We live on a weird planet.
As far as we know, all the others are pretty much inert. Gases and dust swirl. Occasional cosmic events—experienced on Earth, too, such as a blip in an orbit, the tilt of an axis, an errant meteor—may alter the environment. But most changes on most planets happen predictably, within a narrow compass, or are measurable on a slow scale of millions of years.
Earth is not like that. Sci-fi writers who strain to imagine strange worlds might as well look inward, at the wild, untrackable, unparalleled oddness of our own.
Earth is, to us, the most interesting large lump in the cosmos, not just because we live on it and it matters most to us, but also because—objectively speaking—a lot happens on it. For two reasons, Earth is the scene of vast, rapid changes, unreplicated anywhere else that we know of: first, because our planet has life, and organic systems are more dynamic than inorganic ones; second, because Earth has us—cultural animals. And culture, which is the subject of this book, is even more volatile than biota.
By ‘culture’ I mean behaviour—including mental behaviour, such as thoughts and attitudes—acquired by learners, transmitted by teachers or exemplars, and adopted widely. People use the word loosely to mean many different things: civilization; ‘high’ culture; elaborate social organization; the peculiar features of a particular society; the commonalities that make individuals identify with a group; and hundreds of variants, with many nuances, on all these definitions. Underlying every usage, however, and uniting them all, is the bedrock of the word: differentiation from ‘nature’.
Culture is part of nature, in an unchallengeable sense: it happens inside nature and cannot happen without it. But in equally obvious ways it is useful to distinguish the cultural part of nature from what is merely natural. Some of what we do comes to us without any conscious input of our own. We share it with other creatures in the same measure as we share their ancestry or their physical environment: that is mere nature. Other behaviour can vary from group to group; we learn it from other members of our own group—our parents, for instance, or our professors and peers: that is culture.
It is proper to speak of culture apart from nature, just as it is to speak of Essex, say, apart from England, or of an organ apart from the body to which it belongs, only if one is aware that the larger term always includes the smaller, and that consideration of neither is complete without the other. At times, especially in the West, people have pressed the distinction too far by treating culture as if nature had nothing to do with it, but that is not a reason for refusing to acknowledge that culture might have peculiar features that distinguish it from the rest of nature. 1
Nature and culture are not mutually independent: each influences the other. But the balance is a battleground. Scholars and scientists fight over it. The answer to the question ‘why do we have culture?’ lies, I think, in the realm of nature: the simple (but, as we shall see, insufficient) answer is ‘it is natural for us to be cultural’. The question ‘why do we have cultures?’—in the plural or, to put almost the same question another way, ‘why does culture change?’—is, I want to suggest, not answerable in the same way. I propose to explore that question by posing two possibilities: whether evolution or some analogous process is the answer, and whether cultural change happens beyond the limits of evolution’s explanatory power. The purpose of this book is to contribute a new response to what perhaps—as we puzzle over strangers’ comportment, or ponder alien ways of life, or contemplate the variety of our conduct, or compare the commonalities and curiosities that link and part us from other creatures—is the most perplexing property of human beings: why we behave as we do.
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Humans are not the only creatures with culture; over the last sixty years or so, scientists have identified culture among many primate species and claimed it for many others, including examples to be paraded in this book, like the menagerie of some fantastic Barnum or Bailey, such as dolphins, whales, elephants, rats, and even bacteria. Human cultures, however, are different: in comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable. Communities become differentiated, as they change in contrasting and inconsistent ways: that is true, as we shall see, of any cultural species, but the processes involved happen incalculably more often, with a perplexingly greater range of variation, among humans than among any other animals. Human cultures register the constant series of changes that we call ‘history’; they self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering and apparently—now and for most of the recent past—accelerating speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place.
A lifetime’s study of history has convinced me that one of the great problems—unsolved by the scientists and sociologists who have confronted it and rarely even broached among historians—is ‘why have human societies grown so different from each other?’ Or, to express a similar question with the comparative emphasis that I think will lead us to a solution: ‘why, compared with those of other animals who lead social lives, are humans so mutable?’ It is one of the most basic and pervasive questions, but we have no agreed answer. The question raises, in turn, a matter of enduring and apparently unclinchable controversy: how far the laws of evolution might provide solutions. Does evolution or something like it regulate culture as well as organic life? Is all behaviour the result of evolved traits? If not, where lie the limits between what evolution can explain and what is beyond evolution? For historians, one might express the subject of this book as ‘why do we have history at all? Why do the changes we call history happen? Why do we humans alone have history—or, at least, so much more of it than other animals?’ For biologists, a way of putting the same problem might be: ‘is culture an effect or aspect of biology? Or is there more to it?’ People with no disciplinary bias might put it like this: ‘why do humans behave so differently from other animals?’
With some remarkable exceptions, which we shall come to in their place, the lifeways of most extant cultural creatures seem nearly uniform and nearly stagnant by human standards. That does not mean that their cultures are incapable of multiplying and accelerating in the future. Maybe, one day, we will find other species in other worlds with the same propensities as humans’ to create highly mutable behaviours. At present, we have no evidence that such beings exist. Part of the message of this book will be (I hope) that we may not need to go as far as outer space to find them: given time, other Earthbound species—chimpanzees, in particular, and perhaps some other primates—could acquire some of the changeable traits in lifestyle and social and political relationships that up to now seem uniquely human. So far, however, although non-human creatures’ ways of life—those so far identified and studied, most of which belong to apes, dolphins, and whales—do register measurable changes, the rates at which they diverge and transmute seem infinitesimally small in comparison with the swirl and blur of human spindrift, densely sprayed, widely spattered. The key to understanding why human cultures vary so much therefore lies, I propose, in the comparative study of other cultural creatures. Only when we acknowledge how much we have in common with other animals can we begin to see what, if anything, makes us peculiar.
In the pages that follow, I begin by approaching the subject historically. It is, after all, no sin for a man to labour in his vocation. Chapters 1 to 3 tell the story of how people in the Western tradition have tried to understand the problem of why change happens. In Chapter 1 the focus is on theories of change in general—the ancient debate, and the isolated geniuses who tried to add to it later. I start with the history of this very broad question, partly because, logically, it precedes narrower questions of why specific kinds of change occur, and partly because curiosity about cultural evolution arose from—and in a sense, as we shall see, in aversion from—the stagnation of the debate about change in general. Chapters 2 and 3 narrow the focus, turning to attempts to explain cultural change, in particular, and why and how scientists and scholars have failed to achieve a consensual approach.
While the first three chapters tell a story, the remaining five expound and explore a theory. In Chapter 4 I introduce some of the game-changing research of the last sixty years and explain the scope of the comparative method I follow. In Chapters 5 and 6 I propose a new theory based on recent revelations. Chapter 7 is an attempt to explain why that theory matters now—why recent and current history make it urgent for us to find convincing explanations of the rapid, perplexing changes that befall us. In Chapter 8 I ask how change itself might change and adumbrate possible futures.
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In fairness to readers I should declare the assumptions I hope to vindicate. Cultures do not evolve, develop, progress, nor follow any linear, predictable, or regular trajectory. They just change: sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, sometimes (for reasons I intend to explain) accelerating, often in increasing complexity but occasionally in the opposite direction. They change unpredictably, over a range that neither our biological equipment nor our physical environment can fully explain. They change autocatalytically, according to dynamics of their own, or randomly, like the contents of a vast kaleidoscope, shaken without intelligence or purpose or design, in ways that conventional metaphors—of laws, mechanisms, evolutionary trees, descent, and so on—cannot helpfully describe.
Yet, even as I write, between 2011 and 2014, a battery of books fires off what I see as an increasingly desperate bombardment to cover the cultural evolutionists’ retreat. 2 Although on the whole the language of debate in the field has got gradually more moderate and conciliatory in recent years, there are still some shrill, aggressive, and uncompromising voices. Their insistence that cultural change is best expressed as evolution and that only evolutionary theory can explain human culture or ‘produce a unifying and productive theory’ 3 rests—I hope to show—on false assumptions and sometimes on slapdash language. (See below, pp. 146–9.)
I do not have any general theory of change to propose. (I do intend, however, to offer a new way of explaining how and why cultures change: not how and why life changes, but how and why our lives change. I think the theory of evolution describes the former pretty well, but that we need a new approach to the latter.) My explanation serves (and, I should admit, is probably, though not consciously, designed to serve) the cause of freedom. The way we live is up to us, not encoded in our genes or any analogous units, nor implicit in evolution, nor determined by our environment. If we dislike it, we can re-imagine it and strive to refashion it.
Of course, evolutionary explanations of cultural change do not preclude individual freedom. They identify (probably realistically and often accurately) limits to the choices open to us, but leave a lot of possibilities open. On the other hand, by making change seem, to some extent, predictable, they imply that it is controllable: that, I think, is why evolutionary explanations of culture appeal to authoritarian politicians, despite the liberal disavowals of many of the contributing scientists and scholars; I blame the politicians, not the academics. Advocates of Darwinian models for explaining cultural change, moreover, do offend seriously against freedom because, without exception as far as I am aware, they insist that individuals’ contributions only come to characterize cultures if some further, impersonal factor intervenes, such as a propitious physical environment, or an inherited trait, or an intrinsic evolutionary advantage in the proposed innovation. The theory I shall put up for readers’ consideration will obviate the need to appeal to such factors, and leave cultural change to human behest. According to a famous and almost certainly apocryphal anecdote, Napoleon asked Pierre-Simon Laplace, the astronomer who brilliantly described a mechanistic universe, where God fitted into his system. ‘Sire,’ the geometrician answered, ‘I see no need for that hypothesis.’ I imagine some Napoleon of scientism asking me ‘and where does cultural evolution fit into your scheme?’ Like some anti-materialist mutation of Laplace, I should make the same answer.
Since this book is unprecedented and, I hope, surprising, readers may find it helpful to have an outline at this stage of how I have distributed the material and elaborated the argument. The story I start with is of an ancient debate—well documented in the pre-Socratic West—that addressed the problem of change in very general terms: why does change happen? Why is the cosmos unstable? The debate resumed at intervals, but was largely abandoned in modern times, perhaps because it is irresoluble: we are too enmeshed in change to see it objectively. Instead, enquiry—sporadic in antiquity, renewed in modernity—became focussed on seeking to explain particular kinds of change, especially cultural and biological, and how, if at all, the two are related.
The tendency to treat them apart from each other grew pronounced in the nineteenth century, partly because of the way universities structured and compartmentalized academic disciplines; but efforts persisted to find a level of analysis that embraced both. Darwin largely solved the problem of biological change, inviting attempts to understand cultural change in evolutionary terms, too. In the twentieth century genetics, complementing and completing Darwin’s account of how organisms change, excited further efforts and (to over-simplify for purposes of synopsis) four kinds of purported solution: first, that cultural behaviour is largely the product of genetic inheritance and changes accordingly; second, that cultures or the features of cultures operate like organisms, competing to survive; third, that cultural innovations operate like genes, encoding, as it were, evolutionary advantages in successful cases, or spreading in environments to which they are well adapted; and finally, that culture evolves, not in strictly Darwinian terms, but by a ‘second inheritance system’ or process of ‘co-evolution’ in which acquired characteristics are passed on by learning as cultures, like species, ‘descend’ from one another. I undertake a critique of evolutionary models of cultural change, while conceding roles to evolution as the source of the faculties that dispose some animals to be cultural, and as a relatively minor source of influence on the ways in which cultural creatures behave. I argue that evolution is generally an unhelpful term for representing or understanding how cultures change.
Comparing human cultures with those of other cultural creatures, especially our fellow primates, I propose, first, that culture is a by-product of faculties of memory and anticipation evolved in some species; second, that those faculties predispose cultures to change; third, that humans’ faculty of anticipation is exceptionally developed and contributes to making them highly imaginative; fourth, that humans are the most mutable of cultural creatures because in their case peculiar features of memory and imagination make them fertile in ideas (which I understand as ways of re-imagining the world); fifth, that ideas are the main motors of change in human cultures; and finally, that the pace of change is a function of the mutual accessibility of ideas: the more that ideas are exchanged, the more new ideas ensue; and cultural instability increases accordingly. I also suggest that the recent and increasing acceleration of change makes the task of understanding it urgent, and try to connect it with the growth of opportunities for the exchange of culture.
I end with further speculations: that great variety of cultures, such as humans exhibit, may be accessible, albeit not on the same scale, to other species, especially chimpanzees, in future; and that, as opportunities for cultural interchange diminish the acceleration of change will slacken and—even, perhaps—the pace will slow down.
It may seem risky to disclose so much of the end of the book at the outset, rather like revealing that the butler did it in the first pages of a detective story—especially since, as in a whodunnit, I shall unfold in this book, bit by bit, evidence against my case before turning to my own solution. But at least readers with prejudices different from mine are forewarned. A further warning may be in order: this book is an attempt, not to set out a thesis and demonstrate it, but to map a quest, leading to what I hope are suggestive but speculative conclusions. The theory I have to offer must be judged, like all theories including the theory of evolution, not by standards of proof, but according to whether, with elegance and economy, it matches the known facts and achieves its purpose.
The subject transcends every discipline and involves every individual and every species. It ranges over the great battlefield of ideas, joining the conflicts of materialism against metaphysics and determinism against freedom. Big subjects deserve big books but demand short ones: I have tried to keep this one decently trim.