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Merker: Wrestling with the Importance of Culture
B3P2S1 To me, the essence of Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise is to understand the culture of Victorian Britain — in which the Brits navigated the stormy sea of industrialization without ending on the rocks of political disaster — not just as a culture among cultures, but in the light of the science of human life that has developed over the last century.
Victorian Britain exhibited an extraordinary political maturity. And that
is a measure of the extent to which a culture, policy or population has educed — unwittingly over untold generations of cultural transmission — norms and conventions that move citizens to civil management of their affairs by what they willingly do for themselves and one another[.]
Our human nature is “open” in two ways.
We are not just programmed to live in a particular ecological niche.
Our unique language powers “propel us into an open space of possibilities stocked with both error and potential truths”.
The words of a prophet can teach young men that a certain shirt makes him “impervious to the white man’s bullets” or that the laws of industrial production will cause its destruction and “ring in the dawn” of a perfect world of “conflictless prosperity”.
Or maybe the prophet is wrong.
The question is how a culture transmits its truths from generation to generation without “the coercive power of the state”. It does it by transmitting its “norms and conventions” into the “second nature” of its members, starting as infants and continuing in a family, through concrete acts and interactions that survive the “learner bottlenecks” that process knowledge transmission.
If a person directs their personal engagements by “mutual agreement” rather than a “third party or institution” you get what Adam Smith called “the invisible hand”.
As long as exchanges are voluntary, each participant improves their lot in life by simply participating[.]
And the successful exchanges expand the economy and the participation of the population in prosperity.
But there is a problem.
[As] soon as a margin of prosperity has been achieved a new dynamic enters the process: the exploitation of this surplus through parasitism and predation.
Predation: using force to appropriate other people’s surplus.
Parasitism: appropriating other people’s surplus by “fraud, subterfuge, pretense, theft, “or appeal to abstract principle”.
The new economy needs protection for its surplus: it needs the state.
Our notable parasitisms are collectivism and other-regard morality.
Then there is the family, and its “natural communism”. If the culture defines family broadly, then “indigent members of an extended family” can claim support from the producers and keep everyone from advancing beyond subsistence.
The solution is a culture favoring the “monogamous nuclear family”, because it limits the parasitism of distant relatives. Perhaps it is not accidental that the monogamous Victorian nuclear family created “prosperity on a historically unprecedented scale”. Then there is “colonial monogamy”, practiced by birds like gulls, where everyone nests close together. Humans do this too, grouping their nests in villages, towns, and cities. It seems to be in the jeans, yet it seems not to forbid a man from “collecting” more than one wife.
And yet the partisans of overthrow and the enemies of promise all seem united to demolish the “monogamous nuclear family” in the service of emancipation and diversity. The point of flexible culture over simple instinct is to enable us to occupy “widely diverse circumstances” all over the planet. But free-for-all sexuality is actually limited by “imprinting” where the young are imprinted with the sexual mother-father monogamous relationship of the parents.
When the culture downplays the importance of the “monogamous nuclear family” you get the downplaying of sexual differences, such as the appearance of transexualism and all the present sexual confusion.
But the whole point of culture and tradition is to fill in the blanks of biology with cultural norms and “something to live up to” and limit the incidence of confusion.
But do sexual mores matter? Let’s agree that the nuclear family helped in the industrial revolution. But whatabout today? Maybe parental involvement in the creation of human capital is just as important as before.
More to come.
| Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:19:30 GMT |
Merker: The Secret of Human Culture
B3P1S3 In Perishing Promise Björn Merker describes the Victorian culture, in which population doubled and per capita income tripled and the economy transformed from agriculture to industry without political revolution. It did not have a prophet or blueprint. It had a culture, and “one did things and comported oneself in conformity with those norms and conventions”.
“Culture” is
Acquired in childhood, largely through implicit learning in a family setting, if forms a mostly silent background of a given culture’s “matters of course”, matters that need not be discussed or negotiated while its members go about their daily activities.
What is the point of this? Just that most people, most of the time, go about their daily activities, doing things the way we do them, without having to use time and resources to think and plan and analyze from moment to moment.
This leaves those resources free for other uses, notably the ongoing business of life.
That is how the Victorian era worked. Most everyone went with the program, and the program worked. “Since then, the enemies of its promise have done what they could to discredit it” and demolish it.
And the “culture” is not just about trivial things. Take the matrilineal culture of the Na in Asia that “recognizes neither fatherhood nor marriage. Children are conceived by night-time visits of unmarried men to unmarried women.”
Culture… [is not] about superficial aspects of a people’s life…[It] extends to the very foundations of our social existence… [such as] reproduction and generational succession[.]
For humans, even our mating system “has no species-wide definition”. And humans have no planetary-wide culture. We adapt culture to the environment in which we live.
Unlike beavers.
Imagine a species of mutant beaver — a single species — which builds freshwater dams and lodges in Scandinavia, snow lodges in the arctic, kelp-lodges on the Pacific littoral, and lodges of sand fused with saliva in the Gobi Desert.
That will be the day.
How do we humans do it? We are “a new kind of species”.
Our uniqueness starts with human language, which no other species possesses. How to understand it? The understanding turns on the fact that we humans have
two kinds of culture, namely ritual culture and instrumental culture.
Instrumental culture is activity like food washing or kayak building. “The knowledge can be acquired through observational and social learning once the tradition is a fact.”
Success in mastering an instance of instrumental culture is a matter of having the cognitive capacity to follow its causal unfolding and the manipulative capacity to give it a try oneself.
But ritual behavior is different, because tradition behaviors transmitted by ritual “are not derivable from its purpose or function”.
Animals have both ritual culture and instrumental culture. Birdsong is ritual; foraging is instrumental.
Human language is ritual culture. A child learns to speak the language of the parent because that’s the way we speak. And a child, through years of practice, comes to speak in conformance “to the conventions of the ambient cultural tradition”.
We humans have our instrumental culture, where we do things that we have learned are useful. But there are many “human cultural traditions that have obviously instrumental utility” but people have no clue about the benefit.
For instance, if you eat untreated cornmeal you eventually develop pellagra, a deficiency of Vitamin B3 that can be fatal. It turns out that if you mix wood ash with cornmeal before soaking and heating, you add B3. But if you ask a tribe why they add wood ash to cornmeal they just say “it’s our custom”.
But how does a beneficial custom get encoded into a community’s ritual culture? The answer is that in a population
any model behavior that enjoys any kind of advantage… even the slightest statistical edge, will end up disproportionately represented in the population aggregate in the long run [and sufficient generations.]
This, says Merker, is “the ultimate secret of culture, its capacity to shape, unbeknownst to its carriers, their behavior in adaptive ways”. People don’t know anything is going on, but they just follow the culture, “because it is customary.” It occurs through cultural transmission, not natural selection.
These cultural transmissions
leave the species free to culturally educe other conventions for other circumstances in which it might thrive given adequate buffering customs.
Thus we humans can adapt to different challenges as a single species, through culture rather than genetics. Unlike beavers.
The problem, of course, is that any culture has a whole array of cultural traditions, and in the modern era we all are quick to attack traditions we don’t like “on rational grounds”. In the old days, it was the job of “shamans, chiefs, or priests” to deal with such dissenters.
If a culture permits freedom and liberalism and tolerates dissent it may have the “flexibility for weathering change when it comes”. Or the culture may fragment as dissenters attack the culture and fragment it. And what of a culture so devoted to creativity that teachers refuse to correct the faulty spelling of their creative students? Where is the balance?
Merker proposes Edmund Burke, and
his emphasis on taking account of tradition in statesmanship, the importance of continuity in political affairs, with reform rather than wholesale innovation as the modality of change, and to found legitimacy on history rather than on abstract ideas.
In Burke’s time such ideas were just opinion. But now we have the science:
computer modeling of populations of learning agents subject to purely cultural transmission of behavior across many generations.
Back then we had Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Now we have Hayek’s theory of the Knowledge Problem that prevents government planners from running the economy, as in Keynes’ dream in 1936:
I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investment.
Hayek blew up Keynes and The Planners in 1944.
Some cultural practices stave off pellagra. Others make things worse. And we have no way of knowing right now which is which.
Then there is Lee Harris. He argues that
parents, motivated by solicitude for their children, will be eager to inculcate in them not only the norms of the culture as they have received them, but amplified by the lessons they themselves have extracted and are learning from their personal experience of growing up in the world,
The family is the important “channel of cultural transmission” because of the genes. Parents have a biological disposition for “special concern and care for their children” as worked out by William Hamilton in 1964.
Given the science on the generational transmission of cultural adaptations “there is no reason to expect that substituting schemes of reason for a traditional way of doing things will ever yield anything near its intended results”, especially when set up “wholesale across a population”.
In brief:
Cultures are not constructed or “founded”, they accrete through processes of population statistics over generations[.]
So when the reformers and revolutionaries set out to demolish the “mores and conventions” of Victorianism they knew not what they were doing. And we are stuck picking up the pieces.
| Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:35:11 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Men are creators, fighters, destroyers; Women are learners, carers, teachers.
The political is the distinction between friend and enemy — Carl Schmitt
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
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