Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Today, I'd like us to talk about cultural variety or selection and a potential critique of modernity.

Agnes:

Sounds good.

Robin:

All right. So start with the context of biological evolution. In biology, there are species, at least for sexual animals, who can mate or not mate. And usually, we define a species as all the creatures who could mate with each other, at least if they were the right age or whatever. And there's two kinds of evolution that happens in biology. There is evolution within a species. i.e. some members of the species might develop some new innovation that would spread in the species by mating with other members of the species until their descendants could all have the new innovation in the species. And then there's innovation of species in the sense that species often just have features that all the members of the species have. and that most of other species don't have. And then there's evolution by creating new species that have new features that are shared across all the members of that species. And then over time, new species appear with new innovations, and they have descended species that spread those innovations. So two kinds of innovations in biology, within a species and between species.

Agnes:

Can I ask a question?

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

Before you go on. OK. I take it that the evolution within a species, there's a limit or a constraint to it, which is it can't inhibit the members of the species from reproducing with one another. That is, the one that did evolve and the one that didn't. Otherwise, it would then be the evolution of a new species.

Robin:

Exactly. Yes. OK.

Agnes:

Go on.

Robin:

Right. Okay, so in history we can look at, you know, where most innovations appeared, where a lot of innovation appeared to last, and it seems like there was more innovation overall, that is, species to spending with new exciting capabilities, in places and times, when species were fragmented, i.e. smaller species, each of which had a smaller scope, and therefore the same overall metabolism or size of the, you know, ecological niche was divided up among more species.

Agnes:

And this happened- Wait, wait, sorry. When you said smaller species, that confused me.

Robin:

Smaller number of members.

Agnes:

Ah, okay.

Robin:

Right. Species with fewer members.

Agnes:

Okay. So- Species with fewer members is more fragmented?

Robin:

Right, so if we imagine a million kinds of deer, they could have one species which has a million deer or 10 species, each of which has 100,000 deer. Then that second case would be more fragmented. Innovations in each species of the deer won't be able to pass on to the other species of deer.

Agnes:

Wait, but the deer, these are all different species of deer. So you're saying they can't mate with each other, these different species of deer. Exactly. OK. And so this is the difference between, I mean, deer isn't a genus, right? Or something bigger than a species, above species. And so it's that that's fragmented, not the species.

Robin:

Well, I'm just trying to compare two cases where, in one case, a bunch of animals are all in the same species, say a million animals all in the same species. And in another case, there's 10 species, each of which has 100,000 animals. OK. And now the same overall number of animals has two possible scenarios.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

One of which, because they're all in the same species, innovations can spread more easily among all those million animals. Whereas in the other case, they can only spread up to the boundary of the species, but we find it much harder to spread across that boundary.

Agnes:

Got it.

Robin:

But in the second case, there'll be more innovation in the different kinds of deer or different kinds of animal space in the sense of features that would be shared across an entire species.

Agnes:

And I mean, so wait, the second case is the more fragmented one.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

Okay. And is it that, so if you have the more fragmented one, you're saying there would be, it would be easier for an innovation to arise, which is gonna, be a change in the whole, in that small- An entire species, right.

Robin:

A thing that all the members of a species need to have in common, that kind of an innovation is more likely to arise in a world where there are just more species. But innovations that happen within a species where different members of the species can have different innovations, that's more likely to appear and spread when the species are larger and less fragmented.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

So this is a trade-off in innovation. There are two key kinds of innovation, and more of one makes less of the other. And the key parameter is how fragmented are the species.

Agnes:

Here's why that confuses me a little. You said that in the less fragmented group of animals, innovation spreads more easily.

Robin:

Of the first kind of innovation, but not the second.

Agnes:

Right, but if it spreads, then won't all the members have it?

Robin:

So yes, eventually. That's the idea. So over time, all of them would eventually have it. And that's the advantage, that an innovation that any one of them discover could then spread to all of them, but only up to the boundary of the species. Spreading innovations between species is much harder in biological innovations.

Agnes:

Right, and that's true in both cases.

Robin:

Right, but when the species are larger, they can go farther before they reach this boundary for the first kind of innovation, i.e. the within-species innovation. But sort of the species-defining features, the features that are the same for all members of the species, those kind of innovations, to have more of them, you just need more species. So in history of biology, The ocean is a place where species tend to be large. That is, many ocean areas are pretty similar to each other. And so a fish or whatever who can survive in one part of the ocean can survive in many other parts of the ocean. So the ocean tends to have large species. Land, however, tends to be more fragmented because, you know, there's valleys and there's hills and there's mountains and then there's, you know, deserts and, you know, swamps, etc. There's a lot of different kinds of niches which are limited spatially. And so that forces species to be smaller because they have a smaller spatial region in which they can exist. And at the border, they can no longer function because, say, this is no longer a swamp. It's a desert or something. And they're not designed to survive in those other environments. And on land, this is even more true near rivers. Rivers are especially places within a very short spatial distance. Things change a lot. That is, something that survives in a river doesn't really survive five feet up on the banks of the river. It only works in the river itself. And then rivers even change over the length of them in terms of whether they're slow and smooth versus steep and rough, things like that. So we see in the world, there are places where species are more naturally fragmented by geography, and there are other places where they are not. And the observation is that overall, more innovation seems to come from the fragmented places. And this suggests that that second kind of innovation is more important than the first, at least among biological evolution. which might be surprising because you might've thought, you know, the things that are in common across species, that wouldn't be as important as all those little details by which the members vary.

Agnes:

Right. Okay.

Robin:

This is the context. And then we want to make an analogy of human cultural evolution. So by analogy, humans are broken into cultures. That is groups of people who share a culture and interact a lot. And then other cultures where people don't interact as much across cultural boundaries. So we can think of, you know, especially the world of 10,000 years ago or even 3000 years ago is full of lots of little cultures. all around the world, where within each culture they spoke the same language, had similar religions, similar customs, dress, food, et cetera. And then innovations within a culture, say a different way to prepare a meat or something, could spread more easily within a culture. And then they were harder to spread across cultural boundaries because of language, distances, hostility, all sorts of reasons why it would be hard to spread innovations across cultural boundaries. And so now we'd have the same two trade-offs in human evolution in terms of innovation. Within a culture, the bigger the culture, the more in innovation, any one part of it could spread to the rest. But the less we could, humans could have learned things through the variation of cultures and new cultures appearing that have new features across the entire culture. And this would have just been a historical trade-off. And it's not obvious we would have gotten the trade-off right. But in history, when there were lots of small fragmented cultures, we could presume that cultural evolution of cultures was strong and that the cultures would have been very well adapted to their circumstances and very eagerly adopting innovations as they appeared. But that in that context, each culture wouldn't have accumulated very many innovations within itself in terms of how to do things. All right, so now the key context here is that in the last few centuries, first, we had the rise of nations. You and I read Peasants into Frenchmen recently. And before the rise of France, there were all these little local cultures that were pretty insular from each other. People lived in one little area, and they only knew people nearby, and they didn't travel very far. And they even had different languages and customs. And so France was a world of many cultures. And then after the transition, a nation was formed. And now they're Frenchmen, and now they share a culture across all of France. And that means they trade and travel farther, and they depend on each other more, and they make things in one place that are used in another. So they have a larger division of labor. And innovations that appear in any one part of France can more easily spread to all of France. And so there was the rise of the nation state a few centuries ago. And all around the world, nations arose, which produced these larger scale cultural integrations of nations. And this coincided with a rapid increase in innovation in the world of technology and firms and shipping and manufacturing and farming, all sorts of kinds of techniques.

Agnes:

Which is the opposite of what you would predict, right?

Robin:

No, it's exactly what I would predict.

Agnes:

Well, your biological analogy suggests that when you have bigger things, there's less innovation.

Robin:

Right. But if we're focused on one type of innovation, i.e. the within culture innovation, this theory says we should see more of that. And we did see more of that.

Agnes:

Okay. But if we just say overall innovation also increased.

Robin:

That's less clear. Right. So, right. So I want to focus your attention on sort of the micro, you know, the mechanics and production technologies and things like that. Those are the kinds of innovation that, in fact, increased a lot over the last few centuries. That is, we learned a lot about how to do many specific things, and we spread those fast. And so, first there's the rise of the nation state, and then there's also just the rise of world integration. That is, the world has become more integrated together over the last century, certainly, and certainly over the last half century, where not only do we trade across the world, we communicate and travel across the world. And as a result, we've even had more of a world culture. where especially among elites, elites often identify with elites elsewhere and less identify with the elites of other people of their own country. And we've had this increasing integration of world culture, which continues to coincide with rapid innovation of many kinds of particular details like transportation technology, computer technology, entertainment, et cetera, right? And that's all makes sense in the sense of thinking of all that as the sort of thing that, you know, innovates within cultures.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Okay. But now let's go think about the other kind of innovation, the kind of innovation that would be of features that cultures, you know, all the members of a culture would share. We might notice that, well, we've had change in the sense of the merging of cultures into nations and then into the world, but we haven't had that much new culture in terms of features that everybody shares that is we've had fewer species, if it were, of culture. And so that's mostly not what's changing or innovating. It's the many detailed things that we can share within a culture that has been the driving force of growth and innovation for the last few centuries.

Agnes:

So I find it a little bit hard to, um, classify some bit of innovation and try to decide which kind it should be. Let's take the musical innovations of the 1960s through, I don't know, 1980 or something. Which kind is that?

Robin:

So I think the key difference would be that innovations that are shared by a culture, there's gonna be strong pressures of conformity that keep everybody near some common norm. So, in music, you know, if we all, if there's a standard, say, set of scales of music, and you think, right, there's other possible scales of music, if we really don't like music that's in other scales, and we like the music of the scales we all share in our culture, then you might notice that, in fact, we haven't changed the scales of our music. But where it's okay as long as you stay within the scales to maybe innovate some new kinds of beats or new kinds of melodies or, you know, kinds of patterns. To the extent we don't have strong conformity pressures that suppress those kinds of variations. then people have been allowed to invent new songs and those new songs spread and then nations and then the world shares and benefits from the spread of these innovations of the kind of things we kind of allow to be different and vary. But say a different thing we don't vary is say You know, allowing say sex with children or sex with animals or something if there's a whole cultural taboo across the entire society against such things, then we're not going to have much innovation. In those things, because whenever a local variation appears, it gets squashed because the culture wants that to be uniform. It doesn't. Each culture wants to have that be common across the culture.

Agnes:

Right. Okay, good. So this helps me like actually, um, frame certain, sometimes I see certain like debates on Twitter that strike me as puzzling debates, like, uh, Is it terrible if somebody arranges their bookshelves by color? Sometimes people are outraged by this, by somebody, which I do this, I arrange my bookshelves by color, I arrange everything by color, so my books too, of course. And then there's always going to be the group of people who are just like, hey, let people live their lives, you know? And then the other people who are like, no, that's terrible. And now I see that what they're battling over is which kind of innovation this is. That is, if it gets itself classified as the within a culture kind, then we're going to be permissive about it and just let it spread as it wants to spread. But if it gets classified as the culture defining one, then everyone's got to fall into line. It's interesting to me that we seem to be able to actually be unsure about that and be in a state of kind of debate and embattlement about this question about a lot of different things. That is, this question seems to show up repeatedly. Which of these two categories does this innovation belong in? We're like fighting over it all the time. Anyway, does that seem, does that,

Robin:

But let me give another example just to make it clearer to you and the audience. A wonderful book by a guy named Stuntz, who is a Harvard law professor about the history of the law in the US. Actually, I should find the title here, too, because I have it. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. William Stuntz. His story was that the history of US law was that initially the US Constitution gave enormous discretion for states and localities to just have laws be different there. And the Constitution wasn't very constraining about those variations. And so that there was a lot of variation in the law around the United States. And so the definition of US legal culture was, you know, pretty tolerant and inclusive of a wide variety of changes. And then over time, particular moral crises appeared. like slavery but also prostitution and drugs from China and other sorts of things wherein some people in the country felt there was a moral outrage of people behaving badly and they pushed for suppressing this legal variation like if they didn't like prostitution they were going to make sure that nobody was allowed to have prostitution they don't like drugs are going to make sure nobody and same for slavery and that Supreme Court rulings that supported these moral campaigns then ended up restricting how states could be different in their law. And then now we have a much more constrained legal order, wherein the center has much more control over the states and localities in the US, because more and more issues were decided to be things the entire culture should share. In current culture should share its attitude on drugs and prostitution and slavery, etc. And once they were categorized by these moral companions as things we must all share must not allow local variation on. then there's less cultural innovation or variation in those things. Like once upon a time when prostitution could vary by state or county, then there would be cultural variation where even though in a county everybody had to have the same stance toward prostitution by the shared law, different counties could have different stances and therefore there could be cultural evolution and selection among some of them succeeding and others failing and copying and things like that. the more you suppress that variation, the more the entire United States has the same culture. And so then it's like having a larger species where more internal innovation can happen, but less large cultural scale innovation.

Agnes:

But there's also a bit of a paradoxical quantity, which is that It's like having a larger species, but we're moving more and more of these innovations to being species defining, right? And so we're taking the attitude that generally goes with a small species and we're applying it to a large species. Maybe the way to think about it is somehow, I don't know if there's any biological analog to that, but somehow like our environment changed, like we moved into the ocean or something. And so we, like, even though we're really big, where innovations are, I don't know, regulated in this way as though they were the innovations that pertain to a small.

Robin:

We are choosing more and more things to say they define our culture. Culture is defining more aspects of ourselves.

Agnes:

Right, which sounds like we're getting smaller and smaller, right? That would correspond, except we're not getting smaller. We're just behaving more and more like we're small, which is weird.

Robin:

I'm not actually sure that in biological species, larger species have more features, less features that define them. I think it's just more about an environment being more the same, typically. Right.

Agnes:

Right. And so that may be a way to think about it is that our environment is getting more and more the same.

Robin:

Or we are just following sort of moral habits of enforcing popular views on everyone. So we're just being less liberal.

Agnes:

But that might sort of be what it is for our environment to be the same somehow, like our cultural environment.

Robin:

Well, we are imposing it or something. But anyway, so there is this basic value question of whether we're making a good or bad choice here. And the usual framing of that is in terms of how confident are we in our morality? So this is basically the liberalism or tolerance question. To what extent can a society be composed of many subparts that have different attitudes toward morality and values and culture? And in the usual liberal society, the idea would be some sort of minimal set of requirements, the requirements that are the minimum necessary for us to all get along with each other and to function together as, say, different religions and different ethnicities, et cetera, have different cultures. but that we are in some sense becoming less liberal as we more decide that something that many of us share, say, disliking prostitution, must be something that we all share and sort of imposing more commonality on culture. And the usual moral framing would be, well, if we're pretty sure that that's in fact right, that prostitution is bad, then this is a good thing to be doing. And then the usual counter argument is, well, how short can you be you know different cultures see things differently aren't you being arrogant to impose the views of your cultures on others. This is the usual framing of this liberality or tolerance or diversity issue in terms of these choices.

Agnes:

um I mean. it seems to me that say we were more liberal and so we just allowed there to be some prostitution and some non-prostitution, that would be quite different from us becoming fragmented, right?

Robin:

No, it would be in the sense allowing each county to be different about prostitution would be a more of a fragmentation of of culture. That is, there would be more cultural evolution. That is, some places would try and some places wouldn't and then we might learn over time which places prospered more and people might copy the practices of the places that prospered more.

Agnes:

Okay, so then here I think I'm a bit confused because It seems to me that there is a difference. And this gets back to my original question about how we're defining species. There's a difference between something like, let's say we decide, look, some people want their bookshelves to be coded by color. Other people want them to be in alphabetical order. We just let people do what they want. We just let these innovations spread how they want. In that world, there is no species that is defined by the feature of having color-coded bookshelves. It's just the innovation spreads where it wants, and people can still... Right. Right? And that's, as I understand it, the liberal world. which is very different from the fragmented world in which there's some group of people who go and say, no, we're the rainbow bookshelf people, and we're not going to talk to or communicate too much with the non-rainbow bookshelf people. We're going to interact among ourselves. That's not the liberal world. And so it seems to me that us becoming more liberal would not be us becoming more fragmented. It would be us becoming less fragmented, but having more innovations that can spread within our culture without fragmenting us.

Robin:

So for colored bookshelves, let's imagine, you know, bookshelves composed of two things. There's the bookshelves themselves and the books themselves and say those can spread across a large scope, but there's the practice of colorizing bookshelves. And say, within a county, it might be a local culture there that everybody just has to colorize their bookshelves, because otherwise you'd be ashamed that people would laugh at yourselves as they came to your dinner. That would be a local culture promoting colorized bookshelves, which would be different than just an individual liking colored bookshelves. So we want to distinguish what level of innovation it's at. So that was where we started. There's two kinds of innovation. One kind of innovation would be in just individual practices, i.e. let everybody do with the bookshelves how they like. And another would be if there was a culture of pushing for either colored bookshelves or not, that would be at a cultural level.

Agnes:

OK, but that's. That's not something that you get by being permissive. That's like something you get by being impermissive. That is some group succinct. That's not the liberal world. That's the illiberal world.

Robin:

Well, but the idea is that say within a Jewish subculture, you could be shamed for not following the Jewish religion, but in the larger community, you're allowed to choose to be part of the Jewish subculture or not, same for Christianity or other ideas. So the idea of a liberal world was in part the idea that there could be these distinct subcultures and that within each culture, you would have different sets of norms. and that we could all get along by sharing a world where different subcultures still lived in the same cities and had the same criminal law systems and went to war together and things like that.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I think there's just a question in what sense do we live in the same world? Like, I think that with certain, you know, it depends which group of Jews you're thinking about, but like, if you take the most religious ones, most people would say they're illiberal. They don't go to war with the rest of us. They're in some sense, not part of our culture. We still might put up with them, like put up with their existence and say, we even, we value that they exist or whatever, but that's, there's a version of liberalism which sort of says, well, we all have these different commitments to, what is Rawls' phrase? Something like systematic doctrines or whatever. Like we all have these like religious beliefs or whatever, but like we come together as citizens. We sort of set those things aside. We set metaphysics aside. It's not really that important to us. And we can engage on this other level with one another and ignore the fact that we have these differences and live together in a substantive sense. on its other questions. And I think what you're really suggesting is something quite different, which is different little segregated societies that still have some way of letting each other exist, as they did in human beings 1,000 years ago. This is what was happening 1,000 years ago. Not a very liberal time, right? That's not the normal way to describe that time is liberalism. It's just that there was a great deal of variety and a great deal of intolerance. Intolerance is how you sustain the variety. But people didn't all just get rid of each other or kill each other so you could sustain the variety. But to me, that's not liberalism. That's something other than liberalism. It's variety.

Robin:

I don't much care whether the word liberalism applies, but I wanted to just highlight this concept of culture as a shared thing among a community.

Agnes:

That seems fine. The place where I objected was when you were moving from, oh, we're becoming more intolerant, for instance, about prostitution. And so if we became more tolerant and more liberal, we'd be moving towards this world. And what I'm suggesting is we'd be moving away from it. What we need is more intolerance. That is, we need more groups that are like, we absolutely, we're going to make our opposition to prostitution and pornography the core of our existence, and we're going to secede from the rest of society on the strength of that view. And that's illiberal.

Robin:

Right. But if the world, if, say, the Supreme Court declared that prostitution must be legal everywhere, then they wouldn't be allowed to prohibit it in their small part of the world.

Agnes:

Right. So they'd have to secede from the United States.

Robin:

Right. Or the United States could be more forgiving and allowing each little geographic area to have its own different laws.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And then each area could basically have a local culture that was different from other local cultures. And so the key concept that I'm trying to highlight here is the idea of not just individual practices, but cultural practices where a group of people together shares some norms such that they all think and do it roughly the same way. And that's the kind of thing that modernity might be not promoting or selecting as much. There might be much less cultural evolution. than there used to be, even though there's much more of the other kind of evolution in individual practices. So I want to highlight that we've made a trade off of modernity. We've got a lot more of the kinds of evolution and innovation of practices that can vary from individual to individual. But the kinds of things where a whole group, a culture together wants to be different together That's the kind of thing that the modern world isn't experimenting with as many variations on.

Agnes:

Right. And it seems to me, in fact, that the remnants of that or the traces where it can still be seen are the places where it can be monetized mostly for the purposes of tourism. So we're like, we want France to be French, because when we visit there, we're like, ooh, I'm tasting something different. So to that, there's some pressure holding these cultures and places, which is like, we want them to be different when we visit them. But of course, we all want to visit each other, and then that's going to dilute those differences. It's going to be like a front or something. It's almost like every village is a Potemkin village, putting forward their difference in order to attract the visitors who make it the same. It seems to me that the pressure that drives the homogenization is the pressure of culture is coordination. That is, I think you think, well, look, we could still cooperate and coordinate with each other enough to get the benefits of, say, economic exchanges while having groups of people who have these really strongly different moral principles. And I think that it's just not obvious that that's true. I'll take one example, because you're about to interrupt me, and that's my example, is that you and I have different practices, okay? We come from different cultures when it comes to interrupting. And, you know, one approach that we could take is like, I could just be permissive about your more interrupt-y culture, but that's not how I am. I'm like, no, Robin, I'm unwilling to communicate with you if you interrupt me, and I'm gonna lay down the law and I'm gonna force us to have one norm here that we both adhere to, because otherwise we can't like cooperate, coordinate. And I think, now you might think, but it's crazy to think that colored bookshelves are gonna be that, that I can't like, go over to someone's house if they have colored bookshelves because my eyeballs will fall out or something. But I think that we're experimenting with and we're sort of unsure about how much do we need to sort of line up in order to coordinate. And I think a lot of these pressures come from the coordination pressure.

Robin:

I want to admit there's likely a trade-off. That is, the more we allow different places to have different distinct cultures, then the harder it will be to share other kinds of innovations, just like with biology there you know the smaller species are in fact, less able to share innovation spread innovations farther. So, the analog there is there's two kinds of innovations and there's a trade-off, there's a key parameter. And if you turn that parameter, you get more of one and less of the other. And to make the analogy with culture, two different kinds of innovations. And in the last few centuries, we've turned up the dial a lot in one direction. So, we get a lot more of technology and entertainment and you know, wealth basically, it's kinds of, you know, organizations, all of that kind of innovation has been wonderful and vast, but the point is to notice that's coming at the expense of another kind of innovation, which is the innovation in cultures and their sort of shared cultural norms and practices. And now you might think, well, we seem to be doing fine, so maybe I guess that's just not very important among humans, even if it was important among biology. That might be a tempting conclusion to draw here from the fact that we seem to be getting rich and we like it, and we don't seem to be missing all the different cultural variation that much, so why is there a problem? And so this is where I mentioned that the reason I noticed this whole thing recently was that I noticed that fertility is declining worldwide, and there are these small number of exceptional places with high fertility, and they are very insular subcultures that are small and fragmented. And our theory of cultural evolution that we've discussed predicts this in the sense that if fertility is a culturally shared thing, that is, the values and norms of a culture tend to produce the average fertility of that culture, then, you know, when we have large cultures, they're going to have large shared levels of fertility, and we won't see much innovation in fertility variation among the large species or the large cultures, we would see a lot more among the few small fragmented cultures, because that's just where innovation happens more at the cultural level. So, and now once I realize I really value that fertility innovation, that is, I really don't like the fact the world is just declining in population, it looks like it'll just do that for many centuries, then I realize this, you know, these small fragmented subcultures which are very insular, i.e. they are very separate from other cultures by holding strong boundaries and resisting outside influence and being able to perpetuate themselves having a very different local culture. That is allowing them to have cultural innovation at the level of culture, and that's something you need a lot of if you're going to get fertility, i.e. variations of fertility that then produce selection to produce growth. And so that makes me more value cultural innovation, because I realize there's just even just one case where it matters a whole lot, and without it, you have very dire consequences.

Agnes:

Okay, so there's two things I want to ask you about. Okay, the first is just the idea that fertility is something where there could be variation in it makes sense when we're talking about that level of culture but at the level of biology. Isn't every species just trying to be as fertile as they can possibly be? There's variation in success or something because the more you've eaten off. But it's not like there's some group of dolphins that are just avoiding having children or something. So I actually don't understand, at a biological level, even the idea of variation in fertility.

Robin:

Well, in biology, there would certainly be variation in fertility strategies. So they say R versus K selection, whether you have many small kids or a few high investment kids. Do you have kids all year round or just in one season? Do you have special places you go dig a hole to raise kids versus do it elsewhere? There's a huge variation in fertility strategies in biology. those strategies could be counterproductive. And the way the biology works it out is through selections. So for example, there's a kind of turtle that meets in one spot in the ocean and where they all get together there to mate, right? So that's a shared species thing, right? Individual turtles can't really deviate from the fact that they all meet in one place to mate every year. They all have to show up there. So that's a feature of the entire species that is tied to fertility. And if that species makes a bad choice about that, then species selection will select those kind of turtles out, but individual selection among turtles within the species won't do that. It'll have to be something that treats the whole species and makes it rewarded or not that will produce species-level variation and that sort of thing.

Agnes:

Right, so what we have to say is that many of the people in the society deciding not to have kids, and then also many of the ones who decided to have kids deciding to have fewer kids is our fertility strategy. And it's a poor strategy, as it turns out. That's the idea. That would be a fertility strategy is to not do much fertility. And predictably, it doesn't work out.

Robin:

Fertility varies a lot by culture, and we can already see a lot of details of which cultural factors promote fertility or hinder it. And so there's just a lot of variation in cultures in various elements that promote or hinder fertility. But when we're all part of one big world culture, then they'll just be the one big choice of that. And we all will go along with the consequences of that. But when there's many fragmented cultures, then some of them may fail, but others succeed because of there'll be selection at the cultural level for the ones that have a practice that works out in increasing the population.

Agnes:

OK, good. OK, now I have another question. One thought you might have is that this move towards a more globalized world has, we've all landed on a particular fertility strategy, namely not having many kids. And that one happens to be a poor strategy. You end up with very few kids. But we could have had a big global culture that landed on one of the really fertile ones. That's option one. Option two is, no, actually, conceptually, there's some kind of pressure where Coordinating at this giant scale, we're gonna end up on one of the lower fertility strategies. I'm curious whether you a priori have a view on that question.

Robin:

So I guess one way to think about it is in the space of possible cultures, how many of them are how bad? That is, are good cultures rare in the space of possible cultures or are they plentiful? So what you can tell from cultural evolution is that when you have just many small fragmented cultures, each of which is undergoing a lot of selection pressure. if they start to move away from the functional variations, then those cultures will just go away. And because you're repeatedly pushing them to, holding them to account to some measures of success, then in a world of many small fragmented cultures, they are roughly gonna be in a good state in terms of being able to promote that culture, including fertility. then as, say, a small tiny culture grows and merges with other ones and moves up in strange unknown directions, the more unlikely any one random place in cultural space is to be healthy, the more likely it is that random drift would just take you to bad places. Now if most places are good, then random drift will mostly take you to good places, but if in the space of culture most of the spots are not very good then there's just more likely you're going to randomly drift to some place that's not so good. If you were right close to the edge of starvation or something, or the edge of winning or losing wars, you would quickly be brought back to some sort of discipline by those sort of competitive pressures. But in the last few centuries, we've been getting rich and more peaceful. And so the idea is if the world culture gets dysfunctional, it doesn't immediately get disciplined. It's mainly gonna be disciplined through this long-term process of just declining population, but that's gonna take centuries.

Agnes:

Yeah, so I see that that's one way that you could give that answer, that is the answer that it would be predictable that we, maybe there are many bad spots and so we drifted to one of them. I was thinking that it's at least possible, I don't see a strong argument for this, but it's possible that the connection is deeper. I think so too.

Robin:

So I have a hypothesis about how it might be, but I just thought, that might be a distraction from the larger issue to go into why exactly it might be more systematic than in fact we are having lower fertility. So I have a story about that, but I worry about distracting us from the other topics here.

Agnes:

Okay, well maybe, so maybe we'll, like, I mean, this will help in terms of, maybe you'll want to say that, but let me tell you my other sort of observation. it's like I could translate everything you said and it almost sounds to me like a giant like invective against globalization and capitalism and gains from trade and like all the people who are like um cultural appropriation, all the people who are on the other side from you as an economist, now suddenly you're joining their team. And the thought is like, oh, well, the benefits of cooperation and gains from trade are actually outweighed by the secret mystery value of the inner truth of the local culture. And so I kind of just wanted to frame it that way for a minute, just so that our listeners would be appropriately shocked by what you're saying.

Robin:

I'm shocked myself, which is why I'm talking about this.

Agnes:

And I think, sorry, and here's why it matters whether it's more systematic. Because if you think that somehow it's not an accident, but rather that when we just start trying to coordinate at this scale, then you really think that our devastation is actually being produced by cooperation on some level.

Robin:

We're focusing on one kind of cooperation at the expense of another, or one kind of evolution of these.

Agnes:

So that's why I'm- Large scale cooperation, and ever larger scale, right? Over ever greater distances.

Robin:

Right, but I would still put the blame on the attempts to force the larger community to share more culture, rather than just share a space of trade.

Agnes:

Yeah, so that's where I think you're trying to stake out some kind of liberal position where there isn't any. That is, the attempts to force is just the spread of more coordination. That's just what it looks like. No one's forcing anyone to do anything. We're settling on an equilibrium. And some of that settling on equilibrium involves, like, people having angry faces or doing mean things to people. That's always been the way it goes, right? But as we become more, like, you know, coordinating over larger spaces with more and more people, we become more and more alike. And then we also start to police the forms of being alike, it seems to me.

Robin:

So take the example of organ sales, buying organs from people. Now, in principle, the world could allow that to vary. It could be different in different parts of the world. Some places you could allow organ sales, others not. But it turns out that there is a global community of bioethicists who because they are part of a shared community have a shared norm about that. And they are shared cultural norm is that it's disapproved. And because of that, basically it's disapproved everywhere in the world. The only partial exception is Iran, which only allows organ sales at a set price by the government for, you know, and it's very controlled market. And even that bioethicists are getting together all the time and talking about how are they gonna make Iran stop? So it's part of the sense that the bioethicists have a shared culture, which includes a shared morality, and then that makes them try to suppress variation that otherwise could exist.

Agnes:

Right. So I think that in raising that, like, as an issue, like, the world in which everyone was more tolerant isn't the world in which there's tons of fragmentation. And so, like, it seems to me that that situation is kind of, you know, we get caught up in the paradox of liberalism, basically, which is that we We want to be intolerant of intolerance. And, you know, like, there are certain things where it's going to be beyond the pale and we have to somehow make a decision there about what's going to fall into that. But I guess I really think that the standard set of like, you're bringing two things together that I don't think go together. One is the standard set of libertarian talking points, where it's like, why can't we let there be organ sales in some places, or even if you don't want them everywhere, in some places? And this other thought, which is super anti-libertarian, and is saying, maybe we should just allow the world to go back. to when there was no liberalism and people could like constrain people from getting gains from trade so that they were locked into their particular culture and that's not that's not being liberal and permissive.

Robin:

Well but so these are two different kinds of libertarian concepts which have often been in conflict with each other and I'm happy to highlight the difference here and say I'm taking one side, not the other.

Agnes:

But what I'm saying is, I think that getting all the bioethicists to allow, if we convinced people of that set of libertarian arguments, and they allowed organ sales in some places or whatever, we would not be moving towards more fertility, in my view.

Robin:

Well, we could be allowing more cultural variation more ways in which local cultures could be different. And that's so for, I mean, let's let's take the Amish, for example.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

There's a sense in which the Amish are just violating a lot of these norms that many people feel strongly about and it's just kind of hard to understand why they're being allowed to be so different. That is, they don't educate their children as much. They don't let their kids exposed to more variety of culture and the world. There's just a sense in which they are a very insular culture that very much constrains members' behaviors in ways that violates many of the larger liberal norms about how individuals ought to be treated. Even by a local subculture is there a sense of which if an individual parent was treating their kids like that separately from the religion, they might well be called mistreating their kids and then my kids might be taken away from them. There's a way in which they're allowed to be more different because they are seen as this special culture than individuals would allow. And so that, in some sense, you know, the question is, how much of that is the world going to allow?

Agnes:

Right, so I think you should think of it as cultural secession, right? So we like allow the They're not fully succeeding.

Robin:

They're allowed to live here and trade with people and pay taxes and things like that.

Agnes:

To some degree, but this works partly because they themselves place a whole bunch of limits on how much they're willing to trade with people, how much they're willing to interact.

Robin:

But that produces fertility. So the higher level observation is just Again, there's two kinds of innovation. In the last few centuries, we've got gangbusters of one type at the expense of less of the other type. You might think the other type doesn't really matter that much, but with respect to fertility, it matters enormously. And that makes you realize maybe there's a lot of other stuff that matters for it that we're also missing. And that's the overall message to get across here. This is a, maybe if not a mistake of modernity, a big risk modernity is taking, promoting one kind of innovation at the expense of another. And that seems to be realized in our fertility mistake, which if we allow say the Amish or ready Jews or whatever to be different, then they will save us from that mistake eventually. And then the question is how will they deal with this trade-off between you know, the different scales of innovation.

Agnes:

Right, right. Because perhaps it'll just be the same thing happens all over again. They grow big, they decide they want to, you know, all cooperate. And then, you know, some some sprouts have to grow up and it'll be like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. We just repeat this thing over and over again. Right.

Robin:

I mean, that's why I'm trying to draw a lesson here. I was saying once we understand this, maybe we should realize that we should push against our natural inclinations and move more to a world where, in fact, we promote and tolerate at least more cultural variation, more distinctive cultures that do things different, but still can mix with the rest of us by trading with us.

Agnes:

I think that actually maybe we already are pretty tolerant of that. It's just that there are very, very few such groups. So there may be some people who want to do organ sales, right? But they haven't gotten themselves together into the organ sales community that's going to be united on this one question, and we're all going to live together and whatever.

Robin:

And that's really hard to do, right? Right, right. But the issue might not be that we're not tolerant. The issue is not that we're not tolerant. That is, it might be that, say, before the Amish got this big, we were very intolerant of them when they were only 500 people or something, and we should have been more tolerant of groups that size so that they could grow into bigger ones.

Agnes:

Right, but that's probably not going to come by way of us changing our minds about organ sales, right? Because these little groups, they're going to look like maybe cults or whatever. So it'll probably be more like tolerance of cults. So I feel like you should spell out the implications. I think spelling out the implications of you in terms of the organ sales thing is just very confusing. We could become super tolerant about that. I wouldn't help. But yeah, I think that we look down on cults, but maybe you're like, well, cults are the future because they're these potential insular communities. And so we need to protect crazy offshoots. The problem is that sometimes we're scared they're going to become violent or whatever. So we need to somehow be able to judge.

Robin:

They are violent sometimes.

Agnes:

Right. There you go.

Robin:

right so the idea is we should just once we realize the high value that cults can achieve we might should be more tolerant of cults and more willing to accept their costs so it's just like say high art you and i discussed before basically there are these high artists who have achieved great art in our world and people there's the standard story that artists like are difficult to deal with, and have more perversions, and are more selfish, and more trouble to be around, and more disruptive. But we decide that because art is valuable, we're going to more tolerate the disruptions, even of unsuccessful artists, even of the ones who don't become famous. We're just going to be more forgiving of artists. And you might want to have the same attitude toward cults. Once you realize just what cults can achieve and how important they are when they successfully achieve high cultum, we will want to be more supportive and forgiving of cults. Even maybe give them a tax exemption. I came up with your slogan.

Agnes:

Your slogan is cultivate cults. That's your solution to the fertility problem.

Robin:

Well, not just the fertility, just all of the other ways in which we might be missing cultural evolution, right? We're just missing out on other kinds of cultural variation and not exploring the space of possible cultures and culture ways to explore the space of possible cultures.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean, I think that, right. So I think that the, you know, the, the kind of stuff we're going to have to tolerate, um, It's going to look to people, and I will go for the farce and say it will be child abuse. That is sort of the intentional kind of seclusion of children from, you know, a set of opportunities.

Robin:

sexual abuse in the sense of people, right?

Agnes:

And career abuse? Because it's going to come of them. Yeah. No, that's interesting. I mean, that's an interesting conclusion placed to land from the fertility problem. I feel like you had these temporary allies in the kind of, you know, Catholic, religious Catholics, who are into having a lot of kids. They thought you were their friend for a little while. I think you're about to part ways with them.

Robin:

Well, but to many people, those kind of Catholics are cultists.

Agnes:

Oh, absolutely. But they may not be as friendly to the new ones, the fresh ones. No one likes the new cults, the ones that are just coming into being, because that's when they're at their craziest.

Robin:

Raises the issue. I long ago realized there is not a natural alliance amongst contrarians. From a distance, it feels like, oh, you weird people should get along with those other weird people because you're both weird. But weird people do not generally want to get along with other weird people. They usually want to say, the way I'm weird, it looks weird to you, but it really makes sense. And that's why it's a different kind of weirdness than all these other kinds of weirdnesses. Was where people wanted to distance themselves from all the other kinds of weirdnesses, because they want to say my weirdness is exceptional. You will eventually come to accept my thing as not weird. You happen to see it weird. Now that's a mistake. And I'm going to try to persuade you to see it otherwise.

Agnes:

Correct. So are we a, Are we do we instantiate this rule or are we an exception to it?

Robin:

Are we weird?

Agnes:

Yes, we are both weird in different ways. Yes. Okay. Both weird in different ways.

Robin:

And, uh, we have probably found a exceptional alliance. I mean, you and I would each claim that we aren't naturally affiliated with generic weird people. We've only happened to find this other particular weird person and find something in them that we think is actually not justly seen as weird. As we know that we are different.

Agnes:

I think you are weird. I mean, I'm not sure we have an alliance.

Robin:

Well, maybe we don't. That's what I'm saying. I'm not sure.

Agnes:

Maybe we're just instantiating the rule, which is why we disagree so much. I don't know.

Robin:

But we're at least sharing a podcast together and sharing these conversations together.

Agnes:

Yep. OK, I feel like that's a good place to end.

Robin:

All right. Until next time, bye, fellow weirdo. Bye.