This post is part of a series on U.S. national strategy. An updated table of contents is maintained here.
Summary
This Part I provides an analytic decomposition of modernity in light of three revolutionary theoretical discoveries: complex dynamic systems, cultural evolution, and collective action.
This sets us up for Part II, where we will explain the core economic, security, and political problems we are facing today resolved according to this fundamental structure of modernity.
This structural understanding enables us to make more targeted and efficient interventions on a critical causal layer, to avoid crises and maintain national competitiveness.
A central contention of this essay is that we must reach back specifically to modernity—that set of norms and institutions that emerged three centuries ago and were made visible through urbanization, industrialization, and the utilization of fossil energy—to find the underlying structure that configures the core national (and, indeed, global) problems we face today: economic dissatisfaction; the threat of illiberal revisionism leading to great power wars, hot and cold; ecological collapse; and ultimately faltering political legitimacy of liberal governance in the liberal world.
To identify the systemic roots of these problems with modernity—not with other developments before or since—is not to suggest that we don’t have any other problems that operate on other time scales. To the contrary, we have many such problems.
But it is to suggest that this specific class of problems are the deep ones, the ones history has taught us we must get right to avoid decompensation and disaster in the form of severe security, political, financial, and economic crises.
It is to identify and isolate a specific stratum of societal operation, an architectonic register, that requires special focus because of its systemic impact.
One of the key reasons this layer of problems is so dangerous is that they work at macro scale and in the longue durée. They operate slowly enough, on the order of decades, that often we fail to perceive their movement. Even when we’re not focused on narrowly partisan and special interests, it is extremely easy for us to prioritize short-term issues, even when that means we work at cross-purposes vis-à-vis these long-term ones. And it is in the nature of macro systemic problems like these, driven by feedback loops, to spiral out of our control. Once their effects become obvious, it’s often too late. They do not respond well to late stage mitigation measures, which is too often (as now) all that we can muster.
As such, if we hope to get a handle on them we must learn to sharpen our systemic analytic capabilities, relocate our efforts higher up the causal chain, and gain systemic leverage to make precise, intentional interventions. The good news is that if we make accurate structural analyses, we actually can get a reasonably good sense of what we need to do. That is what this essay is really about: identifying the variables and processes that are responsible for the largest systemic macro effects with which humanity must contend. Even if, now, we are decades in to mounting imbalances that could spell existential disaster, we might as well get going.
To understand why this layer is so significant and how it operates, we must start by advancing our understanding of modernity—and indeed of humanity itself.
A Revolution in Human Ontology
Everyone knows what modernity looks like. Its hallmark is material prosperity. Moving fast—on planes, trains, and automobiles. Urbanization. Skyscrapers. Industry. The overcoming of traditional prejudices. These things can be seen and experienced. They are enjoyed. They are reviled. They are envied. But what, exactly, causes them?
When it comes to explaining modernity, there is in fact little consensus, and even less understanding.
In political and popular discourse, considerations of modernity usually emphasize the obvious and the visible: technology, industrialization, and energy, if not the weakening of traditions and sometimes complaints of colonial predation. Thus political leaders in states like China have put the acquisition of technology at the core of their national strategies.
In intellectual discourse, there has long been an attempt to access deeper causal factors. When modernity first emerged, thinkers like Bacon, Kant, and Hegel were focused on the cognitive changes—reason, recognition—that both induced and were reciprocally induced by modernity. As modernity really started to predominate, thinkers like Marx and Weber shifted their attention to structural factors—materialism and the articulation of bureaucracy. More recently, thinkers like Charles Tilly, Francis Fukuyama, and Peter Turchin have provided more multivariate and subtle accounts, sometimes trying to weave together many causal threads into grand narratives, other times arguing some particular variable or process has been decisive.
Some Thinkers of Modernity & the Human
But even the most sophisticated of these models suffer from an epistemic-ontological mismatch: the structure and complexity of their models—whether due to an undue reduction in the variables under consideration, the assumption of simple causal relationships and invariant ontological substructures, or a largely descriptive approach—does not conform well enough to the structure of human life to deliver penetrating understanding and solid ground for intentional action.1
This essay contends that there have been three recent discoveries which can and should fundamentally transform our understanding of humankind: the fact that humanity (including its ecology) is a complex dynamic system, that human groups are subject to cultural evolution, and that collective action is the core problematic linking individual agents to group outcomes.
These three revolutions have emerged in various corners of the academy over the last couple of generations. Their insights are only slowly and individually diffusing from mathematics and the deeper social sciences into the more pragmatic disciplines and ultimately the practice of government.2 Eventually they should serve, just like intellectual innovations of the past, as a source of profound advancement in our understanding, and ultimately national strategic advantage.
For the purposes of this essay, we explicitly bring them together in a protean combination in order to understand the problematic of modernity. They provide the essential conceptual scaffolding that will enable us to articulate the deeper structure of modernity and point the way. So, let’s take a moment to understand the basics of each.
Complex Dynamic Systems
Human societies can be understood in terms of various ontological structures. Traditional, deterministic models assume a straightforward and stable underlying ontology, and search for inputs that straightforwardly determine outputs. Often these are normativized, with good inputs leading to good outputs, and bad to bad, and thus serve as an impetus to normativity. Optimization models tend to focus on how agents maximize objectives under given constraints, and displace their normativity to recommendations for systemic interventions to perfect these optimizations. Statistical and stochastic approaches can comprehend even more complexity, but are too susceptible to reductivism and the availability of data. Sometimes, they aspire to only descriptive results. Narrative historical approaches catalogue events, but are often suspicious of characterizing an underlying systemic logic.3
In contrast, complex dynamic systems—and humanity is undoubtedly in this class—recognize societies as ontologically variable and unpredictable, driven by complex interactions among relatively simple agents that produce nonlinear, path-dependent, emergent outcomes. Complex dynamic systems recognize that societies do have some structure, though in part a variable structure whose variation itself has structure.
The epistemic significance of approaching humanity as a complex dynamic system is profound. It prompts a disposition that resists undue reification of categories (e.g. generalized conceptions of state behavior) or the simple calculation of equilibria. Instead, it encourages us to attend to many variables, foremost the characteristic behaviors of agents, including their diversity, and to explicitly ladder-up to the level of collective, emergent phenomena. And at the emergent, systemic level, it encourages us to search for those control variables (from the technology domain to energy to information to scale) that determine the characteristic behaviors of the system, as well as transitions between qualitatively different systemic régimes. It encourages us to identify the feedback loops and decay functions that are the sources of both opportunity to increase systemic performance and risk to devolve into systemic collapse. It is the perspective that makes it possible to uncover those key points of influence where our intentional action may have the greatest, most efficient impact on the system’s behavior.
Cultural Evolution
Not only is humanity complex, but our foundational ontology is also inherently evolutionary. By now, everyone understands that we are subject, like any living species, to genetic evolution.
But the critical recent insight—arguably one of the most profound discoveries in history—is the illumination of human cultural evolution. Over the past five decades, groundbreaking research by scholars including Cavalli-Sforza, Boyd, Richerson, Feldman, Durham, and Henrich4 has isolated the manner in which humans adopt, adapt, and transmit beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors through cultural as opposed to genetic transmission mechanisms, for example imitation and social learning.
Culturally transmitted traits are not just incidental curiosities like styles of pottery or other material culture—they profoundly shape the functioning and capacities of human groups, how big they can be, how productive they are, how capable they are at organizing violence, how resilient they are. This, in turn, subjects these groups to powerful selection pressures. Thus emerges cultural evolution.
The epistemic significance of cultural evolution is likewise profound. It provides the mechanism that can explain the astonishing phylogenic diversity, but also the limitations on the diversity, we see empirically in our species. It primes us to investigate how changing cultural parameters can tip cultural evolution, like any other evolutionary system, into different evolutionary régimes. It keeps us open to the possibility—nay, inevitability—that adaptive change will continue, and helps us to reorient our focus from achieving superficial or transitory objectives, to achieving objectives that will increase our adaptive fitness—and even the meta-objective of intentionally increasing the rate and resilience of our adaptability itself.
Collective Action
Given that humans have individual agency but nevertheless live in groups in which collective outcomes are of decisive importance, one of the absolutely central questions that arises as we study the behaviors and performance of groups is how they solve the problem of collective action. More than any given genetic change or any one cultural innovation like the wheel, it is the functioning of collective action that is the sine qua non of societal fitness.
Human beings are genetically predisposed to live, coöperate, and compete in groups. And it is clear that our genetic ontogeny provides for notably high levels of baseline prosocial behavior, as illuminated by scholars such as Wilson, Trivers, and Tomasello.5
Empirically, however, these innate predispositions alone reliably foster coöperative equilibria only within the confines of small-scale groups—bands or tightly knit communities.6 All else being equal, human groups have the tendency to fission after reaching a few hundred individuals, fundamentally limiting the scale and therefore capacity of such groups.
To extend coöperation beyond these intimate circles, humans rely on cultural evolutionary mechanisms. These mechanisms span from the ideological to the technological. To be effective, they must accomplish a defined set of functional objectives which can serve like a dashboard for monitoring societal health:7
Identity & Group Formation – Establish the constitution of identity—what determines who belongs to the group and who does not, creating an intelligible perimeter for mutual obligation.
Contribution Norms – Specify what, when, and how much each member must supply (labor, taxes, information).
Benefit Allocation – Decide what mechanism will determine how rights, privileges, collective outputs, and rents are distributed; perceived fairness is critical for compliance.
Legitimacy & Normative Order – Supply moral and other justifications (spiritual or civic) that make deference psychologically available. Establish and legitimate governance, economic, and other hierarchies.
Coordination Infrastructure – Provide physical and informational platforms (roads, markets, social networks) that lower transaction costs and serve as the systemic kernel for collective action.
Monitoring & Information Flow – Generate reliable data on both contributions and outcomes at an individual level—ranging from gossip to bureaucratic audits.
Enforcement – Apply graduated sanctions, from shaming to fines to force, and positive rewards from honor to titles to subsidies, to align behavior with collective action and norms.
Conflict Resolution – Provide predictable structures such as councils and courts to resolve conflicts between group members in accordance with norms.
Predation Control – Protect the group from external and internal predation via highly prosocial normative ideologies; social monitoring mechanisms; defense and police forces (including as necessary control of influence and other sub-kinetic forms of predation); formalize collectively-controlled monopoly on violence.
Free-Rider Mitigation – Detect and deter under-contributors through reputation systems, repeated interaction, and moralizing ideologies.
Ecological & Resource Sustainability – Monitor and adjust production systems to match extraction rates to environmental regeneration and resilience.
Decision-Making & Plasticity: Establish mechanisms to set norms and rules and govern institutions; enable learning and reform through periodic review, experimentation, and continuous-improvement loops.
The effectiveness of given cultural evolutionary packages at producing and maintaining collective action across these functional areas is one of the key determinants of group adaptive fitness, and central to understanding what exactly differentiates modernity and what is required to maintain and advance it.
Modernity as an Adaptive Optimization of Collective Action and New Evolutionary Régime
Having introduced these three groundbreaking developments—complex dynamic systems, cultural evolution, and collective action—we now have the language and conceptual tools we need to understand modernity, and in turn its pathologies and remedies.
Modernity is constituted fundamentally by more than just technological advancement, urbanization, or unprecedented material wealth—at a deeper level, modernity is best understood as an adaptive transition to a new dynamic equilibrium of collective action, which also includes an unprecedented transition from a slow and punctuated to a rapid and continuous critical cultural evolutionary régime. Let’s see how it works.
The Pre-Modern Baseline
Human societies have not marched up a smooth ladder of collective action and group adaptive fitness. Before modernity, across time and space they have hopped—up, but also sometimes down—between four distinct equilibria.8
The Four Pre-Modern Social Types
Foraging bands, such as the contemporaneous North Sentinelese9, are small, mobile groups that rely on strong reciprocity and instantaneous sanctioning provided by humanity’s innate genetic baseline. Every member can monitor everyone else. Inequality is transient, leadership situational, and animistic beliefs seldom claim to police moral conduct.10
Tribal coalitions, such as the contemporary Pashtun, (which emerged one hundred thousand to fifty thousand years ago, a period that appears to uncoincidentally to overlap with the global dispersal of anatomically modern humans from Africa and the eventual elimination of all our congenerics), consist of multiple camps that have fused for seasonal hunts or rituals. Universal monitoring is impossible due to population scale, so it is augmented by portable symbols of larger collective identity and group membership combined with tribal dispute resolution systems. Prestige-based gift exchange and integrative myth-ritual systems bind dispersed lineages. “Big-men” prosper only while redistributing, limiting the scope for permanent coercion—but low collective capacity means that high levels of predation often abound. Ancestor spirits may punish oath-breakers, but morality is situational and kin-bounded.11
Within the last 10 thousand years (which, for context, is only about 3% of the approximately three hundred and fifty thousand year history of our species) two additional equilibria have emerged:
Segmentary polities, such as contemporary Dinka, emerge when there is a sufficient agricultural surplus, enabling chiefs to stockpile prestige goods, hire war bands, and turn episodic tribute into a de facto extractive tax. A coercive and patrimonial dominance-cum-economic hierarchy becomes predominant. Sacred kingship and ancestor cults naturalize ranked lineages. Absent writing or formal bureaucracy, authority remains personal. Hierarchy seldom deepens beyond three tiers, and collapses if leadership charisma or surplus falters. Moralizing deities begin to appear but target insiders, legitimizing loyalty more than universal ethics.12
Bureaucratic states, such as contemporary China, emerge because new information technologies like writing, numeracy, money, and relay roads dramatically increase bureaucratic effectiveness. Rulers have sufficient resources to run censuses, schedule corvée, and field standing armies.13 Private predation is significantly mitigated and transformed into public and semi-public extraction, predation, and rent-taking—taxation, legal monopolies, temple endowments, and simple coercive rents. Moralizing “Big Gods” or universal doctrines flourish, lowering monitoring costs by internalizing prosocial norms among strangers and justifying deference to the state.14
The transition between these four layers involves many different changes in most of the dimensions of human life. But just one variable correlates overwhelmingly with the shifts: population scale.15 With the advent of modernity, a fundamentally new dynamic emerged.
A New Dynamic Equilibrium of Collective Action
Modernity arose as an adaptation out of bureaucratic states.16 The essential shift was the transformation of vertical coercive mechanisms which enable large-scale collective action for both segmentary polities and especially bureaucratic states, but at the cost of high residual public and semi public predation and instability, to omnidirectional collective action mechanisms that actually represents a normatively and institutionally scaled-up version of the collective action mechanism in band societies.
The core intuition of modernity is actually simple: I will play fair so long as you play fair, and because we both can rely on the rules—transparent, impersonal, and enforceable equally for everyone—to make sure you, I, and everyone else keeps playing fair.
In the first few centuries of modernity, this collective action paradigm did not characterize the functioning of society at large, but was cultivated by the state in parts of the economic realm. This partial modernization is also evident in contemporary states like China, where some parts of the economy operate on an effectively modern basis. It was in the early 19th century in a few places like England and the United States where the rest of political and social life also transformed to cohere with modern logic.
In modernity, the legitimacy of traditional mores and strictures of coercive patrimonialism transforms into egalitarian norms, individual autonomy, and procedural fairness and becomes deeply embedded, fostering a robust, self-reinforcing cultural foundation that substantially amplifies societal adaptive potential and competitive advantage. This ideological transition at least in part, preceded modernity and seems to have been a function at least in part of even deeper changes in family structure.17 Modern societies enjoy markedly higher levels of legitimacy and therefore deference, and correspondingly lower marginal enforcement costs, reallocating collective resources towards enhancing adaptive resilience and well-being.
Local identities that are largely a function of unintentional historical drift over often ill-defined territories turn, in modernity, into national identities intentionally crafted by the state and fixed with firm barriers for entry, exit, and territory.18 This shift to nationalism was so powerful that even pre-modern states have found it important, though by no means easy, to attempt to organize themselves in this fashion.
Open, impersonal courts, the press, and free speech generally makes it possible to expose and sanction predators and free-riders, including among the elite. Written law transforms from an (easily manipulated) bureaucratic tool to legitimate control of the population into a universal obligation to mete out punishments.
Open, competitive markets replace economic predation (rent seeking) with an optimization of supply and demand, investment in production factors, and innovation.
Open social and political institutions enable inclusive, high plasticity, and therefore ultimately legitimate, effective, and resilient group decision making.
One of the ways that we know modernity is fundamentally different is that it is a social form which unlike the previous four layers is not primarily a function of scale. There are small city states that are modern and some of the largest states on earth are likewise modern. It is an evolutionary adaptation that enters a new regime of collective action enabled by the concatenation of innovations from ideology and family systems to information and productive technologies.
A New Cultural Evolutionary Régime
As important as this optimization of collective action is, because of the openness to the introduction of new technologies, firms, and other economic innovation, as well as the effective control of predation in the economic realm, the transition to modernity also fundamentally changes the cultural evolutionary régime in which societies function.
Evolutionary dynamics reduce to two19 canonical operators that parameterize qualitatively distinct evolutionary regimes:
The innovation rate (μ) bundles every process that introduces transmissible novelty, i.e. new ideas, technologies, and institutional forms. The selection gradient (s) captures every systematic force that differentially amplifies or suppresses variants: environmental filtering, inter-group competition, reputational incentives, market signals, state coercion, etc.
Plotting μ on the x-axis and s on the y-axis yields four archetypal regimes.
Four Evolutionary Régimes
Neutral Drift/Stasis (low μ, low s)—variation is scarce, selection is weak, so change is glacial and directionless; many small-scale hunter-gatherer bands sat here for millennia.
Selection-Limited Adaptation (low μ, high s)—strong filters act on a trickle of novelty, producing long epochs of stasis punctuated by rapid fixation when a rare advantageous variant appears; Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” and much of pre-modern cultural evolution live here.
Mutation-Driven Drift (high μ, low s)—novelty floods the system but nothing reliably sorts it, so signal drowns in noise (think evolutionary experiments on highly mutagenic microbes or internet memes).
Critical Adaptation (high μ, high s)—innovation and selection run in tight lock-step, maximizing exploration while preventing error catastrophe; this is the edge-of-criticality that modern open-access orders achieved once printing, science, competitive markets, and institutionalized feedback loops cranked both μ and s to sustained highs.
In summary then, modernity’s leap does not amount to just better collective action (much less to just fossil energy or new technology). It is also a cultural evolutionary régime-shift, from selection-limited adaptation characterized by long punctuated equilibria, to a criticality that (in its ideal form) exhibits faster as well as a time- and scale-invariant structure of punctuated adaptation.20 The entry into this evolutionary regime is what explains the rapid and continuous improvement in particularly the economic domain in terms of productivity growth, real wages per capita, and GDP growth as a whole.
Looking Forward to Modernity’s Pathologies and Remedies
Occupying this critical evolutionary regime also introduces new systemic dynamics into the political economy of modern states, for example, the relationship between capital and labor, which create new forms of instability that can rebound on politics and interstate conflict. As we shall see in Part II of this essay, the problematic of modernity consists essentially in, first, the management of these new evolutionary systemic dynamics, including the sustainability of humanity’s ecology given the increased resource use that is enabled by its greater productive capacity; second, counteracting decay functions in which modernity’s collective action paradigm risks devolving out of its equilibrium due to the accumulation of covert predation and free riding; and above all, third, managing the interface between modern and pre-modern states where the potential for catastrophic conflict hangs over us all.
What I hope I have achieved here is to provide a conceptual framework that makes clear not the causal chain that led to the advent of modernity, but rather the structural functioning and logic of humanity, of which modernity is so far the highest expression. My hope is that this framework helps us to understand why certain of our problems are more important than others—because they touch on or are a function of the systemic logic—and above all that it helps us direct our intentional action to maximize our peace, prosperity, progress, and freedom.
There are innumerable facets of the topics addressed here which we neglect entirely, because the work of national strategy must be involved not in accumulating knowledge for its own sake, but rather utilizing knowledge as a basis for action. And, as we shall see in the forthcoming essay on consilience politics, not the action that privileges a particular political faction or interest group, which have a genius for warping their thinking and speaking to meet factional needs, but rather action that is in service the nation as a whole.
Remarkably, already in the 1950s scientists at The RAND Corporation attempted to extend the kind of complex models that had been used during the war to target missiles in order to model the entirety of human society in order to grapple with military planning problems for the Cold War. Unfortunately, their efforts were overwhelmed with complexity and failed. See David Jardini, Thinking Through the Cold War: RAND, National Security, and Domestic Policy, 1945-1975. (Meadow Lands, Pensylvania: David Jardini, 2013).
Institutions like the academy that are responsible for knowledge production are subject to the poor choice of epistemic models. The reason for this is that in such institutions, professional advancement is a function of making arguments that can convince one’s colleagues, which leads not to the optimization of truth, but to the optimization of the appearance of rigor. Thus, epistemic frameworks that appear rigorous, particularly if they are subject to mathematical formalization or empirical data crunching, tend to win out whatever their epistemic inadequacies and limitations.
For more on cultural evolution, see: Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Robert L. Trivers, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," The Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (1971): 35-57; Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
Dunbar RIM. Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 1993;16(4):681-694. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00032325
For various perspectives of the problem of collective action, which unfortunately has primarily emerged from the discipline of economics and therefore has been often seen through an economic, and even rational actor, lens, see: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Coase, Ronald. “The Nature of the Firm.” Economica 4, no. 16 (1937): 386–405.; Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, Third-party punishment and social norms, Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 25, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 63-87, ISSN 1090-5138, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(04)00005-4.; Mancur Olson. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
My contention here blends some of Peter Turchin’s work on the macro transitions of patrimonial and state societies (see e.g. Turchin et al. “Quantitative Historical Dynamics,” PNAS 2017) with anthropological accounts of smaller scale band and tribal societies.
Of course, we actually don’t know much about the North Sentinelese, so this categorization is in a strict sense speculation.
Peoples, Duda & Marlowe, “Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion,” R. Soc. Open Sci. 2016.
Gamble, Clive, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar. Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014.; Christopher S. Henshilwood et al., Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa. Science 295,1278-1280 (2002).DOI:10.1126/science.1067575; Service, Primitive Social Organization 1962; Hayden, “Feasting and Social Dynamics,” Am. Anthropol. 2001.; Botero et al. “Environmental Harshness Is Positively Associated with In‐Group-Biased Moralizing,” PNAS 2014.
Claessen & Skalník (eds.), The Early State 1978.; Ames, “Divine Kingship of the Classic Maya,” World Archaeology 2011.
Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Douglas C. North, John Joseph Wallis, & Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.; Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
P. Turchin, T.E. Currie, H. Whitehouse, P. François, K. Feeney, D. Mullins, D. Hoyer, C. Collins, S. Grohmann, P. Savage, G. Mendel-Gleason, E. Turner, A. Dupeyron, E. Cioni, J. Reddish, J. Levine, G. Jordan, E. Brandl, A. Williams, R. Cesaretti, M. Krueger, A. Ceccarelli, J. Figliulo-Rosswurm, P. Tuan, P. Peregrine, A. Marciniak, J. Preiser-Kapeller, N. Kradin, A. Korotayev, A. Palmisano, D. Baker, J. Bidmead, P. Bol, D. Christian, C. Cook, A. Covey, G. Feinman, Á.D. Júlíusson, A. Kristinsson, J. Miksic, R. Mostern, C. Petrie, P. Rudiak-Gould, B. ter Haar, V. Wallace, V. Mair, L. Xie, J. Baines, E. Bridges, J. Manning, B. Lockhart, A. Bogaard, & C. Spencer, Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (2) E144-E151, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708800115 (2018).
Somewhat uncharacteristically for cultural adaptations, a significant portion of the development of modernity was actually thought intentionally and explicitly beforehand by pre- and early-modern individuals like Bacon and Machiavelli. This is not to suggest there was a simple implementation plan and that the later individuals who made the numerous normative and institutional changes required were acting in a coordinated and deliberate fashion—but certainly to some degree at least some of them were.
Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).; Francis Fukuyama. The origins of political order: from prehuman times to the French Revolution. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. New York City: Verso, 1983
Two other modifiers are also key, but not for the present point: effective population size (Nₑ), which sets the strength of stochastic drift relative to selection. Inheritance bandwidth governs how faithfully information is transmitted.
For a discussion of these evolutionary régimes, see Bakhtin Y, Katsnelson MI, Wolf YI, Koonin EV. Evolution in the weak-mutation limit: Stasis periods punctuated by fast transitions between saddle points on the fitness landscape. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2021 Jan 26;118(4):e2015665118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2015665118. PMID: 33472973; PMCID: PMC7848522.