From Natural Mystery to Social Mystery
How the human cognitive challenge has changed
For most of human history, coping with our natural environment was relatively difficult, and coping with our social environment was relatively easy. For modern people, this is reversed.
For primitive people, the natural world is mysterious. Sometimes it is benevolent, and sometimes it is threatening. Weather can be pleasant, or it can be harsh and miserable. Food can be abundant or scarce, depending on factors beyond one’s control. Plants can supply nourishment or be poisonous. Other animals can be helpful or be predators. Diseases seem to come from nowhere, and cures are unreliable.
Our primitive explanations for natural phenomenon invoked spirits. There were human-like agents that caused rain or sickness. Today, we would say that to the primitive mind, the world seems enchanted.
The enchantment went away gradually (think of the discoveries of the Greeks) and then suddenly, during what we call the scientific revolution. Thanks to our accumulated knowledge, we have been able to insulate ourselves from the dangers faced by our primitive ancestors. We have been able to overcome famine, challenging weather, and disease.
Part of our success in mastering the natural world is due to our ability to cooperate at large scale. This has made our social world much more complex.
In a primitive band, it is relatively easy to assess our social world. There is very little mystery in the psychology of those around us. Just about everything we need to know about other people we can learn by observing who is cooperative and who cheats. We can tell when someone is acting against our interests. When one person is too strong and too selfish, we can readily form a coalition against that person.
In large, modern societies, the social environment is much more complex. There are many ways in which a cheater may appear to be a cooperator, and vice-versa. We have evolved cultural institutions that are supposed to steer people toward pro-social actions. But those institutions are complicated, imperfect, and subject to corruption and breakdown.
Our thick culture is like a house that protects us from the natural world. But it is filled with strange gadgets and hazardous implements that can harm us, both individually and collectively.
I believe that when we look at our thick culture, we are like primitive people looking at nature. We interpret phenomena by invoking “climate change” or “artificial intelligence” or “social media” or “the science,” much in the way our ancestors invoked spirits to explain drought or sickness.
Economics, psychology, and other social sciences give us some insight into the world that our culture has created. But I think that the complexity of culture has far outpaced whatever understanding we have gained, and that it will continue to do so.
And while natural world enchantment evokes humility in the face of non-human forces that feel unknowable and uncontrollable, social world enchantment evokes hubris in the face of social forces that feel knowable and controllable.
An Alcorn hypothesis, inspired by Arnold Kling's various blogposts about Dunbar's Number, evolutionary psychology of cooperation in early human bands, and challenges of cooperation within complex modern societies:
(Dunbar's Number i= several dozen people.)
a) In some contexts of rivalry or competition between organizations, whose membership does not exceed Dunbar's number, behaviors will tend to be regulated informally by an intense thicket of norms that mimic the social psychology of early human bands. For example, think of college sports teams and greek-letter orgs on campus.
b) These norms will be excessively controlling (and so partly dysfunctional) in two ways:
-- The norms will be overkill because the stakes are low compared to the survival stake that fostered intensive norms in early human bands. For example, members internalize norms of collective punishment of individual wrongdoing: players who are punctual must run laps while the player who is tardy watches. For another example, on women's teams and in sororities, norms emerge that bar members from dating anyone who was previously in a relationship with a teammate.
-- The norms are at odds with liberal principles of individual accountability in civil society. Moreover, it is questionable whether the norms improve team performance at all. For example, time and energy for symbolic collective punishment have opportunity costs, given that practice time is finite.
c) The dysfunctional norms emerge naturally and constitute an equilibrium because they are hard-wired in evolutionary psychology and are activated in Dunbar's Number contexts of intensive internal cooperation and rivalry versus other orgs or teams.