Theory of culture as waste.
Illustration by Facundo Belgradi.
What makes a homo human?
We used to think tools made the distinction between whatever homo and homo sapiens, so we decided Lucy was the first human. But then we realized that many animals, not just primates but some birds and beavers and stuff, use tools, too. Home Depot became instantly less sexy and anthropologists became instantly more weary. What, then, makes us human? What, then, makes us special?
Because us humans, we love to feel special.
Two plausible answers to that questions surfaced. Maybe what makes us human is cooperation. Maybe what makes us human is art.
Cooperation is very inefficient.
In general, animals don’t cooperate to the point of taking care of the sick or weak: that’s very inefficient and nature is very efficient. One theory posits that a homo remains that has a broken and healed leg is the first human remains, since it’s proof of cooperation.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said that the first sign of civilization was a healed human femur found in an ancient cave. In nature, a broken leg means certain death. But this one healed —proof someone stopped, stayed, and nursed another back to life. Cooperation, not conquest, is the first leap.
As inefficient as cooperation is, it’s one of the things that makes us resilient as a species. Because we cooperate and help our weak and ill, we are diverse. Because we are diverse, we can adapt to different circumstances, climates and environments.
Art is very unproductive.
What was going on that first homo’s head when they drew on that cave? When they sung that first song? Maybe grief. Maybe joy.
Maybe love.
Definitely not productivity.
The oldest known art is a series of ochre cross-hatchings and handprints, found in Blombos Cave, South Africa, and on walls in Indonesia and Spain (cave art ~73000 BP, Blombos; handprints ~40000 BP). The why is unknown: it wasn’t for food, or shelter, or profit. It was for presence, memory, magic, or play.
Cathedrals are inefficient, unproductive, wasteful. So are carpets, and poems, and opera.
Love is foolish and wasteful.
As are books. As is ethics. As is philosophy.
Loving you is foolish and wasteful and beautiful. Like you are foolish and wasteful and beautiful.
Sports. Children’s play. Chess. Mona Lisa. The Pyramids. The Parthenon.
Inefficient. Unproductive. Wasteful.
Shelter ends once the cave is dry: every additional design decision broadcasts values. Shelter ends once the cave is dry: everything after is theater, every design a vote for a value, a vision, or a story. Shelter ends where architecture begins. Even the efficiency boxes in US suburbia are coded with societal values: efficiency, conformity and uniformity over beauty and individuality.
Animals are efficient. Machines are productive. Humankind is wasteful.
Once humans move from the jungle, from the ecosystem, into their artificial shelter clusters a.k.a. villages/towns/cities, nature’s efficiency goes out of the window. The poop doesn’t recycle itself. Cultural objects don’t compost so easily, especially away from green density. Ecological terraforming, agriculture and hunting disrupt delicate systems of climate, flora and fauna. And though terraforming, agriculture and hunting end up being leap-level improvements in efficiency and productivity, they start as play, as tinkering, as observation.
They start as a mistake.
They start as art.
Foresight is science. Strategy is culture. Art is a mistake.
Machines are productive. Nature is efficient. Humans are wasteful.
This is my theory of waste as the defining human trait. Call it play. Call it curiosity. Call it creativity. Call it destructiveness. Call it war.
Call it love.
Call it theory of beautiful mistakes.
Call it theory of culture as waste.
Wasteful cooperation and wasteful art are the real drivers of humanity. They make us leap into culture through play. This is what most evolutionary theorists, economists, and so-called socialist cultural critics miss. They want humans to be efficient and productive, but what makes us endure and leap is our inefficiency: our surplus, our playfulness, our willingness to squander, to risk, to care, to build cathedrals, to go to space, and to draw bison and to love someone for no reason.
If cooperation makes us more resilient, I don’t think inefficient can be an accurate term.
Cooperation makes us resilient, but the fruits of cooperation aren’t immediately apparent. You have to keep doing it for a while even though it seems like it sets you back. Until you have a breakthrough. That’s not how nature usually works. Nature usually rewards immediately successful efforts. Humans keep doing unrewarding things beyond “reason” and I think that’s beautiful and I think that makes us human.
My opinion, of course.
I agree that doing things that aren’t immediately obviously necessary is a good trait of humans. I do think that humans seem to value things that don’t have a clear payout besides that humans like them, and I agree that those things are usually beautiful. Eg, art is hard to see as having a payout. But I think it probably has a variety of simple and reliable payouts that make it valuable to do in a Community vs Environment scenario. And nature isn’t picky about how long you took to prepare—the ultimate rule in nature is “that which survives, survives”. there isn’t a strict time horizon there, and so if you can do long-horizon preparation and pull it off, survival will reward it; it seems to me that human survival reliability is higher on short timescales because of preparations that have accumulated—that’s not unusual for nature, the only thing that’s unusual is for the preparations to be accumulating as memetic culture rather than as genetic culture.
Now, that’s not to say that “that which survives” should be our only source of what-is-good. I agree that things that we value are, from the perspective of survival, some degree of waste. But I think we came to value them because, previously, they weren’t waste. My worries about the future can be summed up as “the partially-competitive struggle to survive created everything we love, and competition to survive is inclined to destroy everything we love”.
Lovely one, thank you for your thoughtful answer.
This is in fact part of a bigger thing I’m writing and will post this week. After I do, can I come back and answer you?
I promise I’m not copping out. I just want to be as thoughtful as you are here, and also keep a few things under my sleeve.
And maybe, just maybe, what I’m writing might assuage your fears. I hope it will.
This isn’t a good theory.
While humans aren’t literally the only animals to make tools, the difference between human tools and the basically pointy sticks that other animals make is vast.
There isn’t any great reason to expect there to exist a narratively satisfying “what makes us human”.
“Waste” is a non-apple. You have a very specific definition of efficiency, and anything that doesn’t fit this model is “waste”. Sure, by your model, a cathedral is waste. But spending the same amount of effort and resources digging holes and then filling them in again would also be waste. By your definition, almost any activity that doesn’t spread your genes is waste. So your theory is non-predictive as it doesn’t explain why humans build cathedrals rather than something else.
Also, culture and “waste” aren’t uniquely human. From peacock tails to bird songs to magpies collecting shiny things to orcas balancing fish on their heads. Lots of animals have something resembling culture.
Learning to copy is easy. Learning to flawlessly assess if some behavior is useful is hard. So it’s no surprise that many animals learn by copying each other. And the actions they copy aren’t always useful to survival, but are usually pretty good.
The tools=/= humans isn’t my opinion. It’s science current mainstream opinion. I like tools=humans, as a wrote here: https://toolkitforthesoul.com/this-is-why-we-build-things/
Digging holes and covering them has systemic use. It’s part of the ecosystem of plants and the health of the dirt around the particular animal, so no, it’s not a waste.
A cathedral doesn’t benefit the ecosystem but it benefits humanity, since it unites us in a common hyperreality.
The things animals do in general are not necessarily necessary for their survival, but they are usually necessary for the good health of the ecosystem they are part of.
Movement is the first action of the universe. Memesis is the second. (Chaos is the third). Of course copying is easy. It’s also fundamental. It’s also near impossible. It’s what your cells do for your survival. And you, on a macroscopic level, is what animals (and humans) do for our survival.
Animals don’t learn to assess a behaviour. If its not useful for the system, either the system or the animal die.
Peacocks feathers are a defense mechanism, birds song are for communication. Orcas play is for group binding. I don’t know much about magpies, tell me more.
Thank you for reading and for sharing your pov :)
That seems strange. That’s not how evolution usually works.
Have you had long discussions with ChatGPT? This sounds like the sort of thing a person suffering from AI psychosis might say.
Really?
By the way, how many r’s are in raspberry?
BTW, reason doesn’t need personal attacks nor insults. It stands by itself.
:/
“AI Psychosis”. Is ad hominem a thing here in less wrong? Or is it more of an Edinburgh thing?
Yes, actions that benefit the ecosystem in fact benefit the species and are in fact rewarded. Digging holes to hide food: reward for individual plus reward to ecosystem. If the ecosystem survives, you survive. If the ecosystem dies, you probably die with it. Like it happens with the amazon rainforest. they cut/burn the trees, the animals die too.
Peacocks, just like the frilled-neck lizard, for example, use their feathers as a defense mechanism. As a deterrent, to scare away predators. The feathers make it look bigger, or like there might be many animals around. It also serves a purpose for mating.
You can just google things.
It felt similar. So more intended as a hypothesis than an insult, but sure. I can see how you saw it that way.
You seem to be mixing up several different claims here.
Claim 1) Evolution inherently favors actions that benefit the ecosystem, whether or not those actions benefit the individual. (false)
Claim 2) It so happens that every action that benefits the ecosystem also benefits the individual.
Claim 3) There exists an action that benefits the ecosystem, and also the individual.
I don’t feel that “benefits the ecosystem” is well defined. The ecosytem is not an agent with a well defined goal that can recieve benfits. What does it mean to “benefit the planet mars”? Ecosystems contain a variety of animals with that are often at odds with each other.
What quantity exactly is going up when an ecosystem “benefits”? Total biomass? Genetic diversity? Individual animals hedonic wellbeing? Similarity to how the ecosystem would look without human interference?
That is wildly not true. Plenty of animals die all the time while their ecosystem survives.
Sure. You might escape. But probably. Yes.
The problem is, the overall situation is like a many player prisoners dilemma. Often times the actions of any individual animal will make a hill of beans to the overall environment, but it all adds up.
Cooperation can evolve, in social settings, with small groups of animals that all know each other and punish the defectors.
A lot of the time, this isn’t the case, and nature is stuck on a many way defect.
It does seem to be mostly mating.
If you haven’t, consider reading Bataille (especially The Accursed Share).
Thank you for the rec! Will do!
and thank you for reading :)
Part of making a living is making a world to live in.
Such a lovely sentiment! Thanks for sharing!
I must disclaim originality. I read it a long time ago, in a Usenet discussion, but I have forgotten the author.