Chapter 10.                        Part B 

           Another digression is in order here. It is a large digression, but it has been lingering at the edge of this essay for several chapters already. It is such an important one that I am going to indulge in it for a few pages.

            If we strive to be rigorously logical and objective at this point, we can also become very discouraged. Every society has its own worldview, its own values, and its own morés (accepted patterns of behavior). The natural trend for human societies seems to be for each of them to keep moving ahead with its way of life while simultaneously diverging from, and becoming more and more alien to, all other societies and their ways of life.

            Does an analysis of human value systems entail the corollary that we can never arrive at a set of values that would be good and right for all sentient beings? Will people in the world's many different human societies continue to be loyal to incompatible sets of values? Even worse, will citizens of the world's societies continue to follow their own codes of values so rigidly that they will tolerate no other way and will feel motivated to kill other folk whose values and behaviors clearly differ from their own?             

         Analyzing the background physical situation in which societies evolve adds to our depression at this point. The environment around us is always changing so our values systems and morés must too. When new conditions arise, several different societies' responses to them may all prove effective, as happened with lions and hyenas. 

                                                         hyenas attacking a lioness 

        Lions and hyenas occupy the same habitat and hunt the same prey. Their relative competitive advantages/disadvantages interact in extremely complex ways, but they can and do both flourish at the same time in the same habitat. (1.) In this, they are very like human societies, whose bases are socio-culture, rather than genetic, but whose competive situations are very analogous to those of lions and hyenas. Lions and hyenas co-exist in the same habitats and remain extremely, mutually hostile. They exist as hostile neighbors, drive one another away from kills, and fight to the death regularly. Examples of human societies in similar circumstances don't just riddle history; they are what history is about. (Apache/Pueblo, Huron/Iroquois, Ghiljais/Durranis, Croats/Serbs, Poles/Ukrainians, Gauls/Germans, Catholics/Protestants, etc.)  

 

                                            police confronting Catholic rioters in Belfast

                   

                                         police confronting Protestant rioters in Belfast

          In other words, estrangement between societies comes about by a natural process. Different, often neighboring, societies, each with its own values and customs, arise and make war, inevitably as the real world simply rolls along. Such has been the case for all of human history so far.

               

Chapter   10           World Views And The War Digression                   Part A

            Protoplasm moves forward through time only in certain limited ways. If a branch of the living community of the earth strays outside of those shifting boundaries, it is cut off from the energy flow patterns of the planet’s ecosystem, it shrivels, and it dies. The extinction, from the Earth's perspective, of a species, a culture, or an individual is neither sad nor ironic nor comic: it is simply over. Humans cannot, even in complex, nation-sized groups, ignore this truth for long.

 

                                       ruins of ancient Biblical city of Beersheba 

            Recognizing that survival, if it is to happen at all, must happen in material reality, not the dimension of the forms or the soul or cyber-space, all societies, including pre-historic ones, historical ones, and contemporary ones, have always tried to integrate their value systems – the codes by which their citizens choose and carry out their actions in all phases of living – with their society’s world view. Thus, a society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favorable part of the streams of the energy flowing around it. A society's worldview, its way of picturing reality, gives rise directly to its values system, thence to its morés and behavior patterns, and finally, to its survival.

               

            A “worldview” is a way of understanding or organizing all of our sensory perceptions, memories of sensory perceptions, and categories of perceptions of the material universe in which we exist. Every society that survives arrives, by the consensus of generations of its people, at a way of organizing the people’s perceptions of their universe (and the roles of humans in that universe) which the people in that society perceive as being correct, appropriate, and natural.

Whether a worldview precedes, parallels, or follows a set of values entailed by that worldview is difficult to say. Worldviews and the values systems and morés that go with them are subtly and inextricably intertwined. A change in a society's worldview, the values shifts that the change leads to, and the behaviors that the new values foster, probably all arise in starts here and there as one large complex in a nation's ways of thinking, talking, and living – its culture, in other words.

               

         

                                        Aztec calendar (a neatly condensed worldview)

            But in any case, a society’s worldview, if it is analyzed closely, can be thought of as a condensed version of, and guide to, that society’s values. In conjunction with their basic view of what the universe is, a society's people design systems of values and attached behaviors which they teach to their children as being “good” and “right”. Note the two meanings of the word "right" here: "right" in the sense of "accurately describing things in the material world" ("Is that thermometer right?"), and "right" in the sense of being moral ("Do the right thing."). In a close analysis, this ambiguity is not ambiguous at all. We want deeply to believe that our idea of moral rightness is consistent with the way that the universe really works.   

                     Chapter 9.                                       Part J 

  

        Whether future societies will see a profound and enduring redesigning of gender roles and child-rearing practices, and a concomitant redesigning of the roles of worker-citizens that will make women equal partners with men, remains unclear. Moves toward gender equity, in work and citizenship, and real change in the everyday life experiences of women and men have been suggested and tried (to varying degree) before, and have faded away before. But the trends in the West, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, look widespread and strong. The question to be answered will be whether or not societies that contain a higher degree of gender equity will outperform those which do not. That question will eventually be answered, but the evidence proving the answer, one way or the other, will only emerge gradually over the next hundred years or so.

                     

         To sum up this digression, and in an attempt to be crystal clear, let me re-iterate here that the point of illustrating the socio-cultural model of human evolution with some example morés that we are familiar with, and can imagine being revised, is to emphasize the point that our morés and values are programmable. We can, at least in theory, come to a point where we re-write them for the betterment of the whole of our society by processes of rational discussion and debate, processes that are based on reasoning, evidence, and compromise. We'll see what needs updating, and we'll teach the kids to accommodate the updates, or rather, to be the updates. Difficult, yes, but preferable to the blind, trudging, painful, recursive way of doing social change that we have been using for centuries.

               

         Time for reason to take over. The hazards of continuing on in the old ways of prejudice, revolution, and war are too large. We have to find another way, one that rights gender injustices, and so many others, without resorting to the horror of war. And, if we can find a way to base our values on our best models of physical reality, ones we can all see the sense of, it can be done. Difficult. Not impossible.   

               

            Now let's return to our main argument, in spite of digressions that beckon. 

               

          It is clear that individual human behaviors and the internal running of the more complex, but vital, principles and values programs (which are mental meta-behaviors) almost all originate in the programming that the individual is given by his or her society. (The parts of human behavior that are genetically acquired are now largely understood, and not within the scope of this book, in any case.) Furthermore, values get established in a given society when they direct citizens of that society toward patterns of behavior that enable the citizens to survive, reproduce, and expand the society's territory with ever-growing success.

               

         By now some readers are probably inferring a profound insight about the higher order mental constructs that we call “values”. Clearly, the deepest principles which must underlie and guide all of our value systems – in big choices for the tribe and small ones for the individual – must be designed in such a way as to enable us to respond effectively to the largest general principles of the physical universe itself. That universe is the one in which survival happens or does not happen. Values systems must have designs underlying them that complement, and respond to, the designs inherent in matter, space, and time.

         What are these principles? For impatient readers, I can only say that I am coming to them – by small steps and gradual degrees. But we have to discuss the network of ideas at the base of the new moral system thoroughly before we try to build the middle and upper levels. Proceeding with precision and care will maximize the chances that we will see that a universal moral code is possible for us to devise - in theory - and that such a code, if we can implement it, will offer the only path into the future that entails our species' surviving - in practice.             

Notes  

1. http://www.learnstuff.com/feral-children/

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enculturation

3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution        
   #Contemporary_discourse_about_sociocultural_evolution

4.http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/        
   hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205949509.pdf; p. 17 

5.http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/

   when-taking-multiple-husbands-makes-sense/272726/

6.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

   Piaget's_theory_of_cognitive_development   

7.http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?        
   doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DCrito%3Apage%3D50

8.http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/07/more-on-the-male-    female-sat-math-test-gap/

9.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2067887/

   Women-doctors-soon-outnumber-men-numbers-medical-school-fold.html

                Chapter 9.                       Part I 

         Further examples of morés which illustrate this generalization about the relationship between values and physical reality are easy to find. The fact that so many of the world’s cultures are patriarchal in design, for instance, is worth pondering.

            Female humans appear, in general, to be slightly less capable than males in some areas such as large muscle strength and co-ordination, and spatial and numerical reasoning. (8.) However, these differences are, in the first place, slight in comparison to the differences among members of the same gender, and in comparison to the differences between males and females in other species. In addition, they are differences that exist between mythical beings called the “average man” and the “average woman”. Real individual females and males vary considerably from the mean. Some women are weight lifters, some are mathematical geniuses, while some men are weak and moronic.

   

     

                                        U. of Georgia (steroid-free) cheerleader, Anna Watson 

            Furthermore, objective, scientific analysis reveals that - on average - females are superior to males in other ways, such as in co-ordination of the muscles of the hands and in verbal communication skills. The fact that they were not the majority of doctors, lawyers, and political leaders, and in most of the world's societies, never have been in the majority in these jobs for which they seem better suited, is puzzling to say the least. (Women are finally beginning to close in on parity in medicine, for example, which was long overdue.) (9.) 

            Why were females stuck in positions of lower status and pay in nearly all of the world’s societies? That such was, and largely still is, the case seems not only unfair, but also illogical and inefficient. Aren’t such tribes wasting human resources? Unfortunately, logic and fairness were not the determining factors. Cultural efficiency, it turns out, is subtler.

Actually logic and fairness are just values themselves. In other words, like all values, they’re tentative. They must serve a society’s survival in order to become entrenched in the value code of that society. If there are areas in a society’s life in which they work counter to the needs of survival, they will be superseded by what the society will come to call a “higher” value, or the society will die out. Motherhood was a higher value.

               

            Women bear the young, and a society’s children are its future in the starkest, most final sense. Women tend to become pregnant due to anatomy and hormones. We are programmed by our genetics to find sex pleasurable. We seek it without being instructed to. The biological drive toward sex can be, and often is, harnessed and redirected by society’s programming to serve several of society’s needs at the same time, but these do not have to concern us for now. Our line of reasoning has to continue to follow the developing child – society’s future – now in the female’s womb.

               

            Human females, like almost all mammalian females, are not as able to run, hide, dig, gather, and fight when in advanced pregnancy as when they are not pregnant. Then, after delivery, the child, to whom the mother usually bonds deeply, requires years of care and nurture before it can mature, become able to fend for itself, and make adult contributions to the society of which it is a member. In short, for thousands of years, if a society was to survive, its males had to protect its females and to assist, at least indirectly, with the work required in the nurturing of children. A male was simply more likely to provide assistance and protection when he believed that the children were his. Individual males who loved all children were not enough in number to make a difference to the long term odds. Those odds were only improved significantly when nearly all of the men knew, or thought they knew, which kids were theirs.  

              

 

                                     Yanomani leader/shaman with children (Brazil, 1990)

            Note also here that male arousal and orgasm are necessary to procreation, but female orgasms are not. Therefore, societies teaching males to be dominant and females to be submissive thrived, while competing societies which didn’t teach such values did not. Submissive women accept copulation even when they don't feel like doing so. The logical upshot was that nearly all societies that reproduced at a rate which enabled them to grow taught their girls to be sexually faithful, and generally submissive, to their husbands. Hunting societies, agricultural ones, and industrial ones all grew steadily stronger under this patriarchal design. 

        In addition, these societies evolved toward augmenting their belief in female submissiveness with supporting values and behaviors which, in most matters, gave the community's approval to males' dominance over females. Other less patriarchal societies stagnated, or died out, or were assimilated by expanding, aggressive, land-seizing, patriarchal ones. Again, note that little of the history of these societies was guided or shaped by a gender-neutral concept of justice.

                       

                                                Samantha John, co-founder of Hopscotch 

            The implication for post-industrial societies, with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), is that women can now contribute children to society and simultaneously contribute work other than child-nurturing in any of the areas of their culture’s ongoing development and life in which they can do the job. The imperatives of the past which dictated that girls had to adopt submissive roles in order to ensure the survival of their tribe and its culture are evolutionarily obsolete. Advances in birth control technologies (e.g. the oral contraceptive) and in child-rearing and nurturing technologies (e.g. artificial insemination, infant-feeding mixtures) have made the chores and joys of child rearing possible for men, and even for single women, who in earlier eras had little choice but to forego the joys and trials of parenting or else condemn themselves and their children to society's stigmatization.

               

                  

       

            In post-industrial societies, there is no survival-oriented reason for women not being afforded as large and varied a range of career and lifestyle choices as that previously open almost exclusively to men. There is no compelling, survival-oriented reason for any person’s not receiving pay and status commensurate with the value of his or her contribution to the nation’s ongoing life and development.

               

            In fact, what does appear to be true is that any limitations placed unduly or unequally on the opportunities of any citizens in the community – on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, or race – is only reducing the community’s capacity to grow and flourish. Computer technology and the oral contraceptive have made a higher degree of gender neutral justice possible. If we wish to maximize our human resources, become as dynamic a society as possible, and compete ever more successfully in the environments of our planet and perhaps beyond, we must make educations and careers of the best quality that we have open to all citizens who can do the job. If we are going to maximize our human resources, then access to education and careers should be based on merit alone. At least, such is the conclusion we must draw from all of the reasoning and evidence that we have before us today.

Furthermore, the authorities of society, out of a sense of efficiency only, are probably going to have to find ways of ensuring that quality nurturing of children receives pay and benefits matching the pay and benefits given to all other kinds of jobs in society traditionally driven by these incentives. Having kids will have to be a reasonable option, if we are to maintain a stable base population for our society in this new century.

Driving women back into a domestic zone would be retrograde and counter-productive, like locking our bulldozers in sheds and digging ditches by hand in order to "make work". For women and men who choose it, the nurture of children must be given real respect and pay, if we are to continue on the path of knowledge-driven and technology-based evolution that we have chosen. Mere logic says so.

                           Chapter 9.                                Part H                                               

                   

                                         harvesting grain (ancient Egyptian hieroglyph)

 

            Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherer ones, and values such as patience, foresight, diligence, and perseverance quadrupled in importance. Farming requires them. These values, of course, would not replace the hunter-gatherer’s ones totally and immediately, but the farmers' values and their way of life grew until they, in their prolific societies, had largely overrun the old hunters' values and ways. The new agricultural way of life was just better at making more humans over the generations.

                                                                ruins of Ur, ancient Mesopotamian city

            When hard grains that could be stored indefinitely were domesticated, cities became useful to store the community’s food wealth in a central, defensible site. Of course, the progress from stage to stage had many recursions. Nomadic tribes that had little food and plenty of aggression to spare were lurking, and the most aggressive of these tribes might for a time subjugate and exploit the city dwellers. Two ways of life were tested against each other. But in the end, the city dwellers won.

            Inside a city's defenses, governing bodies with administrative offices became necessary in order to ensure fair distribution of the tribe's food and to organize the tribe's members in ways that brought domestic order and protection from invaders. Following them, came craftsmen and merchants who found a protected, central site with a large population more conducive to the full-time practice of their arts than rural life could ever be.

                                                       a potter in action at a potter's wheel

               

            Cities and their ways proved fitter than decentralized farm communities or nomadic tribes had. More citizens working in more and more specialized skilled tasks made even more people. Values shifted toward making citizens that were comfortable while functioning in densely populated neighborhoods, causing the rise of respect behaviors that encouraged citizens to let their neighbors have their small space undisturbed. Don't bear false witness against your neighbor and don't covet the things that he has in his yard right next door. The Bible, for example, directed believers not to covet their neighbors' goods because envy leads to friction and then violence.

       

            The city's laws weren't just the farmer's rough guidelines for living in a thinly populated farming community of familiar faces. The city's laws prescribed in writing more precisely what kinds of behaviors were acceptable in nearly all activities of city life. Urban crowding requires more civility. Even the word "law" came to be associated with reverent feelings (e.g. for Socrates). (7.)  

               

            Most of all, the city had at its immediate beck and call, large numbers who could fight off an enemy attack. Successful cities even progressed to the point at which they could even afford to keep, feed, arm, and train full-time soldiers, professionals who were capable of outfighting almost any swarm of invading amateurs. The farmers still out in the hinterland moved in closer to the city. Life was just better there. Even one generation of life close to, or inside of, the city taught you very deeply to love this homeland. The programming that survived made loyalty to your city-state automatic; patriotism is a virtue that is conducive to the city-state's survival. Away from your city, people, art, morés, and values, you felt there was no truly human life.       

               

                                       

                                          urn showing blacksmith at work in ancient Greece

            Writing, metals, machines, and the technologies of communications, electricity, and computers all brought values shifts to the nations in which they first arose. When the ways of life that they fostered proved more vigorous than those of any of the nearby competing societies, the values shifts, mores, and behavior patterns that rose up with the new technologies were eventually adopted by other societies in the area (usually with accompanying revolutions, both violent and non-violent). Of course, societies that resist these value-moré shifts must find or create competing alternative behavior-generating programs within their own cultures, programs that are equally effective in the cultural-evolution game. Or they get overrun.

Chapter 9.                             Part G 

Principles and values name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within the confines of the human skull. By using principles and values that we have learned from our elders, we form judgments about what we are seeing all of the time. Note, however, that we don't always, or even most of the time, take any action when an experience is evoking one of our principles. Sometimes we just see something pop into our locale, and we recognize that it's harmless so we cease to think about it. Being aware of, and wary of, the details in our surroundings all of the time does not always mean that we are going to be taking action, even though we are always contemplating whole sets of possible actions. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which ways have been getting good results lately, is a kind of internal behavior. Often, what shows on the outside – to the frustration of the behaviorists who want to study only what is objectively observable – is nothing at all.

                                    vaccination of infants: a complex survival skill 

  Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Those are the ways that tribes are seeking, constantly. The ways of thinking that seem to work most effectively over generations are the ones that we keep and then teach to our kids. On the other hand, people who live by concepts and principles that don’t work in reality don’t survive and, therefore, don’t have kids themselves. In short, principles and values can be understood as tested and proven general reference guides for sorting other thinking techniques. They help us to organize our sense data, our memories of sense data, our categories of sense data, and all of the known responses to them. Over generations, they enable a whole tribe to formulate effective plans of action in timely ways.

            So let us now consider the ways in which early humans probably formed and used early principles. Early hunting and gathering tribes, for example, taught their young people ways to kill elk, fish, birds, mammoths, and so on. Crush the spine, right where it enters the skull. Or pierce the heart. Or cut the throat. Study the tracks and droppings. If the tracks are in new snow, or if the droppings are still steaming, the animal is very close by. There were many species to hunt and many ways to stalk and kill each of them. Over time, the thoughtful (thought-full), resourceful hunting tribes thrived best and multiplied.

             
                                        artist's conception of Neolithic mammoth hunters

            Far too many behaviors needed to be in a hunter’s repertoire for those behaviors to be learned or called up one at a time so hunting principles were invented. In nearly all cases, the hunters found it useful to recall general rules about what they’d seen, and what they'd been told, of the game in question’s habits in past encounters. Using these more general principles, the hunters would try to anticipate what the animal would do in the upcoming encounter, on this particular day and in this particular terrain. Then, the hunters would prepare themselves, psychologically, for violent, team-coordinated, physical action, if the hunt was to be a successful one.

            The exact process by which each kill would be made could not be known in advance, but the hunters knew, at the highest levels of generalization, that probably they would need to act with intelligence (in the planning stage) and skill and courage (in the implementation stage). Successful hunting tribes needed, at the most general level, to teach the values that we today call "courage" and "wisdom" to their young in order for their young to have better chances of surviving, reproducing, and passing the same values on to their children. Again it is worth noting that the mechanism of human evolution being implied here is not a genetic one but a socio-behavioral-cultural one, and it requires conceptual thinking.

                Chapter 9.                                    Part F 

           This chapter's whole train of thought now brings us to a deeper implication embedded in my argument.

         Close analysis of human behaviors reveals that complete explanation of how and why they occur as they do cannot be built up from a list of individual behaviors and the advantages that practicing them might give to the tribe that does so. What I am trying to say here is that we can't reason our way to a moral code for all humans without first understanding that humans are capable of forming very large patterns of thinking that we usually call "concepts" or "beliefs".

            Behaviorism's model of human thinking is left behind at this point since Behaviorism does not adequately explain conceptual thinking. It connects stimulus to response in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then explains some individual behaviors where stimulus and response can be clearly described in limited, detailed, objective terms. "The organism sees and recognizes these colors, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward." I go to work at the big, grey factory, punch my time card at the clock beside the brown door, put bolts on widgets for nine hours, punch out, collect my pay, and go home.

                             

           But a human can confront situations that aren’t exactly like, or by sensory evidence even nearly like, anything that the human has encountered before, and still the human can react effectively. The English hunter who had never seen a moose, kangaroo, or rhinoceros, in muskeg, outback, or veldt, still knew where to shoot in order to kill one. Polynesian sailors navigated quite well by the stars of a new hemisphere when they first came to Hawaii as did European sailors when they first began to explore the lands and seas south of the equator.  What these people had helping them in each of those situations was a set of concepts: terms and ideas underlying them that stand for common patterns found in large numbers of experiences. The heart of the animal lies at the center-bottom of the ribcage, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet. 

             Even one particular man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first trial run and quite differently in his next one, after he has contemplated the stimulus situation that is being presented to him for just a bit longer. He sees, hears, or feels a deeper, more general pattern that he now recognizes, and then, based on concepts stored in his memory, he plans and executes a more effective response to it. The lists of concepts and their uses could go on for pages. 

               

         Nearly every human past about eleven or twelve years old is capable of forming generalizations based on what he has learned from his individual experiences and, even more, what he has been taught by the adults of his society. Conceptual thinking is as human as having forty-six chromosomes. It comes to a child at the age when, for example, s/he realizes that the short, wide cup holds more soda than the tall, slim one. Volume is a concept. (I take Piaget as my guide here.) (6.)  

               

            The programmers of society (parents, teachers, shamen, etc.) make use of this faculty in the young subjects that they are programming, and greatly increase these persons’ chances of surviving, by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to sense data patterns that occur in recognizable repetitions in the tribe's territory. The young subject is ready to be programmed with “categories” and then, at higher levels of generality, with "principles", "beliefs", and “values”.

                                

Every tribe has labels (words) for large groups (categories) of similar things or events in the tribe's environment. These category-terms are taught to the young because they are useful in the quest for survival. The Sami (Laplanders) have many words for describing a reindeer because they sometimes need a single word to refer to a dark brown, pregnant doe who is pregnant for the first time in order to find her in a hurry. She is in labor, in distress, and in need of immediate care. And for Cro-Magnon tribes,  it probably was useful to have many terms for rock or stone or boulder or pebble or flint because only certain types of flint could be used to make really effective weapons and tools. On the other hand, most visitors to the Sami speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, or some visitors may have no words for reindeer at all. 

"Principles" are terms for patterns that are common in even larger groups of events. "Danger" and "edible" are very general in their range of application, but still very useful in real life. The first allows one tribe member to tell another to get away from some object or animal or area immediately. And stay away. The second allows one tribe member to tell another that the substance they are both looking at is worth gathering and keeping because it can be eaten, even if, sometimes, it doesn't taste or smell very nice.

The society or tribe has gradually learned that these very general terms are really widely useful in providing guidelines for the design of patterns of behavior that will be effective in the tribe's struggle to survive. And at last we come to "values" which are the most general of principles, ones that apply to huge patterns in our memories of sense data. We care about defining "good" because, deep down, we believe we need to know what "good" is in order to survive in increasing numbers over the long haul.   

                  Chapter 9.                          Part E 

         Honoring parents preserves, and enables the increase of, the tribe’s total store of all kinds of knowledge. Avoiding committing adultery checks the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. It also increases nurture behavior in males, as each man's degree of confidence that he is truly the biological father of the child that he is being asked to nurture increases. Not stealing and not bearing false witness are ways of living replete with benefits for the efficiency of the whole community, in commerce especially.

          By this point in our argument, explaining the benefits of more of these moral commands should be unnecessary. A major fact is becoming clear: a moral belief and the behaviors evoked by it get established in a tribe if the behaviors help the people who practice them to survive in both the short and long hauls. It is also clear that individuals usually do not see the large, long term picture of the tribe's survival. They just do what they were raised to believe is right.

           

 

                                                      child laborers in India 

   Some of the behaviors that the tribe programs into its young may not be enjoyable to those young tribe members while they are young or later when they are adults either. Work is hard. Building shelters is work. Making clothes is work. Gathering food and preserving it for the winter is work. Raising kids is work. Work is tedious. But for survival, individual happiness is not what matters. Patterns of living which maximize the resources of the tribe over many lifetimes are what matter, and these ways of living do not always make sense to all of the people who are being programmed to do them. But tribes that don't teach hard work and loyalty, to family and tribe, die out.

                        

                                                     polyandry family in Nepal       

           To illustrate further, another example of a moré that seems counter-intuitive to Western minds, but that works, can be offered here. Polyandry allows and encourages one woman to have two or more husbands, legally and with the blessings of the community. It seems counter-intuitive to us. But the practice is not only viable in some cultures, it even promotes better survival rates. In some areas of the Himalayas, when a man knows that finding work may require him to be away for an extended period, he can pick a good second husband for his wife. Then he will know that she, and the first man's children and property will be protected. If she gets pregnant while he is away, it will be by someone that he has approved of. (5.)  

   

         Chapter 9.                      Part D 

         Orthodox Jews and Muslims have long been taught not to eat pork. What survival value lay in eating beef, chicken, fish, etc. but not pork? The answer, from a scientific perspective, is that pigs for hundreds of years have been the main intermediary hosts carrying trichinosis to humans. The early Jews and the Muslims did not know that such was the case; trichina eggs and worms are microscopic. But Jewish and Muslim communities benefited over the long haul by eliminating pork from their diets nevertheless.

                                          Enlightenment-era coffee house, Vienna 

            Many Europeans drank largely malt liquor, wine, beer, and, later, tea and coffee, for centuries. This moré was based in custom rather than religion, but its beneficial effect was felt just the same. Local water often contained dangerous bacteria. The blessings here were mixed ones because, of course, they often were counter-balanced by the negative effects of alcohol and caffeine abuse. But the important thing to see is that these people did not need to know anything about bacteria in order to arrive over generations, by trial and deadly error, at a set of behaviors which enabled them to survive in greater numbers over the long haul. Of course, in China, the drinking of tea had been looked on as a healthful practice for both the individual and society for much, much longer.

               

                 

            The laws of Moses, in another area of life, instruct followers of the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim faiths: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land that the Lord thy God hath given thee.” The words instruct the faithful to care for, treat respectfully, and consult, their parents (and therefore, by a small logical extension, all citizens of the community should be cared for in their old age).

               

            Honoring our elders means consulting with them on all kinds of matters. Before writing was invented, an old person was a walking encyclopedia that could be consulted for useful information on treatment of diseases and injuries, planting, harvesting and preserving food, making and fixing shelters and tools, hunting, gathering, etc. Knowledge and wisdom were passed down through the generations by oral means.  By honoring elders, the people in a community preserved, and thus had access to, much larger stores of knowledge than they would have been able to call on if they had simply abandoned their elderly as soon as keeping them seemed a net drain on the tribe’s resources. An elder’s knowledge often solved small problems, and sometimes solved major crises, for the whole tribe. Over many generations, societies which respected and valued their elders gradually outfed, outbred, and outfought their competitors.

            "We have to boil the water. This sickness came once before, when I was seven summers old. Only people who drank soup and tea did not get sick. All who drank the water got sick and died." 

               

            It is worth noting that the commandment in its original wording said: “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long ...” and so on. At first glance, this seems odd. If I honor my parents, they will likely enjoy a more peaceful and comfortable old age, but that fact will not guarantee anything about my own final years. By then, my parents, even if they are grateful folk, will most probably be long since dead. At that point, they can't do much to reciprocate and so benefit me. 

            On closer examination though, we see that there is more here. As one treats elders with respect in their last years, consults their opinions on a whole range of matters, includes them in social functions, and so on, one models for one’s children a behavior that is imprinted on the children for a lifetime; they, in turn, will practice this same behavior in twenty years or so. The commandment turns out to be literally true.

               

            Note also, the deep and complex relationship between our morés or patterns of behavior and our values programming. The common behavior patterns in a culture, patterns that we call “morés”, are just ways of acting out in the physical world beliefs that are held deep inside the individual in his or her mental world, beliefs about what kinds of behaviors are consistent with the individual’s code of right and wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, sensible or silly. More on these matters as we go along.