Hunting buffalo using a buffalo jump (1892)

                                                        (a useful hunting custom) 

                                (artist: Ernest E. Thompson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

8. Humans’ Perceptions of Changes to Their Culture/Way of Life

Note that, in society in general, the process of cultural change is little discussed or understood. This is because in the struggle by a tribe to survive better than its competition, tribe members are typically unaware of why they think with the concepts that they do, follow the customs they follow, and worship as they do. If asked to explain their way of life, they say things like “we’ve always done it this way” or “our gods decreed it”. We must get past that chauvinism. 

For most people, the reasons for why their culture is as it is aren’t opaque: those reasons are more like invisible. Like water is to fish.   

Small updates to cultures occur in subtle ways that can only be seen when one takes an objective view of a lot of different tribes of people. Or to put the matter another way, we can say that in any tribe, updates are happening, gradually, all the time. Old ‘ways’ get replaced in people’s daily lives by new ‘ways’ that work more efficiently. Societies do update their programming, usually gradually. The core concepts called ‘values’, however, are almost, but not quite, unchangeable.

“We’re knapping flint into blades this way now, Dad. Sister discovered it. Yeah, I miss the old days, too. But this way is better. We knap flint this way now. ”

On the other hand, major updates to a culture are scary for any tribe, and most of these tend to happen only after major shocks: famines, epidemics, or wars. A big update only occurs, of course, if at least some of the tribe members survive the shock that is calling for the update, and even then, systemic change is hard.

To be clear, we should reiterate that for millennia, human evolution has been driven by culture, not by genes. Our genome doesn’t adapt to changes in our environment nearly as nimbly as our cultural codes do. When climate change caused catastrophic flooding for some of our forebears, they didn’t develop gills over the next hundred generations. They learned ways to build homes on stilts or boats, and fishing replaced hunting in two or three generations.

We learn to handle changes in the world around us, we keep what we learn, and we pass it on to our kids. With pain, sometimes. But we’re good at this ‘cultural change’ trick. Much better at it than any other species. For better or worse, we’ve become culture driven creatures because culture enables us to evolve and adapt to change more nimbly, profoundly, and effectively than our genome can.  

                                                Teddy Roosevelt on an elephant hunt 

                                            (white man learning new hunting skills) 

                                    (credit: Edward van Altena, via Wikimedia Commons)