The Great Smoothing Out
I recently explored an interesting thought experiment about the Culture while talking with Max Harms. Specifically Max argued that the Culture is far from a perfect utopia, while I felt that it was way better than almost anything else I could think of.
One of the key cruxes in the discussion was that the Culture fails to preserve any meaningful method of honouring their ancestors or cultural traditions. It all collapses into individual utility maximisation.
Given that there are people who feel a strong compulsion to preserve their culture, how does that translate to the state of civilisations in the far future, say thousands of years from now? In my mind it seems ridiculous that in this future civilisation, people will continue to honour ancient traditions such as Japanese folk dancing, but I think there is a decent chance such traditions do continue to exist because of the local incentives people have to protect them.
Let’s imagine an extreme version of this and work backwards to consider what seems good.
In this extreme: descendants of these traditions continue to perform them in large numbers despite lacking the social and environmental context that created them, merely because they feel there is a value in protecting them. Let’s zoom in on the local context to imagine how this occurs. A girl, Yuri, in a small Japanese town is the granddaughter of the previous shrine maiden, and her only sister has expressed a strong disinterest in learning the traditions from their grandmother. As a result Yuri has a strong obligation to keep the tradition going because otherwise it’ll die. The question is whether it’s wrong to force her to keep it going, or whether she should be free to pursue her desires.
In one sense it’s a tragedy for the tradition to die, but on the other hand this is just a natural part of history. We can look back and see that history is littered with traditions and practices that have died out because they no longer serve a purpose. Given that, it seems somewhat perverse that we would selectively favour the traditions that we happen to inherit today, simply because we have enough excess labour that we can indulge in them despite them not serving the purpose for which they were created.
On the other hand, as a society we see it as a tragedy for that tradition to be lost, and we would want someone to continue that tradition if it was in danger of being lost. Hence in Japan, some money is provided by the government to pursue practices of significant cultural value to preserve them and share them for the enjoyment of modern Japanese people.
Given that we get to care about multiple competing priorities simultaneously, and that people genuinely care about these things, this seems like quite a good use of time and effort. A more cynical position would be that, given the extreme suffering that exists elsewhere in the world, a healthy triage of expenditures would allocate them just enough resources to keep them from disappearing entirely.
On the other hand, this seems very unlikely because there is a natural tendency for a push towards the global maxima. The rate of language loss today is the highest it has ever been, and seems to be increasing. People in remote areas of China for example have a reasonable incentive to learn Mandarin or English for economic reasons, and understand that their opportunities are naturally limited by sticking to local dialects. With each generation the number of speakers of that language will decrease.
We can think of this as a kind of “great smoothing out”, where cultural differences present a natural friction, that become silent casualties of Progress.
Medical Mechanica from FLCL, a gigantic clothes iron ready to smooth the world into a flat factory floor when the right circumstances arrive.
An interesting contemporary example is a new law that was just passed in China called the “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress” containing provisions around the use of Mandarin over local ethnic languages in schools in China, essentially ensuring that while the other languages can persist, Mandarin must be given prominence relative to them.
While not explicitly mentioning Tibet, Mongolia, or Uyghur, it clearly targets these regions, which have resisted efforts to switch to Mandarin. In 2020 Inner Mongolia saw significant protests when the party reduced Mongolian-medium instruction in elementary schools, replacing them with Mandarin texts. This led to widespread protests and boycotts, followed by a purge of ethnic Mongolian Party officials who were viewed as insufficiently aligned. A PEN America / Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center report found that more than 80% of Mongolian-language websites in China have been censored or banned.
In contrast to the natural economic gravity leading people to abandon their native languages, this is a much more intense effort to dismantle the existing cultural differences in these places. The law uses the word “zhulao” which is typically used in the metallurgical sense of forging or casting, with the intent to create a unified alloy of peoples across China with a shared language and cultural identity. In fairness to the Chinese, it is still more permissive than France’s historical treatment of regional languages such as Breton, Occitan, and Basque, where the state pursued aggressive suppression for over a century.
Interestingly, yesterday Will MacAskill released a new draft about an idea called the “Saturation View” which gives a clean framework for thinking about this problem.
Total utilitarianism recommends something he describes as “tiling the universe with hedonium”, where hedonium is a compute substrate simulating an enormous number of digital minds which have been optimised to produce the optimal pleasant experience, forever. Naturally such a vision produces a sense of dissatisfaction, that something is missing, like a symphony composed of a single note repeated over and over.
The saturation view argues that the optimal configuration of the universe is to explore the full space of possible minds and experiences. The variance between minds is considered virtuous, with minds that are more dissimilar from the mean providing additional marginal utility. To compare this with our own life, if offered the opportunity to experience the same wonderful experience over and over again for one’s entire life or to experience a dizzying array of different wonderful experiences, most people would choose the variety option. He treats this as a brute intuition without arguing for why, so I’ll offer one: the relationality between experiences is critical in giving them framing and meaning, where the contrast itself provides value. The words in a sentence require spaces between them, and variety between words in order to create appreciable meaning.
This frame gives us a way to reconcile the tensions of some of our earlier examples. For Yuri, who is faced with walking away from her traditions, it is clearer precisely what we are losing, which is that the space that might be illuminated by such practices will be lost. This is the answer to the perversity of privileging cultural inheritances we receive today. In the same way that we don’t mourn people who died 1000 years ago, but do mourn those lost today, it makes sense for us to act to preserve those unique practices, given that we actually have the resources to do so.
We don’t have any clear answers on her obligation to take up the task, and I think this is reflected in reality. We acknowledge that it’s a hard thing and a burden, and I admire people who do it anyway for this reason.
The crux Max kept returning to was the Culture’s homogeneity, and he’s right. The Culture is boring. If everyone is just having sex, producing drugs from their brain, and making art all the time, there is a lot of value being left on the table in the modes of experience they could be having. There is a sense (at least when I read them) that Culture citizens who transfer into totally non-humanoid alien bodies are doing something better than the average Culture citizen, which is likely picking up on this intuition.
And finally we can see that there is something real being lost when China erodes its less mainstream cultures. The language practices in various parts of China aren’t just language, but the vessel in which culture and unique experiences are transmitted. In particular, the pastoralist communities who speak Mongolian as their primary language uniquely carry this heritage in that they maintain ancient ways of life in their entirety. Crushing those vessels prunes those branches before they can branch further.
the impression i get from the novels is that there are plenty of stories to tell—even books to write—about the ‘hoi polloi’ of the culture. plenty of local drama, gossip, events. gambling, sport, spectacle.
Banks does not focus on these characters. and indeed treats them only in aggregate, as a sort of background noise. but these characters are not bored, or even that boring—it’s just: their stories are more like earth stories. the series, after all, tells the history of the culture; these people are not therein meaningful players.
the same is true here on earth though: if all goes according to plan, i will not warrant even a footnote in the history books. but i don’t find my life ‘boring’—quite the opposite! it’s easily one of the top ten most interesting lives, from my perspective!
It may be worth noting that the typical Culture citizen seems to freely choose to die after a few centuries. This suggests they’ve run out of things they want to do in life fairly quickly.
And that they for mysterious reasons don’t indulge in the mind engineering or adventurousness needed to prevent such quick boredom.
I feel like I honestly diverge with Iain M. Banks’ model of people’s minds regarding the self termination question. I think there is massive inertia wrt to taking the action to die which would mean many people would just continue by default.
It’s possible that there’s some worldbuilding element that I missed regarding this.
Every person and pursuit we are told of is boring in comparison to what they could be and could become. Sports and gossip? For eternity? That’s utopia?
Sure humans love sports and gossip and I’d love to partake in some. But there are better sports and better gossip and better everything than the culture indulges in. The culture is boring, as though their ambitions were locked in when the Minds were created millenia ago.
this person is winning, and in style. their life is not boring.
i get your point (and agree!) that they ‘should’ be dissatisfied with the infinite-highschool-beauty-contest planet. it is not the game i would choose to play. but: what do you do with them when it is the one that they choose? some people want simple things.
The examples that you gave of drama don’t seem like particularly interesting things to me, and seem similar to the lowest grade forms of entertainment that we have today, if anything maybe less. I think art and cultural entertainment today are some of the highest forms, and those do exist in the culture, but a big part of the appeal of art is that has teeth, that it actually criticises something. This isn’t shown to be much the case in the Culture.
But moreover, I can easily imagine worlds that are vastly more interesting even within the constraints of the Culture itself that it doesn’t explore. For example, each GSV could represent completely different worlds of experience to its inhabitants, plus a vastly richer digital realm, packed with people competing over invented metrics such as what we see in MMOs today, or people creating vast LARP battles, or recreating interesting moments and scenes from history, or engaging in decades long simulated games with things like simulated magic facilitated by advanced technology.
This is just what I can think of in a few minutes, but there should be enormous numbers more kinds of different experiences available, as well as quite strong convergence to particular sets of values within the Culture, such that the final result seems overall somewhat less diverse even than the modern United States, letalone modern Earth as a whole today.
I was excited to read this because I agree with Max and others that there’s something really wrong with the Culture as a utopia.
I don’t think your examples are all that relevant, though. Saving old traditions seems roughly of equaly worth to creating new traditions. And the reasons for flattening you list are pragmenatic- economic or in the interest of maintaining power. Neither are concerns for the Culture citizenry, so if they’re flattened, there must be another reason. I don’t think you point to any particularly convincing ones.
This is a bit tangential, but here’s my $.02 on what’s going on. This is from a analysis purely of the text. I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on from an external perspective, although that’s quite interesting too: our best Utopia is boring because our best author lacked the imagination to create a better one, and/or knew he couldn’t get people engaged with a better one.
Anyway, I’ve been tinkering with ideas for fun, while enjoying some relaxing AI-written Culture fanfic focusing on the question of what the heck their Minds are aligned to. I think what’s happened is some sort of cultural lock-in. The Minds are aligned with the Culture’s values when they created and aligned the first Minds. THis would explain both why the Culture is relatively boring internally, and why they do so little helpful intervention on the masses of suffering sentients in their galaxy.
The other more interesting but less well-fitting possiblility is that they erred by making the minds too corrigible, too averse to persuasion, and to have too narrow a definition of “human.” Thus they can’t convince their populace to evolve and become less boring and selfish. They merely give Culture citizens what they say they want. This is more interesting in that it could change, if those interested in interventionism convince the remainder of society. But it seems a bit implausible that the kind people of the Culture just truly don’t care much about anyone outside of their own species.
The other possiblity is that the Minds and/or the Culture strongly believe in letting other species/civilizations make their own mistakes, possibly to avoid flattinging the variety of experiences. They humor the few eccentrics who insist on becoming Special Circumnstance interventionists because they’re corrigible, but go no further than they must because they believe in letting a million flowers bloom.
Really, no Mind had bothered to leave a drone to monitor the situation during the Chelgrian revolution disaster? And that was enough to horrify the whole Culture toward noninterventionism, as though they hate a little blood on their hands more than the oceans of suffering that seem to exist galaxy-wide?
Something is messed up there.
If no individual wants to carry on a tradition, despite being immortal, post scarcity, and completely free to choose it.… that seems like an irrefutable proof that the tradition actually wasn’t that great after all. If nobody wants to do Japanese folk dancing, why should individuals be forced to preserve it?
Preserving a tradition requires having some critical mass of people follow it. It’s a collective action problem—following it yourself won’t suffice to preserve it.
Then you can try to convince people to join you in preserving it. If it’s really a valuable thing, it shouldn’t be that hard to do, especially with Minds to help with the grunt work of searching for interested people. Even in canon Culture, Minds often do weird little projects like this if it catches their interest.
If you could just “convince people” to go along with solving a collective action problem, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a collective action problem. The whole idea of a collective action problem is that this sort of coordination is difficult. And in this case one of the things the government can do is solve collective action problems.
The government is a clumsy and forceful way to do coordination. I don’t have a problem with a thousand people voluntarily signing a contract to do a religious commune or whatever. But forcing people to play along when they don’t want to and would leave if they could, just so you can preserve a tradition is pretty horrible. We generally call that “tyranny”.
I proposed my own coordination layer for solving the collective action problem—ask a Mind to search for people who would be interested in your thing and would voluntarily agree to do it. Convincing people is a lot easier when you’re talking to the top 1000 people most likely to be interested. Yes, sometimes you won’t find enough people to sustain your weird archaic tradition and it’ll die out. The alternative is to force them to sustain it and I consider that unacceptable.
I think the main thing I was gesturing at in the post is that traditions can die and be lost beyond recovery, and when they are gone we accept that loss the same way that we accept the deaths of people from the past.
In the same way, that it’s sad when someone dies unnecessarily today, it would be sad for certain traditions that we have today to be lost. We also close the door on evolutions of those traditions and experiences downstream from those things that lead to valuable mind states.
I am less concerned about traditions that are dropped by lack of interest in the far future because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.