Cultural Ecosystems
Cultures experience a common life cycle: They are born hard and soften over time—worn down by the caustic parasitic pop cultures that form spontaneously in any multi-cultural ecosystem—until they dissolve entirely. Sometimes cultures can be held together by outside pressure in a way that slows down this process, like a deep-sea organism whose form is held by the very pressure that would crush a surface dweller.
Cultures evolve mechanisms to fight off threats from each other. These mechanisms make up a culture’s “immune system.” They range from psychological techniques that produce cognitive dissonance in the face of out-group ideas to punishment for deviation from group norms and old-fashioned isolation from the outside world. When someone ridicules you for being “weird” or “cringe,” they are acting as tools of their culture’s immune system, attempting to prevent you from taking actions outside the bounds of cultural norms.
Protective cultural mechanisms can’t be arbitrarily removed among cultures that exist in broader ecosystems without severe consequences. Unprotected cultures will be outcompeted, worn down, and picked to pieces by surrounding cultures.
Not all cultures are softened into obsolescence over time. Some cultures adopt specialized roles within the broader landscape and only die when their ecological niches disappear. Shaker culture, for example, specialized in running orphanages (they could not have kids themselves because they believed all sex was sinful). When state-run alternatives started popping up, Shaker culture quickly transitioned from a respected societal influence to a defunct cultural tradition associated with an obscure type of well-built furniture.
As society changes, cultures evolve to fit new ecological niches. While we don’t know enough to say what ecological niche early Judaism filled, we can say it was not always a specialist in producing city-based[[85]](#_ftn85), highly-trained professionals,[[86]](#_ftn86) as is the case with some Jewish cultivars that have existed since the Middle Ages. (We do not say this as a stereotype but as a fact backed by evidence cited above—members of most modern Jewish cultivars live in cities and get degrees at higher rates than other groups.)
Should we speculate on the ecological niche of early Judaism, our guess would be that in its early days, it had a semi-nomadic specialization, with an ability to maintain a distinct, non-urbanized identity while nevertheless living near and transacting with cities.
The fact that many of the most important relics of this period were also mobile, like the Ark of the Covenant, lends some credence to this hypothesis. Early Jewish semi-nomadic specialization is further supported by Joshua and Judges depicting Israelites as a confederation of semi-nomadic highland tribes that joined forces to deal with military threats from urbanized kingdoms. Perhaps this semi-nomadic specialization was a product of Judaism being an early innovator of the concept that God is not tied to a specific city or region. We can see the end of this cultural niche post-Jeremiah when Judaism became polymorphic, developing territorial and non-territorial organizational methods, types of interactions between homeland and diaspora Jews, and (later) means of coordination between different kinds of diaspora Jews. Jews clearly demonstrate that a single cultivar will evolve to fit new ecological niches over time and should not be thought of as a static thing.
Even a single variant of a cultivar can exhibit polymorphism (more than one phenotype that manifests under different conditions). For example, a culture may have one specialization below a certain population threshold and another when it grows above that threshold, as is the case with both Evangelical Arminianism and some Islamic cultivars. Each of these groups exploits the “oppressed group” role when below certain population thresholds and transforms into a theocratic autocracy when above a certain population threshold. This can produce comical effects (consider how a non-evangelical living in an evangelical town feels when they see news coverage of a “war on Christmas” triggered by evangelicals living as minorities in non-evangelical cities—such as major coastal cities in the U.S.). (We go into this phenomenon in more detail in the chapter “Roles in Multicultural Ecosystems” on page 460.)
The shifting roles some cultivars take depending on critical mass and dominance mean you cannot reference how a cultivar behaves in areas where it lacks population density and power to predict its behavior once it gains dominance over political mechanisms. Instead, you must look for representations of the cultivar in areas where it is already dominant. A cultivar that benefits its neighbors when in the minority often shifts to aggressively stamping out all competition and deviation from cultural norms once it gains control. This doesn’t change the fact that the cultivar can be a critical component of a multicultural ecosystem.
There are also cultivars that evolved to fill specific niches in multicultural ecosystems, such as the Romani (Gypsies) and most modern Jewish cultivars (which makes Israel a particularly unique experiment in that a symbiotic specialist cultivar is forcing itself to live as a dominant culture).[[87]](#_ftn87) A society is almost always better off as a multicultural ecosystem, with each cultivar fulfilling a specialized ecological niche. (For more stats on this point, see: “Immigration and Conservative Values” on page 592.)
The benefits of diverse cultural specializations within an ecosystem fuel our eagerness to create a system that preserves cultural heterogeneity and allows for multiple distinct cultures to exist under one umbrella. After all, a single culture is unlikely to produce the broad range of skills a thriving society needs: A culture that enables effective, inner-city lawyers to feel content with their lifestyles won’t simultaneously be optimized around imparting deep satisfaction to rural farmers.
The extent to which cultural specialization produces adherents who thrive in specific fields can persistently be seen in long-tail distributions. Consider how Catholic trust in systems and bureaucracies correlates with heavy Catholic representation in the United States Supreme Court (with only two of the nine sitting supreme court justices not being Catholic at the time of this book’s publication—though Neil Gorsuch is only half Catholic). Consider also how the Jewish predilection for academic systems correlates with Jewish luminaries being represented among Nobel prize winners at a rate 100 times higher than would be expected based on population alone.
When we think about the niche in society, we want our family’s culture to fill, we are well aware that it will comprise just one tiny sliver within a wider ecosystem. Our goal with this book is to, for the first time, intentionally design an opt-in, diverse, multiphase ecosystem that can govern the interaction of multiple specialized cultures, which will serve society through their diversity of viewpoints, skill sets, and talents. Until now, competing cultures have been dumped into a geographic cage and forced to “figure it out for themselves” with only the barest of rules (like “don’t kill each other”) governing their interactions.
A Note on Generalities
Any tendency for a culture’s adherents to exhibit certain traits, or to be disproportionately represented in certain niches, doesn’t mean that all or even most of that culture’s adherents will exhibit those traits or gravitate to those niches.
We worry about how this book obligates us to make generalities that might be toxic to our careers. It is, for example, impossible to contrast how Jewish and Catholic cultures affect their adherents on a macro scale without making generalities about Jews and Catholics—and people often find any generalization offensive.
When we say something like: “Some Jewish cultivars specialize in urban, communal living and the production of highly trained professionals,” we do not mean that all Jews living within that faction of Jewish culture live that way. Rather, we are trying to highlight how a cultivar produces specific outcomes at a rate higher than other contemporary cultures. It is impossible to catalog cultural evolution without making any generalizations or identifying patterns in how cultures interact across time and geographies.
Ironically, the risk to us from making these kinds of generalizations does not come from the cultures we are generalizing, as most are hard cultures, and very few hard cultures care about generalizations. Hard cultures are typically quite aware that they produce differential outcomes and are distinct from the rest of society—that’s kind of the point. Rather, the risk comes from pop culture variants that use the effective suppression of intellectual inquiry as a metric for status signaling (causing surrounding groups to live under what is akin to a dictatorial cultural hegemony).
Finally, our ability to write about a culture is somewhat limited to our own experiences and what we can read about the culture. All of our books are living documents (we update them about once a year based on reader feedback). If we made a mistake, mischaracterized your culture, or you have additional ideas, please reach out.
Note: You will notice we almost entirely ignore discussion of Black culture. This is not because we lack experience with (or exposure to) it or because it was not important to cover, but because there is no way two non-Black people can make broad—sometimes critical—generalizations about Black culture (as we do with every other culture we mention) without it coming off as racist.