The Two-culture Paradigm, or Dual-culture Theory as Solution to "Inequity"
Turns out, we're missing an important axis when we talk about race, and it may have been costing us real solutions
This piece is under active editing, based on your feedback. Content may change.
One of the things that I’ve noticed in discussions about, well, pretty much everything that people want to debate online in the Culture Wars, is that it is easy to get mixed up and start identifying demographics with personality characteristics. This is one of those things that can derail conversations, and it is important not to get caught up in it under erroneous assumptions, because it can open an otherwise strong hypothesis to unearned criticism.
What I have noticed is that the most meaningful distinctions between individuals lie not in skin color, or gender, or sexuality, but in thinking habits. People get into certain habits in their thinking that appear to predispose them to certain tendencies, that I will go into below in more detail, but these tendencies appear to predict a lot of things, from wealth, to dating behavior, to susceptibility to certain cognitive biases.
Because these two tendencies are not biologically determined, and because they tend to be passed down from parent to child, I have begun calling them “cultures.” Because they are cultures, they can be changed, with some effort, at any time as long as the individual is aware of his or her membership in one over the other. The greatest opportunities for changing a culture, however, are and always will be during early childhood, when it can be assigned instead of changed. Thus, it becomes the responsibility of the caring parent that is made aware of this paradigm to select the culture that he or she believes is most appropriate for their child’s success.
These cultures appear to line up with two major areas of the brain: Culture A with the limbic system, and Culture B with the cerebral cortex. I would gingerly hypothesize that the presence of both cultures in our species at the same time indicates that we are in the middle of a transition into nearly-exclusive cortex preference from nearly-exclusive limbic system preference. More forceful assertion on this point, however, would require further research that is beyond my means at the moment.
I have called them “Culture A” and “Culture B” simply to divorce the distinctions from any emotionally-laden terms, and to signify chronological order, as A is assumed to have preceded B. Here is the breakdown.
An individual may hold characteristics of both cultures but in general, one of these will be found to be predominant in most people.
Culture A: Limbic-predominant
Speed over accuracy
A collectivist mindset: people are seen and treated in terms of group identity
Race/Gender/Sexuality essentialism
Belief that individuals fundamentally lack control over their own situation in life and that success or failure are largely due to forces outside of one’s control
Violence accepted as a valid interpersonal problem-solving modality
Education is not considered a feasible route to a better life
Lack of capacity for delayed gratification
Predominant focus is on the unchangeable past
Subjective lived experience is more highly valued/significant than objective truths
“Fast living:” local dominance hierarchies, high competition/low cooperation, intense sexual competition, early pregnancy, low child investment
Culture B: Cortex-predominant
Accuracy over speed
An individualistic mindset: people are seen and treated in terms of individual characteristics and personality
Race/Gender/Sexuality is largely an inconsequential detail
Belief that individuals fundamentally possess control over their own situation in life and that success or failure are largely due to one’s own actions
Violence not considered a valid interpersonal problem-solving modality
Education is considered a feasible, if not the most efficient, route to a better life
Capacity for delayed gratification
Predominant focus is on the changeable present and future
Objective truths are more highly valued/significant than subjective lived experience
“Slow living:” global dominance hierarchies, low competition/high cooperation, muted sexual competition, late pregnancy, high child investment
Origin
There is nothing biologically deterministic about these two paradigms. As far as I can tell, any individual that is not subject to brain damage or nutritional deficit has access to Culture B; however, like any other culture, it is passed down from parent to child and laterally from peer to peer.
I repeat: THERE IS NOTHING BIOLOGICALLY DETERMINISTIC ABOUT THIS. You cannot look at a race, phenotype, or nationality of people and remark that either Culture A or Culture B is inevitable or endemic to them. The only link to anything biologically determined about the individual is the human tendency for people of similar biological characteristics to associate as peers, or to “associate” as parent and child. That’s it.
There is nothing wrong, however, with pointing out that Culture A or B are currently over- or under-represented among a given demographic, or that one is better represented in one or the other, and this, I believe, is the gateway to much more meaningful and solution-oriented conversations.
It is my belief that Culture A is the evolutionary strategy most relevant to early hominid environments: lots of predators, lots of competition from other humans, short life spans, high child mortality, and thus reproductive strategies that make sense in that framework. Culture B would have evolved out of Culture A as humanity became more successful at defending the boundaries around society and thus more ordered. Life spans would have elongated and long-term reproductive strategies would have become not only feasible, but competitively superior to short-term strategies.
Elaborations
Culture A individuals will prosper more in environments that are low in order and high in chaos. In these environments, average life span is not very high and opportunities for reproduction must be maximized as quickly and broadly as possible in order to attain reproductive success and pass your genes on to the next generation. In high-order, low-chaos environments, Culture B will prosper.
There is an additional wrinkle, however. Humans are both themselves and their environment. So, complementarily to what I've stated above, Culture B individuals are more likely to create and maintain high-order environments and Culture A individuals are more likely to create and maintain low-order environments. What this means in extension is that Culture B individuals are always going to have an edge over Culture A individuals in the long term, because, with enough time, they will create a high-order environment for themselves and leave the low-order environment to the A Culture. Low-order environments are the default condition, and thus Culture A individuals will always exist but Culture B individuals will out-compete them in every timeline except the immediate short term.
Implications
My suspicion is that when the number of Culture A individuals reaches a certain critical mass in terms of percentage of the overall population, not only does society begin to fall apart due to the easy violence and overall tendency of Culture A individuals to create and maintain low-order environments, but in modern frames of reference, too many people begin putting their energy into non-working solutions aimed at already-solved or unsolvable (due to their primary existence being in the past, their echoes into the present notwithstanding) historical issues, neglecting functional solutions to present and future problems. See literally any conversation about race where someone pulls up their list of racial incidents in the United States to buttress their assertions.
I further suspect that what we are seeing in our country today indicates that this cutoff has been passed. This is why we are seeing much of the turmoil we see now.
The only workable solution is to encourage more individuals to turn to Culture B for themselves, their peers, and for their children. This will be a challenge as it seems that we are bombarded by messaging every day that glorifies Culture A in marketing, popular culture, music (a comparative look at artists or musical styles that are typically marketed by race is revealing here), sports, and television.
The encouragement for more people, especially young people, to adopt Culture A has been sophisticated, well-funded, and consistent, and we are up against no easy task. For anyone who wants to know about these efforts in detail, all you have to do is turn on your television set or visit a movie theater. You will notice the theme soon enough now that you are looking for it.
Motive can be accounted for by the potential that Culture B ways of thinking bring to control, dominate, and - most significantly - profit from Culture A individuals. I will leave the identity of the perpetrators and judgement as to whether it is accidental or purposeful as an exercise for the reader.
You have your theoretical foundation layed out....and I know from my experience that this piece will grow in depth of detail around explaining the theory, empirical support for it and by real world examples or events that display the theory in action serving to convince the reader of your argument
and simplifying it for those lacking a little bit in prior knowledge of these concepts .....there are a lot of exciting tantalising ideas here for you build out, so you have my eager attention as the reader now....
I like the easy flow and the tone....as you add detail and examples it will get a lot bigger but that is a good thing because it will guide the reader more slowly through each point allowing greater absorption of the idea... which they will need (I assume?) to understand the following ideas.
I don't know your pace, but I'd like to see where this is in a few weeks.....this is good stuff, go all in on theory and anticipate the challenges to it as u go and counter them
I like your distinction. And I agree gree with your conclusion that, with regards to human beings, there are “no biologically deterministic” cultures.
However, I think you do yourself a disservice by not referencing environmental factors that contribute and serve as incentives for particular cultures to develop. For example, it is not a novel observation that Culture B has developed in the difficult climates of northern Europe where the lack of self-awareness and hasty anti-social behavior means the end of a division of labor, and thus a certain death for that civilization. And, that Culture A is more closely associated with tropical environments, where feeding yourself is a simple as picking up a coconut that’s fallen from a tree. In B, respect for property rights is fundamentally necessary. In A, if you have impulsive behavior, and are shunned by those around you, you will certainly not starve, or die from a cold winter if you have no shelter.
To push the importance of the environmental factors, consider the literature on eye color. Since the late 1970s, it has been well documented that eye color is a characteristic in the animal kingdom if you use the same distinctions that you made for Culture A and B. Dark-colored eyes are associated with fast reaction times, and a low propensity for analytical thinking. Light-colored eyes, such as those in wolves, are associated with slower reaction times, more cunning thinking, high focus on child nurture, and pair-bonding. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583485686/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
With all that said, I want to emphasize that I do not think that genetics determine what culture any group will fall into, but rather that genetics adapt (starting with the brain, which is the fasted adapting organ in the human body) to the environments which humans choose to live in. And, because harsh environments demand more attention to analytical and abstract thinking, and more importantly to behavior that looks far into the future to anticipate what dangers may come, Culture B will be pretty much a requirement for a society that wishes to survive and prosper.
Consequently, the economic theory of culture is, in my opinion, the superior explanation of causal relations with regards to humans desire to move in the direction of either culture, and biological adaptations by large haplogroups will slow the ability for one group to switch to the opposite culture that suits its respective environment better.