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In fact, this systemic homeostasis can persist far beyond when it fulfils any socially beneficial function. These systems aren’t very democratic and tend to stay very stable because they benefit the members of the group who run them (and those funding them). Experts and institutions are needed, with the technical knowledge to manage part of the big complexity - health services, energy policy, and even discreet parts of the system like pesticide regulation or social media algorithms. They discovered that in big, complex societies, most things are run by specialist sub-groups. Instead, a theory of 'punctuated equilibrium' emerged in social science. None of these huge social transformations were linear. Thankfully, life isn’t linear, and nor is cultural change.īack in the 1990s, social scientists tracked how major social changes – on smoking and health, suffrage, technology adoption, etc – actually happened. Track forward any of the trends in a linear way, from energy transition to achieving net zero, and we seem locked into cultural and societal norms that will doom us. The combined promises from individual governments won’t adequately limit climate change, let alone what they are actually doing (a great deal less than their promises). On a linear line of increased action for climate we are horribly behind. Leaving us with the question, can we change culture faster than climate change? Especially in terms of how we’re responding to climate change.

We should remember that future school children will likely look back to today’s accepted behaviours, with bemusement and perhaps outrage. But our wild, often confounding, and malleable human cultures can evolve at speed, with transformations even in one lifetime so elemental it’s hard to remember life before them.Īnd this cultural transformation is a neglected but extraordinary promising factor in the greatest challenge any human society has faced. The planet is turning at the same speed it always has, and we humans live with the same biped bodies and brain-chemistry basically unchanged in 200,000 years. We shape our collective identities and behaviours together and call them normal.

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Collectively they are called ‘culture’, and despite our fondness for the concept of free will, our cultural rules rigorously control each of us far more than we’d like to admit. We all exist within a vast web of social structures and semiotics – from the languages we use, to our customs, assumptions, social norms, biases, traditions, and stories that permeate every second of human life, including our dreams.