Regarding my last post, which I kind of dashed off at work, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s one breed of explanation for lopsided cultural numbers that’s been especially popular lately. It’s essentially a version of Darwinism: some forms of culture make societies more numerous and powerful than others, so when those two cultures come into contact, the dominant form will prevail.

Probably the best known proponent of this is Jared Diamond, who in Guns, Germs and Steel argued that cultural features like agriculture, state formation and war (within limits) gave ancient societies the edge over the hunter-gatherers who had ruled the earth for millennia. Similarly, Rodney Stark argued that Christianity succeeded despite persecution because its care for the sick and opposition to abortion and infanticide increased its growth rate over pagans. A little while ago an article in Foreign Policy argued that sexists will inherit the earth because patriarchy produces more children than modern society. And so on.

Some people have accused these theories of being reductionist, and indeed, I don’t think they tell the whole story. For one thing, it’s not like cultural features just randomly appear, in the manner that genetic mutations appear. Even apart from factors like divine revelation, cultural habits would likely not appear in the first place if they didn’t express something about the nature of the people doing them. One question that is just beginning to be explored is how genetic predispositions express themselves, and what effect the environment has on that. The Mosuo, for instance, are in some ways recognizable to us — they aren’t just patriarchal society in reverse. The society seems to be based around the power of motherhood, which is hardly an unfamiliar power to the rest of the world, but is usually tempered by other forces such as fathers, children’s spouses, and governments. In Mosuo-land, for whatever reason, mothers have managed to head off any such competition.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that some cultural habits do lead to greater numbers than others, and it raises some interesting moral issues. One point that Diamond made was that what makes societies dominant isn’t necessarily what makes individuals happy. Early agriculturalists, he points out, were generally more sickly and oppressed than hunter-gatherers, but their settled lifestyle let them have more children than the nomads. Because it wasn’t really that appealing a lifestyle change, Diamond argues, agriculture actually spread quite slowly after it first appeared. But ultimately its success was inevitable.

In one sense, culture is the pinnacle of evolution, because it lets people adapt by changing without having to wait for the genetics to shake out. But this also raises the familiar dilemma that what feels natural and right to the individual might ultimately be bad for the group. I think this problem runs deeper in the Western attitude than cultural relativism does. In a comment to the last post, Lynn observed astutely:

Also, if we really believed that people were just infinitely malleable, there’d be no basis to critique traditional roles, either. Why not patriarchy, if people can adapt to one set of roles as well as another? The basis for feminism surely has to be that patriarchy comes at a cost, and that cost, just as much as any preconditions for male dominance, is built into human nature. Otherwise the Taliban, like the Mosuo, are just people practicing another equally good way of doing things.

She’s right: feminists who point to the Mosuo are not really arguing for human malleability. Instead, they’re arguing that patriarchal society is a kind of falsehood, an illusion, under which lurk people’s true selves. The feeling that society is a kind of mass illusion is very common in the modern era (hey, maybe that’s another reason Gnosticism is getting big!), and that feeling is not entirely without foundation. After all, a lot of social truths do indeed turn out to be false, and recent centuries have made westerners especially aware of this fact.

Nonetheless, a great deal of psychological research, not to mention common experience, has also shown that human beings are so innately social that this really isn’t a “true self” apart from society. Here I find myself remembering a bit of advice Telford gave me when trying to overcome my cynical approach to reading the Bible: not to ask, “Is it true?” but to ask, “How is it true?” In some sense, all human societies are real, but accepting the “plain meaning” of their mores is not necessarily the way to understand their reality.

But anyway, I’m also cautious of arguments that tell individuals to submit themselves to society for the sake of that society’s supremacy and dominance. That’s why all the conservative worrying about the “birth dearth” grates on me — not that it’s exactly wrong, but that it seems to be premised on a perpetual zero-sum-game struggle between societies. On the other hand, a lot of secular liberals do seem to be in denial about the whole thing, either totally ignoring it or figuring that everyone else will eventually be converted to modernity and start having fewer children too. Me, I wouldn’t want to wager on that one.

I guess that’s where faith comes in. When survival itself is the highest good, there isn’t much of an argument you can make against doing whatever you have to do to ensure your society’s dominance. But if history is indeed under the guidance of a God wiser than ourselves, we do not have to be slaves to such machinations.

When I was growing up in northern California, one of the Eastern philosophical concepts that had become tossed into the New Age salad was the imperative to “live in the moment.” In fact a friend told me that the utopia in Aldous Huxley’s Island was populated with mina birds trained to keep repeating, “Here and now!” in order to remind everybody to stay focused on the present.

It turns out that there’s a tribe in the Amazon that takes this concept to the extreme. The Pirahã first caught the attention of linguists because they have an extremely impoverished language that potentially refutes Noam Chomsky’s theory that human brains are naturally equipped with a universal grammar. But linguist Daniel Everett believes the reason for their language is cultural:

He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: “Live here and now.” The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. “All experience is anchored in the presence,” says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn’t allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past — limiting the language accordingly.

Living in the now also fits with the fact that the Pirahã don’t appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: “Everything is the same, things always are.” The mothers also don’t tell their children fairy tales — actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art.

Now, this I find much more astonishing than the idea that Chomsky might have been wrong about something. We moderns look at the cave paintings at Lascaux, or read about the common narrative themes of folk tales, and see what seems to separate all people, no matter how primitive, from animals. What kind of people are these, who have none of these things?

The story also reminded me of a question that I have with a lot of these nature/nurture debates, which tend to assume that finding any group of people anywhere who deviate from the norm means that “nature” cannot explain the norm. The same sorts of claims swirl around the Mosuo, to the effect that patriarchy and marriage must have no basis in nature because here’s a culture with neither.

Yet when the numbers of people involved are incredibly lopsided, it’s difficult to believe that these cultural differences represent equal choices, as it were. There are only about 350 Pirahã — one big extended family, in effect. All sorts of bizarre things can happen in one family, as we well know. The Mosuo are more numerous, at around 50,000, but they’re still a minuscule data point compared to the cultures with more familiar marriage and family roles out there.

This reinforces the impression I had as a psych student, that Western thought is still groping in the dark when it comes to dealing with the phenomenon of “culture.” On a popular level, many Americans deal with the abundance of cultural differences by treating cultural norms as almost disembodied, random — some cultures happen to be this way and some happen to be that way, and all our norms are probably reversed somewhere else. In my experience this was sometimes underscored by anecdotes that I now suspect are mythical — that there’s a tribe somewhere where eating is done in private but urinating is perfectly shameless and public, and so on. And who knows how many Star Trek episodes posited planets that reversed some received Western cultural standard.

Yet 350 vs. six billion is hardly a random distribution. If the difference is indeed purely culture, why are some cultural patterns obviously so much more popular than others? Could we really choose to be some other way, if we wanted to? I think it is difficult for Westerners to believe that human behavior that is not genetic could be so powerful, could have a sort of life of its own without any particular people deciding what it should be. But that is exactly what culture is, and that is what keeps it so mysterious.