs and of many of our intuitions.
This overcompensatory effect was in many ways accounted for, or anticipated within the dialectical theory of historical development as delineated by the German philosopher Georg Hegel, and within some relevant reformulations of this dialectical process as theorized by the German philosopher Karl Marx (among others). Throughout history, we’ve had an endless clash of ideas whereby the prevailing worldviews are shown to be inadequate in some way, failing to account for some notable aspect of our perceived reality, or shown to be insufficient for meeting our basic psychological or socioeconomic needs. With respect to any problem we’ve encountered, we search for a solution (or wait for one to present itself to us), and then we become overconfident in the efficacy of the solution. Eventually we end up overgeneralizing its applicability, and then the pendulum swings too far the other way, thereby creating new problems in need of a solution, with this process seemingly repeating itself ad infinitum.
Despite the various woes of modernity, as explicated by the modern existentialist movement, it does seem that history, from a long-term perspective at least, has been moving in the right direction, not only with respect to our heightened capacity of improving our standard of living, but also in terms of the evolution of our social contracts and our conceptions of basic and universal human rights. And we should be able to plausibly reconcile this generally positive historical trend with the Hegelian view of historical development, and the conflicts that arise in human history, by noting that we often seem to take one step backward followed by taking two steps forward in terms of our moral and epistemological progress.
Regardless of the progress we’ve made, we seem to be at a crucial point in our history where the same freedom-limiting authoritarian reach that plagued humanity (especially during the Middle Ages) has undergone a kind of morphogenesis, having been reinstantiated albeit in a different form. The elements of authoritarianism have become built into the very structure of mass-culture, with an anti-individualistic corporatocracy largely mediating the flow of information throughout this mass-culture, and also mediating its evolution over time as it becomes more globalized, interconnected, and cybernetically integrated into our day-to-day lives.
Coming back to the kinds of parallels in biology that I opened up with, we can see human autonomy and our culture (ideas and behaviors) as having evolved in ways that are strikingly similar to the biological jump that life made long ago, where single-celled organisms eventually joined forces with one another to become multi-cellular. This biological jump is analogous to the jump we made during the early onset of civilization, where we employed an increasingly complex distribution of labor and occupational specialization, allowing us to survive many more environmental hurdles than ever before. Once civilization began, the spread of culture became much more effective for transmitting ideas both laterally within a culture and longitudinally from generation to generation, with this process heavily enhanced by our having adopted various forms of written language, allowing us to store and transmit information in much more robust ways, similar to genetic information storage and transfer via DNA, RNA, and proteins.
Although the single-celled bacterium or amoeba (for example) may be thought of as having more “autonomy” than a cell that is forcefully interconnected within a multi-cellular organism, we can see how the range of capacities available to single cells were far more limited before making the symbiotic jump, just as humans living before the onset of civilization had more “freedom” (at least of a certain type) and yet the number of possible life trajectories and experiences was minuscule when compared to a human living in a post-cultural world. But once multi-cellular organisms began to form a nervous system and eventually a brain, the entire collection of cells making up an organism became ultimately subservient to a centralized form of executive power — just as humans have become subservient to the executive authority of the state or government (along with various social pressures of conformity).
And just as the fates of each cell in a multi-cellular organism became predetermined and predictable by its particular set of available resources and the specific information it received from neighboring cells, similarly our own lives are becoming increasingly predetermined and predictable by the socioeconomic resources made available to us and the information we’re given which constitutes our mass-culture. We are slowly morphing from individual brains into something akin to individual neurons within a global brain of mass-consciousness and mass-culture, having our critical thinking skills and creative aspirations exchanged for rehearsed responses and docile expectations that maintain the status quo and which continually transfers our autonomy to an oligarchic power structure.
We might wonder if this shift has been inevitable, possibly being yet another example of a “fractal pattern” recapitulated in sociological form out of the very same freely floating rationales that biological evolution has been making use of for eons. In any case, it’s critically important that we become aware of this change, so we can try and actively achieve and effectively maintain the liberties and level of individual autonomy that we so highly cherish. We ought to be thinking about what kinds of ways we can remain cognizant of, and critical to, our culture and its products; how we can reconcile or transform technological rationality and progress with a future world comprised of truly liberated individuals; and how to transform our corporatocratic capitalist society into one that is based on a mixed economy with a social safety net that even the wealthiest citizens would be content with living under, so as to maximize the actual creative freedom people have once their basic existential needs have been met.
Will unchecked capitalism, social-media, mass-media, and the false needs and epistemological bubbles they’re forming lead to our undoing and destruction? Or will we find a way to rise above this technologically-induced setback, and take advantage of the opportunities it has afforded us, to make the world and our technology truly compatible with our human psychology? Whatever the future holds for us, it is undoubtedly going to depend on how many of us begin to critically think about how we can seriously restructure our educational system and how we disseminate information, how we can re-prioritize and better reflect on what our personal goals ought to be, and also how we ought to identify ourselves as free and unique individuals.
The Open Mind 