chuui

Cultural determinism, does it exist?

Response to a bluesky tread

I’m not sure @derparrot.bsky.social can be trusted here. At least he should have cited his source.

It seems to be a reference to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGlal8VojEM

I disagree with some of SH’s assessments, but I also often disagree with his critics, if only for the fact that a lot of the time they feel the need to misrepresent his actual positions to critique him. And if the comment is indeed in reference to this YT clip, then the quote that @derparrot.bsky.social gives is also not a real quote, it’s paraphrasing a not quite clear fragment that included talk about Venezuela. The fake quote is: ‘with him [SH] describing Iran as a “more sophisticated culture than Iraq or Afghanistan”.

What SH really said was that Iran was a not a “shithole country” (referring to Trump speak) but “that country [has] [6:56] an amazing culture” (his intonation made it clear that he meant that in a positive sense).

In a later part he did also say: “[Iran]’s different from, [7:01] you know, we we we risk drawing the wrong lesson from our misadventures overseas by grouping all these countries into the same bin. I mean that, you know, Iran is not Afghanistan and Iraq wasn’t Afghanistan. I mean, there’s, you know, they’re not, they they both failed, but they, you know, they’re they’re it was it’s reasonable to consider them to be to have been quite different and to still be quite different”.

Apparently this is the source for the ‘Iran [is] a “more sophisticated culture than Iraq or Afghanistan”’ claim that is put in SH’s mouth.

In my reading SH is at best expressing a small amount of hope that Iran might end up in a better place because it’s different from Afghanistan and Iraq. This seems to me like stating the obvious, but in my perception many critics of SH so much despise SH’s idea that cultures can be ranked on their ability to provide for their citizens basic welfare, that they rather suggest that SH is making a much stronger claim than he is actually making, or even that he’s a racist for suggesting that cultures can be ranked at all (down in the thread @alankersaudy.bsky.social writes: “It is a stupid racist paradigm”).

If I place this in the wider context, in which he talked about Venezuela having a chance of restoring its democracy, than that may clarify better how SH is thinking here. Full quote: “I mean, the aftermath in [7:32] Venezuela could be pretty ugly. I have no idea what to expect, but I certainly don’t expect anything like what we saw in Iraq or Afghanistan because we’re talking about a country that has known democracy, wants democracy, has it knows what it’s like to have real institutions, um is not driven by by um religious uh sectarianism. I It’s just you there’s a crime syndicate problem, no doubt.”

So, historically having had institutions for democratic procedures may give Venezuela a better chance at restoring democracy. Maybe SH thinks the same about Iran, but he didn’t say that here. I fail to see how this is an extreme claim.

I myself might want to critique some of SH’s claims that he might have made elsewhere about the effect of culture on behavior or societal progress (“cultural determinism”), but this video does not allow for that.

Intergroup conflict is required

Rachell Powell in conversation with Sean Carroll¹

link

Given the standard evolutionary account of why and how human morality evolved, it appears that there are certain types of moral systems—or certain spaces of moral possibility—that are extremely difficult to achieve or are not sustainable, due to the highly parochial, tribalistic moralities that we have inherited.

There is a whole story behind that, but the idea is that, in order to produce altruism within groups, intergroup conflict is required. As a result, a form of group-level selection favors groups that are moral, but this strategy is adaptive only because of competition with other groups. What emerges, in effect, is in-group favoritism and out-group antagonism, which are extremely universal in humans. This is the evolutionary picture.

... some people would want to say, well, we ultimately won't be able to sustain [more normative ways] of being, which you might say, oh, this what's happening at this moment in the world is kind of evidence of.

But I personally think you got to see the bigger arc and the bigger trajectory. I think it's a little too fine-grained to make that conclusion. But I think the sort of upshot is that humans have a capacity for normativity. This is going back to your question about normativity, for understanding, for thinking about what's right and what ought to be. That's not... That's kind of open-ended. And under certain kinds of circumstances, humans are able to step back, critique the kind of norms that they're following and make consistency judgments and other things that allow them to interrogate and improve our moral systems.

I think that what is critical for humans to be able to do that is the creation of certain kinds of social conditions that do not replicate the cues and triggers from the early ancestral environment to which we respond with out-group antagonism. This is a large and complex process. It requires the creation of surpluses, education, and many other supporting factors.

It is also very easy to reverse this progress and regress rapidly when there are actual or perceived conditions of scarcity, intergroup competition, or predation of one group by another. Whether these conditions are real does not matter, because culturally they can be invoked polemically: people can be led to believe they exist, and that alone can trigger highly exclusivist, strongly xenophobic, out-group attitudes.

... we might know the playbook of a demagogue, but that doesn't mean we're going to be able to successfully battle it.

... maybe we'll get to a point in human history where we reach a level of stability that we're a lot more comfortable with. But right now, it is quite precarious. We honestly don't... I would not have said this like 15 years ago, but I really don't know where we're going to be 30 years from now. I really don't.

Notes

Visible link: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/26/342-rachell-powell-on-evolutionary-convergence-morality-and-mind/