War forces us to cleanse our information banks

From Marginal Revolution, War dissolves customs by Tyler Cowen quoting from Peasants into Frenchmen by Eugene Weber.

Wars as disruptors of customs, customs being, to a degree, a manifestation of accumulated knowledge.

…the role of wars in dealing the coup de grace to lingering customs is quite remarkable. Contemporary observers noted this development without comment or simply attributed it directly to the catastrophe. But war was less a cause of change than a precipitant of changes already under way. Edgar Morin makes precisely this point when he writes that in the parish of Plodémet “the war of 1914 accelerated and amplified most of the processes set off in 1880-1900.” Like the Great Revolution in peasant parlance, the Great War became a symbolic dividing line between what once was and what is, so that informants in a survey used terms like jadis and avant de guerre interchangeably. Yet wars are not watersheds for customs, but difficult times in which people are forced to focus on essential matters and come to see things differently. Many festive customs were not necessarily suspended by the Great War. In the countryside, mourning was almost as universal as hardship; two years for parents, one for siblings. There were few pigs to slaughter, no festive family meals, no public festivities. And after the war there was the great influenza epidemic. By 1919 the old customs were no longer part of people’s lives. Some were restored to their prewar prominence, but many were quietly forgotten.

There is a fair amount of research coming out in the past year highlighting that in developed economies, the only time there is an increase in equality in a nation occurs during wars and other major natural catastrophes such as drought or plague, when material percentages of the population are killed.

I wonder whether a small contribution to that equalization might come in the form of recalibrating knowledge and ceasing customs which are not additive to the individual or communal well-being? Take, as an example, a thought hypothesis. Let's say that over time, a village has evolved a variety of traditions, the net result of which is that there are effectively a large communal celebration in the village every month - some religious, some communal, some for other ostensible reasons. One can see that from an economic view, that that set of customs would have served in the past, when everyone lived perilously close to starvation, as a mechanism for transferring food assets from those with a small surplus to those undernourished in a fashion that creates no future obligation but which also insures that a higher percentage survive over time.

On the other hand, in a period of rising productivity, usually because of improving technology and/or governance, these customs might be still indulged in but no longer serve their original effective purpose. People are no longer near starvation. While the customs might be fun and respected, they now represent a persistent drag on individual and communal capital. Surplus food is being consumed because of custom rather than sold for money to make investments and improvements.

Until there is a war when everything is reset and past customs which have no current utility are expunged.

Catastrophes, military or natural, under this hypothesis, become a means not only of equalizing people, but also of purging non-contributive knowledge and customs.