One of the more challenging problems confronting macrosociological theory is that of providing an analysis of continuity and change that does not exaggerate the importance of the latter at the expense of the former. All of us today are products of an era of extraordinarily rapid and pervasive change, which makes it tempting to exaggerate the power of the forces promoting change and to underes- timate the power of those promoting continuity.
11. C. P. Snow called attention to another major cause of the exaggeration of the role of ideology in his famous lecture on “The Two Cultures”—namely, the bifurcation and separation in the educational process in Britain and elsewhere between training in science and technology and training in the humanities.
Determinants of the Characteristics of Individual Societies 69 Fortunately, an evolutionary perspective provides one of the more effective defenses against this, drawing attention, as it does, to the experience of the totality of
human experience from the Stone Age to the present. As a result, one is quickly reminded
that continuity, not change, has been the more salient feature of life in most societies throughout most of history, and helps us keep more clearly in mind the exceptional nature of the modern era. It also sensitizes us to an aspect of the problem that we might otherwise neglect—namely, the shifting balance in the relative importance of the two processes. This, too, is something that requires explanation.
If our analysis is correct up to this point, the ultimate sources of both con- tinuity and change, and also of the shifting balance between them, are to be found in the interaction of the five sets of factors we have just considered: the genetic,
neurological, and cultural systems of information, and the biophysical and sociocul- tural environments. This brings us back once more to human nature and the de-
pendence of human populations on the environment.
Several aspects of human nature are especially relevant in any explanation of the sources of continuity and change. First, as we have seen, the common genetic heritage of our species motivates humans everywhere to strive to maximize plea- surable experiences and minimize painful and unpleasant ones. Second, it enables them to learn from experience and to modify their behavior in response to such learning. And, third, it leads them to economize most of the time.
But this is only half of the story. Life is not lived in a vacuum; pleasure, pain, and learning are all products of encounters with the environment, and econo- mizing decisions always reflects its influence. Thus, the environment must also be taken into account in explanations of continuity and change, with several of its characteristics being especially important. First, and most important of all, the material resources available to human populations are finite, never infinite. Sec- ond, the environments themselves, both biophysical and sociocultural, exhibit elements of both continuity and change. And, finally, environmental change is partly endogenous, but partly a response to prior changes in human societies (e.g., population growth and technological innovation).
When one reflects on the nature of human nature and the environment, it is obvious that the potential for both continuity and change is always present in every society. Which occurs, or which is dominant in a given situation, depends on the specifics of the situation. For example, the economizing tendency that is so important a part of our nature causes us to develop many habitual patterns of action, but these persist only as long as environmental conditions make them rewarding. If conditions change, or we discover a more rewarding pattern of action, we are likely to modify our actions. Thus, human nature and the environment are like two-edged swords, sometimes promoting continuity, sometimes change.
From its inception, evolutionary theory has been associated with the concepts of change and progress, and not without reason. This is not to say, however, that evolutionists believe that change and progress are always dominant in individual so- cieties, or even in the global system of societies. As noted earlier, continuity was the dominant feature of life in the vast majority of societies of the prehistoric past, and
change in these societies was neither frequent nor important in most cases. Even in more recent times, continuity has been a striking feature of the life of most societies. Few societies in history have experienced rates of change as great as those in western societies in the last 100 years, yet even among these societies social and cultural continuity plays an important role and some elements of social organiza- tion and culture have survived for centuries, even millennia. The calendar, the alphabet, the numeral system, many tools, many techniques of production, the institution of marriage, the family system, concepts of justice and morality, the concept of God and of life after death are all thousands of years old.
The causes of this continuity are not hard to find. They include the essential stability of the human genotype and the slowness of change in the biophysical environment. They also include the relative uniformity and stability12 of the so-
ciocultural environment of most societies prior to the last 9,000 years (i.e., before the emergence of the first farming societies) as well as certain characteristics of societies themselves, especially the socialization process, the development of so- cial institutions, and the systemic nature of societies and their cultures.
As sociologists have long recognized, the socialization process is especially important in this regard. During the early years of life, individuals acquire much of the cultural information on which they depend throughout their lives, but during these early years, they have little or no control over the content of the information they receive and absorb. As they grow older, their ability to control the flow of information increases, but their rate of learning appears to decline, partly by choice, and partly because of physiological changes that reduce their ability to absorb new information. In addition, the most powerful members of soci- eties are usually older persons who tend to have a lower capacity for absorbing new information (though often a greater store of information overall). Through their con- trol of families, schools, religious groups, governments, and other organizations, these individuals greatly influence the learning process in the younger generation. Thus, the inverse relation between ability to absorb new information and ability to control the flow of such information promotes social and cultural continuity.
The systemic nature of societies and their institutions also ensures a sub- stantial degree of societal continuity. Most of the parts of sociocultural systems are linked to other parts so that a change in one part necessitates or stimulates changes in others, thereby increasing the costs of change and the likelihood that older patterns will persist. The extent of such linkages and the magnitude of the obstacle they pose are illustrated by the difficulties that have been encountered in the effort to introduce the metric system in the United States. All kinds of equip- ment that has been engineered to specifications employing the traditional system of measurement would have to be replaced and an entire generation of people compelled to unlearn one system and learn another. During the transition period,
12. Stability in this context refers to the fact that all societies maintained the same technologi- cal infrastructure for millennia (i.e., the technologies of hunting and gathering), unlike the modern world where neighboring societies often change drastically, transforming the sociocultural environ- ment.
Determinants of the Characteristics of Individual Societies 71 maintenance workers would have to be equipped with two set of tools. Countless laws would have to be rewritten and endless records revised. In short, despite many obvious advantages, it is far from clear that the benefits of a shift to the metric system would outweigh the costs. The Chinese encountered a similar prob- lem some years ago when proposals were made to replace their ideographic system of writing with a simpler alphabetic system. In the end, they found it more re- warding and less costly merely to simplify the older ideographic system.
Nevertheless, despite obstacles, change does occur, even in the most stable societies. Of course, much of the change is relatively inconsequential: Just as mutations occur randomly in a population of organisms because of imperfections in the processes of genetic reproduction, so nonadaptive innovations occur more or less randomly in human societies in the process of sociocultural reproduction. Changes that occur in languages over time are a classic instance of this. Contem- porary Australian, Canadian, American, and British English all differ from one another despite the fact that they derive from a common source in the recent past. The same is true on a grander scale of the family of Indo-European languages. Comparable instances of nonadaptive change can be observed in myths and leg- ends. So far as we know, most of these changes were not intentional (though some probably were, as in the biblical version of the story of the great flood), but re- sulted from defects in the process of transmission and reproduction.
Even when unintended and unimportant initially, cultural changes like these can assume importance later. If nothing else, they reinforce the boundaries be- tween societies by differentiating members from nonmembers. Linguistic alter- ations are especially important in this respect, since nothing helps to identify “foreigners” more readily than their speech.
While nonadaptive innovations can sometimes have important consequences, they are much more likely in the wake of adaptive innovations. By definition, adaptive innovations increase the capacity of a society to satisfy its members’ needs, at least in the short run, and adaptive innovations in the technologies of subsis- tence, transportation, and communication have often had far-reaching conse- quences for the entire life of a society. Discoveries, inventions, and other adaptive innovations obviously occur in response to unfulfilled needs and desires. But this raises further questions: Why does the rate of adaptive innovation vary as much as it does among societies? And, why does it vary from one period to the next within a given society? Part of the answer to these questions is that differences in the rate of adaptive innovation in societies are a function of differences in the rate of change in the environments to which they must adapt. Differences in the rate of change of the
sociocultural environment are especially important, because cultural borrowing seems
to be a more important source of adaptive innovation in most societies than indepen- dent inventions and discoveries and because changes in the sociocultural environ- ment have been much more frequent and much more important than changes in the biophysical environment during most of the last 10,000 years.
Differences in the rate of adaptive innovation in societies are also greatly influenced by characteristics of the societies themselves. For example, because of
the systemic nature of societies, there tends to be a “multiplier effect” in the pro- cess of innovation: Each change tends to increase the need for, and the possibility of, further changes. It is almost as difficult for a society to make a single adaptive innovation as it is for an individual to eat a single salted peanut. In addition, most discoveries have multiple applications: The discovery of the basic principles of metallurgy, for example, led to varied applications in fields ranging from art and religion to economics and warfare.
The best predictor of the rate of adaptive innovation in societies is the size of
the store of adaptive information already available to their members. The size of this
store of cultural capital available to the members of a society is important not only because of the potential such capital provides for inventions (which are, by defini- tion, new combinations of existing information) but also because it tends to stimu- late population growth, increase contact with other societies, and stimulate more positive attitudes toward innovation and change, and each of these developments increases the probability of higher rates of adaptive innovation.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the rate of innovation and the level of societal development will always correspond to the magnitude of the cultural capital a society possesses. There are too many instances in history in which less advanced societies have overtaken more advanced ones (Nolan, n.d.; Nolan and Lenski, 1985) to justify such an assumption. In the modern era, the societies of north- western Europe have overtaken those of the Middle East, and more recently Ger- many, Japan, and the United States have overtaken Britain, which pioneered in the Industrial Revolution.
The reasons for developments such as these are still not fully understood, but technological innovations appear to have played an important role in many instances. Sometimes, they reduced the locational advantage of one set of societ- ies while increasing it for another: Thus, the advances in maritime technology that enabled Europeans to bypass Middle Eastern merchants and trade routes all but destroyed the historic locational advantage of Middle Eastern societies and substantially reduced the historic disadvantage of western European societies. Other times, societies have invested so heavily in a current state-of-the-art technology that when a newer technology appeared, they were reluctant, or unable, to make the necessary capital investments and thereby lost the advantage they previously enjoyed relative to other societies that had not invested as heavily in the earlier technology. The experience of Britain and the United States in the steel industry in the recent past provides a good example of this: Newer technologies, such as continuous casting, rendered older plants economically noncompetitive, but the companies owning those plants were slow to abandon them because of the tre- mendous capital investment involved. By delaying the changeover, they gave Japa- nese and German competitors an opportunity to gain an advantage. Finally, the cost of wars and military preparedness has often taken a toll, draining resources from the productive sector. When this has happened, resources that might have been used to support research and development in the productive sector were often sacrificed, since they seemed less essential in the short run.
Determinants of the Characteristics of Individual Societies 73