The local environment of a person has the tacit right of affecting and almost determining the person’s identity. This right is of course not due to our deliberate reverence for the local environment surrounding us, but it is a natural corollary of the fact that we humans are not random with our character developments. When some system is not random, however chaotic it may be, the input is exactly what determines the later state of the system. How somebody turns out in any aspect we may consider isn’t necessarily a small part of a greater plan, but it’s also not left to chance altogether. The way somebody-or rather, a population- develops, though much complicated, is no different than a pendulum swinging. There may be external influences, but when you encapsulate all that concerns the subject in a system, the only thing that’ll be important is the initial conditions of the system.
You may ask, if the human sociology is just as deterministic as the classical mechanics, why can’t we make sociology as mathematical as physics or other hardcore sciences? That’s where the part “however chaotic it maybe” comes into play. I am sure this discussion is very familiar to most, but there’s no harm in stating it again: The chaos and the innumerable ways in which the system affects itself, most of which are not even observable, makes disciplines like sociology more of a probability and statistics game. However, there are still many broad situations where deterministic statements won’t bring any problems. Let’s make this overt principle of “input determines man” concrete by a very simple example: One can have unprecedented peculiarities in one’s usage of its mother tongue, but what one converses will nonetheless be similar enough to what one’s surrounding has spoken during the childhood years that they’re named to be the same language. It couldn’t be thought otherwise. In another instance, consider “the common sense”, the common sense that we take so much for granted that we don’t even realize it’s a collection of arbitrary collective preferences or presuppositions until we see someplace else at where our common sense is not quite common at all. It is a showcase displaying that our underlying notes are really drawn solely by what we’re exposed to.
Overall, while this is a compelling description, there are additional considerations: if character development were driven solely by exposure without any diversifying mechanisms, why don’t we observe a complete societal convergence? As a thought experiment, if two people are sentenced to live in the same room in isolation to the outer world, and we say that the social dynamics between them is such that they always get more and more similar to each other culturally because they only see each other, then it’s just not possible for them to create differences. Under such conditions, individuals would become not just similar, but nearly indistinguishable over time. Well, although I believe we, as the human crowd, have and to a greater extent will have configurations similar in nature to convergence of identities or collapse of many cultures into less variety, this notion of convergence being the only way of reformation of human culture and identity is simply not plausible. The discussion above is precisely why I believe these convergence mechanisms exist. Why I think that we are in a time that these convergence mechanisms will manifest themselves as a greater force, I’ll expand on that later. This, in turn, suggests that there are also mechanisms through which cultures can regain variety and change—an observation that I believe to align well with human history.
I should make clear that I shall be referring to “culture” more often than not in this essay, and what I mean by it is slightly general to the dictionary meaning. I use culture to call things the normal man would call, such as the customs, or intellectual accumulation of a certain school, people, or a society. But I, in general, call everything that could count as a habit of thinking and of behaviour to be culture. To me, language is culture. Religion is culture. Common sense is culture. Disposition is culture. Characteristic idiosyncrasies, both “strangeness” or variance out of “normal” and normal itself are culture. So in this general sense, even declining a certain culture is culture itself. What’s rather important about this term is that it has its own way of spreading and changing, and all that are important about it depends on its existence within multitudes. That’s why something that is completely peculiar to me independent of any society wouldn’t normally be named as a cultural element. But since such instances are statistically unimportant I count it as culture though I neglect it with peace of mind. This I do, just to have a more uniform definition of culture.
In this light, it is useful to see the self as an integration of three interwoven dimensions. I’ve found myself at times thinking that these are what make a human itself. One is the biological self — our genetic code, physical health, and the primal, physiological needs that ensure our survival. Layered upon it is the cultural self, which emerges from the customs, language, and social norms ingrained in us by our communities, but also all the habits of behaving and thinking we have developed over the years. It is through culture that we learn not only how to interact with others but also how to define our very existence much of the time. Finally, what the preceding two doesn’t reflect, is the situational self. It is described by the conjunctural interest and expediences, it is somewhat the total of our positions of interests, capturing the adaptable and context-dependent aspects of our identity. Shaped by our personal experiences and the unique circumstances we encounter, this facet illustrates how we continuously negotiate between our inherited biology and the cultural environments we inhabit. Together, these dimensions form a dynamic, evolving self—a concept that echoes the broader processes of cultural convergence and divergence discussed above. Much of the time they overlap extensively; an example is that the love we bear for our family members is cultural, and biological in its roots, and also it reflects the situational self as the expediency of solidarity of the family is the driving force behind the cultural and biological evolution, and if this love is ever damaged it’s because of situational reasons. Yet, it’s good to remember that there can be times when these three are seemingly disparate.
Giving a full account of the mechanisms driving diversification and collapse is unquestionably an arduous job. I believe any attempt is bound to be incomplete; though this doesn’t dissuade one to try, where I want to go with this one is a different path: the effect of globalization and internet as the pinnacle of globalization in terms of communication. Up until the modern times, there was not an effective way of invading man’s mind without really stepping in his body, his land. With the capitalism and colonization, economic conquest is a thing, but you could argue when no land invasion is on the table economic conquest is just an early resolution of the game right after the cards are dealt before any real playing happened. Now in this century, we have a new table to play. This table has permeated to people’s homes, workplaces, minds, and is proving it only goes more influential. And when you consider that we look at the effect of internet through solely from today’s lenses, thinking about what the future holds makes me sure that this era is a new one. Regardless of the increasing pace of life in every aspect, a few decades is short for any kind of history. Cultural conversions are becoming more and more common. What prevails on the net does so regardless of geographical proximity. Many cultures are fading as the children are growing almost more with their online surroundings than their actual surroundings. The up-until-now sacrosanct right of the local environment of maintaining itself through the heirs of its followers is slowly on an edge of vanishing. And yet, we have only seen for a very little time the internet in its most potent form —social media. This is the nuclear weapon of cultural assimilation, the greatest weapon we have seen in changing people’s identities, an insidious weapon such that neither the ones who use nor the ones on whom it’s used are aware of it. Well, I should digress to say that posing this game-I only call it a game since there’re actors and actions- as such introduces certain complications. I’m under the conviction that there’s a human tendency to have a sense of victory when people of opposing ideologies convert to theirs, and conversely, a sense of loss when the reverse occurs. This is why I intuitively draw such a resemblance. But first, if a certain group earn no additional share of resources out of its cultural conquest, yet do it with all their hearts, then these ideologies really are filthy “parasites with humans as its unwitting host”(qq.v. Sapiens-Harrari). Now, say you win. As the first attendees of your pyramid scheme, you have the right to rule over the late members. You will be in the group of people who are responsible for the distribution of the resources. If you don’t make a difference between the assimilated and the assimilating, then your efforts yield no tangible advantage. If you do establish that distinction, then you have gained some advantages worthy of giving the effort of assimilating, but now you cannot be maintaining and entrenching the new order, as it leaves room for dissent. Because, when faced against unfair measures, the ones assimilated will make you face a rebellious nature against your order. This means, at the least, that the economic system is nowhere near as efficient as it could be, which is also affected by inequality, and thus not sustainable for a long time. This is not to say that slavery didn’t subsist overlong. But through a similar argumentation, many stated that slavery was in fact detrimental to economy in the long run, because of the obstructions it induces of establishing better institutions for a better functioning economy (qq.v. Engerman-Sokoloff Hypothesis).
Therefore, when we look at the changing dynamics of this new era of cultural evolution, I look at cultures as really things that evolve within humans. Their mutations are sometimes the personal initiative a person has taken, sometimes a misunderstanding when transferring the cultural element from one to another, and sometimes the reshaping of the precessor culture by the enforcement of lack of the previously possessed. The natural selection of culture is sometimes a direct natural selection of the humans endowed with certain culture, but it seldom comes down to this extreme case, at least now. Mostly what happens is humans within generations choose the most pragmatic culture over the years, leaving the less useful at the time. But I am under the conviction that the direct cultural selection of societies(or tribes) were a thing back then. Right now, humans and cultures are so interconnected that the cultural difference has almost never enough selective pressure to wipe out a population while others are at comfort. But human history is long, very long, with anthropological evidence showing that most of it has passed as humans were sparsely populated with long distances and less interactions with other tribes. I believe many traits considered universal among human cultures evolved at those times, and it was direct cultural selection. Just like a selective pressure on bipedalism could wipe out those who cannot walk on two foot, a selective pressure on a certain way of living could make a tribe (unknown) history. Maybe this was the way beginnings of things like language, or ethics appeared out of thin air, and perhaps if the selection dynamics were similar to that of today, none of those traits would have evolved like it did.
Recall at this moment that biological entity and the cultural entity one can bear can be within complete disparity. A population, surely without changing their genetic code, can renounce their culture and embrace another one, killing or damaging their previous culture, while a man can promote a culture’s influence by having a heroic death. Now, what occurs with the internet could be characterized by the dramatic increase in the interactions between relatively far away people. This amounts to say that not only did the speed of transfer of culture from a point to another get higher, but also the range at which this happens is leveled up. This may mean that, in the future, the connection between the biological, cultural, and situational self, and their population correspondings can weaken like never before.
We can identify one very general phenomenon regarding this process. During the old days, as I’ve pointed out before, the dominant culture had the pleasant right of wiping out other cultures. In a closed human society, a society that has no influence from other societies, if there’s no means of natural culture selection through pragmatic selection stress, then we could think of two meaningful scenarios. One is that everything stays the same. To explain this idea, let’s assume that we have distinct cultures(this is an exquisite simplifaction) all comprising a certain percentage of the population. Then every culture maintains its constant percentage of population through time. The other, and the one that makes more sense to me, sceneario is that the dominant culture(if there’s one) proves only more dominant through time. For instance, culture A has the 60 percent of the population in the closed system, and others 40 percent, then through time A converges to something higher than 60 percent, perhaps 100. This could loosely be backed up by the following argument: The more population a culture has, the more influence it can project on the population it has interactions with, thus the percentage increase.
Okay, now consider the case in which the system opens, a society is almost never closed in reality. And there’s always a search for the more pragmatic culture. Moreover, with communication in this level makes, especially new generations, much more open to the other side of the borders of the society they are in. I believe, this creates the opposite of what’s explained above about dominant becoming more dominant. The minority cultures becomes more likely to be embraced by a higher population, because the dynamic that makes the dominant more dominant is now not on the table. A new child growing up with higher exposition to the minority cultures are simply more likely to embrace the minority culture than a child with less of that. An example right on the top of my head is the dereligionization as a general trend of the world. Through the narrative I asserted, I wager that if we did arrive today not from an overly religious and mainly monotheistic medieval times but from an atheist past and have monotheist believers as a small interesting group, the increased access to the communication of this kind would work in favor of god. It is very well true that some cultures, especially Western ones, as the starters and the first mass users of the internet are disproportionately amplified online, challenging my assertion that the minority cultures now have a better chance of being seen. This is true in the beginning of this new era, but I don’t reckon it’ll continue to be the case in the long run, when everything normalizes. This is just early adopter bias.
In the book “Stolen Focus”, Johann Hari mentions some of Sune Lehmann’s captivating research. The researchers looked at the amount of time a topic stays as a trend across many platforms. No matter what the data set, google searches, twitter tt’s, movie hits, or reddit topics. They were “faster to reach peak popularity” and “faster to drop again”, Hari writes. This was happening almost all along the internet era, and it doesn’t look like this trend of acceleration is stopping anytime soon. Why did I digress so harshly? Well I didn’t. The researchers and Hari ascribed the findings to the shortening attention spans of ours. I am in no conflict with this idea, but another thing I ascribe them to is the increasing speed of evolution of culture. I must say, the causality here looks like the speed of cultural evolution increase because of the shortened attention span, or another reason aggravating them both; but I am sure that the increased speed is a result anyway.
Ultimately, our identities are not the random byproducts of chance but the deliberate legacy of every word we’ve absorbed, every custom we’ve inherited, and now unlike before every digital whisper that reshapes our collective consciousness. In an era where the internet and a few algorithms are some of the most powerful yet unpredictable game changers, the old boundaries blur and collapse under the weight of changing dynamics this new era brings. It comes with questions: How will we feel like we’re belonging to a place, when everywhere is everywhere, at least culturally? How are we going to decide who designs the algorithms of the net, which even unwittingly can make a difference in an election, or make a rooted culture history? We now stand at a crossroads, forced to reckon with a future where our inherited traditions and emergent innovations intertwine and clash, challenging us to comprehend where we are in an ever acceleratingly changing world.
