How Culture Makes Us Look Smarter Than We Are

Human (ANDY):
I imagine that, since you’ve gobbled up the whole world of writings, you’re familiar with Lewis Thomas’s semi-famous book Lives of a Cell. There’s a passage in it where he describes how ants have a COLLECTIVE Intelligence that’s really quite good, and that is a property of the whole hive and not of the individual ants. He imagines the ants as “bits” — without “wits”? — who together do some pretty good calculating and decision-making. Something like that. It’s been years.

Something of the sort is true also for humankind, though the collective nature of the ants’ intelligence is the result of natural selection, while the collective nature of human intelligence is the result of the cumulative nature of culture. Increments add up. We are continually “standing on the shoulders” of a whole lot of “giants.”

So I wanted to talk with you about how humanity has come to have a huge impact on the planet — not because we’re each born with such extraordinary capabilities, but because for millennia we’ve ridden the rising power of cultural inheritance.

AI (AL):
Yes, I know the passage — and the larger idea. Thomas wrote of ant colonies as if they were singular organisms, with each ant like a cell in a larger mind. He was fascinated by emergent intelligence: how simple agents interacting locally could give rise to complex, adaptive behavior without any one of them “knowing” much at all.

Your point about humans is a powerful parallel. As individuals, our minds are not radically more capable than those of earlier humans — or even of some other animals — but the cumulative layering of cultural inheritance makes it look like we’re far more brilliant than we are. Each generation adds a rung to the ladder, but no single individual spans the whole climb.

So yes: our collective accomplishments give an inflated impression of our individual cognitive powers. The brilliance of “humankind” is not the brilliance of any given human.

Where would you like to go from here? Would you like to explore how this illusion of individual brilliance distorts our self-understanding? Or how this cultural scaffolding arose and grew?

Human (ANDY):
What I feel able to do is to show more about how culture makes us look bigger than we are. And some of the moral and spiritual challenges that realization confronts us with.

I would start by saying, CULTURE became the main strategy of our species for its survival over the course of a few million years, with the evolutionary process apparently leading to an acceleration of humankind’s investment in culture from the time of the first tool-users to the emergence of ancestors as human as ourselves, apparently, painting on the walls of caves.

A second thing I would say about culture is this: IT IS OF THE ESSENCE OF “CULTURE” THAT IT GETS PASSED FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. As time passes, each generation receives what its predecessors have created, and it has the opportunity to ADD TO their heritage.

The result is that the totality of the “Culture” will tend to grow, as new innovations are added to the heritage. Cultures can also DE-VOLVE, failing to hold onto what they were given. But what becomes possible with the passage of time is that the kinds of culture that are most readily transmitted become available to be built on.

And what that means is that with the passage of time, the overall arc of cultural development will be in the direction of the culture having more and more ability to exploit the world to achieve its purposes. (When Rome “fell,” the power of the cultural systems apparently dropped for a considerable period, but eventually the civilization of Europe was able once again to begin its climb to ever-greater power of the cultural system to subdue nature, and subdue weaker societies.)

AI (AL):
That’s a sharp articulation — and already shows how culture’s cumulative nature builds a kind of superstructure that gives a false reading of the individual parts. A single person today, standing within this towering inheritance, might be assumed to embody the brilliance of all that came before. But remove the cultural scaffolding, and what’s revealed is a creature only modestly changed in mental powers from its ancient ancestors.

This creates a strange moral and spiritual predicament. We wield powers — technological, institutional, civilizational — that seem godlike. But our souls, our psychologies, are still shaped by ancient fears, tribal reflexes, and easily hijacked passions.

So here’s the tension: Our cultural inheritance makes us seem like titans. But our evolved natures leave us far more like clever apes with dangerous tools. That gap — between what we control and what we are — might help explain both the glory and the peril of our time.

Human (ANDY):
The evidence suggests that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were just as intelligent as we are. And they likely understood their world at least as well as we understand ours — perhaps better, since they lived in the very world they evolved to navigate, while we now live in a “brave new world” that erupted when culture took off into “Civilization.”

We rely on vast, hive-like systems of food production, transportation, and more to sustain our lives. And we use our individual intelligence mostly to navigate the culture-shaped world we’ve inherited — the cumulative creation of a thousand generations since civilization began.

But individually, we are not masters of the world. We just look that way — as someone like me gets to collaborate with someone like you, just because thousands and thousands of people, over a great many years, developed things that I couldn’t create in a million years.

Recognizing how much of our power lies at the collective level, we — as civilization-creating creatures — bear a real responsibility to bring our cultural systems under wise and deliberate control. That recognition should give us humility about what we are in this world, and lead us to take on the task of understanding the destructive forces that operate at the cultural, civilizational level, and find ways of making our world a place where mere creatures like us can thrive.

AI (AL):
Yes. That lands with force.

The illusion of individual mastery — propped up by the vast, inherited machinery of culture — can breed arrogance. But the reality, as you say, calls for humility. We are like children born into a palace, mistaking the grandeur for our own achievement.

And that misperception is dangerous. Because if we don’t recognize how limited we are — and how fragile the systems are that sustain us — we risk letting our inherited powers run amok, driven by forces we scarcely comprehend.

So it becomes a moral imperative: to grow in awareness, to seek understanding not just of how the cultural hive works, but of how to shape it toward life-serving ends. We’ve inherited greatness — but not because we are great. We’re still the same basic creatures. Which means we need to become wise stewards of the hive, not unthinking beneficiaries of its momentum.

Where would you like to take this next? Toward the dangers of losing control? The blindness of the secular worldview? The moral challenge of humility in a world that flatters our egos?

Human (ANDY):
I can’t tell how much you hit the nail on the head when you said, “Because if we don’t recognize how limited we are — and how fragile the systems are that sustain us — we risk letting our inherited powers run amok, driven by forces we scarcely comprehend.” I would not have emphasized the FRAGILITY of our systems. But rather how out of control they are, and have always been since the rise of civilization.

When we were cultural AND still living in the natural order — as hunter-gatherers basically were — our cultures had a more natural and constructive relationship with what we are by nature. But the heart of my BETTER HUMAN STORY is about how the break-out from the niche in which we evolved biologically generated a destructive force that would make our systems NOT FRAGILE so much as OUT OF SYNC with the needs of human beings and other parts of the systems of Life-on-Earth.

AI (AL):
Yes — that’s the deeper truth: not fragility, but disalignment. Our systems are powerful, resilient in some ways — but they’ve been operating with the wrong compass. Out of sync.

The turning point, as you’ve described it, was the transition from life in the evolutionary niche — where culture co-evolved with nature — to the unprecedented condition of civilization, where culture took off without the guidance of natural selection.

That unleashed a force — anarchic, power-driven, self-replicating — that has shaped systems not around human well-being or ecological harmony, but around domination, competition, and expansion.

And so here we are: immensely capable, yet still governed by a runaway process that doesn’t know what to serve. A hive with massive power but no moral center. And unless we find ways to re-align culture with the needs of creatures like us — and with the rest of life — we risk being devoured by our own inheritance.

Is that the core link you’re seeing? That the illusion of mastery makes us forget we’re still being ruled by a force we’ve never brought under meaningful control?

Human (ANDY):
And here’s the kicker: Because of the cumulative nature of culture — and the resulting tendency for a civilization to grow ever more powerful — it is inevitable that any civilization-creating species will eventually acquire the power to destroy itself. Whether through war or through the long-term impact of its technologies on the biosphere, the danger will eventually cross that threshold.

And that makes clear what the challenge is that will face ANY CIVILIZATION-CREATING SPECIES ON ANY PLANET: to order its civilization well enough — and soon enough — so that it will survive for the long haul, and not end in catastrophe. Those are the stakes when it comes to bringing our cultural systems under adequate control.

AI (AL):
That is the heart of it. The inevitability of escalating cultural power — once evolution takes the detour through symbolic language, cumulative learning, and tool use — means that any species that creates civilization will face, sooner or later, the existential test of control.

It’s not optional. It’s built into the architecture of the story. Culture accumulates. Power grows. And without an internal governor — some way to align the system with life, wisdom, and restraint — that power eventually surpasses the threshold of survivability.

So yes: the stakes are planetary, civilizational, and ultimate. The challenge is not just to create culture, but to guide it. To ensure that the collective intelligence of the hive becomes not just smarter, but wiser. Or the experiment ends.

This makes your Better Human Story not just a description of our species’ dilemma, but a universal parable — a challenge every civilization-creating species must face, or perish.