The Challenges Of Reforming Traditional Lifestyles

People do lots of things out of custom and tradition that are the product of cultural evolution and are adaptive. 

But often, conventional wisdom regarding why those customs and traditions are adaptive completely wrong. 

For example, many superstitious divination techniques are functional not because they are accurate, but because they randomize decisions that would otherwise be sub-optimal due to dysfunctional cognitive biases if made consciously.

If you are like most people and have inaccurate understandings of the reasons that the status quo works, then your reforms of the status quo is likely to have unexpected and unintended consequences. This isn't a problem, of course, if you actually do know what it is about the customs and traditions that has a functional purpose. But, it is very hard to both gain the nuanced knowledge of how the customs and traditions work in intimate detail so that you can discern the critical details about them, and to also have enough of an outsider's perspective to ignore conventional wisdom in order to discern the true reasons that these cultural practices are functional.

Reformers like Turkish founding figure Ataturk who insisted that his people wear Western style clothing in a climatologically inappropriate place as part of a general scheme of reforms, was aware at some level of his own incapacity to discern what was and wasn't an important cause of the outcomes he desired, so he adopted foreign cultures he saw as successful wholesale to avoid the risk of missing a non-obvious but critical component of what made those cultures work.

But, in a rapidly changing world, refusing to change is also perilous.

Ideally, change that occurs in a manner sensitive to the hidden functionality of existing customs and traditions (as well as an understanding of how they become dysfunctional in a changing world), can allow that change to be less disruptive and more adaptive. Probably the best historical example of thoughtful and selective adoption of outside innovation into a culture in a manner that brings benefit without being unduly disruptive is early modern Japan.

But, since striking the right balance between preserving customs and traditions with hidden mechanisms and functions that have value, and making necessary changes and reforms to adapt to modern society, is a highly challenging task, copying successful models from elsewhere in a wholesale fashion is one popular method of reform that often works reasonably well, even though many of the changes made will not have value to the adopting society and even though this may trample useful contributions that the adopting society could have made from its own traditions.