Modern Culture Trends

I’ve written lots on specific centuries-long culture trends, and also on their plausible drivers. But let me now try to pull that together, into an overall summary of as many trends as I can find, organized by their likely strongest drivers. I see six key drivers.

1. Learn - We learn more about our world.

We’ve learned to doubt magical or supernatural events and processes, making our world seem less enchanted and transcendent. We more trust science and professional experts, relative to religion, tradition, and power. Learning of germs, we’ve focused our purity rituals on germ cleaning. Learning more about mental interiors, these have become more central to our fiction and our moral ideals, and we’ve become more tolerant of the mentally ill. As medicine is now more effective, we use it more.

2. Econ/tech - We find more tech, and grow our economies.

Clocks let us be more punctual, while new systems of measurement and naming let us find and compare things more widely. We buy more stuff instead of making it, and work more at jobs, first men and then women also. We are less wary of private property, interest, and market prices. We live more densely, travel further, and move home more to get better jobs, so we know our neighbors less. We talk to and get more news from further away, are more open to change, and give more status to innovation. We less interact with, rely on, and feel obligated to kin.

Our organizations are larger, and more often for-profit. Our more capable governments take on more roles, including protecting us from many harms. With more reliable law, we settle fewer disputes personally, and our more complex world has more complex rules. Our kids do less work and more school, as that helps shape and train them for modern jobs. School makes our thinking more reductive, abstract, and analytical, and less holistic and dialectical. Formal insurance, via both the market and state, makes us safer, and displaces family and neighbor risk-sharing.

3. Egalitarian - We more avoid creating or accepting inequality.

We avoid suggesting people are less valuable due to their family, age, gender, race, class, sexual preference, colony status, or disability status. We avoid norms, rules, and official choices that depend directly on such features. We repudiated slavery, colonialism, inherited aristocracy, and formal gender rules. We’ve replaced monarchy with democracy, prefer juries to judges in law, and are more sympathetic to rebels against authority. We try to treat nature and animals more respectfully.

4. Lazy/selfish/myopic - We more do what takes less effort or discipline.

We work less, leisure more, wait longer to marry, and have fewer kids then, using contraception as desired. We have fewer norms and rules that limit words, clothes, and interactions, and we less celebrate self-control. We are more sexually promiscuous, and more accepting of diverse sexual practices and recreational drugs. We less push individuals to sacrifice for communities, are more pacifist and less war-like, and we choose more privacy and personal space. We seek comfort, happiness, and fun more than honor, duty, and achievement.

5. Signal - We do more than is otherwise cost-effective, to look better.

We over-insure, do way too much medicine, make stuff too safe, punish too little, and avoid punishing physically, all to show that we care. We do too much school, and over-clean, to seem smart, conscientious and conformist. We over-consume, to show off wealth and identities. We follow fashion, and see too much art and news, to seem smart and well-connected. We invest more in fewer kids, to make better looking kids. We seek variety, and avoid sameness, to show authenticity, creativity, wealth, curiosity, and courage. We make overly-complex rules and regulations, to seem smart.

6. Other Enjoy - We do what we enjoy, even if that isn’t adaptive.

We choose our own marriages, instead of having them arranged, with mates of more similar ages. Our work gives us more meaning and satisfaction. We consume far more fiction and music. We over-eat, and let our personalities be more gendered. With fewer huge disasters, we less seek religion’s comfort. Being rich makes us feel high status, and so we try to be leaders via paternalism, governance, and cultural activism.

Notice that while the first two drivers more plausibly result in adaptive changes, the last four drivers less plausibly do so, more plausibly resulting from increased wealth plus relaxed selection pressures. I intend to edit this as I learn more; did I miss key trends or drivers?