Abstract
Chapter 1 introduces the book. It conveys the central message of the work, which is that contemporary Western populations are in decline in a number of ways, apparent across a host of indicators of mental and physical health, intellectual productivity and ability, social cohesion, and perceived meaning in life. A brief summary of some of the indicators of these trends is offered, including data evidencing rising rates of psychopathology and declining in-group altruism. It is noted that these trends appear to stem ultimately from modernization, that is the set of social, cultural, and economic effects consequent to the development of a capitalist industrial economy. The theoretical model at the heart of the book, the social epistasis amplification model (SEAM), is then explained, and the rest of the book is outlined.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Some have argued that recent Western history, sometimes meaning modernity (which can denote different time periods, but in this context most often means the period from industrialization on) and sometimes the contemporary period more narrowly, has not been an “age of disenchantment,” but rather that in this era, transcendent meaning has been sustained through or is being revived by “New Age” and other forms of basically paganistic and/or occult thought (see, e.g. Josephson-Storm, 2017; Partridge, 2004/2005; Teichrib, 2018). While this view may not be entirely inaccurate, we will later discuss empirical data indicating that it is exaggerated: if one understands “disenchantment” simply as loss or relative lack of perceived existential purpose, then it does seem that disenchantment characterizes modern history.
- 2.
Unless otherwise indicated, we intend “behavioral” to be inclusive not only of observable behavior but also of psychological properties, although we will occasionally use the term “psychobehavioral” to refer to that same general category.
- 3.
Group selection typically entails that groups of organisms compete with one another to survive and reproduce, as opposed to individual selection, which often entails that individuals compete with one another to survive and reproduce (although there are many factors that exist independently of competition that contribute to differential fitness between groups and between individuals). These are not mutually exclusive processes, but the balance of selective pressure at any given time may be closer to the group or individual level. The topic of the “levels of selection” (e.g. selection at the group level or individual level) is discussed in more detail in Chap. 2.
- 4.
One could argue that with the shift from tribal to more complex human societies, the nature of warfare changed greatly, such that extinction of populations through inter-group conflict became very rare. Thus, the fitness costs of inter-group conflict may have been markedly attenuated. Nonetheless, there is evidence that selection pressures related to inter-group conflict in the Modern Era were quite strong, having had the effect of inducing large changes in population levels of at least one psychological trait over the course of about a century (Woodley of Menie, Figueredo, et al., 2017). If relevant inter-group conflict in the Modern Era had been associated with weak group-level selective pressure, and so with small fitness losses for populations that were unsuccessful in such conflict, one would not expect group-level selective pressure to have induced large changes in population levels of phenotypic traits in the course of just ~100 years from that Era—but germane data suggest that such selective pressure did have such effects in the case of at least one phenotypic trait (Woodley of Menie, Figueredo, et al., 2017).
- 5.
We may conjecture that the broader competitive ecology of Little Ice Age Europe would have promoted progressively more effective social monitoring of this sort, in that competing groups would have effected a positive feedback loop of selection for general intelligence among themselves (through warfare, as indicated above), with each group being placed under selection for higher levels of this trait, at least in proportion to the advantage a more intelligent group(s) had over them by virtue of superior intelligence; with growing average general intelligence of any group, there would have been a more efficient and effective execution of all social processes with the function of maintaining or improving group integrity, and the same sort of positive selective feedback loop would likely have applied to all other traits that could so benefit group integrity, including monitoring for negative social epistasis.
- 6.
Something similar seems to happen with the modern Amish, whose austere way of life annually brings non-trivial fractions of Amish youth to abandon their communities for the modern world when the opportunity to do so is presented to them (Harpending & Cochran, 2015; this opportunity comes about in an established adolescent rite of passage known as Rumspringa, which has endured in the Amish world possibly because it is an adaption for controlling patterns of social epistasis); the high levels of social stability and well-being and low levels of mental illness (Seligman, 1990) that the Amish enjoy may have something to do with this “boiling off” of incompatible members of their communities (Harpending & Cochran, 2015 also discuss the role of such “boiling off” in the evolution of distinctively Amish traits).
- 7.
Gerhard Meisenberg (personal communication) suggests another possible driver of the more severe moral orientations of older Western populations: less developed abstract cognition, limiting the possible complexity and nuance of moral reasoning (see also Oesterdiekhoff, 2012, 2016, and along similar lines Meisenberg, Rindermann, Patel, & Woodley, 2012). Nonetheless, gains in certain dimensions of abstract reasoning through modernization (the Flynn effect, about which more later) have co-occurred with the increasing mutational damage described above. This leaves open the possibility that modernized moralities reflect much preoccupation with “moral ambiguity” because of distortions of the psychological processes underlying “nuanced” moral cognition, stemming ultimately from deleterious mutations.
- 8.
We will later argue that it is probably a mistake to think of social epistasis and culture as distinct phenomena. If social epistasis is, as we will maintain, a major epigenetic determinant of the patterns of (at least) psychobehavioral development that populations exhibit, then it likely influences the constituents of culture (e.g. political orientations, moral beliefs, and life goals).
- 9.
Though narrow, specialized cognitive skills suited to the generation of wealth in mild ecologies and environments do become valuable; the Flynn effect, or the observed rise in IQ scores in modernizing and modernized populations of about three points per decade, is largely or exclusively promoted by the enhancement of such skills (Woodley of Menie, Figueredo, et al., 2017).
- 10.
Gerhard Meisenberg (personal communication) observes one rarely appreciated weakness of this strategy, which is that not all worldviews welcome to the liberal table clearly encourage commitment to the sorts of prosocial norms that would allow stable consensuses to be reached in pluralistic societies where normative truth is a contested matter. It is possible that ideologies with more aggressive and antisocial proponents may be advantaged in efforts at liberal consensus building such that they ultimately supplant liberalism with their preferred illiberal view(s).
- 11.
As we discuss in greater detail later, we use this term in the European sense, which represents the original understanding of liberalism. On this definition, indicated above, liberalism is the political view that governments ought not to impose on the governed any particular vision of the good, the right way to live, or however one might prefer to characterize such comprehensive normative ideals (see, e.g. Simpson, 2015).
- 12.
Though this may have less to do with the cultural effects of liberalism on ontogenetic behavioral development than with the genetic pacification that preceded and likely partially enabled liberalism’s broad purchase on the West (or it might be that contributions from environmental and genetic factors have been quite comparable; Frost & Harpending, 2015).
- 13.
These patterns are given to fluctuation. High marriagelessness and childlessness were observed in parts of the West in the early twentieth century, for instance (Rowland, 2007; Sobotka, 2017), though in the past appear to have been related to social crises, such as significant interstate wars, which have become far less common over time in the West (Mann, 2018). It may be that in Western Europe, marriage began to wane at some point during or at the end of the Middle Ages; the Anglosphere, where high marriage rates remained the norm for much longer (Therborn, 2004), may have started to succumb to the same tendency in the second half of the twentieth century.
- 14.
Strikingly, the problem may be serious enough to have lowered the average annual frequency that American adults have sexual intercourse (1989–2014), which is surprising given the sexualization of Western culture and the associated liberalization of attitudes about sex (Alexander, Inglehart, & Welzel, 2016; Attwood, 2009; Inglehart, 1977; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005). But as it happens, a central cause of this decline has been “[a]n increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner” (Twenge, Sherman, & Wells, 2017; see also Collins, 2004), which is something that, ironically enough, sexual liberalization has if anything facilitated insofar as it promotes non-monogamous sexual behavior.
One might suppose that the number of people living without a marital or steady partner is an effect of an aging population with a concomitant increase in the percentage of widowed persons. However, the decline in sexual frequency is robust to a control for age and marital status (Twenge et al., 2017).
- 15.
Widerquist and McCall (2017) offer striking evidence of how badly human physical health has deteriorated in at least this respect (i.e. the prevalence of chronic and degenerative diseases) in noting that, even when differences in longevity between the populations are statistically controlled, women in hunter-gatherer societies tend to develop breast cancer at the extremely low rate of one in 800; among modern women of the United States, the rate is about 100 times higher.
- 16.
As a general rule, periods of peace have preceded times of civilizational decline the world over, and those times of peace themselves typically have followed eras of remarkable cultural development contemporaneous with much inter-group conflict. This is apparent in the history surrounding the Pax Romana, as well as the Warring States Period in China and the long run of violent conflicts between ancient Greek city states (see, e.g. Murray, 2003).
- 17.
“Purposive” should be understood as an antonym of “nihilistic.”
- 18.
The term “dysgenic” denotes selection for traits generally thought to be socially undesirable, and selection against traits generally thought to be socially desirable; it is usually employed in discussions of selection for lower levels of human intelligence.
- 19.
Throughout human history, it might be that the effects of social epistasis control modules have been the major source of social selective pressure controlling deleterious mutation accumulation. One may hope that through genetic engineering, humanity will develop a more benign way to control this problem, which would target mutations themselves rather than their carriers. But the problem is that we have not evolved instincts to target deleterious mutant genes apart from their carriers, which has pessimistic implications for the success of such endeavors.
References
Alexander, A. C., Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2016). Emancipating sexuality: Breakthroughs into a bulwark of tradition. Social Indicators Research, 129, 909–935.
Attwood, F. (Ed.). (2009). Mainstreaming sex: The sexualisation of Western culture. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.
Brashears, M. E., & Brashears, L. A. (2015). Close friendships among contemporary people. Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. In Press.
Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Domingue, B. W., Belsky, D. W., Fletcher, J. M., Conley, D., Boardman, J. D., & Harris, K. M. (2018). The social genome of friends and schoolmates in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115, 702–707.
Eisner, M. (2003). Long-term historical trends in violent crime. Crime and Justice, 30, 83–142.
Entis, L. (2016, June 22). Chronic loneliness is a modern-day epidemic. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/
Epstein, S. A. (2009). An economic and social history of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fernandes, H. B. F., Zerbe, J., Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M., & Figueredo, A. J. (2021). Humans: Between-group conflicts. In T. K. Shackelford & V. Weekes-Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of evolutionary psychological science. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-619-1
Frost, P., & Harpending, H. C. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology, 13, 230–243.
Greenfield, P. M. (2013). The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000. Psychological Science, 24, 1722–1731.
Harpending, H., & Cochran, G. (2015). Assortative mating, class, and caste. In T. K. Shackelford & R. D. Hansen (Eds.), The evolution of sexuality (pp. 57–68). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Inglehart, R. F. (1977). The silent revolution: Changing values and political styles among Western publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Inglehart, R. F., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, cultural change, and democracy: The human development sequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Josephson-Storm, J. A. (2017). The myth of disenchantment: Magic, modernity, and the birth of the human sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kesebir, P., & Kesebir, S. (2012). The cultural salience of moral character and virtue declined in twentieth century America. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7, 471–480.
Mann, M. (2018). Have wars and violence declined? Theory and Society, 47, 37–60.
Meisenberg, G., Rindermann, H., Patel, H., & Woodley, M. A. (2012). Is it smart to believe in God? The relationship of religiosity with education and intelligence. Temas em Psicologia, 20, 101–120.
Montes, S. (2013, November 1). Facing a rising tide of personality disorders. Counseling Today. Retrieved from https://ct.counseling.org/2013/11/facing-a-rising-tide-of-personality-disorders/
Moore, R. I. (2007). The formation of a persecuting society: Authority and deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Murray, C. (2003). Human accomplishment: The pursuit of excellence in the arts and sciences, 800 BC to 1950. New York: Harper Collins.
Oesterdiekhoff, G. W. (2012). Was pre-modern man a child? The quintessence of the psychometric and developmental approaches. Intelligence, 40, 470–478.
Oesterdiekhoff, G. W. (2016). Child and ancient man: How to define their commonalities and differences. The American Journal of Psychology, 129, 295–312.
Partridge, C. (2004/2005). The re-enchantment of the West (2 vols.). London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Rowland, D. T. (2007). Historical trends in childlessness. Journal of Family Issues, 28, 1311–1337.
Rubin, E. L. (2015). Soul, self, and society: The new morality and the modern state. New York: Oxford University Press.
Salter, F. K., & Harpending, H. (2013). J. P. Rushton’s theory of ethnic nepotism. Personality and Individual Differences, 55, 256–260.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1990). Why is there so much depression today? The waxing of the individual and the waning of the commons. In R. E. Ingram (Ed.), Contemporary psychological approaches to depression: Theory, research, and treatment (pp. 1–9). New York, NY: Plenum Press.
Simpson, P. L. P. (2015). Political illiberalism: A defense of freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Sobotka, T. (2017). Childlessness in Europe: Reconstructing long-term trends among women born in 1900–1972. In M. Kreyenfeld & D. Konietzka (Eds.), Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, causes, and consequences (pp. 17–56). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
Teichrib, C. (2018). Game of Gods: The temple of man in the age of re-enchantment. Eureka, MT: Whitemud House Publishing.
Therborn, G. (2004). Between sex and power: Family in the world, 1900–2000. London, UK: Routledge.
Twenge, J. M. (2013). Overwhelming evidence for generation me. Emerging Adulthood, 1, 21–26.
Twenge, J. M., Sherman, R. A., & Wells, B. E. (2017). Declines in sexual frequency among American adults, 1989–2014. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46, 2389–2401.
Westbrook, D. (2004). City of gold: An apology for global capitalism in a time of discontent. London, UK: Routledge.
Widerquist, K., & McCall, G. S. (2017). Prehistoric myths in modern political philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Woodley, M. A., & Figueredo, A. J. (2013). Historical variability in heritable general intelligence: Its evolutionary origins and sociocultural consequences. Buckingham, UK: Buckingham University Press.
Woodley of Menie, M. A., Figueredo, A. J., Sarraf, M. A., Hertler, S., Fernandes, H. B. F., & Peñaherrera Aguirre, M. (2017). The rhythm of the West: A biohistory of the modern era, AD 1600 to the present. Journal of Social Political and Economic Studies Monograph Series, Volume 37. Washington, DC: Council for Social and Economic Studies.
Woodley of Menie, M. A., Sarraf, M. A., Pestow, R. N., & Fernandes, H. B. F. (2017). Social epistasis amplifies the fitness costs of deleterious mutations, engendering rapid fitness decline among modernized populations. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 3, 181–191.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sarraf, M.A., Woodley of Menie, M.A., Feltham, C. (2019). Introduction. In: Modernity and Cultural Decline. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32984-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32984-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32983-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32984-6
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)