Through the cognitive revolution, humans have created norms, an imaginary order, which have evolved through religions and ideologies. Currently, capitalism is the dominant norm, but new norms, such as hate, have recently emerged and are impacting the future of humanity.
What are norms?
The biggest difference between humans and other animals is our cognitive abilities. The cognitive revolution, which took place around 70,000 years ago, allowed Homo sapiens to rise to the top of the ecosystem. The most influential invention of the cognitive revolution is the imaginary order of things that human groups subjectively share with each other. Today we call these norms. This imaginary order allowed humans to perform large-scale collective actions on a level that other animals could not even imagine. This power has been a driving force in human development, and it is no exaggeration to say that it has guided us all the way to the present. In the following sections, we’ll explore how this imagined order, or norms, has manifested itself in human societies and how it has influenced humanity.
Our first norms: religion
Immediately after the cognitive revolution, humans continued to live the same way they had before: as hunter-gatherers, gathering edible plants and fruits from the environment and hunting animals. If they were successful in their hunts or found a tree with a lot of delicious fruit, they would live well for two or three days, but if not, they had no choice but to starve. So they believed that praying to the spirit of the apple tree would bring them many apples, and praying to the spirit of the bison would make hunting easier. This belief that natural objects have spirits is called animism. Ancient hunter-gatherers shared this animism, painting animal paintings in caves, praying to giant old trees, and performing specific rituals after each successful hunt. In other words, the norms of animism influenced not only their cultural life but also their behavior. Cave paintings and primitive tribal customs that still exist today show how influential animism was for humans at the time.
However, these animistic norms began to decline rapidly after the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago. After the Agricultural Revolution, humans no longer needed to honor spirits. There was no reason to pray to plant spirits anymore, as seeds were planted in the ground and given the right amount of sunlight and water, and the crops would naturally grow. Instead, ancient farmers began to worship gods as providers of sunlight and water. Rain gods, sun gods, wind gods, and earth gods were important to ancient farmers, and as a result, the dominant norm shifted from animism to polytheism. This also influenced the population explosion and state formation during the Agricultural Revolution. To create a state system, the ruling class used the authority of the gods to legitimize their rule.
The newly emerging polytheistic norms were very powerful and played an essential role in the formation of early state systems. Many ancient states around the world had polytheism as their dominant norm. Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt are prime examples. Polytheism was an impeccable code, with few logical contradictions in explaining the workings of the universe. However, as a group of believers in a particular god among many gods grew in power, a new norm emerged: Christianity.
The evolution of norms: from religion to ideology
What all of the above-mentioned norms have in common is that they assume a transcendent being and derive their legitimacy from it. However, since the 17th century, humanity has been faced with a new evolution of norms. With the rise of rationalist philosophy, represented by René Descartes, religion gave way to ideology as the dominant norm. Of course, religion still serves as a norm for many people today, but it’s no longer the dominant, coercive norm. In the Middle Ages, it was considered a sin not to believe in Christianity, but this is no longer the case today.
Instead, many different ideologies have emerged. Instead of a transcendent being, these ideologies began to persuade people by offering them a better life. Examples include capitalism, liberalism, egalitarianism, and nationalism. Of these, capitalism is currently the most powerful and influential norm.
Today, with the world integrated into a single economic zone, it’s hard to find a group that doesn’t follow capitalism. Even groups that claim to be socialist often run their economies according to capitalist principles. Capitalist norms have had such a powerful impact on human society that we can even see it in our lunch choices today. But capitalism wasn’t perfect, and it made many people unhappy in its early days. Socialism emerged as a reaction to this, and its norms, which emphasize communal production and communal distribution, were supported by many. However, it remains a defunct ideology today.
Future norms
After World War II and the end of the Cold War, liberal, egalitarian, and capitalist norms spread rapidly around the world, and today they are almost mandatory. However, in recent years, a new ideology has begun to emerge that opposes liberalism and egalitarianism. I’ll call it misogyny. It justifies the pursuit of human selfish desires without significantly undermining liberalism. This trend can be seen in the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. It’s noteworthy that people who agreed with Trump’s xenophobic ideology and policies made him president. This was a far cry from the modern norm of “promoting the well-being of human society as a whole”.
