ROBIN HANSON: What Culture Can You Trust?

Of these variants, the most trustworthy are probably those that were carried along to success by winning cultures. Over the last few centuries a few cultures have had far more success than others in influencing the world. That probably reflects good things about them. So features that were rare centuries ago, but common early on in the cultures that came to win, and are now common due to them winning, those are more likely to be adaptive features. Like maybe freedom of religion, speech, and commerce?

Among common cultural features today, the most suspect are values and norms that must be shared by many, but which arose in the last few centuries, and thus probably didn’t arise mainly via cultural selection. Most such changes were pushed by cultural activists, and won due to some activists winning out over others to control widely shared social pressures. So most “modern” norms and values seem suspect.

By its fruit the tree is known.