The Creative Nucleus
Diversity as the Feedstock of Cultural Evolution
Diversity is the feedstock of evolution—without it there could be no innovation. This is especially apparent in genetic evolution, where the shuffling of genes creates different forms which have differential fitness in a selective environment, but it is also true for the evolution of culture, in which memes (cultural genes) are shuffled and selected, leading the creation of new cultural forms.
As in genetic evolution, however, some cultural forms grow stronger than others, and threaten to destroy the diversity that birthed them. What follows here is a long and somewhat difficult quotation, but it is one that raises an issue that I think is essential for us all—philosophers, social dancers, and all humans beings alike—to understand.
In History and Truth, philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes:
“The phenomenon of universalization, while being an advancement of mankind, at the same time constitutes a sort of subtle destruction, not only of traditional cultures, which might not be an irreparable wrong, but also of what I shall call for the time being the creative nucleus of great civilizations and great cultures.
We have the feeling that this single world civilization at the same time exerts a sort of attrition or wearing away at the expense of the cultural resources which have made the great civilizations of the past. This threat is expressed, among other disturbing effects, by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization which is the absurd counterpart of which I was just calling elementary culture. Everywhere the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc.
It seems as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level. Thus we come to the crucial problem confronting nations just rising from underdevelopment. In order to get onto the road toward modernization, is it necessary to jettison the old cultural past which has been the raison d’être of a nation? . . .
Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before a colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take part in the scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandon of a whole cultural past. It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. There is the paradox: how to become modern and return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.” [line breaks added]
To summarize the logic as I see it here: diversity, “the creative nucleus of great civilizations and great cultures,” is necessary for the evolution of culture. Universalization, in which the most powerful results of evolution become universally adopted, threatens to undermine this diversity, and in the process, evolution itself.
Examples in life and on the dance floor abound: as Richard Powers notes, at various times in the history of social dancing, fad dances, particularly the “the Twist” and other 60’s solo dances, threatened to kill social dancing entirely. The fad is universally adopted in place of the wide variety of dances that existed before it, and as the dominant fad fades away—as all fads eventually do—it takes with it many of the dances it replaced, extinguishing the creative diversity which birthed it.
In biology, a similar phenomenon is occurring. The diversity of life gave birth to humanity, which has quickly become the dominant species on Earth. But in expressing this universal dominance, we are contributing to a rate of species extinction which rivals the five mass extinctions of the past, prompting some to call this era the Sixth Extinction. This is tragic not only because there is beauty in the various forms that comprise biodiversity, but because biodiversity is essential to the survival of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a form of creative resilience, which makes it much more likely that a living system will be able to survive a shock, because it increases the ability of the system to adapt. To take an example from the last mass extinction, sixty-five million years ago, even as all of the dinosaurs died off, the small mammals survived to repopulate the Earth. Maintaining and increasing the diversity within a system makes it much more likely that the system will survive.
The same is also true of culture. The universalization of the dominant culture is usually accompanied by the destruction of cultural diversity, which increases the brittleness and vulnerability of the entire human enterprise in the face of unexpected shocks, and undermines the potential for ongoing cultural evolution.
To make the paradox of universalization a little more concrete, let’s see how it plays out on the social dance floor. As usual, I think the art of social dancing has many insights to offer.
Suppose we have a class of students who have never danced before, but who are eager to have as much fun as they can. How can we most effectively enable them to do so?
One simple method would be to put the students in a room together with an iPod on shuffle, and let them figure it out themselves. While this unconventional method might cause the students and administrators to question our teaching ability, I’m not sure it’s quite as ridiculous as it sounds. If you think about it, this is how all social dance forms began: people tried different ways of dancing together to different kinds of music, discovered that some ways were more fun than others, then focused on making those ways even more fun. Thus, given enough time, we might expect the result of this experiment to be something like the history of social dance: a slow evolution of a variety of different dance forms.
The main problem with this method of “teaching” is that it will be very slow: our students might dance for years—assuming their interest is maintained for that long—without discovering some very fun ways of dancing: the redowa, for example, or the schottische. There are infinitely many ways of dancing to any given song, but far fewer that really work, and while these ways of dancing may seem obvious in retrospect, discovering them all by random experimentation in a timely manner is highly unlikely.
Another method for teaching, which addresses this concern, would be to take the results of experimentation by a particularly great dance teacher or dance community—Arthur Murray or the Savoy Ballroom, for example—and teach our students this style of dance. It would be quick, and easy, and we’d have them dancing in no time. By training them in this style of dance, we would help them bypass tedious years of stumbling through steps that don’t work, and have them dancing in ways that are much more fun that the vast majority of steps that our iPod shuffle students will try. By standardizing the moves, we will also make it more likely that our students can dance with each other.
But this method of teaching is also imperfect. While we will quickly have our students dancing in this style, they might begin to feel like this is the only way to dance, a feeling which might be reinforced by the teacher explicitly telling the students that it is the only way to dance. As a result, while our students will reap the benefits of learning a particularly effective style of dance, they will miss out on the benefits of exploring their own style and potentially inventing new ways of dancing.
The parallels with the paradox of universalization are obvious. By universalizing one particular style of dance, we help everyone reap the benefits of that style, but in the process, we destroy the very creative resources which gave rise to this style and all of the others in the first place.
So how can we resolve the paradox?
A third method of teaching, practiced by Richard Powers, myself, and others, suggests an elegant way out of the paradox. In our philosophy of dance education, there is acknowledgement of the value of both experimentation and universalization. Richard wastes no time jumping straight into teaching the kinds of dance which he and other dancers find to be the most fun, but he does it with a radical acceptance, even encouragement, of different styles.
Take dance position, for example. As Richard notes, there are at least five different positions where various schools of dance say that the follow’s left hand must go while in closed position: 1) resting flat on top of the lead’s shoulder, 2) resting flat on the back of the lead’s shoulder, 3) resting like a knife’s edge on the back of the lead’s shoulder, 5) resting flat on the front of the lead’s shoulder, or 5) pinching his biceps, pinky extended. Ballroom dance studios around the world fight with each other about which of these holds is the “right” one. Richard, on the other hand, and the students he teaches, accept them all as functional options: some people prefer one or the other, some holds makes some dances easier, but all can be equally effective for different people in different contexts.
This is not at all to say, however, that there are no clear guidelines in Richard’s classes. Stepping on your partner’s feet, or running into other couples on the dance floor, is unequivocally bad. Having noodle arms—the lack of a strong connection between the partners—is also universally accepted as detrimental. Aside from the most essential guidelines for comfort, however, every lesson is conditional, presented with an air of “perhaps.” Dancers are allowed to try things out, and as a result of their own and their partners’ experience, to learn for themselves what is most effective, which may be different for different partners.
To summarize this philosophy, Richard is fond of a quote from Fred Astaire, the dancing master of the silver screen, who advised dancers:
“Above all, be yourself! Dancing should be a form of self-expression. Whatever else you may do, don’t make the mistake of being an unimaginative copyist. Don’t be a slave to steps or routines. After you have been dancing for a time, you will find that you do the Foxtrot, the Waltz or the Tango just a little bit differently from anyone else.
You have developed your own individual style. That is nothing to worry over. On the contrary, there would be more cause for worry if you did not develop a style of your own. Styles in dancing are developed just as inevitably as styles in writing or painting. The dancer without individual style is no more than a mechanical robot.
For ballroom dancing, remember that your partners have their own distinctive styles also. Cultivate flexibility. Be able to adapt your style to that of your partner. In doing so, you are not surrendering your individuality, but blending it with that of your partner.”
To summarize Astaire’s wisdom in the language of this essay:
Utilize the tools of universal culture as you find them useful: the Foxtrot, Waltz, and Tango are extremely good inventions. But above all, be yourself: develop your own personal style and repertoire, building on and adapting universal culture to you. In addition, cultivate flexibility. In blending with your partner, you can resolve the tension between your two styles organically and creatively. In doing so, you might just create something new, adding to the repertoires of you and your partner, and perhaps, if others like it as well, contributing to the evolution of universal culture.
Of course, the paradox of universalization is not limited to the dance floor—we must also find ways to resolve it in our everyday lives. Fortunately, there are efforts underway to establish a similar approach in fields outside of social dancing. For example, critical regionalism is an approach to architecture that strives to resolve the paradox in an organic way by respectfully blending local culture with appropriate universal knowledge.
In the course of building history, we have discovered various methods for building safer, more comfortable, and more sustainable buildings, and there is value in their universal implementation: safety, comfort, and long-term survival. But not all safe, comfortable, and sustainable buildings need to look exactly alike, and there is value in local aesthetic traditions. Given a toolbox of technology from all different origins, we can build an infinite number of diverse buildings, all of them sustainable, comfortable, and safe, in thousands of different aesthetic traditions, based on new and old cultural preference. We can use knowledge from around the world to build the diverse buildings that we each desire.
Of all of the aspects of dancing socially, this is the one that excites me the most. There is something exhilarating about adapting to a new partner on the fly, knowing that in the process, you might create something new, contributing to the ongoing evolution of culture.
This was a piece which never quite found a home in Waltzing: A Manual for Dancing and Living. I’m glad to be able to publish it here on Medium.
