Why cultural evolution is key to addressing the metacrisis and seeding a civilizational renaissance
Rufus Pollock & Rosie Bell
Life Itself Sensemaking Studio
We can't go on living like this.
Most of us sense that something has to change — and that the change required runs very deep indeed.
'the centre cannot hold.'
"Cultures are adaptive responses, just as feathers are for birds and fur is for mammals."
Culture is the shared views, values, beliefs and norms that bond and organise human groups — and shape how we perceive reality itself.
Not just art or heritage, but the deep patterns that make collective life cohere.
| Culture | Institutions & Technology | |
|---|---|---|
| What | Shared views, values, beliefs, norms | Laws, organisations, markets, tools |
| Where | Internally embodied — minds, habits, perception | Externally represented — structures, artifacts |
| Visibility | Largely invisible, taken for granted | Visible, measurable, designable |
| Changes by | Social learning, imitation, meaning-making | Policy, engineering, investment |
You can change a law without changing the culture.
When that happens, the law often fails.
Berlin, 1856. Police chief von Hinckeldey enforced the law against the aristocracy, shutting down an illegal gaming club.
An aristocrat challenged him to a pistol duel. Duelling was illegal. Yet:
Hinckeldey was shot dead. Wife and seven children left behind.
The aristocratic code of honour — culture — was more powerful than the law, the police, and the king.
"It is impossible to understand the social life of people if one relies solely on official sources such as written laws."
Cultures change over time in response to changing conditions. This happens at several levels:
Physically weak, slow, can't tell poisonous from edible plants. Yet we colonised every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth.
"Imagine 20 of you vs. 20 capuchin monkeys, parachuted into an African forest. After 6 months, who survives? The monkeys."
Our success is cumulative cultural evolution: knowledge that accumulates across generations, becoming more sophisticated than any individual could devise alone.
Boyd & Richerson proposed that fire-making — a cultural innovation — transformed human biology:
Fire → cooking → digestible food → smaller gut → bigger brain → more culture → …
Culture didn't just help us survive. It reshaped our bodies and minds.
Evolution requires: (1) variation, (2) inheritance, (3) selection. Culture meets all three.
A young hunter watches the three best hunters, averages their arrow length. Arrow lengths converge on the optimum without anyone understanding aerodynamics.
"Neither evolution nor adaptation requires discrete traits, 'replicators,' low mutation rates, vertical transmission, or random variation."
Coherent systems are held together by stable relationships among parts.
When disruption passes a threshold, the system reorganises quickly into a new stable pattern — like water freezing into ice.
Ideas aren't constrained like genes — change can diffuse much more rapidly. Cultural life can demonstrate major transitions over shorter time periods.
Academic tolerance for cultural evolution decreases as the scale of explanation increases.
Social Darwinism misappropriated evolutionary language to legitimise colonial violence — casting domination as developmental necessity.
Postmodern scholarship pushed back hard from the '70s, rejecting grand narratives as naïve and dangerous.
But the need to understand large-scale cultural transformation hasn't gone away. Contemporary analysis is gradually regaining trust as an empirically disciplined field.
It's quite uncontroversial to speak of a modern or a medieval cultural era.
From Hegel's unfolding Geist to Marx's materialist history — a desire has persisted to understand shifts in the dominant organisation of power, knowledge, and collective life.
We needn't discard the whole project because some past accounts were flawed. We can salvage what is illuminating without uncritically resurrecting past violence.
The globally dominant mode of societal organisation shows signs of breakdown.
Breach of multiple planetary boundaries makes a major shift appear inevitable: either societal collapse or far-reaching transformation.
Unlike earlier societies, the globalised complexity of systems means a significant collapse might leave little foundation intact upon which to recover.
Public discourse remains stuck at entangled symptoms — climate change, inequality, rising authoritarianism. Our ways of addressing them neglect the deepest cultural roots:
These aren't arbitrary failings. They are self-reinforcing families of ideas — cultural paradigms.
We don't lack the knowledge or resources to tackle climate change. We lack the capacity for collective restraint.
Any country that restrains itself unilaterally risks economic disadvantage within a system organised around competitive growth.
Same with AI: any company or nation that slows down risks losing power and prestige.
At root: a culture that nurtures a misguided view of the world as the sum of fundamentally separate material parts.
From this sense of material separateness flows:
This is the metacrisis.
Cultural paradigms can and do transform. What's new is our growing capacity to comprehend these patterns — and participate intentionally.
We are meaning-making beings. We change our ways on purpose. Our growing understanding of cultural evolution increases the possibility that we might make it an object of intention.
Deciding together to aim for the kind of paradigm shift that could underpin a desirable, sustainable future.
Alarm bells ring at the suggestion of deliberately shaping culture.
Over the past century, the most visible efforts to shape culture have taken the form of oppression, propaganda, and manipulation.
And yet: external forces from nudge units to tech giants are already shaping our cultures whether we like it or not.
At a bare minimum, we need to become the kind of culture that no longer reproduces these conditions.
"It turns out that my life depends on the whole thing… rivalrous dynamics multiplied by exponential tech self-terminate… either we figure out anti-rivalry or we go extinct."
Transformation toward a recognition of life as fundamentally interdependent has itself become a condition of survival.
And what a beautiful coincidence: the cultural shift we need directs us to care for other beings and for the world as for the self.
Genes → genomes → cells → organisms → societies
Each major transition: previously independent entities forming new levels of cooperative organisation.
Arthur Koestler's "holon": entities that are whole in themselves but participate within larger wholes.
A worldview of interdependency represents a "basin of attraction" — increasingly viable under existential pressure.
The Ilahita of Papua New Guinea sustained a population of ~3,000 — an order of magnitude larger than the usual tribal ceiling of 200–300.
Facing external threat, they developed new initiation rites and religious practices that deliberately bound different clans together.
Cooperation was no longer grounded in blood ties, but in shared meaning and belonging — a paradigm shift enabling a more resilient, larger-scale whole.
— from Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World
For millennia, slavery was culturally normal — woven into views of personhood, moral order, economic life.
Abolition demanded not just legal change but a widening of the moral circle: a transformation in who counts as a person.
This shift in views and values began at the margins — Quaker communities, pamphlets, radical churches — and spread over decades into mainstream consciousness.
The law followed the culture, not the other way around.
A shift in views and values preceding and enabling structural change:
"Inclusion" represents a fundamental dynamic of cultural evolution: the enlargement of the cooperative whole.
Existential risks demand cultural capacity for solidarity and coordination at planetary scale.
Meanwhile a survivable future likely also requires reducing complexity: re-localised food systems, decentralised energy, stronger bonds of local interdependency.
Scaling up solidarity while scaling down systems calls for a shared worldview that can hold both global and local.
Survival now apparently favours qualities associated with maturity:
Coordination can no longer be secured through domination, but through shared awareness of participation in a larger whole.
Postmodern views and values have spread from radical fringe to mainstream — reshaping knowledge generation toward collectivism and inclusivity.
Metamodern pioneers are consciously informed by anticipated post-conventional stages of development — integrating what came before.
Culture wars? Not just ideology clashing — friction between different orders of meaning-making, each with its own coherence.
| Pre-modern | Modern | Postmodern | Metamodern | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Truth | Sacred revelation | Positivism | Relativism | Transrational / Integral |
| Inner dev. | Spiritual formation | Material growth | Healing | Becoming |
| Individual | Embedded community | Individualism | Collectivism | Interbeing |
| Paradigm | Total immersion | Unconscious immersion | Culture wars | Construct-aware |
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Throughout history, big change has begun in small, marginal communities experimenting with alternative ways of life.
From early Protestant communities to Renaissance city-states, from monastic orders to civil rights groups — counter-cultural norms have been pioneered at the margins, then spread.
Modern views and values arrived in Europe not as a top-down choice but the cumulative result of smaller experiments:
Renaissance city-states → Reformation → scientific societies → political revolutions
Feudal structures were slowly eroded and recombined, producing a long, uneven transition — accelerated by crisis.
When new ways of living prove more viable, more coherent, more enlivening — they spread.
"Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. The actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."
Any strategy failing to account for crisis is delusional.
We would be wise to follow our longing for joy, beauty and community — to give our benevolent weirdness its due — so that the ideas lying around when the time comes are more than simply expressions of the broken status quo.
Reorient our energy from control towards cultivation.
Trust emergence, while understanding that its conditions may be of our own making.
Culture is not engineered primarily by governments or institutions, but co-created through countless acts of attention, imitation, endorsement and refusal.
An invitation to recognise our own role in shaping culture and, knowing that we are anything but in control, to be guided by love in choosing what to create and to reproduce.
At a moment of real urgency, it seems no bad wager to begin cultivating the conditions — in ourselves and around us — that support more cooperative, life-sustaining, and beautiful ways of being together.
Something like a planetary civilization is coming into being.
The question is whether it can grow up in time.