We often tend to believe that tendencies in cultural evolution are generally improvements that are often inevitable given enough time. However, in the past decades, we have seen trends that many of us would consider cultural deterioration, like increasing desecularization in many places all over the world and taking away women’s rights. People inside a given culture have different values and tendencies (e.g. conservatives and liberals) and any given culture can dynamically shift between different poles. Where do our polarities come from? I have argued that they come from the evolutionary tendencies we have inherited from our subsistence strategies: foraging, farming and herding. In order to understand which direction change is taking, we have to understand the elements of these subsistence strategies in our own culture.
All civilisations develop from farming societies, so let’s start by comparing what Western cultures and farming cultures have in common when compared to hunter-gatherer (HG) cultures:
- Hierarchies in institutions (school, etc.) and jobs
- Religion is organised and hierarchical
- Most jobs are routine (e.g. 9-5) and repetitive
- More working hours (hunter-gatherers (HGs) don’t work more than 20 hours per week)
- Striving for wealth and status is a good thing (discouraged in HGs)
- Gender roles are more clearly defined
- High need for security and defence
In general, Western culture does not share a lot of features with farming cultures. As Joseph Henrich put it, it is an outlier in the anthropological record or WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic). Of course, people in subsistence cultures are not highly educated, industrialised or rich. However, when it comes to being democratic we are easily beaten by egalitarian hunter-gatherers. So, let’s compare now what Western culture shares with foraging cultures as opposed to farming cultures:
- High degree of egalitarianism
- Less nepotism
- Less endogamy
- Women have equal rights
- Higher degree of mobility
- More varied and balanced diet
- Lower fertility rates
- More permissive child reading
- No child labour
- Fatherers are typically more involved in parenting (alloparenting in HGs)
- Less routine work (work is less and more irregular in HGs)
- More cognitive work (e.g. tracking = detective work)
These are a lot of admirable traits that our Western culture shares with foraging cultures and in fact a lot of cultural progress has been due to making our Western culture more like a foraging culture and less like a farming culture. I have argued that most of Henrich’s WEIRDness actually comes from strong historic foraging movements in our Western Culture: education, democratisation and innovation were mostly driven by this forager element or forager types. These were all important factors in making the West rich, even though material wealth itself is not a forager value but was driven by farmer industriousness and herder competitiveness.
The Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map (see above) can in fact be understood as deriving its dimensions from farming (tradition/safety), foraging (secular) and herding (self-expression) cultures.
South East Asian and many African countries lean heavily towards farming cultures, whereas Latin America tends towards the extraversion of herder cultures. Of course, no country really represents a foraging culture, however, we can see it in many movements. Buddhism, for example, is a culture that is highly influenced by forager values.
Check out my book Mapping Human Nature and Culture: Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists for more:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LSF98WV
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