Overcoming Our Planet’s Sustainability Crisis

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Humans became extraordinarily successful because culture allows us to adapt much faster than genes. But cultural evolution does not necessarily select institutions that benefit humanity as a whole. Institutions can become entrenched and maladaptive. Our ecological problems now require institutional adaptation much faster than our historical processes normally provide. Therefore, we need to discover whether cultural evolution itself can be deliberately accelerated.

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Our human species has provoked impending global crises by our behavior on our only planet, Earth. Global warming, “.... around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades...”1, the pillaging of the Earth’s mineral resources, and many other symptoms of our unsustainable living arrangements are already at hand. We have only decades to correct our relationship with our home planet. Thousands of the world’s scientists2 have repeatedly warned of these conditions and the need to change our behavior. To address these challenges, we need to quickly develop and implement solutions at the global level.

Our success as a species stems from our capacity to develop human culture.

To set this notion in motion, consider the following. In just 70,000 years, our species has settled on every continent except Antarctica. This happened with negligible contributions from gene-based evolution. We, as a species, are 99.9% identical at the DNA level. Evolution did not produce new physical characteristics that enabled us to live in such disparate climates. Think of the Arctic, deserts, tropical rainforests, and high-altitude mountains. We didn’t grow fur to live in the Arctic; we invented clothing and igloos. In contrast, ants, which coexist with us in all of our environments, needed to evolve into 14,000 different species over 150 million years to accomplish the same feat. Humans spread out of Africa to every place on Earth (except Antarctica) over ~70,000 years.

So, how did we accomplish this? We are highly cooperative and excellent learners. This shapes our culture, the knowledge that defines and structures our lives. Human culture is the accumulated system of socially transmitted behaviors:

· technologies

· beliefs

· norms

· institutions

· symbolic systems

through which human groups organize for survival, cooperation, reproduction, meaning, and power across generations.

The selection of cultural innovations isn’t rational. As a writer, now lost to me, noted, our brains evolved to survive, not to be rational. Human beings evaluate ideas through evolved cognitive biases3, including conformity, authority, group identity, prestige, loss aversion, fairness, and other social tendencies. Institutions can amplify these biases. We evolved these cognitive biases to support life in a tribal environment. For example, if everyone in your community believes a proposed change in how buildings are built is dangerous, even if you have little evidence yourself, conformity and trust in familiar authorities make you more likely to agree with everyone else.

First, gene-based evolution works like this. During reproduction, random genetic variation produces differences among individuals. Some of these differences are passed to the next generation. In a particular environment, some inherited characteristics may increase an individual’s chances of surviving and reproducing. Over many generations, these characteristics tend to become more common in the population because the individuals carrying them leave more offspring. This process of variation, inheritance, and natural selection is a fundamental mechanism of evolution throughout the living world.

The evolution of culture follows a different pattern:

1. problems and opportunities

2. cultural experiments

3. social selection of successful experiments

4. spread

5. establishment

6. accumulated culture

7. culture shapes the next round of change to meet new problems.

Or, in a slightly longer definition: We encounter new problems and opportunities. People try different behaviors, ideas, and solutions. Some of these spread from person to person and generation to generation. Cognitive biases, social groups, and powerful institutions influence which ones survive. Successful patterns become established as norms, practices, knowledge, and institutions. Together, these accumulated patterns form human culture, and the existing culture shapes which new ideas and behaviors are likely to emerge and survive.

Institutions are part of human culture. Institutions are culturally evolved and socially transmitted systems of authority, rules, norms, roles, and practices that organize recurring collective behavior and, once established, shape the selection and transmission of subsequent cultural variation. The influence of existing institutions and their elites4 on experiments with new institutions to meet new challenges is a central problem in the process of institution formation.

This creates pressure for a social solution: allocating resources, coordinating behavior, resolving conflict, defending territory, organizing production, transmitting knowledge, establishing legitimacy, and so forth.

Individuals and groups try different ways of dealing with the problem. Most are initially informal: new practices, rules, organizational arrangements, technologies, or norms. This is the cultural equivalent of generating variation. Importantly, these experiments need not be consciously recognized as such.

Some practices spread while others disappear. Selection is strongly shaped by cognitive biases such as conformity, prestige, authority, group identity, imitation, perceived fairness, reciprocity, and other features of human social cognition. Thus, selection is not simply a rational comparison of which arrangement works best.

As an innovation challenges existing arrangements, power becomes increasingly important. Incumbent elites may promote, suppress, modify, appropriate, or prevent it from scaling. Conversely, emerging groups can use institutional innovations to challenge existing elites. This means institutional evolution contains a second selection mechanism beyond ordinary social acceptance: selection through power and influence.

A successful practice becomes standardized. Expectations become rules: this is how we do things. Roles become defined, procedures become routine, sanctions appear, organizations develop, and authority becomes attached to specific positions. An informal cultural practice has now become an institution.

The institution offers explanations for why it is proper, necessary, natural, sacred, efficient, or just. Families, schools, religions, governments, professional organizations, corporations, and the media transmit these understandings. People born into the system may eventually come to see the institution not as one possible solution among many but simply as the way the world works.

Once established, institutions reshape the environment in which subsequent cultural evolution occurs. They distribute resources and power, create organizations whose members depend on them, reward some behaviors and penalize others, and influence which future alternatives are even imaginable. Institutions therefore become selection environments themselves.

Unlike gene-based evolution, where the selection of favorable random genetic variations is driven purely by the success of survival and reproduction, institutional evolution doesn’t automatically select institutions that are good for humanity and the earth as a whole. For example, a corporation can be very successful in sales and profits while contributing to the destruction of the environment. Institutional success is often measured by the goals established by the people and organizations with the greatest influence over the institution.

An institution can remain highly successful at solving the problems that created and sustain it while becoming maladaptive at the level of the larger system on which it depends. For example, modern agriculture uses irrigation and chemical fertilizers to increase production even as it undermines the quality of the very soils that sustain food production.

One can readily argue that capitalism has been a highly successful institution in many respects. Our global economic output, which had grown only slightly per person over more than a thousand years, has zoomed upward in the past two hundred years. However, its impacts on our home planet, the Earth, now make it necessary to build a new economic system that is sustainable within the bounds of our home planet.

Humanity’s typical mechanism for adapting its institutions operates on a timescale of centuries. Religions, capitalism, and the modern nation-state system all developed over centuries, not decades.

Our environmental problems operate on a timescale of decades. With incumbent elites and their institutions resisting action, we need to develop a strategy to address these pressing, existential problems.

We face the challenges of our self-inflicted global crises. We need to create new institutions that can support our lives on Earth in a more sustainable and equitable fashion. This institutional evolution must occur within the next few decades, not centuries. Thus far, our incumbent elite, the rich and corporations, have actively resisted experiments to solve our problems. The global environmental crises persist, and efforts to make the economy more equitable have been suppressed.

Before we consider how to create new human institutions to address the global crises, we can make a few observations about our existing institutions. The nation-state system, capitalism, and the elites in control have structural characteristics that make adequate responses to global ecological problems extremely difficult.

Our existing institutions are the environment in which we must develop new ones. Nation-states drive solutions that favor nation-states. Capitalism is driven by profit. Incumbent elites have disproportionate power over which experiments receive resources and which are suppressed.

The global crises we face are, in fact, global in nature. They can only be solved at a global level. This means we must break free of nation-states as the organizing elements of our political structures. They are structures of inter-state competition and conflict.

You might point to the United Nations as a counterbalance to nation-states. This is true only in a very limited sense. The United Nations Charter explicitly declares that it cannot interfere in the internal affairs of a nation-state. Its effectiveness in developing and implementing global solutions to problems is very limited.

The elites of our political and economic worlds have consistently ignored our planetary crises. The production and consumption of fossil fuels have continued to rise inexorably. They have continued to profit from extracting resources from the Earth that support the insatiable, structurally required growth of our economic system, capitalism. All of this, the elites have supported almost lockstep.

Capitalism must be replaced as our economic system because it rewards behaviors that are harmful to our only home, the Earth.

First, capitalism requires constant growth. This is an obvious impossibility on a finite planet.

Second, capitalism feeds on cost shifting. Capitalist producers shift as many of their costs as possible onto those outside the firm. Pollution in its myriad forms is one example. Plastic waste now collects everywhere. Promises of recycling by industry are a fraud. The trillions of hours of human attention sucked up by the advertising industry are another example. Cost shifting is not an optional business strategy in capitalist enterprises. It increases profits. If your business does not take advantage of cost shifting at least as much as your competitors, you will suffer lower profits and likely collapse.

Third, capitalism treats the extraction of resources (such as fossil fuels and minerals) from the Earth as a right, with no consequences attached.

Fourth, capitalism is driven by the desires of a tiny fraction of human beings, the owners of businesses. And this same tiny fraction plays a completely outsized role in our politics. They set the agendas to suit their needs, not those of our species.

Fifth, capitalism endures and drives fetishized consumption. We are surrounded by marketing that incentivizes us to buy more and more. The effects of this are most visible in the developed world and among the rich.

Sixth, capitalism is only interested in the basic needs of most human beings, such as housing, food, healthcare, family life, and more, to the extent that it can extract a profit from them.

We need an economic system that is both sustainable for the immediate and long-term future and significantly more equitable.

Instead of waiting for new institutions to emerge over centuries, can humanity deliberately create many institutional experiments, test them for sustainability, resilience, and human welfare, and rapidly spread those that work?

If you have comments, suggestions, criticisms, or anything else that might improve my thinking, send them along to mark@markorton.com. Thanks.