Why are we so loyal to our cultures? To ask this question is to ask about the origins of culture and cultural diversity—and about the very purpose of culture. Given that there really is no such thing as a person outside of culture, what we are ultimately asking is what it means to be human.
In Wired for Culture, Mark Pagel describes cultures as survival vehicles. In the same way that organisms are survival vehicles for genes, cultures are survival vehicles for individuals. Culture provides the infrastructure for daily existence. Those who share a common culture, for example, share a common language, religion, foods, dress, attitudes, and beliefs. These commonalities are most evident in small, homogeneous populations similar to those in which humans originally evolved: tribes. Indeed, Pagel calls tribes “cultural survival vehicles.” A culture is most likely to survive intact under tribal conditions since outside influences are minimized. Loyalty to culture, Pagel argues, encourages people to behave more tribally; we close ranks to protect culture and seek to preserve it, sometimes with extreme means.
Pagel asserts that we are loyal to culture for the same reason our genes are loyal to our bodies. We are loyal because, in our evolutionary past, those who were loyal to culture survived. Nature favors survival not of the fittest necessarily, but of the most cooperative.
Humans are ultrasocial mammals. This ultrasociality is an evolved trait, likely a product of social learning, which causes us to mimic people around us; language, which allows us to engage in unambiguous cooperation and reciprocation (p. 221); and self-domestication, which allows us to be less violent to members of our own tribes or cultures (pp. 99–131). Together, these processes facilitate enhanced cooperation, further aided by the development of a reputation marketplace (altruism). This, in turn, has been augmented by the invention of money, since “money, like reputation, is an abstract system of trust” (p. 219). Indeed, Pagel argues, the presence of social learning “established the need for systems of exchange and cooperation; in short, that established the need for a social brain” (p. 254).
One of the consequences of humans evolving to be good imitators, however, is that we are very bad innovators (p. 340). Very few people are highly creative innovators, and those who are typically find themselves branded as social outcasts. Most people simply copy what others are doing, assuming that following what the majority does must be a successful strategy. Innovation, on the other hand, seems to make things worse, not better. Thus, by challenging the consensual way of doing things, creativity tends to undermine ultrasociality. This is why new ideas are typically met with anger and ridicule. Only when proven better are novel ideas copied by everyone else.
As human cultures have grown in size and density of population, greater numbers of creative people come into contact, generate new ideas, and introduce innovations. At the same time, most cultural evolution emerges through a combination of cultural learning and spontaneous adaptations, or mutations (random errors), some of which stick. This is the most common way social systems change over time, with most people adhering to tradition and a few changes taking place by mistakes that others find work better (p. 240). Combine rare innovations with common mutations, Pagel maintains, and you get a system of growth characterized by punctuated equilibrium—precisely what we see in the areas of wealth generation and technological innovation.
For this growth of cooperation to happen, high levels of trust are necessary. But whom to trust? Pagel suggests that adhering to religious, cultural, and social beliefs, especially the most “ridiculous” ones, signals group membership and thus trustworthiness. Group memberships, including ethnic and religious ties, may be signaled as obviously as forms of dress or as subtly as noticing that the person sitting next to you in the café is reading Coleridge. (“Oh, I see you are a member of the poetry-reading tribe!”) This trust, though, can be exploited by cheaters and free riders. Social cheating required the evolution of improved deception-detection (p. 313). But deception can also prevent free riding, Pagel notes. While we may want others in our tribe to copy our successful strategies—and we certainly want to be able to copy theirs—we may not want those outside our tribe to copy us (pp. 336–338). Being able to detect deception could help reveal successful strategies others are attempting to hide, which could in turn improve the odds of survival. The upshot of all this detection and calculation was an even larger, more flexible, more social brain.
Given our innate tendency towards tribalism, how can one explain what is perhaps the most obvious feature of modern society—that we live in social configurations exponentially larger than tribes? Pagel argues that societies can expand beyond tribal size because “we have evolved rules and dispositions that allow us to exchange goods and services with people we have never met” (p. 347). If our hypersociality is a consequence of selection for those best able to exchange with strangers, this may suggest that legislation restricting or prohibiting mutual exchange is antisocial in nature and, thus, immoral, particularly if we understand morality as being grounded in sociality and trust. Pagel maintains that large-scale societies
naturally emerge by taking advantage of three properties they all seem to share: one is that they emerge from local rules; the second is that there can be some surprising efficiencies of larger groupings; and the third is social viscosity, or our tendency to maintain local ties within a larger society. The first of these allows larger societies simply to emerge so long as they pay their way; the second tells us how they pay their way; and the third shows us how our tribal psychology can still operate in a larger society. Revealingly, it is also these three features that oppressive and dictatorial regimes attack or exploit to break down a society and hold it within their grip (p. 349).
These are scale-free mechanisms that allow highly complex social orders to emerge through self-organization. On the hostile side of the ledger, Pagel observes, “oppressive and dictatorial regimes” must attack and break down these features to rule. Self-organization undermines such regimes.
This gets us to the underlying biopolitics of Pagel’s book. Pagel argues that followership is associated with social learning (p. 362). This ironically allows anyone who is a weaker social learner to gravitate toward a leadership role. Further, “the cooperative enterprise of society is always finely balanced between the benefits that derive from cooperation on the one hand and the benefits that derive from trying to subvert the system toward your own gain without being caught overpowered” (p. 363).
Despite today’s rampant political polarization, Pagel is optimistic that “the very feature of our social existence that makes us unique—our ability to cooperate with others—makes us uniquely among the animals capable of moving beyond the divisive politics of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism” (p. 368). This is because “the returns of cooperation, trade, and exchange that derive from that part of our nature” have historically overcome racism and xenophobia, and are likely to continue to do so (p. 369). But that also means being aware that politicians will always try to exploit those drives for their own gain. So long as we continue “to provide or somehow create among people stronger clues of trust and common values” (p. 369), that is, better institutions, we will one day have a culture that finally overcomes politicians’ ability to exploit these aspects of human nature.
Overall, Pagel’s book is an excellent synthesis of the current work on culture and our evolved psychology, which, because of that synthesis, results in some real insights. The book is clearly written, and its audience is clearly the intelligent layperson. However, the considerable amount of original insights makes it well worth the time of any social scientist or humanities scholar.
