Culture wars

January 2017 – April 2018

Since 1981, the World Values Survey Association has been carrying out surveys around the world regarding people’s values, asking respondents, for example, whether most people can be trusted, and whether they are proud of their country. A lot of the variation in values across countries falls along two axes, call them Survival versus Well-Being/Self-Expression, and Traditional Authority versus Secular Rationality, shown as the x and y axes in the chart below.

In societies high on Survival and low on Well-Being/Self-Expression (left on the x axis), people tend be less trusting and less happy, and to value money and material well-being more than emotionally rewarding careers. In societies high on Traditional Authority (low on the y axis), people are more patriotic and more religious.

We can also plot countries around the world by their positions on the two axes, as in the chart below.

A few observations: Confirming everyone’s stereotypes, Sweden is extreme both in post-materialism, and in post-traditionalism. Overseas Europe is more traditional than the Continent: the Anglosphere is more traditional than the Continental Protestant world, and Latin America more traditional than the Continental Catholic world. And it looks like Soviet Communism did a moderately effective job of destroying traditional values, and a really good job of leaving people miserable.

Values change over time. They constitute a mediating link between economic and political change: economic changes tend to result in changing values, while changing values tend to result in changing political institutions. More specifically:

1. The growth of industrial employment tends to move societies up the y axis, away from traditional values, without shifting them much on the x-axis. The history of rapidly industrializing late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Europe reflects this value shift, with new ideologies and leaders bypassing or assaulting traditional hierarchies of aristocracy and Church while fighting ruthlessly to make sure their followers came out on top in the struggle for existence.
2. More recent economic changes, toward post-industrial employment, tend to move societies rightward on the x axis. The declining levels of violence documented by Pinker, as well our halting progress toward a more democratic world, are reflections of this. These are encouraging developments, but matters are complicated by the fact that this movement is highly uneven, both across and within countries. We no longer see the stark divisions of the Cold War era. But in many areas around the world, people find themselves in a house divided against itself on cultural matters, and the resulting culture wars can make for more conflict. Political scientists have coined a label for this, Center-Periphery Dissonance, and many of the revolutionary political struggle of the last several years have pitted a modernizing center against a more traditional periphery.

Muslim majority

873 – 936 A. D.

259 – 324 A. H.

Muslims were initially a small minority in the lands they conquered. But over the course of centuries they came to be a large majority of the population in the Middle East and North Africa. Strikingly, it may be possible to quantify, at least roughly, the progress of conversion.

A major production of Islamic society, from the earliest days until recently, is the biographical dictionary. As befits a patrilineal society, many of these dictionaries provide a nasab, or genealogy, for their subjects, a list of ancestors similar to the begats in the Bible, as well as a nisba, an affiliation, most often a geographic affiliation. An individual might be listed as Muhammed son of Ahmad son of Rustam, affiliated with Nishapur (a city in Iran). Note that the first two names (Mohammed, Ahmad) are clearly Muslim, while the name of the grandfather (Rustam) is Persian. This is probably telling us that Rustam was the first member of his family to convert to Islam, and that he initiated a sequence of Muslim names among his descendants. It’s possible to use this information, along with some reasonable demographic assumptions, to construct a graph showing the course of conversion to Islam among a large group of biographic subjects. Here’s what we get for Iran:

The points fall nicely along a logistic curve. A logistic curve is what we often see with the spread of an infection, where the y-axis shows the number of people infected. Logistic curves also commonly show up when we look at memes rather than germs, where the y-axis might show how many farmers have adopted a new strain of corn. In either case, the rate of growth of the “infection” is proportional to the product of the number already infected and the number not yet infected. So conversion to Islam in the medieval period may fit a simple model of cultural transmission. (Note however that this method does not tell us about people who never converted to Islam during this period, like the ancestors of present day Christian Copts in Egypt.)

This exercise is presented by Richard Bulliet (he also wrote about wheels). He makes some further observations.

• Conversion seems to proceed more quickly in Iran than in other areas of the Arab empire (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia). It looks as if the Christians who were the majority of the population in the latter areas are more resistant to Islam than the Zoroastrians in Iran.

• Converts, especially in the early stages, often leave behind their native communities and settle with other Muslims. This helps drive urbanization, with new cities growing up around Muslim military cantonments; Baghdad and Cairo get their start this way. The wave of urbanization following the Arab conquests contrasts sharply with the ruralization which follows the end of the Roman Empire in western Europe.
• The early period when converts make up less than half the population coincides with a period of anti-Islamic revolts. As the Islamic fraction grows, these revolts move from more central to more peripheral regions. They eventually cease altogether as Muslims attain a secure majority.
• In the early period, local Muslim rulers are too insecure to risk rebelling against the central authority of the Caliph. It is in the later period, with local Muslims securely in the majority, that regions assert their independence, and the ummah (community of the faithful) fragments.
• Rather than assimilate to the locally dominant version of Islam, later generations of converts often carve out cultural space for themselves by adopting variant versions. Much of the sectarian segmentation of the Islamic Middle East today, between different legal schools and sects, traces back to differential timing of conversion during the medieval period.

The selfish meme

310 – 404

In the first decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, the number of those who worshiped him as a resurrected savior was at most a few thousand, and probably many fewer. In 313, when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan mandating tolerance for Christianity, Christians numbered many millions. Thus, in two and a half centuries, Christian numbers had doubled at least ten times. On average, someone who lived to the age of seventy-five during this period could expect to live through an eight-fold increase in the numbers of Christians between her birth and her death.

Christianity began in confusion, controversy and schism and so it continued. A dominant orthodox church, with a recognizable ecclesiastical structure, emerged only very gradually and represented a process of natural selection — a spiritual survival of the fittest … The Darwinian image is appropriate: the central and eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD swarmed with an infinite multitude of religious ideas, struggling to propagate themselves. Every religious movement was unstable and fissiparous; and these cults were not only splitting up and multiplying but reassembling in new forms.

Paul Johnson A History of Christianity

If we’re going to apply Darwinian analogies to culture, we might want to distinguish between the selection of memes within people’s heads, and between them (intra- and inter-cephalic selection, if you will). Inside people’s heads, different ideas survive or fail depending on the benefits and costs they produce for their carriers, how well they fit with other ideas, and so on. Outside people’s heads, some ideas may spread because people work extra hard to propagate them. Christianity spread as rapidly as it did partly because it radically exalted the Spirit over the Flesh. As Clement (a relative moderate among early Christians) wrote “Our ideal is not to experience desire at all.” A consequence is that the new religion effectively sterilized a fraction of its hosts, who gave up on the normal business of marrying and raising children, and turned into cultural super-spreaders.

Two ways of life were given by the Lord to his church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living; it admits not marriage, childbearing, property nor the possession of wealth. . . . Like some celestial beings, these gaze down upon human life, performing the duty of a priesthood to Almighty God for the whole race. . . . And the more humble, more human way prompts men to join in pure nuptials, and to produce children, to undertake government, to give orders to soldiers fighting for right; it allows them to have minds for farming, for trade, and for the other more secular interests as well as for religion.

Eusebius, quoted in Peter Brown The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity

Women were another important vector for the spread of Christianity. Pagans and Christians agreed they were over-represented among converts. Celsus, a pagan critic of Christianity, took a dim view of this, sounding like a modern critic of advertising for children: “Christians must admit that they can only persuade people destitute of sense, position, or intelligence, only slaves, women, and children, to accept their faith.” Tatian, a Christian apologist, was cheerier: “They say of us, that we gabble nonsense among females, half grown people, girls, and old women. Not so. Our maidens philosophize, and at their distaffs speak of things divine.”

Of course some of the same observations (e.g. regarding the overcoming of desire and religious celibacy) could be made about the spread of Buddhism during the same period, suggesting that there are general principles at work in the spread of religions, as in the spread of microorganisms.

For a sophisticated scholarly treatment along these lines of the interaction of selfish genes and selfish memes check out Mixed Messages: Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Human Societies by Robert Paul. A lot of work on the coevolution of genes and culture has been done by mathematical modelers; Paul is something else, a long-time cultural anthropologist who brings wide knowledge and thick description of culture and symbolism to the topic.

Write and wrongs

Here’s one account of the origin of the first system of writing in Mesopotamia:

The immediate precursor of cuneiform writing was a system of tokens. These small clay objects of many shapes – cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, etc. – served as counters in the prehistoric Near East and can be traced to the Neolithic period, starting about 8000 B.C. … The development of tokens was tied to the rise of social structures, emerging with rank leadership, and coming to a climax with state formation. Also, corresponding to the increase of bureaucracy, methods of storing tokens in archives were devised. One of these storage methods employed … simple hollow clay balls in which the tokens were placed and sealed. … Accountants eventually [turned to] imprinting the shapes of the tokens on the surface of the envelopes [balls] prior to enclosing them. An envelope containing seven ovoids, for example, bore seven oval markings. The substitution of signs for tokens was a first step toward writing. Fourth millennium accountants soon realized that the tokens within the envelopes were made unnecessary by the presence of markings on the outer surface. As a result tablets … replaced the hollow envelopes filled with tokens.

Schmandt-Besserac How Writing Came about

(Hat tip to commenter Eric Kimbrough for the reference.)

Examples of tokens and corresponding pictographs below:

And here is Claude Lévi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques) on the original function of writing:

Writing is a strange invention. One might suppose that its emergence could not fail to bring about profound changes in the conditions of human existence, and that these transformations must of necessity be of an intellectual nature. The possession of writing vastly increases man’s ability to preserve knowledge. It can be thought of as an artificial memory, the development of which ought to lead to a clearer awareness of the past, and hence to a greater ability to organize both present and future. After eliminating all other criteria which have been put forward to distinguish between barbarism and civilization, it is tempting to retain this one at least: there are peoples with, or without, writing; the former are able to store up their past achievements and to move with ever-increasing rapidity towards the goals they have set themselves, whereas the latter, being incapable of remembering the past beyond the narrow margin of individual memory, seem bound to remain imprisoned in a fluctuating history which will always lack both a beginning and any lasting awareness of an aim.

Yet nothing we know about writing and the part it has played in man’s evolution justifies this view. … If we ask ourselves what great innovation writing was linked to, there is little we can suggest on a technical level apart from architecture. … To establish a correlation between the emergence of writing and certain characteristic features of civilization, we must look in quite a different direction. The only phenomenon with writing has always been concomitant is … the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system and their grading into castes or classes. … At the time when writing first emerged, it seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a … likely explanation of the birth of architecture. My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery.

Memory palaces

A big driver of progressive evolution, both biological and cultural , is improvements in the fidelity of inheritance. This was true back in the Proterozoic with the evolution of the eukaryote chromosome. And it’s true in human history with the invention of writing, and later with the printing press.

Writing greatly facilitates the storage and transmission of information. But even before writing was invented, people had figured out several techniques for storing large volumes of information in memory.

Poetry was one such technique. Imposing explicit, regular phonological and metric patterns on words arranged in lines, on top of the normal rules of phonology and syntax that operate in prose, can greatly facilitate memorization. The illiterate speakers of Proto-Indo-European had a considerable poetic tradition, although they probably were not doing word-for-word memorization. The Indian Brahmin heirs of this tradition, however,  were memorizing enormous bodies of text, in some cases memorizing multiple Bibles worth of literature forwards and backwards, syllable by syllable, just to make sure nothing was lost. As a result, our knowledge of ancient spoken Sanskrit has been compared to having tape recordings of the language.

Another powerful technique for memorization exploits human spatial cognition. The “method of places,” involves associating facts to be memorized with real or imagined spatial locations. The method was known to the ancient Greeks. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit in China, thought this was one of the most valuable things he could teach the Chinese. A modern introduction is Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

Lynne Kelly is a scholar who argues that the transmission of large bodies of cultural information by the method of places played a central role in many non-literate societies. In traditional aboriginal Australia, the landscape was not just a collection of physical sites and associated ecological resources, but was tagged with a large body of information. Walking through the landscape, in reality or in imagination, would call forth the associated facts. At least for someone in the know. Knowledge was power.  Multiple stages of initiation passed on the carefully guarded stories and knowledge associated with particular places and paths. Some of this information was about mythology and social organization, some of it was practical knowledge of the environment, well beyond what any one individual could discover in a lifetime.

Kelly also argues that in more stratified (but still non-literate) societies, people were not just tagging the landscape with facts to be remembered, but were building substantial monuments to encode important information. She makes a case that the megaliths of Neolithic Europe, and Stonehenge in its initial stages, were memory palaces, built at the behest of knowledge elites, whose social position depended on their monopolizing a store of encyclopedic information.

She makes her argument here and here.

First signs

15.4 – 14.7 thousand years ago

In July and August, this blog covered one of the great revolutions in information transmission, the evolution of language.  And as we move into September, we will consider another, the invention of writing. But in between these two great revolutions, there are tantalizing hints that people were experimenting with other techniques for enhancing social memory.

Genevieve von Petzinger has made an extensive study of cave paintings from Ice Age Europe, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago; her results are presented in a recent book. The most famous cave paintings are pictures, sometimes of extraordinary quality. But von Petzinger has been interested in something else, in the geometric signs that often accompany these paintings, or stand on their own.  These are not random doodles. A limited number of different signs – she lists just thirty two – is found repeatedly. Some signs, like the Spanish Tectiform, are limited in geographic distribution. Some appear early and disappear later, some do the reverse, others persist through the whole period.

These signs would seem to be some kind of symbolic code. But not, yet, a writing system. Perhaps some of them represent astronomical phenomena, like modern astrological symbols:

or perhaps they represent the terrestrial natural world, or social divisions, or all of the above. At this point we don’t know.

Memory palaces

A big driver of progressive evolution, both biological and cultural , is improvements in the fidelity of inheritance. This was true back in the Proterozoic with the evolution of the eukaryote chromosome. And it’s true in human history with the invention of writing, and later with the printing press.

Writing greatly facilitates the storage and transmission of information. But even before writing was invented, people had figured out several techniques for storing large volumes of information in memory.

Poetry was one such technique. Imposing explicit, regular phonological and metric patterns on words arranged in lines, on top of the normal rules of phonology and syntax that operate in prose, can greatly facilitate memorization. The illiterate speakers of Proto-Indo-European had a considerable poetic tradition, although they probably were not doing word-for-word memorization. The Indian Brahmin heirs of this tradition, however,  were memorizing enormous bodies of text, in some cases memorizing multiple bibles worth of literature forwards and backwards, syllable by syllable, just to make sure nothing was lost. As a result, our knowledge of ancient spoken Sanskrit has been compared to having tape recordings of the language.

Another powerful technique for memorization exploits human spatial cognition. The “method of places,” involves associating facts to be memorized with real or imagined spatial locations. The method was known to the ancient Greeks. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit in China, thought this was one of the most valuable things he could teach the Chinese. A modern introduction is Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

Lynne Kelly is a scholar who argues that the transmission of large bodies of cultural information by the method of places played a central role in many non-literate societies. In traditional aboriginal Australia, the landscape was not just a collection of physical sites and associated ecological resources, but was tagged with a large body of information. Walking through the landscape, in reality or in imagination, would call forth the associated facts. At least for someone in the know. Knowledge was power.  Multiple stages of initiation passed on the carefully guarded stories and knowledge associated with particular places and paths. Some of this information was about mythology and social organization, some of it was practical knowledge of the environment, well beyond what any one individual could discover in a lifetime.

Kelly also argues that in more stratified (but still non-literate) societies, people were not just tagging the landscape with facts to be remembered, but were building substantial monuments to encode important information. She makes a case that the megaliths of Neolithic Europe, and Stonehenge in its initial stages, were memory palaces, built at the behest of knowledge elites, whose social position depended on their monopolizing a store of encyclopedic information.

She makes her argument here and here.

First signs

16.4 – 15.5 thousand years ago

In July and August, this blog covered one of the great revolutions in information transmission, the evolution of language.  And as we move into September, we will consider another, the invention of writing. But in between these two great revolutions, there are tantalizing hints that people were experimenting with other techniques for enhancing social memory.

Genevieve von Petzinger has made an extensive study of cave paintings from Ice Age Europe, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago; her results are presented in a recent book. The most famous cave paintings are pictures, sometimes of extraordinary quality. But von Petzinger has been interested in something else, in the geometric signs that often accompany these paintings, or stand on their own.  These are not random doodles. A limited number of different signs – she lists just thirty two – is found repeatedly. Some signs, like the Spanish Tectiform, are limited in geographic distribution. Some appear early and disappear later, some do the reverse, others persist through the whole period.

These signs would seem to be some kind of symbolic code. But not, yet, a writing system. Perhaps some of them represent astronomical phenomena, like modern astrological symbols:

or perhaps they represent the terrestrial natural world, or social divisions, or all of the above. At this point we don’t know.

Culture wars

May 2016 – July 2017

Since 1981, the World Values Survey Association has been carrying out surveys around the world regarding people’s values, asking respondents, for example, whether most people can be trusted, and whether they are proud of their country. A lot of the variation in values across countries falls along two axes, call them Survival versus Well-Being/Self-Expression, and Traditional Authority versus Secular Rationality, shown as the x and y axes in the chart below.

In societies high on Survival and low on Well-Being/Self-Expression (left on the x axis), people tend be less trusting and less happy, and to value money and material well-being more than emotionally rewarding careers. In societies high on Traditional Authority (low on the y axis), people are more patriotic and more religious.

We can also plot countries around the world by their positions on the two axes, as in the chart below.

A few observations: Confirming everyone’s stereotypes, Sweden is extreme both in post-materialism, and in post-traditionalism. Overseas Europe is more traditional than the Continent: the Anglosphere is more traditional than the Continental Protestant world, and Latin America more traditional than the Continental Catholic world. And it looks like Soviet Communism did a moderately effective job of destroying traditional values, and a really good job of leaving people miserable.

Values change over time. They constitute a mediating link between economic and political change: economic changes tend to result in changing values, while changing values tend to result in changing political institutions. More specifically:

1. The growth of industrial employment tends to move societies up the y axis, away from traditional values, without shifting them much on the x-axis. The history of rapidly industrializing late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Europe reflects this value shift, with new ideologies and leaders bypassing or assaulting traditional hierarchies of aristocracy and Church while fighting ruthlessly to make sure their followers came out on top in the struggle for existence.
2. More recent economic changes, toward post-industrial employment, tend to move societies rightward on the x axis. The declining levels of violence documented by Pinker, as well our halting progress toward a more democratic world, are reflections of this. These are encouraging developments, but matters are complicated by the fact that this movement is highly uneven, both across and within countries. We no longer see the stark divisions of the Cold War era. But in many areas around the world, people find themselves in a house divided against itself on cultural matters, and the resulting culture wars can make for more conflict. Political scientists have coined a label for this, Center-Periphery Dissonance, and many of the revolutionary political struggle of the last several years have pitted a modernizing center against a more traditional periphery.

Memory palaces

A big driver of progressive evolution, both biological and cultural , is improvements in the fidelity of inheritance. This was true back in the Proterozoic with the evolution of the eukaryote chromosome. And it’s true in human history with the invention of writing, and later with the printing press.

Writing greatly facilitates the storage and transmission of information. But even before writing was invented, people had figured out several techniques for storing large volumes of information in memory.

Poetry was one such technique. Imposing explicit, regular phonological and metric patterns on words arranged in lines, on top of the normal rules of phonology and syntax that operate in prose, can greatly facilitate memorization. The illiterate speakers of Proto-Indo-European had a considerable poetic tradition, although they probably were not doing word-for-word memorization. The Indian Brahmin heirs of this tradition, however,  were memorizing enormous bodies of text, in some cases memorizing multiple bibles worth of literature forwards and backwards, syllable by syllable, just to make sure nothing was lost. As a result, our knowledge of ancient spoken Sanskrit has been compared to having tape recordings of the language.

Another powerful technique for memorization exploits human spatial cognition. The “method of places,” involves associating facts to be memorized with real or imagined spatial locations. The method was known to the ancient Greeks. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit in China, thought this was one of the most valuable things he could teach the Chinese. A modern introduction is Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

Lynne Kelly is a scholar who argues that the transmission of large bodies of cultural information by the method of places played a central role in many non-literate societies. In traditional aboriginal Australia, the landscape was not just a collection of physical sites and associated ecological resources, but was tagged with a large body of information. Walking through the landscape, in reality or in imagination, would call forth the associated facts. At least for someone in the know. Knowledge was power.  Multiple stages of initiation passed on the carefully guarded stories and knowledge associated with particular places and paths. Some of this information was about mythology and social organization, some of it was practical knowledge of the environment, well beyond what any one individual could discover in a lifetime.

Kelly also argues that in more stratified (but still non-literate) societies, people were not just tagging the landscape with facts to be remembered, but were building substantial monuments to encode important information. She makes a case that the megaliths of Neolithic Europe, and Stonehenge in its initial stages, were memory palaces, built at the behest of knowledge elites, whose social position depended on their monopolizing a store of encyclopedic information.

She makes her argument here and here.