History and Culture

This section asks how we got here and what we've lost along the way. The articles share a revisionist impulse: the standard stories about civilisational progress, collapse, and cultural change are usually wrong in ways that flatter the teller. The real stories are messier, more contingent, and more interesting.

Cultural Evolution as Foundation

Cultural Evolution is the section's theoretical anchor: Henrich's argument that what separates humans from other apes isn't raw intelligence but cumulative cultural transmission. Individual humans are bad at inventing survival techniques from scratch; what we're good at is copying, refining, and faithfully transmitting complex knowledge across generations. The manioc processing story — the nixtamalization technique that prevented cyanide poisoning, lost when the Portuguese exported corn without the processing — is the clincher. Tradition beats reason when the causal structure is opaque.

The wheel experiment confirms this experimentally: performance improved across cultural generations while understanding didn't budge. Theories actually made things worse by narrowing the search space. And the self-domestication hypothesis — human brains have been shrinking for 20,000 years, possibly because complex societies reward social cognition over lone-wolf brilliance — reframes human uniqueness as a collective rather than individual achievement.

Collapse Revisited

Civilisational Collapse dismantles the standard apocalypse narratives. The Maya didn't collapse — sixty independent states had individual waxing and waning over three centuries. Easter Island's population never exceeded 4,000 and had effective agriculture; the real devastation came from European slave raiding. States collapse; civilizations transform. What destroys culture permanently is usually deliberate destruction by conquerors, not internal failure.

The Material Basis Of Civilisation shows how material constraints gate possibility: steel required 250kg of wood per kilogram before coke-smelting, and titanium remains trapped by process economics despite being the 9th most common element. Lost And Found Knowledge documents how useful knowledge gets prematurely discarded: terra sigillata's antibacterial properties, mercury's genuine efficacy against syphilis, the Antikythera mechanism's unmatched sophistication. Digital Lore applies the same concern to the present: Discord's chat platform as the new repository of practical knowledge, structurally designed to lose everything it accumulates.

The Technology Question

The Luddite Question reclaims the actual Luddites as skilled workers opposing the capture of automation's gains by owners — not anti-technology but anti-exploitation. The pattern repeats: who captures the gains from the machines? The pizza effect (cultural practices abstracted and commodified) shows the same dynamic applied to culture itself.

Subculture Fragmentation traces how the internet made opting out of mainstream culture viable, creating psychologically healthier niche communities at the cost of shared reality. Universal Culture argues that what's spreading globally isn't Western culture but universal culture — the collection of practices that outcompete all alternatives in an open marketplace — which ate Western culture first.

The Moral Landscape

Aztec Virtue Ethics offers a genuinely different moral framework: the slippery earth, rootedness over perfection, virtue as cooperative practice rather than individual achievement. The connection to Cultural Evolution is direct: the locus of wisdom is the community, not the individual. Medieval Warfare And Popular History debunks Game of Thrones as medieval — the armies, the logistics, the civilian destruction all belong to the early modern period, and the "brutal past" narrative creates a dangerous false confidence about the present.

Legibility And Folk Knowledge is the section's most provocative article: gri-gri bullet-proofing powder that works as a coordination mechanism but only because people believe the wrong explanation. Understanding the mechanism destroys it. Some practices require active misunderstanding to function, and making them legible is itself the destructive act.

What Connects Outward

History connects to Emergence through cultural evolution as an emergent process. To Legibility And State Power through the state's appetite for simplification. To AI Alignment through the question of what we lose when we formalize opaque cultural knowledge into training data. To the Bicameral Mind through the idea that even "having a mind" is a cultural invention. And to Scaling Laws and Superexponential Growth through the very long view of human history — where the industrial revolution looks less like the new normal and more like a spike that may or may not be sustained.