Evolution or Revolution

Many people realize that culture isn’t static, yet act like it is. Honestly the dwarves fall into this folly more than one would expect, a trait they share with the elves. Humans for the most part understand it however there will always be that one man yelling about the kids these days.

Seldom will have a story that spans a full change in culture. Often the story teller spans such a small slice of time cultures are functionally static. Worldbuilders on the other hand often chronicle more than enough time to cover not only a singular culture but the ones that come after it. Meaning that a worldbuilder may end up telling stories in different eras of a world and different eras of the cultures. This means worldbuilders need to understand what makes a culture change, and how they change over time. There are two different form factors of cultures and they both interact very differently with changes. Thus this week we will be covering the old world cultures, the new world cultures and how both of them interact with the changes brought by time.

I will start with what I call old world cultures. These are cultures that end up tied to a specific people in a specific place. I call them old world cultures because the majority of cultures in the old world follow this pattern. These cultures are connected to the land and their history is very closely tied to that land. The stories of these people tend to be old, wandering and specific. In old world cultures the history of any significantly old structure or institution may be a centerpiece of the culture. In essence old world cultures are ethnocentric with a single ethnicity within them. I find Europe to the Far East to be goldmines for examples as documentation abounds. The histories of the people are well kept and have been stable for hundreds upon thousands of years. Fantasy worlds should center their cultures in these old, storied, and static cultures.

These cultures change slowly until they change quickly, meaning things will stay the same until they reach a breaking point and then revolution. The evolution within old world cultures is slow, with changes often resisted as the culture is old, settled, and thus changes are examined debated, discussed, and otherwise thought about before anything gets implemented. Deviations are often tolerated within reason but they seldom have a lasting change on the culture without acceptance from the wider culture. This can only last for so long, when things need to change culturally, generally due to advancements with technology, things happen fast. It could be a revolution, or more commonly a civil war as two or more sides form ranks and then battle it out to see who is going to be the one left on the field. Depending on how many sides, and how big the differences are between the sides will determine how long the revolution will last. In these revolutions it is very unlikely that the split will survive the revolution. Whomever looses will end up subsumed by whomever wins, generally with the culture folding the looser back into the main culture.

Old world cultures can manage this due to the fact that their history weights down, and impresses itself into many parts of every day life. This generally comes from the history, traditions, and rituals that the culture has constructed over the centuries. It can be simple things such as manors or phraseology or as complex as an entire festival or religion. That is not to exclude the family or personal rituals and traditions, they do follow after the main culture after all. The other thing that the weight that comes with the old world cultures is to develop a high trust society. The weight that leads to stability which leads to people trusting their neighbors. Provided that the order of things isn’t too shaken up after an evolution or revolution this may continue as the weight of society pushes people back into the patterns that were established before the evolution or revolution.

I have seen it asserted that these kinds of old established peoples within the lands they have called home for centuries become boring. Meaning one must change them to change them. Often this is a matter of taste, and one’s cultural pallet. Anything with enough history will gain a flavor to it, the question is it one that the observer can taste?

New world cultures are sometimes called prepositional cultures by those wishing to sound more academic than is necessary. The United States is the textbook example although most countries from the American continents fall under this umbrella. To prelude next week, the new world cultures have many more sub-cultures and counter-cultures. Likewise it is more likely that there are more than one ethnicity will exist within a new world culture as they are not inherently ethnocentric. This may all imply that the new world culture is more forgiving than the old world verity, which often isn’t true. Because the new world culture works on a contractual basis, there may be more room for divination however crossing the line generally brings harsher punishments as crossing that line is undermining the culture in its completeness. Infractions are treated this way as the culture does not have the degrees of nuance as the old world cultures have developed over their centuries. While this may sound heavy handed, the heavy handedness will also be a function of the specific culture. Meaning some may be more heavy handed others may be less so. It will depend on what the contract is formed and enforced.

How heavy handed the culture is with enforcing it’s contract and what the terms are will wildly change the feeling of the culture. If one has strict terms and heavy handedness it may act like an old world culture. There will be differences, as the enforcement and the enforcers are likely to be oppressive rather than integrated. Many dystopian cultures operate under these kind of heavy handed enforcers and strict cultural rules, some even are able to set things up in a way that gilds them under a coating of utopia. To say it’s a liner scale and the cultures with lighter hands are better is sadly untrue. Cultures with to little or to light a touch when it comes to enforcement often explode into competing fragments. These fragments may or may not openly war with each other, many times it becomes a cultural cold war, with all the spy v spy antics seen in the 70s and 80s between the KGB and CIA.

Like many things the new world culture is only stable if it hits the middle between oppressive due to enforcement and falling apart due to a lack of definition. This however isn’t a ‘low energy state’ to adapt a term from physics. It takes a lot of time and effort to keep a new world culture from going too heavy or too light on enforcing it’s contract. Meaning there is a cultural cost to up keeping a new world culture in one piece and away from either edge. This cost isn’t something that can be universalized or generalized, as each culture will have it’s own way of paying that cost. It could be economic, social, or something else, that upkeep needs to be managed. When it isn’t the new world culture will slowly evolve to one edge or the other and then revolution is inevitable.

This isn’t to say that new world cultures work like typewriters sliding to one end, having a revolution before resetting back to the center. Skillful characters and important movements can often have ‘revolutionary’ effects where the culture changes in a big way without leaving their current position on the chart. Worldbuilders would do well to keep these events fewer and farther between; sometimes clustered as opposing factions that come together to improve the culture will work if more difficult to land well.

When working to evolve new world cultures they come from amendments to the contract or the enforcement of the contract. This means that the core of the culture shifts around as different ideas, interpretations or technology works to change the culture. Cultural movements are common, powerful, and often ongoing. This means that there are almost always something changing, something up and coming, something new. It could be a fad, it could be a meaningful change. Which is something that needs to be accounted for when dealing with the larger culture. Sometimes these movements and evolution will turn into revolutions. Unlike the old world cultures these revolutions don’t have to be open conflict, nor destructive. That isn’t to say they won’t be, simply that they don’t have to be. The more people who are in support of the revolution the less likely it will be to cause strife and conflict. When there is strife and conflict it tends to be on a larger scale. The American Civil War is one of the most well organized, usually these kinds of revolutions are messier, and destabilizing.

There is a possibility for one to turn into the other. Generally new cultures start out as new world cultures and over time eventually turn into old world cultures. This is a gradual entrenching of where and how the culture functions eventually ending up in the old world state. This is something that most don’t recognize as happening due to the generational timescale. Hundreds of years add up until eventually the culture becomes so resistant to change that it has become an old world culture. Because of this time scale examples from history are very hard to come by, I have found that China and South East Asia have a some examples where a group splits off, and then finds their footing over generations.

Going the other way is not only possible, but equally as common. When something happens, generally an event on the scale of a war, or bloody revolution, an old world culture can be reformed into a new world culture. Examples range across the world and time, the American and French revolutions, the uprisings in Italy, Germany, Russia, Spain, and China all take an old world culture, generally breaking down due to war, distance, or economic ruin and create a new one in it’s place to various degrees of success.

This is a good time to point out that while some cultures and cultural institutions imply types of government, governments and cultures are largely independent co-dependents. Meaning an old world culture may have a monarchy or it may have a republic depends on the culture. A new world culture may have a dictator trying to start a monarchy in place of the republic or it may have a republic that replaced a monarchy. Trends do exist however that is a topic for another lecture.

This is of course the short version of the machines that affect how cultures can be changed over time. The other major players, will be addressed next week, as sub-cultures and counter-cultures often are what lead the evolution and revolutions within the larger culture. Knowing if evolution or revolution is more likely will influence how they act and how the larger culture acts towards them. Meaning next week will be centered on the players who cause the changes in culture.