Universal Culture

Here's a puzzle that Bryan Caplan and many others get wrong: when people talk about "Western culture" spreading around the globe — Coca-Cola in Mongolia, gender egalitarianism in Japan, evidence-based medicine in India — they're confusing the summoner with the demon.¹

Scott Alexander makes the distinction sharp. There was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. It involved maypoles and Latin manuscripts and maybe Thor. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is now proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

The entity is universal culture — the collection of practices, products, and norms that outcompete all alternatives in an open marketplace of ideas. Coca-Cola isn't culturally western; it's an Ethiopian bean mixed with a Colombian leaf mixed with carbonated water and sugar. An American discovered that the combination tasted good, but in a world where America never existed, some other chemist would have found the same thing. It was a discovery waiting to be plucked out of the void, like penicillin. "Western medicine" is just medicine that works. It happens to have been discovered first in the West because the West had a technological head start, but it ate traditional Western medicine — Hippocrates' four humors — before it started on anyone else's.

The Thermodynamics of Culture

Universal culture is high-entropy; it's already in its ground state and will survive without anyone pumping energy into the system to protect it. Every other culture is low-entropy — it survives only through active maintenance. The Dalai Lama banning Coca-Cola. The Académie Française removing English words from French. Secret police killing anyone who speaks against Comrade Stalin. If you want anything other than universal culture, you need either very high mountains or a willingness to get your hands dirty.¹

This reframes the entire "clash of civilizations" narrative. The thing spreading around the world isn't Western culture imposing itself on everyone else — it's a selection process that Western culture was the first victim of, having industrialized first. The maypole-dancing, manuscript-copying civilization that existed in England before the Industrial Revolution has been as thoroughly consumed as any Tibetan monastery. Coca-Cola replaced traditional yak's milk in Mongolia, but it also replaced traditional apple cider in America.

The prediction is straightforward: if China or the Caliphate had industrialized first, they would have developed universal culture, and it would look very familiar. The best way to industrialize is the best way to industrialize. The gender norms that spring up after industrialization aren't recognizable to Cicero, St. Augustine, or Voltaire — they're the norms that work for industrial societies, whoever discovers them first.

Immigration and Multicultural Equilibria

This framework also explains something puzzling about immigration debates. Why do people worry about immigration threatening their culture when gays, Hasidim, and Black Americans all maintain strong cultures while being vastly outnumbered? San Francisco is 6% gay. Only 1% of New Yorkers are Hasidic. These groups hold on to their cultures just fine.¹

The answer is that those subcultures coexist within universal culture, which serves as the common operating system. Universal culture has evolved a specific technology for this: social atomization. Everyone does their own thing in their own home, and the community exists to perform lowest-common-denominator functions everyone can agree on. This works brilliantly for managing diversity — but it requires a very specific set of cultural norms and social technologies, and only universal culture has developed them.

When immigration increases, both immigrants and natives don't "assimilate into Western culture." They both assimilate into universal culture in order to share common ground. This is invisible to people already assimilated into universal culture, to whom it just looks "normal." A Hopi Indian who no longer knows the old ritual dances differs little from a Southern Baptist whose kids no longer go to church. Universal values have triumphed over both.

The Double Standard

Alexander identifies a troubling inconsistency. We celebrate small, exotic groups trying to maintain their culture — the Hopi practicing traditional dances, the Tibetans maintaining Vajrayana Buddhism, Bhutan's gross national happiness program. We call it cultural genocide when dominant cultures destroy smaller ones. But we apply none of this sympathy to our own outgroups: rural Southern fundamentalist Christians, working-class Leave voters. Their desire to protect their culture makes them "xenophobic," their religion is "stupidity," their rejection of cosmopolitan norms makes them "ignorant."¹

If you put Brexit supporters and Remain supporters on different islands and gave them different skin colors, the language coming out of London — "these people are ignorant rubes who need us to keep their country running" — would sound indistinguishable from colonial rhetoric. The insistence that they tolerate unwanted immigration mirrors how China tries to destroy Tibetan culture by exporting millions of Han Chinese. But we can't see this, because we've confused universal culture with Western culture, and therefore assume that advocating for the protection of any Western tradition is inherently aggressive rather than defensive.

Whether universal culture is actually good is a harder question. It's objectively better at science, economics, and soft drinks. But Alexander points to nagging counterevidence: Latin American countries that score as well or better on happiness surveys than wealthier European ones. Amish children who experience modern culture and mostly choose to stay Amish. Early American colonists captured by Native Americans who almost always wanted to stay, while natives captured by colonists never did. The possibility that universal culture is to human flourishing what heroin is to pleasure — something every society would select if given the opportunity, but not actually good for anyone in the long term.¹

I think the strongest version of Alexander's argument isn't a prescription but a diagnostic: if you can't tell the difference between "the world is getting better because good ideas spread" and "the world is being homogenized because competitive ideas crowd out meaningful ones," you should probably worry more than you do. The subculture fragmentation literature describes one response — people routing around the monoculture by opting into global interest-based communities. Whether that's a solution or a symptom is genuinely unclear.