My first university psychology class asserted that human behavior would eventually be as predictable as the motion of physical bodies — that psychological laws exist outside our understanding, waiting to be discovered by the scientific method. I have always had trouble accepting that premise and have seen little evidence that such laws exist or are forthcoming. Henrich’s book helped me understand why, and gave me better tools for thinking about what does exist in their place.

The relevant framework is Complex Adaptive Systems — nonlinear, self-organizing processes whose emergent properties cannot be derived from the properties of their constituents. What Henrich introduces, and what I find most clarifying, is culture as one such system: not a product of human intelligence or intent, but an evolved complexity that has developed faster, and with more direct consequences for us, than the biological evolution of our species. Culture is not what we make. Culture is what makes us — calibrating our attention, our perceptions, our motivations, and our reasoning to fit the worlds in which we grow up, worlds we did not design and largely do not understand.

The connection to network theory is direct. Communication, from its Latin root, means to make common, to impart, to unite. Dynamic communication — the activity Luhmann identified as the self-reproducing element of any social system — is what network theory calls edges: connections between nodes. Those connections may be physical forces, biological appetites, or societal authorities. What they share is that the information flowing through them may be less essential to the process than the connections themselves. The cohesion of nodes through connections is what allows stable complexity to appear, to be shared in language, and to persist. Where connections are lost, stable complexity is lost with them.

This reframes what Henrich calls the Collective Brain. There is no collective brain — only culturally produced individual brains, and the connections among them that allow know-how to accumulate, transmit, and recombine across generations. The process works not through intelligence or reasoning but through mimicry: we learn from prestigious individuals, those who have succeeded in the world we find ourselves in, and we do so automatically, unconsciously, and with a fidelity that exceeds what rational analysis would recommend. Henrich’s most counterintuitive and most important finding is that placing faith in cultural inheritance over personal intuition has been, for most of human history, the more reliable survival strategy. Culture is smarter than any individual who carries it. That is not a comforting thought. It is a clarifying one.

The word for poet in Greek is ποίησις — making, the activity by which something is brought into being that did not exist before. Henrich describes cultural evolution as precisely this kind of making: unintelligent, undeliberate, unintended. What poets, in the broad sense, bring into being are the concepts that allow experience to be held in attention and shared in understanding. The success of a concept is not determined by its truth but by its ability to facilitate connections — to produce novel ways of surviving in the world and transmitting that understanding. Language and mathematics are products of this process. So are theology, social norms, and kinship structures. All of them precede and shape the individual cognition that subsequently attempts to explain them.

What Henrich does not sufficiently emphasize, though his framework implies it, is that culture as a complex adaptive system necessarily generates its own fluctuations. Stable order is not the end state — it is one phase in an ongoing process of emergence, stability, fluctuation, and re-emergence. The communication technologies of our time — social media, global networks, rapid connection formation — are introducing feedback loops comparable to those produced by the alphabet and the printing press. Those earlier disruptions gave rise to the Golden Age and the Renaissance. What the current disruption will select for is not predictable, because new order is not created. It emerges. We participate in the process without being able to direct it, and we rationalize the result only after it has stabilized into the next common understanding.

I find myself optimistic about this, though I hold the optimism carefully. The theories of Complex Adaptive Systems suggest that emergence of order is tied to the destruction of the status quo — Kali’s work, as the mythology has it, is necessary for Shiva’s renewal. What gives me cautious grounds for optimism is the possibility that free speech and free association, by allowing for the diversity and differential success that selection requires, may have themselves become the evolved mechanism for navigating these transitions with less of the historical violence. That free association has produced the conditions for its own survival seems to me more plausible than its opposite. Just an inkling. But one I find worth holding.