Chapter 13    Part E 

       For the thoughtful citizens living in a society, the ways in which values and behaviors arise can seem very difficult to analyze. The values that a society lived by when it was first growing stronger can get lost for generations before the whole system starts to unravel. This is why trying to find constants in history can seem so frustrating. A tribe's experiments in steadily evolving new tunings for its values, or its laziness in adhering blindly to its old ones, can take generations to show results or consequences, and the consequences can be obscured under mounds of irrelevant trivia.

       But then again, we should not be surprised at the apparent gradualness, from our limited perspectives, of history's processes. A thousand years is fifty human generations. In evolutionary terms, a span of fifty generations is trivial. In normal genetic evolution, a thousand generations often have to pass before a new anatomical feature can prove itself. 

      The evidence of history indicates that a new value, and the cultural-behavioral morés that are implied by it, and attached to it, can prove themselves much more rapidly than a new anatomical or physiological variation can. The evidence, therefore, supports the view that the cultural-behavioral mode of evolution is superior to the genetic mode in a very basic sense. Cultural evolution responds to environmental changes in a more timely way and thus outruns genetic evolution. Cultural change seems slow in our limited view, but it is actually very quick compared to biological change. And most cultural experiments don't take a thousand years. Only the very profound ones do. 

      Some societies have worked out sets of values and behaviors that have led them to deal with their environments so effectively that for generations, even centuries, the citizens of such a society may come to believe that they have found the answers to life’s riddles (as was the case in Rome and in Victorian England and is presently the case in some nations of the West). These citizens may create sub-environments that are well insulated from harsh contact with the uncertainty and adversity of the material universe. People of wealth and indolence can get so totally insulated that they come to take their lifestyle for granted; values like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love then come to be thought of, by the nation’s elites, as being old-fashioned notions for peasants, notions that subtle, worldly adults no longer need. In reality, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality, and it will keep right on being hard and unpredictable, demanding courage and wisdom, love and freedom of us.  

  

     propaganda poster for the Cuban Revolution 

        Ultimately, all societies must exist in material reality, and if some of a society’s citizens are not experiencing adversity or uncertainty and so are feeling no need to practice courage, wisdom, love, and imagination, this fact only means that other citizens are handling more than their share, and buffering or insulating the lives of the spoiled and deluded few. In the past three centuries, complacency of a nation's elites has more and more frequently brought revolution and the overthrow of an old, corrupt order. (e.g. France, Russia, China, Cuba, etc.) Marx was right in this at least: as civilization grinds forward, literacy spreads, ideas spread, and more and more ordinary people, in larger and larger groups, become aware of their collective power. Arrogant, abusive aristocrats, bureaucrats, theocrats, and plutocrats are less and less likely to be tolerated, in societies all over this world, with each year that passes.  

    But we also must not lose sight of the fact that even revolutions are merely group behaviors that are contained within the cultural evolution model. Society's main mission is to find more and more dynamic balances among its values clusters and so to grow constantly more courageous, intelligent, venturesome, and loving. 

    Some social changes contribute to the building of new values/morés clusters and others contribute to the destruction of old ones. Some do both at once. The important point to see for my purposes in this book is that this inclination towards unceasing positing and testing – an inclination which the evidence shows is programmed into us genetically, and which, thus, constantly puts some people in every society at odds with that society’s morés – is an unalterable part of our nature. And luckily so. It makes our cultures evolve. It gives us our statesmen, scientists, artists, and eccentrics, and they enable us to respond to this ever-changing reality and thus to evolve, economically and socially, in a timely way.

          overcrowded slums of Manila

  Externally, of course, reality's uncertainty and adversity are always weathering, eroding, and jolting the body of any society, compelling it to deal with change. When a society no longer deals effectively with these jolts and pressures (e.g. drought, war, famine, plague, overpopulation, pollution, etc.), then by one mechanism or another, it is sooner or later superseded by a society that does.

    bee sipping nectar while pollinating flower 

              lions killing a hippo 

          stock market trading floor 

      Another interesting feature of the way in which values drive society's behavior patterns and morés is the paradoxical design or dynamic equilibrium all values clusters seem to exhibit. Values seem to be designed in matched pairs. As one value drives humans toward one set of behavior patterns, it is tempered with a complementary one which attenuates the other, focuses it, and cuts down on the excesses that the undiluted use of the first value might lead to. Nature creates endless arrays and clusters of relationships by balancing cooperating/competing forces. 

     If our young people were filled only with aggression (“daring/courage”, as they saw it), they would die off constantly, in large numbers, hurling themselves at cars, cliffs, oceans, outer space, and each other. But they are also encouraged to acquire judgment (“wisdom”, as their elders see it), which will direct them to practice courage in ways that (probably) will benefit, rather than harm, them and their society. Be aggressive, assertive, and ambitious, but aim to use your drive to become an entrepreneur, a scientist, a doctor, an athlete, an artist, or a musician, not a criminal or a highway casualty. And, in the end, bring a human system together out of emptiness, what would have been there if there had been no human values at all.