Building new cultures

A polaroid photo by Andrei Tarkovsky

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In 1555, six hundred men, mainly French Huguenots and Swiss Calvinists fleeing their Catholic persecutors, set out to found a new society off the coast of Brazil.

Their leader was Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon. Villegaignon’s CV included fighting the Turks, the Scots, the Italians, the Arabs, and pirates; he’d been a scientist, an explorer, a mercenary, and, always, an entrepreneur

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. It was he who abducted Mary, Queen of the Scots, when Francis II wanted to marry her.

And now, Villegaignon was going to found a new culture.

He called it France Antarctique.

Villegaignon was a Catholic, but when he set out to recruit citizens for his new society, he found it easier to convince Protestants, since they were persecuted by the Catholics, so why not? He took anyone he could find: “rakes, wantons and runaway slaves”. By July 12th, 1555, he’d filled two boats.

He had overlooked only two items: women and supplies.

The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss relates the story of their arrival in the new world in his Tristes Tropiques (1955):

A handful of Frenchmen, after braving every imaginable danger in their attempt to escape from religious strife in France and establish a new community where Catholic and Protestant alike could live under a free and tolerant government, now found themselves alone on a continent as unfamiliar as a different planet, knowing nothing of the geographical circumstances or the natives, incapable of growing food to keep themselves alive, stricken with sickness and disease and depending for all their needs on an extremely hostile community whose language they could not understand, and were caught in a trap of their own making. The Protestants tried to convert the Catholics, and vice versa. Instead of working for survival, they spent weeks in foolish discussions: How should the Last Supper be interpreted? Should the wine be diluted with water before consecration? The Eucharist and the question of baptism gave rise to veritable theological tournaments, after which Villegagnon was either converted or returned to his former faith.

It is hard for me not to read this as an allegory of online communities. The utopian visions, the schisms, the culture wars. There are many people I meet online who feel frustrated by the societies they were born into and dream of forming new societies “in the cloud and let it rain down on earth” as offline communities, perhaps network states. Many will end up like France Antarctique. I’ve seen a few attempts up close. It’s not been pretty: mold-infected houses, bullying, and endless meetings. Shaping a new and healthy culture is hard.

Yet, in a way, you have to shape the culture, whether you like it or not. You already do. You already live in a culture of your own making—a culture you summon by curating your social graph, choosing where you work, who you talk to, their norms and practices, the information you feed the algorithms, and what you let the algorithms feed you. The culture you live in, the one that shapes and supports you, is not the one you inherited from your parents, and it is not the same as the cultures that shape and support your siblings. You live in France Antarctique. You have to make it work.

What are the characteristics of a functional culture?

Integrated cultural institutions

In the 1920s, the Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski thought about how cultures solve people’s needs.

In his view (a school of thought known as functionalism) a culture is made up of a set of institutions. An institution is a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors. Sometimes it looks like what we in everyday speech would call an institution (an institution like the government, or a museum). Often a Malinowskian institution is more fluid (like the institution of marriage).

Marriage, schools, initiation rites, trade, courts. Institutions like these, Malinowski argued, serve to solve basic human needs. We need a way to form pair bonds and raise families, for example. How can we solve this? Arranged marriages. Raiding villages, hunting for sex slaves. A bunch of brothers sharing a wife. Those are all valid institutions. As is Tinder.

We need to keep warm, we need to eat, we need sex, we need support when raising our young, and we need to grow skilled—our institutions have to solve for all of these needs. At the same time.

The institutions have to be integrated. That is: they need to fit together into a whole that supports people throughout their life cycle, in all of their changing needs. You can’t have a culture that works for people in their twenties and then fails them when they become parents; or a culture that meets people’s need for food but fails to train them to shoulder the role of an elder. Cultures like that will disintegrate.

So: a culture consists of institutions (like marriage) that help us meet our human needs. And the institutions need to fit together in a coherent way.

How do you make the institutions fit together?

Usually, through cultural evolution

Most of what we know about what happened in France Antarctique has come down to us from a man named Jean de Léry. Léry was a Calvinist and former shoemaker who had joined Villegaignon, searching for a more tolerant society. When France Antarctique descended into 4chan madness, with Villegagnon increasingly determined to starve the Protestants to death, Léry and a few other Calvinists got themselves banished from France Antarctique. Their crime? Refusing to accept that Christ’s flesh was physically present in the elements of the sacramental bread. Léry went to the mainland.

Going native among the Tupinambé Indians, Léry proved himself to be a deft anthropologist. He made the first known transcriptions of Native American music. Later, he documented the culture of his hosts in a History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called America (1578), a now largely forgotten masterpiece of ethnographic literature.

The Tupinambé that Léry fled to had an integrated culture. The institutions fit together as a whole. It wasn’t perfect—they couldn’t treat basic infections and also they ate people—but it was a stable functioning whole which served its members throughout the various phases of their lives. This integration was likely a result of evolutionary forces.

This is how cultural evolution works on institutions. Through trial and error different groups will assemble different webs of institutions. Over time, groups that make bad design decisions for their institutions will lose out in the competition: their members will starve, get killed by other groups, or, as is often the case in the anthropological record, people will just look at their more successful neighbors and convert to their style. Successful cultures will spread.

(Caveat. There is also a selection pressure for institutions and cultures to maintain themselves, as Radcliffe-Brown argued in opposition to Malinowski. If you start a company to solve a problem, the company will tend to stay around after the problem is solved. The same is true of government institutions. And sometimes an institution’s attempts to preserve itself will hurt the people it is meant to serve. But there are limits to this: if the institutions that make up a culture can’t meet people’s basic needs, the people will cease being, and with them the institutions.)

So the evolutionary pressures will push the institution to meet people’s needs. And the evolutionary pressures will shape the institutions to fit together, too. When new institutions are invented, it is like a new set of selection pressures are introduced (cows are introduced, for example, which creates a new economic institution, herding, and this changes the context which other institutions operate in) and the other institutions shift under these pressures (the family structure might changes to accommodate the work of tending cows). Over historical time, these pressures meant institutions evolved to fit together and support the needs of people. At least well enough for them to survive and reproduce. On average. I’m not trying to be romantic.

Villegagnon, on the other hand, tried to design a culture deliberately. He had a rosy vision: he wanted a tolerant government, he wanted out of the religious wars that were consuming Europe, he valued intellectual discussion. But he failed to establish even the most rudimentary institutions a culture needs. There were no women; the men didn’t work; their political constitution led to tyranny — and so on and on. Only a small number of the citizens of France Antarctique made it back to Europe alive. Léry escaped on a pirate ship. Villegaignon, on the return trip, traded a cannon for a parrot and ate the parrot.

Perhaps Villegagnon was a uniquely bad founding father. But what he was trying to do was also genuinely hard. Establishing a healthy culture is an ordeal; it is a high-dimensional optimization problem.

Deliberate cultural design

Considering we are all more like Villegagnon than the Tupinambé these days, what should we do?

There aren’t many cultures around. Not in the sense Malinowski and the other early anthropologists used the word. There are few integrated wholes left. Rather, we live in a mosaic of subcultures (if by subculture we mean a social group that only contains a subset of the institutions we need across our lifetimes). We find meaning in one subculture and earn our living in another—and it is up to us to stitch together this so the institutions fit together. The upside of this is it gives us the power to invent new and better cultures, cultures that uniquely fit our needs.

But there are many ways to fail integration. A lot of my friends are computer geeks. They have built wonderful subcultures where they find meaning and work. But, as they grieve in their mid-thirties, there are few women there. They forgot the pair bonding institution!

Teenagers, excluded from the adult world and our institutions, drift off into subcultures that break them mentally. They are looking for communities where they are valued and can find meaning and they find France Antarctique.

And I—well, what institutions am I failing to integrate into my culture? It is a question worth pondering.

As far as I know, there exists no general theoretical framework for how to design a functional culture. It would be interesting to see a broad set of case studies of contemporary examples. We know it is not impossible to design flourishing cultures.

When it comes to your personal life, perhaps a good strategy is having continual deep conversations with people around you. If you talk to people at various stages of their lives—your kids, your peers, your parents and grandparents—you maintain a living understanding of their needs. You are not limited to just seeing the slice of human experience that people in your position see. You can ask yourself: Is this a decision that creates a stable culture across the lifetimes of those I care for? This might give you are more integrated understanding of the needs of a human life, a better understanding of the context you are designing for when you are designing your culture, as you always are.

And for those who are self-selecting into new communities, like France Antarctique, based around shared values and ideals: there are myriad examples of stable cultures that have formed this way. Often groups we regard as ethnicities are actually conscious projects. The Tsimihety is an ethnic group in Madagascar, but their name hints at their beginnings as a political project. During the Sakalava monarchy, subjects had to cut their hair when the king died: Tsimihety means “those who never cut their hair”. Similarly, the Cossacks of Russia is a culture formed by serfs who escaped their owners, often guided by religious visions, hunting for the lukewarm rivers to the east, as the serfs in War and Peace talk about.

Actually. Considering how common these kinds of attempts to found new cultures are, it might be the case this is how the earth was populated: by people following prophets into the wild, seeking a new kind of society, their France Antarctique. Perhaps most failed to design integrated cultures that could sustain them.

But some succeeded.

And sometimes, they succeeded in ways so grand it was incomprehensible to the cultures they left behind.

In 1969, when one of these wild breakaway cultural experiments managed to put a man on the moon, my great-grandfather, a poor old Swedish farmhand, stood up and left the TV room.

“What nonsense!” he said. “You cannot walk on the moon. Never happened. Never!”

But it did. And there are other moons to walk on.

Warmly
Henrik

1. Stefan Zweig on Villegaignon:

Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, half pirate, half scientist, a dubious but attractive figure, is a typical product of the Renaissance (...) He has been brilliant in war and a dilettante in the arts. He has been praised by Ronsard and feared by the Court, because his character is incalculable. Hating any regular occupation, despising the most enviable positions and the highest honours, his volatile spirit prefers to be free to indulge unhampered its fantastic moods. The Huguenots believe he is a Catholic and the Catholics believe he's a Huguenot. Nobody knows which side he is serving, and he himself probably doesn't know much more than that he wants to do something big, something different from anyone else, something wild and daring, something romantic and extraordinary.