“Lastly, habit in the individual would ultimately play a very important part in guiding the conduct of each member; for the social instinct, together with sympathy, is, like any other instinct, greatly strengthened by habit, and so consequently would be obedience to the wishes and judgment of the community.”
-Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Culture exists, and with it a “meme-pool”, so to speak, analytically independent of any one human being. One of the most important features of this meme-pool is a set of general rules and common practices pervading the society superseding any one person within it. It could even be said that these habits are memes that invade the minds of those that are surrounded by them, and program, so to speak, to follow the behavioral specifications that are constituted by that meme. It is no wonder that Charles Darwin noted in The Descent of Man that the human being was more an animal of habit than one of reason (a theme Friedrich Hayek picked up on in the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty). After all, most actions within human life do no find their motivation in rational calculation à la Thornstein Veblen's caricature of the lightning rod calculator. Even when most of us do deliberate, the deliberation is not between the whole range of possible options, but between what we normally choose from (and perhaps that new ethnic restaurant if we're feeling daring).
We are not only creatures of habit because of an inner anxiety that makes us cleave to what is the norm which has yet to not placate us, even when that satisfaction is lukewarm at best. Instead, it is within our very genetic programming to adopt the habits of our surrounding society and to stick to them. It makes sense from a purely evolutionary point of view that such behavior would be selected for because those ancestral hominids (let's not discount the possibility actual cultural evolution, to differentiate between the simple existence of culture and its adaptation across time, may have happened with other species of Homo) who adopted the local culture would have a survival edge over those who did not.
After all, culture does not simply exist for no reason. The practices that dominate within a culture did not simply randomly assume a position of dominance; rather, it was by their adoption in lieu of others and their ability to out compete them for places within minds that they become dominant. Culture, once understood as something more than human artistry, is a record of what solutions have solved problems in the past (think of tradition as problem-solving). Whether it is the clothing culture being a record of what has served people well in the past for protecting themselves against their surroundings or a food culture being a record of what has served well for nutrition, culture points the way for well-serving practices. Those who do not conform to the local culture and insist on reinventing the wheel (or more accurately for the case in point: rediscovering the best hunting techniques) will be unable to learn from culture. Since culture is a record of previous best-practices, the democracy of the dead to cite G.K. Chesterton, those who are most apt to learn from it are those who will, on average, thrive. Ergo, the human propensity to conform plays the very important role within human society of ensuring that most people within that society will adopt what has emerged as the best-practices within it, and thereby be able to thrive.We are left with the co-evolution of the possibility of cultural evolution with the natural selection of the most reproductively successful hominids. Natural selection has selected our genes so that we are, by our very biological disposition, easily programed by the memes of the surrounding culture. In addition, the prevalence of coordination games that rely on conventions as solutions in advanced patterns of cooperation mean that for Homo sapiens to be a truly cooperative animal, she has to quickly be able to pick up on the surrounding cultural practices that constitute those solutions. Even the possibility of human cooperation in complicated networks of exchanges is conditioned upon the human capability of playing the conventional equilibrium informed by culture to countless coordination games in her interactions with her neighbors.
It is quite amazing that the biological dispositions of an ape chosen for by natural selection could, due to certain dispositions selected for, harness culture and with that advanced forms of cooperation to remake the world in its image.
Comments