The Fragility of Culture’s Hold on the Good

Good Order Is Not “One and Done”

Out of my life’s work, this is how I’ve learned to see the Central Challenge facing humankind: “To order our civilization well enough — and soon enough — so that human civilization can survive on this planet for the long haul.”

And throughout the half century since I first understood that challenge, even if only vaguely at first, the question has been percolating in my mind: “Will we make it? Or will we muck about in a disordered world until our warfare or our ecological damage brings us to self-destruction?”

Over that span of time, the odds I’d put on our getting our act together have declined. When the Cold War ended, I thought maybe the international system could make some real progress. But poor use was made of that opportunity — humankind no longer perched on the possibility of nuclear holocaust — and then over the past quarter century, the world has become more disordered.

And even if most people don’t share my way of seeing the forces at work, I have been hearing more people speaking more pessimistically about the human future.

So it doesn’t seem that we need any further dose of sobering news about where we are, and how we are likely to end up.

But the experience of the past twenty years has brought me to another sobering realization, one that feels too important to leave unspoken. We’re not going to do better at meeting our species’ Central Challenge by underestimating the challenge that we face.

It is our experience in America that has brought this sobering realization. The implications of what has transpired in America – particularly with the election of Donald Trump to a second term – go beyond those that I wrote about at the time. My newspaper column soon after the election laid out the ways that Donald Trump’s being President would drive human civilization further toward self-destruction.

• He would fortify the war system, not least by siding with Putin the aggressor against Ukraine, the victim.
• He would throw the nation into reverse in terms of striving to deal responsibly with the crisis growing out of humankind’s disruption of the earth’s climate system, on which we depend for our survival.
• He would throw America’s weight onto the side of the tyrants, while alienating our long-time friends in the “free world.”

And all that has come to pass, and all that has made self-destruction more likely – and made it less likely that humankind can come together in those ways that our long-term survival will require.

But now there’s also something that this extraordinary political development in the United States SHOWS that has recently struck me. The way America has fallen apart in its political life – after centuries of always SANER functioning as a democracy – reveals an honest truth that I hadn’t much looked at before: You can “get it together” rather well, but that doesn’t mean that Good Order will necessarily be maintained.

I’ve been envisioning how humankind needs to re-arrange our civilization so that a catastrophic war would be impossible. (Letting Mutual Assured Destruction continue is playing Russian Roulette, and a full chamber is sure to win the spin at some point.) And a different kind of ordering will be necessary to organize our economic activities so that they are compatible with the needs of the system of Life on Earth and therefore sustainable for ourselves.

And I envisioned a planetary order that was well-structured enough to let human life proceed, but in a healthier world. This good arrangement would work satisfactorily enough that people would maintain that order indefinitely. A “one and done.”

But America has just shown that in such things as “good order,” there’s never a “one and done.” In the history of human efforts to create good order, I can think of no step more boldly of the kind that civilization needs than the framing of the American Constitution. Whatever its flaws, it was a huge step forward for mankind: unlike the long dark history of tyranny throughout the millennia, the American experiment was going to enable a people to have their proper voice in how the society operates.

“The problem of power” is at the center of much of our destructiveness, and solving the problem of power with democracy has been a major step toward the kind of world we should be striving to create.

When Benjamin Franklin was asked, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, what kind of government the delegates had created, he reportedly answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That qualification—if you can keep it—underscores how good order must continually be renewed.

And here in this Trump era, one can see that even something so fine and so durable as the American system of government can just start collapsing—if the requirements for “keeping” it are not met. It turns out that something like “American Democracy” and “the Rule of Law” has to be achieved by each generation in turn. And this second Trump presidency has made it clear – as clearly as anything could – that American civilization has not been maintaining its capacity to make democracy work.

We don’t have to understand just what it was that broke down to enable people to support a leader who makes a point of attacking the American system that has made democracy work reasonably well. What is clear is that there was something that a healthy democracy needs that got lost along the way.

What that tells me is this: that Central Challenge is not only something that we will have to meet by creating a well-ordered world. In addition, humankind is going to have to continue to do the work to keep the good order going. All the psychological, ideological, legal, political, cultural things that go on in the civilized world will have to be tended to, like a garden needing watering. Because the human world is a living thing. It is not static. And I’ve probably been imagining some perpetual promised land as what we should be aiming for.

But the people reaching the Promised Land did not end their struggles in the coming generation, and likewise all the generations to come will have to manage a dynamic system in which things can change.

One source of instability: The fashioning of one generation by another generation, unfolding in unpredictable ways including the possibility of something going wrong.

Another source of instability: people lose hold of the meaning of things, making an idol of the flag and not caring about protecting “the Republic for which it stands.” People can be manipulated, as we’ve seen, so that people can consider themselves “patriots” while attacking what American patriotism has always been about.

How Culture Made the Transmission of Good Order Unreliable

This problem is inherent in the society of a cultural animal. Human consciousness has opened up such a wide range of possibilities that human societies are built upon sand in a way that the societies of ants or even chimpanzees aren’t.

This shows something important about what it means to become a cultural animal. Culture is a mixed bag: it gives us great flexibility, but to do that it makes a lot that matters iffy in people, and in their societies.

Culture is the third phase in the evolutionary picture as I envision it.

First there is the Cosmos before there is Life. Nothing has value there. In the non-living world, it doesn’t matter if a planet gets blown up. The non-living world is indifferent to order, so that an asteroid slamming into the Yucatan killed off most species of life, and destroyed the order in which dinosaurs were the dominant species. Indifferent earth also brought Ice Ages that scoured the earth. There is nothing in the non-living world that would spare Pompeii from being annihilated by Mount Vesuvius.

“Good” order has no meaning before life came onto the scene.

But then comes Life, the second phase of this cosmic unfolding. Life is all about creating order. Natural selection continually favors the organisms whose characteristics enable them to survive and reproduce, while DNA provides a remarkably reliable means of transmitting those characteristics to succeeding generations. Mutations introduce variation, but against a background of generally faithful replication. What works tends to be preserved.

But then comes culture, the third phase in this evolutionary process. In our evolutionary lineage, natural selection increasingly favored the capacities that enabled our ancestors to rely on culture as their main adaptive strategy. The use of tools rewarded some kinds of hands. The emergence of language rewarded some kinds of oral set-ups.

And increasingly over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, or maybe a few million, and especially since we became HOMO SAPIENS, we expanded the range of human consciousness and eventually enabled us as a species to extricate ourselves from the niche in which we evolved biologically — back when Life on Earth was all about order created by natural selection always favoring what works.

Culture is what defines us as a species, and it introduces into the story — from Big Bang to the evolution of species and an ordered biosphere — a new kind of indeterminacy. Culture is so fluid over time that there will always be various forces to contend with that might lead to disorder if not properly managed. A healthy human society at Time #1 might or might not be a healthy human society at Time #2.

So if we are willing to take on that Central Challenge — on which our survival on earth heavily depends — we will have to put into the design-assignment: figure out how this good order might deteriorate after being established, and how we can contain within it good mechanisms for keeping the people and the institutions in good shape in the requisite ways.

When the Keepers of the Flame Help Extinguish It

But America’s experience with Donald Trump reveals something still more disturbing about the challenge of maintaining good order.

If we think about what qualities in the American consciousness might preserve our constitutional order, some of the most important have historically been most deeply rooted in Conservative America:

I think of the conservative American patriotism, which has had conservative voices in town squares on the 4th of July declaring the virtues of our democracy. Surely those people would be defenders of all that makes us “the land of the free.”

And I think of TRADITION as being one really important way that cultures perpetuate themselves. One would think that the conservative Americans who have always upheld the value of tradition would reject utterly any force that continually assaulted the norms of American democracy.

And with that kind of patriotism and traditionalism, there is the allegiance to religion — the Old Time Religion is one of culture’s most powerful tools for seeing that every generation be inculcated with values and beliefs and rules of conduct that will keep people on the straighter and narrower. Surely people who talk as many do about Jesus would never lend their support to someone who is arguably the opposite of Jesus in spirit.

What we see in the election of Trump is ESPECIALLY SOBERING because it brings into focus how difficult a challenge it is to transmit essential values in the culture through time. What more powerful mechanisms do cultures have for making sure the next generation stays on the given track than Religion, Tradition, and Patriotism?

All of those mechanisms are most powerful in Conservative America. We would expect THOSE people to be the most stalwart defenders of the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Yet it has been precisely THOSE people who have provided the political support for the opposite of those old conservative values.

Mechanisms for good cultural transmission are apparently quite fallible, making the challenge to create and maintain a viable civilization even more challenging than I have realized.