Read the room

The uncomfortable but inevitable process of cultural evolution

While idly scrolling a few days ago I came across this interesting exchange:

I can’t say that I’ve seen many objectionable uses of “read the room”. Its use usually seems pretty innocuous to me—like hey, we’re dealing with some shit right now, can we talk about this some other time when nerves have settled. I would like to say a word in favor of conformity, however.

What? No one likes conformity. Conformists are unthinking drones. They’re the enablers of oppressive regimes and the ruiners of art and culture. My generation had a serious mistrust of conformity drilled into it from a young age. We were reared on movies in which guys who went by names like “maverick” flipped the bird to faceless representatives of authoritarian states. We thrilled to images in advertisements of figures representing an out-there computer company (where people “think different”) rouse us from our dumb reliance on the same tech everyone else uses. We’re not company men; we’re people who’ve been taught that to be successful we should be entrepreneurs, build our own brand, be the influencers rather than the influenced.

But however we see ourselves, we are all conformists. That is, furthermore, a very useful thing. Of course it’s important to be able to think for oneself. Of course it’s important to question orthodoxy and improve upon old and stupid ways of doing things. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that conformity is critical to maintaining a functioning society.

It’s tempting to see the social world as being constructed of institutions, like markets and governments, which we primarily navigate as individuals. As individuals we decide whether to vote and how, and maybe we make our choices for good reasons or bad ones, but ultimately the political system is one oriented around the aggregation of lots of individual preferences and perspectives. Ditto for markets. We are individuals with our own tastes and our own knowledge about the world, and we transact in the market more or less rationally based on those factors. The genius of the market is its capacity to generate an efficient spontaneous order out of all the individual pieces of information fed into it.

But that’s not really how any of this works. Rather, the information we have, the meaning we ascribe to it, and our tastes and preferences are all heavily influenced by the people around us. Day-to-day life is a continuous process of watching how others behave, adjusting our own behavior based on what we observe, and consequently contributing through our own actions to others’ understanding of what counts as appropriate behavior (of reading the room, you might say). The differential evolution of mask-wearing culture across different societies is one very clear example of the way in which this process works, but other examples include—very nearly everything else. Why do you watch the television you watch? Because everyone else is watching it too. But come on, your fave is a super kooky show with lots of offbeat humor and obscure cultural references, not the Big Bang Theory. Yeah, so kooky and offbeat that a studio invested lots of resources in the project which could only be justified given the belief that a sufficiently large market for the program exists—or could be conjured into existence given appropriate social cues from influential taste-makers.

Systems like participatory democracy and capitalism are thus less about aggregating diffuse individual preferences and information, and more about processing a distribution of information and tastes already shaped by intense and ongoing social interaction. Of course we do have an individual capacity for independent thinking and autonomous action; I could walk outside with no pants on right now. But there are constraints on this capacity. One is that we cannot reason our way through a question without relying on socially determined concepts and meanings. Just reflect for a moment on the amount of shared cultural understanding needed to parse this dispatch: how incredibly similar we, you all and me, have to be in our outlooks and values for any of this to make sense.

Another critical constraint is the extent to which there are socially legitimate ways to exercise our capacities for independent thinking and autonomy. This was arguably the key to unlocking human potential needed to escape from the drudgery and poverty of the pre-modern world: the evolution of social frameworks in which unorthodox ideas could be openly aired and evaluated. It was hard to prosper as a species when novel theorizing about the solar system could land a guy in front of the Inquisition. But the emergence of enlightenment ideas and liberal values did not occur as a consequence of the destruction of conformity. Society still exists. What occurred, rather, was the spread of behavioral norms which legitimized free thinking, open debate, and so on. We gave ourselves permission to be contrarian. We do—now, actively—give ourselves permission to be contrarian within certain socially sanctioned frameworks. But interactions within these frameworks are all heavily socially moderated. To effectively question or criticize the rules, you have to scrupulously follow the rules.

Why do these details matter? They’re important because solving serious social challenges is about getting people on the same page. The behavior of people who see themselves as anti-conformists or free-speech absolutists implicitly acknowledges this. What they’re after is not really or not solely the ability to express whatever ideas they want. Rather, they are interested in maintaining a certain social consensus which confers legitimacy on certain sorts of expression. The anxiety and frustration which many seem to feel when, say, a writer loses a job for airing a controversial opinion is not necessarily a response to the violation of a sacred right, but a sense of confusion and helplessness in the face of a shifting social landscape: a lament that where we once appeared to be on the same page, we no longer do.

But the frustration on the other side is similar in nature. Solving critical social problems, from racism to inequality to climate change, is a matter of getting people on the same page. It is about shifting the powerful social forces that drive our behavior so that they propel humanity in one direction—toward greater racial and economic justice, toward decarbonisation—rather than another.

If you’ve lived your whole life in an environment in which human progress is largely understood to flow from individual effort, from unorthodox perspectives and a willingness to buck convention, then young people’s attitudes may seem worrying or dangerous. Progress, to those my age and older, means maintaining support for norms which valorize the behavior of mavericks. But if you’ve grown up in an era characterized by the profound and ongoing failure to mobilize collectively in order to solve enormous problems, then nudging norms in a direction which prioritizes social good over the individual’s right to be an ass seems like a self-evidently sensible thing. 

I suspect there is going to be a running generational conflict along these lines for the foreseeable future. Not for the first time. The 1950s were an era of stifling conformity, for understandable reasons: overcoming the extraordinary economic challenges of the first half of the 20th century and mobilizing to win total war meant transforming the atomized society of the beginning of the century into one in which everyone, to a far greater extent, was on the same page. Of course many members of generations born before and after that tumultuous era felt New-Deal values represented a road to serfdom—or, at least, a buzzkilling way of life that interfered with enjoyment of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Serious collective challenges are likely to send the pendulum swinging back in the other direction.*

I’m not dispositionally inclined to welcome this shift toward a less individualistic set of cultural norms. As a child of the Cold War (and someone who ended up in journalism thanks to an odd but deep belief that people need to hear what I personally think about stuff) it sits uneasily alongside the social rules of thumb I internalized growing up. And certainly there are risks that the process overshoots or goes wrong in ways that trample freedom and generate suffering. But there are other sorts of risks out there, as well. Neither is cultural evolution something we could halt, even if we wanted to. It’s how we adapt to changing social circumstances and overcome the novel social challenges that pop up as a consequence of economic and technological change.

In the end, we’re all engaged in the same basic exercise. We’re all advocating for the social consensus we think is best: pushing and pulling others while we are pushed and pulled. That’s what it means to be human.

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* Is the swing of the pendulum necessarily one in which the freedom of the individual is constrained in order to raise collective welfare? No, I don’t think so. The cultural shift might be one which valorizes empathy. That is, we move in a direction in which greater status is attached to efforts to understand others’ suffering and prioritize their welfare alongside your own. Arguably, that’s what wokeness is mostly about: not stigmatizing insensitive actions so much as increasing the social rewards to being empathetic. If you think about a problem like climate change, then, the role of cultural evolution would not be to increase tolerance for heavy-handed government intervention, but to raise the personal satisfaction people receive from doing things that help others, and thus reducing the obstacles to decarbonization policies.

That would still be a cultural shift which facilitates collective action. But it would be less a matter of society deciding that the freedom to own a ten-ton, coal-burning SUV should take a backseat to limiting climate costs, and more a matter of the would-be SUV owners themselves deciding (in response to shifting social norms and preferences) that the personal return they derive from their Canyonero net of the concern they have for residents of Bangladesh makes is too low to justify the purchase. (That’s just an example; I am not under the impression that banning SUVs will solve the climate crisis.)