Is Culture Degeneration Biological or Ideological?
Decline
05/24/2025
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Mises Wire
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Jeffery L. Degner
The process of cultural decay is front of mind for those engaged in the pronatalist movement. The question of how it happens was raised by Robin Hanson in his recent appearance at NatalCon. His goal is to discover what cultural elements have contributed to fertility decline, which he contends will accelerate movement towards a self-destructive way of life. Conversely, he looks to the positive developments that have come before us and they are evidence that “culture is humanity’s superpower.” From his standpoint, this ability has come about because of natural selection and that humans have proven themselves capable of cultural evolution, and now, perhaps, cultural devolution.
Another claim he lays out is that one of the drivers of cultural evolution is the importance of status recognition. The idea goes that humans tend to mimic the behaviors of those perceived to hold lofty stature. For Hanson, one of the most powerful modern status markers is educational attainment. When it comes to marriage formation, he’s onto something here. Indeed, as others have pointed out, this is a primary driver of mate selection in the modern West. Charles Murray has demonstrated that this is, in fact, one of the most important parameters in mate selection since the mid-twentieth century.
For Hanson, this is a poor marker for mate selection, especially if one values a growing population. Just as wealth had been a highly important status marker for marriage in the past, which in his view has previously led to fertility decline—education as a status marker has done the same. If this selection mechanism leads to lower overall fertility, it then arguably turns into cultural decline (something that Hanson doesn’t thoroughly define).
He also distinguished between micro and macro cultures—with smaller peasant groups typifying the former and the modern, nation state embodied in the latter. Hanson observes that macro cultures are susceptible to devolution to a higher degree than smaller, more nimble cultural units. The current state of the West, in his view, is represented by a “global monoculture of elites.”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/culture-degeneration-biological-or-ideological
