Chapter 2: Static Societies

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Transcript

In ancient societies, life was remarkably predictable. People were born and died under much the same moral values, ways of living, technology, and political systems. Contrary to romantic notions of simpler times, this stagnation was a living hell. Without progress, suffering remained constant. All sources of evil—famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids—cause suffering only until we create the knowledge to prevent them. As we’ll see, these primitive, static societies were tragically effective at suppressing the only means by which people acquire such knowledge: creativity.

Take Sparta in the fifth century BC—a prime example of a static society. Sparta was frozen in time, ruthlessly stamping out creativity and individual thought. The Spartan education system molded children into extremely obedient soldiers, with hardly a creative or disobedient bone in their body. Historian Donald Kagan describes it perfectly, “What are the qualities that are supposed to be produced by this system?...Every aspect of your life is governed by the laws and the customs of the community. You better conform; there is nothing else for you…Obedience to your superiors…uniformity. You are all just like one another, you go through exactly the same experiences; there’s no distinction among you.” In Sparta, little ever changed or improved. Its citizens rarely considered that progress was possible—or even desirable. 

But how did Sparta—and other static societies—maintain this iron grip on their people? The answer lies in the power of memes—not internet jokes, but units of cultural transmission: ideas, behaviors, and traditions that spread within a culture.

Much like genes, memes compete for survival. What makes one meme successful over others? According to Richard Dawkins, it’s the ability of a meme to change its holder’s behavior in a way that ensures its own transmission. Memes are, in a sense, “selfish.” They spread not because they benefit individuals or society, but because they compel behaviors that make them more likely to be passed on.

For example, many Spartan soldiers likely despised their harsh, militaristic lifestyle. Yet the dominant memes compelled them to rise early, train rigorously, and engage in constant warfare. Imagine a young Spartan child who dreams of being a philosopher instead of a warrior. This child seeks a life of quiet over the howls of war, contemplation over physical aggression, training the mind over training the body. In Sparta, such a child would face immediate punishment, ensuring that alternative memes never spread. Would-be philosophers... artists... innovators... All sacrificed at the altar of maintaining Sparta’s static society.

Memes aren’t replicated by simple copying. We don’t have direct access to the ideas in people’s brains. Instead, we have to use other people’s behavior as a clue to what ideas they’re trying to express. This process is prone to misunderstandings. As philosopher Karl Popper said, one cannot speak in a way as to not be misunderstood. But words are just one kind of meme, and Popper’s dictum applies to all of them—there is no way to express behaviors, traditions, lifestyles in a way that cannot be misinterpreted.

For instance, wrestling was a cornerstone of the Spartan indoctrination system, one of the many ways by which the society turned boys into warriors. Imagine a young Spartan boy watching two respected men wrestle. He sees one execute a leg sweep, bringing his opponent down. The boy must now interpret what he’s seen if he is to learn how to do the move himself. But this isn’t a matter of simple imitation. He may guess that the man chose that particular move because it would impress superiors. If the boy similarly wants to satisfy the adults of the society, and if he thinks that the leg sweep is capable of causing that, then he may want to emulate the wrestler’s behavior. But which aspects of his behavior are the right ones to replicate? The inspired boy may guess that how the wrestler moved his arms during his leg sweep was irrelevant–or, he may guess that the wrestler moved his arms in a certain way with deliberation, as the move wouldn’t have worked otherwise. There is no guarantee that the boy will be correct—it’s entirely possible that he will incorrectly guess which aspects of the wrestler’s movements were important to the leg sweep and which were incidental. 

In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to go wrong when trying to assimilate another person’s memes. In a way, it’s amazing that people ever get it right at all! When a group of Spartan boys receive instruction on how to wield a sword from a superior, when striving to assimilate the instructor’s memes, they do not typically walk away from the lesson wanting to wield the instructor’s own sword. They rightly recognize that which aspects from the lesson are worth copying (for instance, particular ways of holding a sword during various combat scenarios) and which are not (for instance, using the individual sword that the instruction wielded during the lesson, as any similar sword would be adequate).

For a society to remain static, its memes must be copied with near-perfect accuracy, and any new variations must be extinguished before they spread. That is to say, static societies must suppress dissent and deviation from cultural norms of behavior, often ruthlessly. Thus every static culture has its own version of a secret police, or an Inquisition, or a headmaster, whose task is to prevent change in the culture’s memes. As I’d mentioned, it’s plausible that any Spartan who tried to spread memes pertaining to living the lifestyle of a philosopher, rather than a warrior, would be punished as quickly as possible. Not only would this prevent the memes from spreading too much, but it would also send a signal to any citizens who happened to internalize the meme from the original dissenter—“Do not step out of the Spartan line if you want to keep your head.”

However, suppressing dissent is costly and difficult. No culture could remain static solely by preventing people from transmitting and acting upon dissident ideas once they had been created. So, static societies also evolve deeper, crueler methods of enforcing conformity–they disable the source of new ideas—human creativity.

David Deutsch: Creativity is disobedience. By not recognizing that; by suppressing disobedience, you’re suppressing creativity—always.

The main targets of this are always children. The earlier a person’s creativity is disabled, the less of a lifetime they have to ruin a static society with novel ideas. So, Spartan children were raised in a harsh, uniform education system that coerced them into conformity. They were taught to suppress their own desires and view creative acts outside cultural bounds as evil. These children grew up and imposed the same on their own children, perpetuating the cycle. After all, thinks the Spartan mindset, it was the only way—and the righteous way—of creating people. 

In such societies, the pursuit of happiness is nearly impossible. Creativity is necessary for progress and improvement, but it risks change, which static societies fear. Consider the Spartan warrior at the top of their military hierarchy. He may be perfectly content, if only because he cannot imagine any other way of life. However, even he is not inoculated against suffering such as heartache and hunger, and he may recognize an improvement to his life should he come across it. Imagine that someone suggested such an improvement, perhaps a better way to maintain a loving relationship with his wife, or a cheaper way for him to grow food. If such a change would make life a little better for the warrior, then the originator of the idea would surely go on to tell other Spartans as well, and soon enough, change would sweep over much or all of Sparta. And yet Sparta rarely experienced such society-wide improvements. Why not? It must be because no such idea was thought of in the first place—the suppression of creativity that Spartans learned to adopt as children followed them until death, robbing them of countless opportunities to create new options, innovative solutions, relieving progress for themselves. Thus a static society cannot possibly cause its members to find happiness in life. Rather, it renders them helpless to solve their problems, keeping them in a tragic state of doing the same things over and over, regardless of their sense that something might be wrong. A static society perpetuates by breaking its members’ spirits, turning inherently creative people into slave-like automatons.

For any society, the mere “appearance” of stability is not actual stability unless there is a good explanation as to why things are not changing. For example, it may superficially appear that an ancient, forest-dwelling  tribe that has existed in the same way for thousands of years is “stable”. But a single change from the outside could expose it as the vulnerable, unstable society it really is. Forget something as cosmically momentous as an unforeseen asteroid—a single forest fire could completely devastate the tribe, wiping out its crude shelter, means of acquiring food, and social structures in mere hours.

This enduring stagnation was a cruel joke played on humanity, because for hundreds of thousands of years, we had the capacity to improve, to reduce human suffering, to increase our knowledge of the world, but almost none of that happened—until, at long last, all of them did in an explosion of creativity and progress in what we now call the Enlightenment. 

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Co-written by: Arjun Khemani and Logan Chipkin