The complete idiot’s guide to protecting one’s culture

NOTE: The analysis below is a companion piece to this short story

Status-quo — a loaded word that has different connotations for different people.

Regardless of your feelings about the word, it is tough to argue against the fact that change is difficult for most people. And really quick & drastic changes can feel threatening & induces feelings of insecurity.

One could even argue that this resistance to a quick, drastic changes often manifests itself in certain repeating political tropes — foreigners stealing jobs, death of a prized culture etc.

In fact, the death of our cultures or a “set way of doing things” seems to occupy a large space in our collective consciousness. Change is the only constant they say, and yet that wisdom is at direct odds with our desire to continue living the way we have been.

This article explores the reasons that culture could change or even die. And what one can do to future-proof culture — and if that’s something we can even achieve.

A beginners guide to memetics

Let’s start with a quick dip into Memetics first. It will be helpful in helping us understand each culture’s origin story.

Memetics proposes that the things that occupy our collective minds (including sounds, words, ideas, religion, entertainment etc) behave similarly to organic life forms. These memes may exist only in the minds of humans, but their existence in this “abstract world” has many parallels to the evolutionary dance that organic lifeforms perform in the “real world”.

Specifically, much like organic life forms, they compete against each other for limited resources (mind space) and only the fittest survive.

While all memes do this unconsciously (similar to many lifeforms), and there will always be certain memes that achieve outsized success. A collection of such high-performing memes often coalesces together to form what is referred to as “culture”.

An important point here is that high-performing memes usually become so when they satisfy a deep human need. More often than not, this need is rooted in our own desires to derisk the future and survive/thrive.

Why? Because humans have evolved in a world where scarcity of resources necessary for survival (imagined or real) has had a major role in shaping up our psychologies. Combining this inherent resource insecurity (almost in-built in humans) with the chaos and risk that is also a facet of life, one can imagine why de-risking ourselves is so important.

Unsurprisingly, because surviving & thriving is so important to us, there are a lot of memes inhabiting this fertile niche of human mind.

At the lower end of the sophistication spectrum of culture are certain behaviours that have evolved over the years. Biases & heuristics that may have proved useful to our ancestors have become part of our day-to-day behaviours.

On the slightly more sophisticated end of the spectrum we start getting into sophisticated forms of culture. Religion, ideologies, stories, forms of government and even science — sophisticated memes that are competing against each other.

All in an effort to establish their dominance as the meme that can best help us survive & thrive.

It is a useful thought & one that could help us future-proof memes by thinking of them in evolutionary terms. This could be especially useful to preserve memes that may be cherished parts of our “culture”.

How to assess the “fitness” of a cultural trait

In order to assess the fitness level of high-performing memes we will need some measuring units. I propose that to understand the “Darwinian fitness” of a meme, we could use similar measurements as when we try to understand the virality of disease or mutation.

One point to note is that for memes in de-risking niche, the measures below are naturally viewed through the context of the meme’s human hosts:

a. Speed: how fast a meme can spread (dependent of ease of transmission from one human mind to another)

b. Size: The number of humans it is able to hold under its sway (dependent on the size & inter-connectedness of the human network that it is operating in)

c. Effectiveness: How good the meme is at solving the specific problem of the niche (probably the most subjective measure, most often dependent more on subjective perception of humans than any objective measures)

d. Adaptability: The ability of the meme to be effective in an ever-changing world (dependent on how much flexibility the meme affords its believers)

Using the above criteria as a guiding light, we could even make sense of the “fight” between two memes (science and religion) over the last few centuries.

Both can be said to be memes jostling for dominance in the de-risking niche of human consciousness.

Religion Vs Science (fight based on…)

a. Speed (Religion wins)

This round goes to religion. Most religion is rooted in stories & feelings, and humans love stories! Science will lose this round all day, every day.

b. Size (Religion wins, but gap is narrowing)

Since the network of general population (that understand stories) will be more dense than science enthusiasts. This round goes to religion as well. Although this may still change in the future.

c. Effectiveness (Religion was winning, now it’s losing)

In the absence of scientific understanding, it was quite effective to place all responsibility of de-risking on the shoulders of Gods and view the world as a black-box subject to whims of God. There was no alternative.

This has changed as people understand natural laws better better.

d. Adaptability (Science wins)

This is the one area where science destroys religion. The world will constantly change & throw out new info. More inflexibility to explain the world within a framework will always lead to defeat.

So…what does this actually predict for us?

I predict that while it will take time, science will eventually supplant religion as the guiding force for millions of individuals. This is not necessarily because of some inherent goodness in science, but rather the fact that religious memes tend to be unadaptive — they often call for an inflexible framework to govern our behaviours in a universe that is always changing.

CAVEAT: I am not suggesting that religion will disappear. Since we live in a chaotic world, there will always be the need for faith & hope. And that isn’t going away anytime soon. But if religion continues to be inflexible, it will see its size shrink.

It seems to me to be a feature of the system itself.

In fact, this is the most important point I want to make. Over a long enough time period, adaptability is likely the most important characteristic a meme can possess (at least in the de-risking niche of human consciousness).

Speed and size could possibly lead to huge societal changes during the life of a single human, thus over stating their importance in our minds, but adaptability is what allows a meme to prosper over centuries.

One could say many religions are already deploying this strategy. Letting go of their most outdated beliefs in an effort to still be relevant (e.g., Hinduism and sati).

Why is this relevant?

Increased conservatism and isolationism seem to be on the news cycle a lot.

Faced with huge changes (technological, demographic, cultural), it is natural that our de-risking tendencies go on overdrive. One can see this happening now (as I write this in 2020) and this tendency will only increase in importance as the world becomes ever more complex.

One framework to achieve this de-risking is the simple plan to go back to the “glory days” — to not only maintain the status-quo but somehow reverse time itself. The fact that this thinking props up over and over again in history is testament to how strong of a contender this particular framework (“go back to way things were”) is in the de-risking niche.

Analysing it, the success can most likely be attributed to the simplicity of its logic. Things always seemed better in the past (a known human bias). So why not go back to it. This simplicity of logic means that it is exceptionally easy to transmit this meme from one mind to another.

However, the problem is that the framework/cherished values that were deployed in the good ol’ days usually suffer from an inability to adapt to a changing world.

In essence, it doesn’t matter how good your deeply cherished memes were at de-risking the world before, they need to evolve with changing realities. Put another way, if the values of “glory days” were actually as great as you imagine, they wouldn’t be on the verge of extinction.

The fact that they are becoming extinct is because they were not able to provide hosts with a good de-risking strategy in the face of changes happening in the real world.

Of course, it’s much more palatable to apply this logic to biological counterparts. You can claim (and be right) that dinosaurs were amazing at carving out a niche for themselves at some point. But to say they were the most perfectly evolved organism ever seems absurd. If they were, they would still be around.

There can never be a perfectly evolved organism, because the world itself is constantly changing. And this same logic can be said to hold true of de-risking memes as well.

Moving to more practical business, there’s a particularly troubling and self-defeating strategy I’ve noticed in many countries. When an adversarial group becomes more conservative/fundamental, there is a tendency to counter them with even more inflexibility.

For example, certain religions becoming more inflexible and fundamental when faced with fundamentalism of another religion (Buddhist responses to increased Wahhabism). While this reaction may make sense from an emotional perspective– it is an exceptionally bad long-term strategy.

If your “adversary” is making their meme/religion more inflexible — they are robbing it of its own adaptability. Doing the same to your religion is completely counter-productive.

To use an absurd analogy, it would be similar to deciding to ingest poison yourself because your adversary is slowly committing suicide.

Instead you should be doing the very opposite!

At the very least here is a list of alternative options:

1. Ignore your foes,

2. Focus your efforts improving the speed (ease of communication) & size (people & their inter-connectivity within your culture) or effectiveness (perceptions of humans) of your own ideals

3. Focus on making it more difficult for your adversary’s ideas to spread by attacking speed (making their ideas more difficult to communicate) & size & effectiveness (highlight all instances of failure)

But most important of all — TAKE CARE NOT TO MAKE YOUR DE-RISKING MEMES MORE UNADAPTIVE!!! You may win in the short-term, but it will be a pyrrhic victory.