Spheres Within Spheres

Toward the evolution of the West, including membranes, metarules, and the development of a new culture.

Source: Susan Wilkinson

Friedrich Hayek spent much of his later life thinking about a tension at the heart of civilization. The rules that make large-scale social life possible are often not the ones our evolved instincts would tend to generate on their own. Humans evolved for life in small, familiar groups, but eventually we learned to live within a far more impersonal civilization—one sustained by property, contract, law, and market exchange, and by standards of conduct that no one designed.

That order did not arise from a blueprint or command. Hayek argued that it emerged gradually, through a process of cultural evolution in which groups, institutions, and practices that fostered coordination tended to persist, while others disappeared. Property rights, the rule of law, and market discipline are not really expressions of our evolved nature, but cultural achievements that can restrain and sometimes redirect that nature.

That insight still has force, but it leaves a critical question open.

Hayek was clear about how an extended order can emerge and endure. But how do different social orders, moral systems, or patterns of life coexist within the same society? He understood the tension between spontaneous order (cosmos) and deliberate organization (taxis), but he said less about what it means when incompatible ways of life must share the same country, metropolis, or neighborhood.

Because that is the situation in the developed world. And friction follows.

Misplaced Values and Norms

The family runs on love, sacrifice, and unconditional belonging. The market runs on exchange, prices, and choices. The state runs on forced conformity and compliance. A religious community runs on shared devotion and holy authority. Each of these systems is, on its own terms, a triumph—a hard-won solution to a real coordination problem. The trouble starts when one of them wanders outside its territory. Indeed, when we look closely at many of the conflicts that pervade modern life, a pattern emerges.

Familial loyalty is a beautiful thing within a clan. Move it into a public office, and you get corruption. The logic of the market is extraordinary at allocating software and steel. Let it govern friendship or parenthood, and you get something cold, transactional, and a little monstrous—a life where everything has a price, but very little has worth. Bureaucratic universalism, when applied to an intimate community, flattens everything that made the community flourish.

Mix in a little ideological fervor, and a society can lapse into incoherence.

So the questions we need to ask are not the ones we keep asking. We argue endlessly about which norm is correct, as though one of them should prevail and rule the rest. But values and norms shouldn’t compete for a single sovereign scepter. They evolved for different functions, just as a heart or a kidney did.

Put simply: The question is not which set of values is best; The question is where each belongs.

Spheres for Evolved Instincts

There’s a temptation—call it the temptation of High Modernism—to treat our tribal instincts as errors. Belonging, loyalty, the pull toward an ingroup get coded as atavisms to be trained out of us, intellectual embarrassments on the road to a rational cosmopolitan future. Such a future is just waiting to be contrived by those who possess the One True Way.

But instincts evolved because they solved problems, too, and those problems haven’t all vanished. People need to belong to something smaller than all of humanity. They need loyalty, identity, reciprocity, and the concentrated local trust that lets you leave your door unlocked. A civilization that tries to abolish these doesn’t achieve enlightenment. It finds isolation, incoherence, or forced conformity. Eventually, human instincts return in their ugliest forms, because what we refuse to house in a healthy structure returns as something feral.

The objective, then, is not to overcome our tribal natures. It is to nest them—to let them find expression in their proper spheres and keep them from colonizing the spheres where they could do real damage. Civilization works when various instincts and institutions are restricted to their proper functional roles. None should seek to swallow up everything else in ideological or cultural imperialism, unless, of course, we build an empire of the mind upon the Covenant.

Such, of course, reframes the entire project of politics. Before us, then, lies an opportunity, bold but fragile, to evolve.

From Rules to Metarules

The classical question—which set of values should prevail?—assumes a society can and should converge on a grand answer. But there is no grand answer. People differ in their capacities, aptitudes, and cultures. Yet differences can go too far. In an excessively pluralistic world, where certain values and norms are not just different but incommensurable, society breaks down.

Let that sink in. Some value systems are commensurable. Others are not. This is a brute fact that too many universalists fail to acknowledge.

The profound achievement of humans will be to learn to hold first-order values and second-order values at the same time, to the extent that the latter create space for the former in a condition of peace.

So the questions have to move up a level.

Questions about which system should prevail must first yield to: What peoples, systems, and cultures can coexist without devouring one another? And, what governs the boundaries among them?

What we need, in other words, are not just better rules but better metarules—principles that govern the interactions among first-order rule-systems and cultures.

Philosopher Robert Nozick glimpsed a version of this in his “utopia of utopias,” a framework whose only content was the freedom to build, join, and leave smaller ‘utopias.’ His instinct was right. Today, it needs to be carried out of theoryland and into our broader cultural life.

Nested Membranes

But in returning to Hayek’s cultural evolution, no culture, much less any built atop a set of metarules, has yet evolved in a form capable of transcending politics and conflict. We must try to build that culture from theory today and try living it locally tomorrow, but it will either take hold or it won’t.

Such is evolution.

Indeed, a healthy society looks like an ecosystem. Biology already solved a version of this problem billions of years ago. A cell maintains itself with a membrane, which is a porous boundary. The membrane is what lets the cell stay itself while still exchanging with the world around it—admitting what it needs, expelling what it doesn’t, and in doing so, preserving what’s worth protecting on the inside. Cells nest into organs, organs into organisms, organisms into ecosystems. At every sphere and scale, the same pattern recurs. A boundary forms, porous enough to permit exchange, but firm enough to preserve identity and functional integrity of the system it encloses.

Human communities can and should be built the same way.

People gather around shared values and ways of life. Membership follows commensurability—you join what comports with your idea of the good life. The boundaries between communities function as membranes rather than walls: they keep differences alive while allowing people, ideas, and goods to pass through. Of course, some people, ideas, and goods will have to be expelled. Such is life. Individuals nest in families, families in communities, communities in regions, regions in civilizations. The health of the whole arrangement depends almost entirely on the quality of those interface rules—on how well the membranes work.

The future, in this picture, belongs neither to the homogenizers who want one global monoculture nor to the fragmenters who want every group sealed behind a wall. It belongs to nested differentiation and commensurability. Many forms of life, distinct and intact, can be held within a larger order that allows them to flourish without dissolving into one another or battling for dominance. And those ideologies whose primary rules are expansionist, such as Islam or Communism, must be kept outside the outermost membrane of social life. Such is not to say there shouldn’t be local communes within a larger ecosystem. That is to say—if its operating principle is to become the ecosystem—the worldview is invasive to the outermost covenantal sphere, and must be rejected.

More than Metarules

But metarules alone won’t do, and this is the part theorists tend to miss. People do not bleed for procedures. No one has ever sacrificed for a boundary-management protocol. Stable civilizations are held together by stories, symbols, virtues, and sacred commitments—by things felt, not merely things agreed to.

So the potential power beneath all of this is cultural. What kind of culture can contain many cultures at once? It cannot be cultural relativism. That view implies that every way of life is as good as every other, and commensurability either doesn’t matter or must somehow be compelled by authorities. Nor can our metarule be a universalism that quietly insists everyone conform to a vague monoculture that celebrates diversity and inclusion while ignoring real frictions. Such universalisms tend to ignore the need for reciprocity, as in We will tolerate you as long as you tolerate us. But systems that make room for ideological imperialism will end up dominated by ideological imperialists.

So this has to be something else. Something newer. An upgraded liberalism.

What awaits us must include an ecological sensitivity to culture itself, in which what can be integrated is integrated, but what cannot must be viewed with open eyes. A superordinate culture, capable of holding multiple value systems in view at once, recognizing what each one is for, and resisting the itch to make any single worldview the measure of all the rest. If this existed, it would look something like a culture of reciprocal pluralism. It would integrate only what is integrable, and only at the appropriate sphere and scale, perhaps according to a subsidiarity rule.

Almost certainly, the culture would start with whether someone is willing to be bound by the Covenant.

Then, such a culture would cultivate its own virtues, identify its vices, and say plainly what can be accepted within, and what must be rejected from, the corpus of a coherent, diverse, and peaceful society.

That’s what makes such a project so difficult.

Thinking this way, much less living this way, takes a level of developmental maturity many people never reach. Most people are stuck in first-order cultural or ideological imperialism. The capacity to take on another’s perspective without losing your own must be cultivated, and it is a capacity only a few possess. But perhaps those few can multiply, enough to create a powerful, transformative bloc.

It also takes sensitivity to invisible membranes—spheres of life great and small—coming to know where one sphere ends, and another begins. Nested belonging requires learning to see these invisible spheres and subspheres. It means developing not just a sense of responsibility for one’s local tribe, but for the whole living, integrated array of tribes. And in that arrangement, though decidedly not utopian, we would have to find something sacred. Something more like this: a deep reverence for the harmonization of difference to the degree difference can be harmonized, but no further.

A Different Figure

Every age has its hero. The first-order cultures—the ones still playing the old game—produce revolutionaries, conquerors, and technocrats, each certain that their order should win and rule the rest.

Each seeks domination.

The age now arriving requires a different figure. We might call him a steward of membranes—or perhaps what Alexander Bard calls a shamanoid. The shamanoid’s work is not conquest but rather the patient tending of the interfaces between worlds. His task is to preserve difference without friction and fragmentation, and to unity without homogenization. He does not dream of the final victory of one form of life over all the others, but instead, the continuous harmonization of difference amid constant change.

He knows that domination games are just the diseases of politics and war, with all the pathologies built around first-order values and their zero-sum arrangements.

Civilization is not a contest to be won but an ecology to be conserved—an unfinished arrangement of evolving norms and forms, each within its place, each contained within some larger sphere that does not consume its nested spheres, respecting the membranics of time, place, and cultural circumstances within the Covenant.

Toward a Culture of Reciprocal Pluralism

1. Honor spheres. Recognize which values belong to which domains, and resist exporting them everywhere.

2. Cultivate nested loyalties. Belong fully to family, community, civilization, and humanity without collapsing any level into another.

3. Practice reciprocal pluralism. Extend toleration to those willing to return it. If not, be willing to eject them.

4. Differentiate before judging. Ask what function a norm serves before determining its value.

5. Build membranes, not walls. Create boundaries that preserve identity while permitting exchange.

6. Associate by commensurability. Form institutions with those who share enough to cooperate deeply for the Covenant.

7. Exit before conquest. When coexistence fails, seek separation before domination.

8. Reward maturity. Venerate and elevate those capable of perspective-taking across value systems.

9. Reject ideological imperialism. Oppose any movement bent on eliminating or absorbing its rivals, or the second-order superstructure.

10. Steward the membranes. Train shamanoid leaders who will guard the interfaces among cultural spheres.

11. Practice subsidiarity. Solve problems at the smallest sphere capable of solving them well.

12. Venerate harmonized diversity. Treat the flourishing of many peaceful forms of life within a larger order as an achievement worthy of reverence.