An incredibly important area that is so often neglected! Culture is not simply clothes and music, but the security program that enables trust, alignment, and implicit communication.
I once had a well known professor of strategy who opened the course by claiming culture is irrelevant. Basically, what can not be seen, does not exist. Didn't seem quite right... Culture is exactly the adaptive, competitive foundation that is essential for organizations and societies to succeed.
Unfortunately, it was brutish forces last century that understood this and elevated culture to the highest priority, while the post-modern, corporatist world pushed it aside.
Having been in and trained by several of the best organizations in the world in at least 3 different domains, there's zero doubt for me. Culture is the Necessary factor for effectiveness. Deliberately designing and maintaining culture is one of the highest, most difficult and necessary human art forms.
1) I did not see how to access your continued "free" viewing for nonsubscribers
2) there might have been a typo in the 3rd from last paragraph? "Instead of the disincentives that our current programs give, they will [not???] have strong material incentives to work full-time, get married, and have children.
Since you do not like OT comments, I will not say more here [delete this as you please].
I think your distinction between cultural evolution as not really involving mass material improvements vs. progress that does provide that mass improvement is a useful aspect to consider. But your essay today seems to sort of by accident include advances of wider application, that also happen to have some technological aspects as well. Adopting hammers? Converging on particular clothing fashions. Perhaps examples of political structures or religious expansions should be included as part of cultural evolution, long before the modern technical world and scientific method came along?
This leads me to wonder if there isn't a tighter interconnection between those two states/ stages. In trying to understand this, it seems to me that cultural evolutions occurring without mass benefit must then be occurring in very structured or hierarchical societies, where only the leaders or wealthy can obtain them (in the short run). But isn't part of the definition of culture the set of behaviors and practices used by a given group of people? If that group is too small, is it really valid to call that a cultural impact or capability? I see something of a chicken and egg condition here?
[Upon rereading the above paragraph, perhaps it is more correct to explore such evolution as a bifurcated (or multiple set) result: distinct cultures evolved by the wealthy and the non-wealthy, etc. They are spread to subsets of the population but not to the total group -- therefore not "progress" per your definition.]
Plus, given the range of material progress exhibited by different societies over the last 200 years, your selection of the (particular cultural adaptation) of finding and using high density energy sources to jump over or bridge the Malthusian trap may be the major cultural adaptation among the whole long history of such cultural developments.
It occurred to me just now that the cultural evolution leading to adopting the scientific method might have been a necessary precursor to the wider discovery and use of fossil fuels? Someone had to discover the science of combustion and how to measure the relative energy available from various sources? In turn preceded by the discovery of gases and of oxygen in particular?
I will say that your Substack and Progress Project has caused me to explore more ideas and relationships than most of the previous political or technical topics I have been examining. Thank you for that.
You make some interesting observations. I am glad that my Substack is getting you to explore a broader range of ideas.
Perhaps I was not clear enough in my article, but Cultural Evolution as a theory existed long before my work. It is a viable theory for explaining the change of groups over time (not just elites) by applying theories from biological natural selection. I do not believe, however, that the theory can explain material progress itself.
So I see material progress as a sub-set of Cultural Evolution that has the specific outcome of increasing the material standard of living of the masses. This requires the Five Keys to Progress.
Many researchers who support Cultural Evolution are quite hostile to the idea of progress because it supposes a certain direction of evolution and that some kinds of societies are good.
I will talk about the importance of science in a future article.
Some of those researches seem to not fully understand the differences between biological evolution via natural selection (random, non directional) and cultural evolution that may well be directional in aims or goals, and include specific non-random avenues of advance. But not all memes "catch on" longer term and thus die out from lack of appeal, while others have demonstrated benefit that last until something else overcomes it (horse and buggy whips, etc.).
It strikes me that while anthropology has/had a lot to offer when it was exploring and analyzing newly discovered groups and their cultures in as objective and neutral a way as possible, that got distorted by "multiculturalism" that said all cultures were equally valid and valuable. Clearly various cultures have varying levels of success and longevity, based on whatever criteria you choose to assess them. But a number of them are/were found wanting when criteria related to Western civilizational ideas, derived in part from Judeo-Christian cultural impacts, were used to make such assessments. In the final analysis, when it comes to humanity, pure objectivity has its limits.
> In trying to understand this, it seems to me that cultural evolutions occurring without mass benefit must then be occurring in very structured or hierarchical societies, where only the leaders or wealthy can obtain them (in the short run).
Not necessarily, there are also parasitic memes that are optimized to spread themselves at the expense of their human hosts.
An incredibly important area that is so often neglected! Culture is not simply clothes and music, but the security program that enables trust, alignment, and implicit communication.
I once had a well known professor of strategy who opened the course by claiming culture is irrelevant. Basically, what can not be seen, does not exist. Didn't seem quite right... Culture is exactly the adaptive, competitive foundation that is essential for organizations and societies to succeed.
Unfortunately, it was brutish forces last century that understood this and elevated culture to the highest priority, while the post-modern, corporatist world pushed it aside.
Having been in and trained by several of the best organizations in the world in at least 3 different domains, there's zero doubt for me. Culture is the Necessary factor for effectiveness. Deliberately designing and maintaining culture is one of the highest, most difficult and necessary human art forms.
Thanks for this great article.
Thanks for the comment. I am glad that you enjoyed it.
quick comment ref your Upward Bound posting:
1) I did not see how to access your continued "free" viewing for nonsubscribers
2) there might have been a typo in the 3rd from last paragraph? "Instead of the disincentives that our current programs give, they will [not???] have strong material incentives to work full-time, get married, and have children.
Since you do not like OT comments, I will not say more here [delete this as you please].
I think your distinction between cultural evolution as not really involving mass material improvements vs. progress that does provide that mass improvement is a useful aspect to consider. But your essay today seems to sort of by accident include advances of wider application, that also happen to have some technological aspects as well. Adopting hammers? Converging on particular clothing fashions. Perhaps examples of political structures or religious expansions should be included as part of cultural evolution, long before the modern technical world and scientific method came along?
This leads me to wonder if there isn't a tighter interconnection between those two states/ stages. In trying to understand this, it seems to me that cultural evolutions occurring without mass benefit must then be occurring in very structured or hierarchical societies, where only the leaders or wealthy can obtain them (in the short run). But isn't part of the definition of culture the set of behaviors and practices used by a given group of people? If that group is too small, is it really valid to call that a cultural impact or capability? I see something of a chicken and egg condition here?
[Upon rereading the above paragraph, perhaps it is more correct to explore such evolution as a bifurcated (or multiple set) result: distinct cultures evolved by the wealthy and the non-wealthy, etc. They are spread to subsets of the population but not to the total group -- therefore not "progress" per your definition.]
Plus, given the range of material progress exhibited by different societies over the last 200 years, your selection of the (particular cultural adaptation) of finding and using high density energy sources to jump over or bridge the Malthusian trap may be the major cultural adaptation among the whole long history of such cultural developments.
It occurred to me just now that the cultural evolution leading to adopting the scientific method might have been a necessary precursor to the wider discovery and use of fossil fuels? Someone had to discover the science of combustion and how to measure the relative energy available from various sources? In turn preceded by the discovery of gases and of oxygen in particular?
I will say that your Substack and Progress Project has caused me to explore more ideas and relationships than most of the previous political or technical topics I have been examining. Thank you for that.
You make some interesting observations. I am glad that my Substack is getting you to explore a broader range of ideas.
Perhaps I was not clear enough in my article, but Cultural Evolution as a theory existed long before my work. It is a viable theory for explaining the change of groups over time (not just elites) by applying theories from biological natural selection. I do not believe, however, that the theory can explain material progress itself.
So I see material progress as a sub-set of Cultural Evolution that has the specific outcome of increasing the material standard of living of the masses. This requires the Five Keys to Progress.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-five-keys-to-progress
Many researchers who support Cultural Evolution are quite hostile to the idea of progress because it supposes a certain direction of evolution and that some kinds of societies are good.
I will talk about the importance of science in a future article.
Some of those researches seem to not fully understand the differences between biological evolution via natural selection (random, non directional) and cultural evolution that may well be directional in aims or goals, and include specific non-random avenues of advance. But not all memes "catch on" longer term and thus die out from lack of appeal, while others have demonstrated benefit that last until something else overcomes it (horse and buggy whips, etc.).
It strikes me that while anthropology has/had a lot to offer when it was exploring and analyzing newly discovered groups and their cultures in as objective and neutral a way as possible, that got distorted by "multiculturalism" that said all cultures were equally valid and valuable. Clearly various cultures have varying levels of success and longevity, based on whatever criteria you choose to assess them. But a number of them are/were found wanting when criteria related to Western civilizational ideas, derived in part from Judeo-Christian cultural impacts, were used to make such assessments. In the final analysis, when it comes to humanity, pure objectivity has its limits.
> In trying to understand this, it seems to me that cultural evolutions occurring without mass benefit must then be occurring in very structured or hierarchical societies, where only the leaders or wealthy can obtain them (in the short run).
Not necessarily, there are also parasitic memes that are optimized to spread themselves at the expense of their human hosts.