A new employee is shown the monthly report.
It must be exported from the system, printed, signed, scanned and emailed to three people.
“Why do we print it?” she asks.
Nobody knows.
There is a pause—the kind organizations use when waiting for history to log in.
Eventually someone remembers that an auditor once asked for a signed copy.
The auditor left eight years ago.
The printer remains an important member of the governance process.
A group can remember without knowing
We usually talk about culture as values, food, music, language, ritual and identity.
But culture may also be a form of memory.
A group encounters a problem. It develops a response. The response is taught to new members, copied, corrected and eventually repeated without anyone needing to reconstruct the original discovery.
This is extraordinarily useful.
You do not need to personally rediscover every safe food-preparation method, rule of hospitality, professional ethic or conflict ritual. Social learning allows intelligence to accumulate across people and generations.
Research on cumulative culture examines this human capacity to preserve and improve behaviours through transmission. The details remain debated, but the broad idea is simple: a group can know more than any one member can derive alone. (Mesoudi & Thornton, 2018)
Culture is not merely what a group believes.
It is what the group has learned how to continue.
Culture compresses
Imagine that a community has learned, through painful experience, that a certain action creates conflict.
The full lesson might be:
Under these environmental conditions, among people with these obligations, this behaviour creates a risk that is difficult to reverse.
That is hard to transmit.
So the lesson becomes:
We do not do that here.
Compression makes coordination cheap.
It also deletes the footnotes.
The next generation receives the instruction without the dataset. This can make wisdom look arbitrary and arbitrary rules look wise.
The same thing happens in families:
We always call when we arrive.
At work:
Two people must approve a production change.
In professions:
Never make this decision alone.
And in communities:
Guests eat first.
Each rule may contain a history. The behaviour is the surviving file; the explanation has been misplaced.
Then the environment changes
The problem that created a practice may disappear.
The group moves.
Technology changes.
The power relationship reverses.
The once-rare risk becomes common, or the once-common risk becomes rare.
The behaviour can survive because transmission is often easier than reevaluation. Reviews of norm dynamics describe persistence as the product of several mechanisms: people learn from parents and peers, coordinate around shared expectations and sanction deviation. Norms can therefore remain stable even when their original payoff changes. (Bicchieri et al., 2023)
This gives culture a legacy-code problem.
Some ugly-looking sections contain essential protections.
Others are obsolete workarounds.
Deleting either without understanding why it exists is dangerous.
Engineers sometimes call this Chesterton’s fence: do not remove a fence until you understand why it was built.
The principle is wise.
It can also become a marvellous excuse never to remove a fence, even after discovering that it was installed by the former owner to keep one unusually ambitious goat out of the vegetables.
Not everything survives because it works
The phrase “accumulated wisdom” is flattering.
Culture is accumulated selection, and selection has several criteria.
A practice may survive because it:
- solves a real problem;
- benefits people with authority;
- is easy to remember;
- creates visible group membership;
- punishes dissent;
- produces meaning;
- or simply began early enough that alternatives now feel unnatural.
Recent modelling work suggests norm reinforcement can sustain different traditions even where payoff-based learning alone would not. History matters: where a group starts can influence where it settles. The authors are explicit that empirical work is still needed to establish how much the model explains real cultural dynamics. (Manning, Thompson & Morgan, 2024)
This is why “it has lasted for generations” is evidence of transmissibility, not necessarily goodness.
Cruel practices can be stable.
Inefficient routines can be excellent at protecting status.
A norm can coordinate a group while distributing the benefits unfairly.
Culture remembers solutions.
It can also remember victories.
Some practices are not trying to be efficient
Here the engineering analogy breaks.
A wedding ritual is not a slow version of a database transaction.
A mourning practice does not need to maximize throughput.
A family meal may be valuable precisely because it refuses the logic of efficiency for an hour.
Some practices solve practical problems.
Some express identity, grief, gratitude or continuity.
Some do both.
And some survive mainly because questioning them imposes social costs.
If we evaluate every tradition by instrumental usefulness, we may destroy things whose purpose is to create meaning rather than output.
The better question is not always:
Does this still work?
It may be:
What work is this doing now?
The printed report may no longer satisfy an auditor. It may still reassure a manager. The family ritual may no longer prevent an old danger. It may now tell dispersed relatives that they still belong to one another.
A practice can outlive its first purpose and acquire a second.
How to question a sacred workaround
Perhaps groups need a small cultural archaeology before reform:
- What problem do people believe this practice solves?
- What evidence would show that the problem has changed?
- Who benefits from the current arrangement?
- What identity or meaning would be threatened by removing it?
- Can we preserve that meaning while changing the procedure?
- What hidden failure might the “inefficient” step be preventing?
This is slower than declaring the old system ridiculous.
It is also faster than deleting the wrong line of legacy code and spending the weekend discovering why it was there.
What I still cannot figure out
People inside a culture often cannot see its assumptions because the assumptions define what normal looks like.
Outsiders can see the strangeness, but may miss the protection.
Insiders know the texture, but may be invested in the rule.
How can a group distinguish accumulated wisdom from an old workaround that has become sacred?
Until the next strange question,
Osagie
My current hunch: Culture is partly compressed social memory, but compression preserves power and meaning as readily as it preserves practical wisdom.
Most likely reason I am wrong: Many cultural practices may not have originated as solutions at all; treating them that way could impose a tidy engineering story on messier human history.