Cultural Evolution in the Anthropocene – NewCo Shift

Humanity is lost at sea in a world of unprecedented change.

Where humanity is going, there are no roadmaps. The terrain is unlike anything weve seen before. The changes sweeping the Earth right now are literally planetary in scale and so filled with complexity that few among us even have a semblance of knowing what is actually going on. This makes it very difficult to navigate the troubled waters of the 21st Century.

Here are a few examples of things our species has not known in the three million years weve existed as tool using hominids:

The list could go on from here. My point in creating it is to show that we cannot simply apply the tools and models of past eras to the present situation. Nor can we employ them to forecast our possible futures. Instead we must bring to bear the vast collective knowledge gained across the universities and research centers of the world to build newer, more complex models that make sense of our present and emerging realities. This is what Ive called the predicament of knowledge as a key challenge for culture design in other writings.

I am going to make a bold claim nowthat cultural evolution is THE MOST IMPORTANT body of science for dealing with the global crises arising from this unprecedented time in human history. The study of social behavior, emergent complexity in human systems, how political and economic systems change, the roles of language and technology for shaping human experience, what makes us uniquely human, how landscapes and ecosystems co-evolve across various spans of space and time, and so forth. These are the topics that matter most in the midst of an unprecedented planetary crisis unlike anything our species has seen before.

And yet, almost no one has even heard of cultural evolutionary studies! Even more problematic, many who have heard of it tend to think in out-dated theories from decades (or centuries) ago. They dont know about the incredible advances that have been made in the last forty years.

My colleagues and I have been carefully going through a birthing process to create the Cultural Evolution Society in the last 18 months. We have already gathered together more than 1800 researchers and cultural change practitioners from around the world. Our first gathering is planned for September of this year at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Seeds have been planted for mobilizing and synthesizing knowledge about cultural change and human systems unlike anything attempted before.

We are rising to the grand challenges of cultural evolution just as our field is needed most. This includes a process to clarify the language used by researchers in dozens of different fields; crafting research agendas around the study of technology evolution, spread of ideas and institutional practices, and social learning in general; merging the study of human and non-human social behavior to deeply understand how we relate to the rest of the natural world; and much more.

My hope is that our efforts will not be too little, too late as a convergence of crises bring our increasingly fragile global system closer to collapse. The levels of inequality have corroded trust in social institutions and brought gridlock to political systems around the world. An ominous threat of war now bubbles up from many places as authoritarian militants take the helm of many nations. A mass extinction event caused by human activities continues to unravel the biosphere of the Earth. And the inability to discern truth from fiction in our decentralized social media environments only increases the social fragmentation that accentuates these undesirable trends.

Humanity needs culture design. We must deeply learn about how cultures evolve and employ this knowledge in holistic, integrative design frameworks for the practical solutions that remain to be envisioned or are in current need of expanded deployment. We must also evolve and change the very structures and social norms of our dominant institutionsfor it is the thinking of old that created our problems and that same thinking will not be able to solve them.

How will you be part of the evolution for humans and the Earth? What role or roles will you play in the great transitions now upon us individually and collectively in the 21st Century? Where will you stake your claims in the emergent future that promises to be very different from familiar pasts?

Now is the time to awaken and engage.

Onward, fellow humans!

Read the original post:

Cultural Evolution in the Anthropocene - NewCo Shift