Humans can only know so much, which puts a bound on the complexity of our social institutions, which puts a bound on their quality, unless we cooperate to remember more than we otherwise could. Thus breakdown in social order means moderns are structurally incapable of remembering complex reasons for beneficial traditions.
If you have 20-person social units, division of labor allows more cultural storage space because different people can know different parts or one person can specialize. If someone questions their current traditions, they can ask a local cultural authority for guidance and get a nuanced answer.
On the other hand, if you have 1-person social units, people don’t really have local cultural authorities to reliably shard culture, and thus can reliably hold onto only the traditions they are individually capable of regenerating.
Thus effective possible complexity of culture is reduced in an individualist social context.
Given a limit on cultural complexity, how does this effect quality?
With a high bound on complexity we might get the following competing memes, with the best argument winning:
- X because complex technical reasons A, B, and C.
- Y because I said so.
- Z because it seems fun.
Tradition X, with actual technical reasons, probably beats naively hedonistic Z, and soundly beats unjustified Y. What if we lower the bound? Then things have to be compressed:
- X because tradition.
- Y because I said so.
- Z because it seems fun, and no one has a better idea with serious justification.
Now X and Y are basically indistinguishable, and Z wins, but they are the same proposals as before. Therefor, lowering the complexity bound on culture has reduced quality.
Thus reduction in local social cohesion and trust necessarily reduces quality of social technology. We necessarily revert to more primitive social technology as we atomize, because we lose the ability to remember more advanced social tech.
Progressivism, in this view, is the inevitable systematic replacement of traditional X with justifiable Z after a major reduction in the cultural complexity bound. The major reduction coming from the well documented decline of extended families, churchgoing, geographical roots, etc.