How To Judge Cultures

Perhaps the most vehement intellectual foolishness of our time is the demand that no culture may be judged. According to this dogma, all cultures are equally valid and very certainly none can be judged as inferior to another.

That’s not just hogwash, but dangerous hogwash. And the reason it’s dangerous is very simple:

Without evaluation there can be no quality control.

So yes, we must judge cultures. 

The Hitler Binary

Among the many manipulations which are at play in our world, few have more potency than the binary illusion. “It’s only A or B” is something that we humans fall into without noticing, and so the trick is used a lot.

This is a well known fallacy of logic, more commonly known as the excluded middle. But by any name you know it well: Two and only two options are presented to you, accompanied with an overflow of emotional pressure, as in, “if you choose option B you’ll be shamed by everyone as a monster.”

This is what happens when the idea of judging a culture comes up. “Thou shalt not go there” warnings flash, and option B involves you being labeled a monster like Adolph Hitler.

Again, that’s hogwash. What we’re talking about here is evaluating cultures according to objective standards, for the purpose of improving human life.

Being willingly blind or being a monster are not the only choices open to you.

If we are forbidden from examining and evaluating the ways people live, we’re more or less forbidden from improving them.

The Primary Standard

If you want to evaluate a culture, the first and central factor is how well that culture supports cooperation.

Cooperation is the fundamental operation of human thriving. Any successful culture – any culture that assists the improvement and extension of life – must produce and protect cooperation. Think of it this way:

• Without farmers cooperating with tractor-builders and truckers and processing plants and a hundred other specialties, we’d all have to grow our own food.
• Without grocers cooperating with who-knows-how-many wholesalers, innumerable employees, real estate ventures of many types, endless delivery drivers, and much more, we’d again have to grow and store our own food.
• Without auto manufacturers cooperating with people digging and smelting ore, with engineers, rubber works, glass works, innumerable employees and much, much more, we couldn’t have cars or trucks.

And so on, ad infinitum. If we wish to live any sort of convenient and expansive life, we are utterly dependent upon cooperation. With it we thrive; without it we go back to primitive life.

And so the primary standard for judging a culture is this:

A culture that creates, supports and defends cooperation is a good culture.

A culture that ignores, disrupts, burdens or otherwise throws wrenches into the gears of cooperation is a bad culture.

Because in the end we’re stuck with this:

Whatever interrupts cooperation interrupts human thriving.

What Do We Do?

This is a short post and not a book, so let’s jump to the end: Once we evaluate, what do we do?

And that answer is simple: Start improving the ideas people are spreading. Cultures are simply the ideas people pass along, particularly in their families. So, start your fixing right there.

When interacting with people who’ve become anti-cooperative, encourage them to change; explain to them how essential cooperation really is. In the present climate you wouldn’t want to say “your culture is broken” (it would likely make things worse), but you could say, “No, I don’t want to do that, it breaks cooperation rather than strengthening it, and I like modern life.”

Top-down fixing is mostly useless, since cultures consist of ideas passed-along by individuals. And this is doubly so now, since people reflexively attempt it via massively anti-cooperative systems. Politics is is anti-cooperative at its core: My team winds, yours loses. And the central operational statement of every government (theocracy, monarchy, communist, democratic or whatever) is still worse: Do what we say or we’ll hurt you.

Cooperative things are independent commerce, healthy families, anything based on the golden rule, the Bitcoin economy, the local Little League, reading circles, local clubs and so on.

Last Thoughts

I’ll begin closing with this:

By devoting our time and energy to cooperation-friendly activities and ideas, we move our families and our world forward.

By devoting our time and energy to anti-cooperative activities and ideas, we move our families and our world backward.

None of this has anything to do with putting people down. People who do that (and there really aren’t very many of them) damage human cooperation so badly that they can be considered walking hazards.

We can also bear in mind also that in a thousand years we’ll all come off as primitive and backward. 

The progress of the race grows in us, as individuals and as families. Let’s get busy.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com