The reliable science-writer, Ed Yong, published an article back in November, Bigger groups mean complex cultures, which leads off with the insightful paragraphs:
Humanity’s success depends on the ability of humans to copy, and build on, the works of their predecessors. Over time, human society has accumulated technologies, skills and knowledge beyond the scope of any single individual.
Now, two teams of scientists have independently shown that the strength of this cumulative culture depends on the size and interconnectedness of social groups. Through laboratory experiments, they showed that complex cultural traditions—from making fishing nets to tying knots—last longer and improve faster at the hands of larger, more sociable groups. This helps to explain why some groups, such as Tasmanian aboriginals, lost many valuable skills and technologies as their populations shrank.
“For producing fancy tools and complexity, it’s better to be social than smart,” says psychologist Joe Henrich of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, the lead author of one of the two studies, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1. “And things that make us social are going to make us seem smarter.”
In this study, `group knowledge’ was better passed on when there was a greater number of instructors and a consequent greater variety of ways and levels of competence in models of how to do things. I think that, more generally, we’re looking at a better group memory when we have a richer body of instructors or, probably, a richer body of accessible knowledge in various forms. Another way to state matters is that individual intelligences might remain the same when men gather in groups, large or small, but the intellect of a larger group will be greater, all else being equal. For an explanation of individual intelligence and intellect, see my essay, Intelligence vs. Intellect, which was a response to Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect, a book which deserves to be republished.
My previous posted essay, We Need to Act in the Spirit of St Benedict, Not Just to Mindlessly Repeat His Acts, discussed this issue in terms of a Benedictine response, viewed as at least a partial retreat from an increasingly disordered West. I consider the Benedictine response to the collapse of moral order in Rome to be first of all a spiritual response putting God first and doing what was needed to advance this story God is telling: the growth and maturing of the Body of Christ so much as that can happen in this mortal realm. In addition, it occurs to me how strange it is for Christians to be retreating from a Civilization built by Christians for Christian purposes; maybe we Christians should have worked harder to maintain and advance Western Civilization so that it might have remained ours.