Why I am a Cultural Traditionalist
And how to discern faux culture from the real thing
Despite the growing polarization and inability to comprehend one another, our society agrees unanimously on one thing—things are different now. Beyond Covid and Trump, the cultural milieu of the past ten years has been so radically novel that it has even sparked a wild theory that the CERN Large Hadron Collider spawned a tiny black hole that launched us into a parallel universe. Whether or not we really did jump into a parallel universe (and there is curious Mandela Effect evidence that we did), one thing remains certain—we are now living in a very different society than just ten years ago. Whatever probability that this change can be reasonably attributed to the jumping to a parallel universe (let’s say no more than 1%), the rest must be attributed to something else.
In this essay, I will be making the case that a shrinking emphasis on cultural heritage has detached us from the culture we grew up in, and heaved us into an entirely novel social environment which feeds off of the culture from whence it came.
To make this case, I must first define a pile of terms, many of which require some framing in an evolutionary context. For example, I define culture as the set of adaptive behaviours learned by a population that has been allocated to conscious transmission, but this definition makes little sense without understanding the context of what “adaptive behaviours” are, what it means for a behaviour to be “learned”, what a “population” is, and what “conscious transmission” means compared to other forms of transmission. Furthermore, culture is learned through vertical and horizontal transmission, known as heritage and multiculturalism respectively, but again these terms mean relatively little at the moment. Lastly, I will define cultural traditionalism as the active effort to preserve existing cultural norms over novel faux culture, or anti-culture.
When we contemplate the behaviours of other organisms, particularly those we deem of substantially lesser cognition than ourselves, we attribute complex behaviours to simple mechanistic patterns stored genetically as “instinct”. One of my favourite examples to illustrate this point is the base-jumping Barnacle Goose. Take a moment to watch this clip, and reflect on the mechanistic process that could lead to such a behaviour. Intuitively, we can sense those goslings have an instinct to hurl themselves off a cliff to their near-certain death. That behaviour does not emerge from cognitive contemplation, nor random luck; it is stored somewhere in the genome. When one contemplates the behaviour of moderately cognitive organisms, there is room for some behavioural learning that is not hard-coded in the genome; my go-to example here is the wonderful Mimic Octopus and its many forms of facultative mimicry. And lastly, when one contemplates the behaviours of higher cognition organisms, there is purchase for such a vast array of learned behaviours that it becomes difficult to recognize that which has been hard-wired into one’s DNA. The sex/gender debate that has emerged out of the trans rights movement is a pertinent example of the confusion discerning between learned and innate traits in Homo sapiens.
Humans, as Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying reflected on a recent podcast, are not blank slates, but are the blankest of slates in the animal kingdom. More than any other critter, much of our behaviours can be learned, and much of our genetic predispositions can be overwritten. This all begs the question—how does one determine is a behaviour is learned or instinctive? In humans, these sorts of research questions typically require twin studies. Or, less reliably, self-assertion. In reality, humans are generally terrible at knowing thyself, and often mistake learned behaviours for innate traits, and more commonly the inverse.
As with everything, the learned vs. innate dichotomy maps onto an important tradeoff: behaviours that are learned are typically more plastic, meaning they can adapt to changing environments more readily; behaviours that are innate are more reliable, meaning they are more likely to be expressed in most individuals. In humans, sexual impulses are innate—almost everyone has them. Behaviours that are learned are seldom learned individually, but rather as a suite. The language Hebrew is often learned alongside the Torah, Nazism alongside eugenics, farming alongside industriousness, shoe-tying alongside obedience, and so on. Culture is generally defined by the suites of behaviours that tend to be found together in a population. We’re now most of the way to understanding what culture is, but there is an important qualifier in my definition: adaptive.
An adaptive trait is simply one that provides some benefit to the organism, at some cost, that persists over time. Built into this definition of adaptation is time, and here is where the term culture is often misused. We often synonymize culture with music, art, fashion, cinema, and language, and while these are often integral components of culture, they are not in and of themselves cultural. A new form of artistic expression does not immediately become culture, it becomes culture if it provides some benefit to those who engage with it, such that it persists for multiple generations. Genetically, a trait must persist for many generations to be considered adaptive, but culture is more flexible. It is a decent heuristic to assume a cultural trait is adaptive if it is deemed valuable enough by those who engage with it to pass it on to their offspring. Two generations pretty much clinches it (think of any learned trait you share with your parents and grandparents, and it’s cultural).
What we now have is a useful model of culture—the learned collections of traits that are deemed worthy enough to pass on to one’s offspring. But I also mentioned one more important feature, conscious transmission. This may seem an unusual qualifier, for two immediately apparent reasons: first, some non-human animals have culture but we cannot know if they have consciousness, and second, cultural processes such as language acquisition seem to occur largely unconsciously. While it is true that the fundamental language acquisition process of a toddler is done unconsciously, it is the conscious exchange of language where cultural language development occurs. For now, grant me that culture transmits consciously, because I have a separate point to elaborate on. Cultural transmission occurs both vertically and horizontally.
Vertical transmission is that which occurs between generations, horizontal transmission within a generation. A gene can transmit vertically because it is inherited by offspring from parent, and does not transmit horizontally because you cannot inherit a gene from a friend or colleague. In contrast, culture transmits vertically because it is inherited by offspring from parent (biological or not), and it also transmits horizontally because you can inherit culture from a friend or colleague. This bimodal transmission of culture is often confused with a bimodal creation of culture. Culture can transmit horizontally and vertically, but it is only created vertically. The culture that transmits vertically, I call heritage, and the culture that transmits horizontally, I call multiculturalism. Heritage is great because it retains what has worked in the past for it is likely to continue working into the future, barring some external force, like the Bolshevik Revolution, that changes the social landscape entirely. Multiculturalism is great because we can borrow and lend cultural lessons and tools across cultures that may otherwise remain undiscovered. However, the horizontal transmission of ideas, behaviours, values, or norms that are not cultural (something we do all the time) does not itself resemble the creation of culture. The reason harkens back to the definition of adaptive—culture must be beneficial enough over time to warrant passing down to one’s offspring. Therefore, the stuff that spreads horizontally are called memes, but not culture. Culture has memes too, for instance a country’s national anthem is a cultural meme. All culture has memes, but not all memes are culture. Faux culture is the memes that look like culture that hasn’t yet cleared the adaptive hurdle.
Faux culture is nearly impossible for our conscious minds to discern from real culture. What’s worse, in a social environment, rejection of faux culture is often seen as passé or even bigoted. By definition, trends are not culture, they are faux culture with the potential to become culture (after all, all culture starts out as a meme, just like all genetic adaptation starts out as a mutation). The Evo-Psych explanation for why social humans shame those who do not engage in faux culture is likely difficult to parse, and is besides the point of this essay, though I presume such an explanation exists. All that matters is to recognize that such a social inhering mechanism exists. The conscious transmission of culture is thus its own worst enemy. Our inability to consciously identify those memes which have cleared the adaptive hurdle gives purchase for maladaptive faux culture to propagate, and propagate they have.
Lurking just behind the issue of faux culture is the final piece of the puzzle. Multiculturalism, as wonderful as it is, is difficult to discern from standard memetic transmission, and thus an emphasis on multiculturalism is by definition going to result in an increased prevalence of faux culture. I believe this is the fundamental explanation for the abandonment of culture in the West, and the spread of harmful ideas that show no adaptive value. Cultural heritage, in contrast, is safeguarded against this effect. The lessons gleaned from one’s parents, and especially one’s grandparents, are far more likely to serve one’s interests, than the lessons learned from one’s peers. Ideas that have withstood the test of time are more likely to remain adaptive, than ideas that have never proven themselves adaptive in the first place.
Okay, I have now provided all the tools needed to understand my definition of culture, and built into it is a rule. The rule is that ancient culture is more likely to serve an adaptive purpose, novel culture is less likely to, and faux culture is even less likely to. Anyone who understands this rule would be compelled to cherish ancient cultures and work to conserve them from defenestration. Simultaneously, such a person would be wise to regard novel culture with skepticism, and faux culture with contempt. If we translate the analogy back into genetic evolution, it would suggest novel traits in an organism are never desirable, and that ancient traits should always persist. The constantly evolving diversity of life on Earth belies this conclusion, however. The very title of this blog, The Red Queen, in fact describes an evolutionary process where a constantly changing environment necessitates a constantly evolving organism to “keep up”. So how do we square the circle?
Evolutionary wisdom would suggest that our ancient cultures would become mismatched to novel social environmental conditions, and may thus become maladaptive. And yet I have asserted that the very novelty of our social environment requires more cultural traditionalism, not less. The reason is because the destruction of culture is itself a runaway process—once a society begins to weaken its cultural heritage, often for some morally justifiable reason, a novel social landscape results that demands further cultural change. Once you get the dog’s tail wagging, the tail starts wagging the dog. Culture is no longer changing to remain adaptive, it is changing simply because society is demanding it to.
Society often demands cultural change once it identifies rotten elements therein. Consider the process by which some element of a culture is no longer seen as adaptive (e.g., spirituality) or moral (e.g., slavery) so it is sloughed off in such a way that appears to provide a great benefit to society. The danger of such a process is it results in the perfectly logical, though careless and false, conclusion that sloughing culture was itself the thing that benefitted society. My argument is that it is the other way around: culture itself is the thing that benefits society, and finding the harmful elements to slough off is a necessary responsibility. In 20th century western culture, one clear example of this is gay rights. Steadily from 1950-2015, America gradually dispelled with its cultural heritage of the heterosexual exclusivity of marriage. Such a graph as this one provides the precise evidence of cultural change (note here the between generation effect maps onto heritage, and the time effect within a generation maps to multiculturalism):
We look back now, by no means in a distant future, and laws prohibiting same-sex marriage seem offensively archaic. In fact, our very inability to sympathize with the anti-same-sex marriage position now is the very proof of the rate of change our culture has undergone. But here is where things get tricky: change for the sake of change is not a good thing, and all change comes with a cost. When a cultural evolution such as the civil rights movement results in such a ubiquitous laudation as the same-sex marriage issue, it threatens to mistake the culture as the issue, and the anti-culture as the solution. In other words, a successful sloughing off of a harmful or maladaptive cultural element can be misinterpreted as a revelation that the entire culture was maladaptive (which, definitionally, it can’t be).
We are now living through a time where an increasing percentage of the population believes western culture must be dispensed with in order for good to prevail. There is evidence of this everywhere, and anyone who has been even remotely paying attention to current events will sense it too. Those who take time away from their day jobs at Harvard to fight Nazis on Twitter by mansplaining why 2+2 actually does equal 5 are not making an arithmetic argument, they’re making a cultural one: fuck your culture, it does not represent me. It is true, the agreement that 2+2=4 is a cultural one, but there is a reason why it must be preserved—to uproot a cultural axiom as fundamental as this one would destabilize everything.
Cultures, like biological organisms, function best when they evolve slowly and in a gradual, step-wise fashion. The function of DNA is to preserve with near perfect fidelity the parental blueprint for life in the offspring—mutations are to be prevented at all cost, and thus evolution only occurs by a very slow process of accident. In contrast, our cultural evolution is at a point where advocacy for scrapping the entire blueprint is gaining popularity, without even knowing what is on it. One cannot be anti-West without understanding it is where their anti-slavery, pro-education, pro-tolerance, anti-discrimination, anti-poverty, and pro-women views came from (no, we are not born with these moral ideals). While all of those concepts can and do exist in non-western cultures, the question is whether these axioms remain if western culture falls. Pulling at the frayed strings of culture may cause the entire textile to unravel. Tenets of culture are not independent of one another, even though that is often how we think of them, and this is why there is a cost to sloughing off the harmful/maladaptive elements of culture.
All of this to say, cultures are not infallible, and it is the duty of man to contribute to his generation in such a way as to improve his culture by sloughing that which has become maladaptive or which he believes in his heart to be immoral. I am by no means advocating cultural stagnancy, but it is equally the duty of man to preserve his culture in such a way as to provide stability for the generations after him. To desire to discard one’s culture in its entirety, is to have the hubris to think of oneself as a God compared to the dozens of generations, and millions of men before him, who judged that culture worthy of preservation and inheritance.
I am a cultural traditionalist because I believe in the adaptive evolution of culture, and I believe all that my culture has taught me persists for good reason, and those elements of our culture which are no longer serving our best interests are a bug, not a feature. Without a new tradition of conserving culture we may lose everything to those who are willing to risk burning everything to the ground to see what grows back in the rubble. The best way to become a cultural traditionalist is to study history. Learn to identify values and behaviours that existed decades or centuries before now, and recognize the advantages these cultural behaviours are likely to provide. Similarly, you will begin to notice the behaviours and norms that are novel, and you will learn to be skeptical of these, for they have not yet proven their worth.