connectivity and cultural diversity

Intergenerational cultural meme transfer mechanisms have all broken down. Instead of asking our own grand parents about their child rearing practices, we all go to the same search engine and click on the same links. We all watch the same movies, read the same books. Greater connectivity has brought us lesser diversity. We seem to be heading towards a single monoculture as social trends propagate at the speed of light through the fiber optic cables.

Why should we worry? Just scroll back in time and look at the rise and fall of civilizations. Why have certain cultures prevailed during certain periods? When brute force worked, the brute won. When ideas became important, the cerebral won. There are of course many reasons why developing countries have hard time catching up, but one important aspect is cultural. Some cultures are just not meant to be successful in today’s environment and this is normal. (Inspect those countries that did indeed catch up, you will find cultural discontinuity, widespread debasement and confusion of values.)

Tomorrow conditions will change. We need to maintain diversity to be able to cope with those upcoming changes which we can not fathom today.

Postmodernists are right in the sense that no culture is superior to another in an absolute sense. However, this does not mean that all cultures are equal. Relative to a certain context or problem, we can objectively talk about some cultures being fitter than others. (Remove the context, any comparison becomes impossible.)

Note that, when one culture assimilates another, it selfishly hedges itself against the future possibility of losing the evolutionary upper hand. In other words, it prolongs its own survival at the expense of decreasing the adaptivity of the whole.