Chapter 10 – World Views and the War Digression

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

   

                                                              Ruins of ancient Beersheba.

Recognizing that survival, if it is to happen at all, must happen in material reality, not the dimension of Plato’s forms or the soul or cyberspace, all societies including prehistoric 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 worldview. Thus, a society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favourable part of the energy available physically near that society. A society’s worldview, its way of picturing reality, gives rise directly to its value system, then to its morés and behaviour patterns, and finally, to its survival.

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

Whether a worldview precedes, parallels, or follows a set of values favoured by that worldview is difficult to say. Worldviews and the value systems and morés that go with them are subtly intertwined. A change in a society’s worldview, the value shifts that change leads to, and the behaviours the new values foster – these probably all arise sporadically as one large complex in a nation’s ways of thinking, talking, doing, and living—its culture, in other words.

 

     

                                                  Aztec calendar (a neatly condensed world view).

In any case, a society’s world view, 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 that they teach to their children as being good and right. The word right has two meanings 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.”). Upon 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 the universe really works.

Chapter 9.                                      (continued) 

   

In today’s post-industrial societies with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), women can now simultaneously contribute children and work other than child nurturing to most areas of their culture’s ongoing development and life. The imperatives of the past that dictated girls had to adopt submissive roles 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 to be afforded as large and varied a range of career and lifestyle choices as those 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 appears 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 education and careers of the highest quality open to all capable citizens. If we are 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 the reasoning and evidence we have before us today.

Furthermore, the authorities of society, if only for efficiency’s sake, will probably 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 a 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 counterproductive, like locking our bulldozers in sheds and digging ditches by hand in order to provide more jobs. For women and men who choose it, the nurturing 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. Logic says so.

It remains unclear 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. 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 degrees) 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 will be whether societies that contain a high degree of gender equity will outperform those that do not. That question will be answered, but the answer will only emerge gradually over the next generation or so.

To sum up this digression, let me reiterate that the point of illustrating the sociocultural model of human evolution with some example morés that we are familiar with and that we can imagine being revised is to emphasize the fact that our morés and values are programmable. At least in theory, we can rewrite them for the betterment of the whole of society by processes of rational discussion and debate, processes that are based on reasoning, evidence, and compromise. Difficult, yes, but preferable to the blind, inefficient, painful methods of social change that we have been using for centuries.

It is time for reason to take over. The hazards of continuing 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. Rational thinking and evidence-gathering can tame our atavistic urges. Difficult, but not impossible.

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

It is clear that individual human behaviours and the internal running of the more complex but vital values programs (which are mental meta-behaviours) almost all originate in the socialization that the individual is given by his or her society. Furthermore, values become established in a society when they direct its citizens toward patterns of behaviour that enable the citizens to survive, reproduce, and territorialize 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 that must underlie and guide 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. Value 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 of our seeing 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 enables the survival of our species—in practice.

Notes

1. “Feral Children,” Learn Stuff website, December 5, 2012. http://www.learnstuff.com/feral-children/.

2. “Enculturation,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enculturation.

3. “Sociocultural evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution#Contemporary_discourse_about_sociocultural_evolution.

4. Pearson Higher Education, “Anthropology and the Study of Culture,” My Anthro Lab, Chapter 1, p. 17. http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205949509.pdf.

5. Alice Dreger, “When Taking Multiple Husbands Makes Sense,” The Atlantic, February 1, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/when-taking-multiple-husbands-makes-sense/272726/.

6. “Piaget’s theory of cognitive development,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget’s_theory_of_cognitive_development.

7. Plato, Crito, Perseus Digital Library. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DCrito%3Apage%3D50

8. Mark J. Perry, “U.S. Male-Female SAT Math Scores: What Accounts for the Gap?” Encyclopedia Britannica blog, July 1, 2009. http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/07/more-on-the-male-female-sat-math-test-gap/

9. Jenny Hope, “Women Doctors Will Soon Outnumber Men after Numbers in Medical School Go up Tenfold,” Daily Mail online, November 30, 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2067887/Women-doctors-soon-outnumber-men-numbers-medical-school-fold.html.

Chapter 9.                                               (continued) 

Further examples of morés that illustrate this generalization 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 coordination, and in spatial and numerical reasoning ability.⁸ However, these differences are slight compared with the differences among members of the same gender, and compared with 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 individuals, male and female, vary considerably from the mean. Some women are bodybuilders and 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 coordination of the muscles of the hands and in verbal reasoning skills. That they have not become the majority of doctors, lawyers, and political leaders in most of the world’s societies, jobs for which they seem better suited, is puzzling to say the least. (Women are finally beginning to achieve parity in medicine, for example, which has been long overdue.⁹)

Why have females been relegated to positions of lower status and pay in nearly all the world’s societies? This seems not only unfair but illogical and inefficient. Aren’t such tribes wasting human resources? Unfortunately, logic and fairness have not been 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 they work counter to the needs of a society’s survival in certain areas, they will be superseded by what the society will come to call a “higher” value. In the case of women, motherhood was a higher value.

Women bear the young, and a society’s children are its future in the starkest, most final sense. Women become pregnant due to anatomy and hormones. We are programmed by our genetics to find sex pleasurable. We seek it without needing instruction. The biological drive toward sex is often 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 capable of running, hiding, gathering, and fighting when in advanced pregnancy as when they are not pregnant. After delivery, the child, to whom the mother usually bonds deeply, requires years of care and nurturing before maturing, becoming able to fend for itself, and making adult contributions to society. 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 nurturing 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 numerous enough to make a difference to the long-term odds. Those odds were improved significantly when most of the men knew, or thought they knew, which kids were biologically theirs.

   

Note also that male arousal and orgasm are necessary to procreation; female orgasm is not. Therefore, societies teaching males to be dominant and females to be submissive thrived, while competing societies that didn’t teach such values did not. The logical upshot was that nearly all societies that reproduced at a rate that enabled them to grow taught their girls to be sexually faithful and generally submissive to their husbands. Hunting, agricultural, and industrial societies all grew steadily stronger under patriarchies.

In addition, these societies evolved toward augmenting their belief in female submissiveness with supporting values and morés that, in most matters, gave the community’s approval to male dominance. Other less patriarchal societies stagnated or were assimilated by expanding, land-seizing, patriarchal ones. Whatever increased male commitment to child nurture raised the tribe’s odds of going on. Again note that little of the history of these societies was shaped by a gender-neutral concept of justice.

Chapter 9.                                          (continued) 

Cities and their ways proved fitter for economic progress than decentralized farm communities or nomadic tribes. More citizens working in increasingly specialized skilled tasks meant more and better goods and services available and thus, over time, helped to increase the population. Values shifted toward making all citizens comfortable while they functioned in densely populated neighborhoods, causing the rise of behaviors that encouraged citizens to respect their neighbors’ property. Don’t bear false witness against your neighbor and don’t covet the things he has in his yard next door. The Bible directed believers not to covet their neighbors’ goods because envy leads to friction and then violence.

A city’s laws expanded on the farmer’s rough guidelines for living in a thinly populated farming community of familiar faces. The laws prescribed 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 Socrates⁷).

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 where 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 remaining in the hinterland moved closer to the city because life was better there. Just one generation of life in or near the city taught citizens to be patriotic to their new state. Programming that survived made loyalty to one’s city-state automatic; patriotism is a virtue conducive to the city-state’s survival. Away from their city, morés, and values, people came to feel that there was no truly human life.

 

       

                                              Urn showing blacksmith at work in ancient Greece.

Literacy, metals, machines, and the technologies of industry, communications, and computers all brought values shifts to the nations in which they first arose. When the ways of life they fostered proved more vigorous than those of nearby competing societies, the values shifts, morés, and behavior patterns that rose up with the new technologies were eventually adopted by those other societies (usually with accompanying revolutions, nonviolent or violent). Of course, societies that resist these shifts in values and behaviors 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.                                 (continued) 

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 methods of killing 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 the droppings are still steaming, the animal is close by. There were many species to hunt and many ways to stalk and kill each of them. Over time, the thoughtful, resourceful hunting tribes thrived best and multiplied.

        

                                                 Artist’s conception of Clovis mammoth hunters

A hunter needed far too many behaviours in his repertoire for those behaviours to be learned or called up one at a time, so hunting principles were invented. In nearly all cases, hunters found it useful to recall general rules about what they’d seen and been told of their target’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 terrain. The hunters would then prepare 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 that they would need to act with intelligence (in the planning stage) and skill and courage (in the implementation stage). At the most general level, successful hunting tribes needed 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 discussed here is not a genetic one but a socio-cultural and behavioral one, and it requires conceptual thinking.

 

   

                                              Harvesting grain; ancient Egyptian hieroglyph.

Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherer ones, and values such as patience, foresight, diligence, and perseverance quadrupled in importance. These values, which farming requires, would not replace the hunter-gatherers’ values totally and immediately, but the farmers’ values and their way of life grew until they, in their multiplying societies, had largely made the old values obsolete. 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, towns were formed as an efficient way 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 with 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 tested themselves against each other. But in the end, the city dwellers won.

Inside a city’s defenses, governing bodies with administrative offices became necessary 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 practice of their arts than a rural setting.

   

                                                                   A potter in action at a potter’s wheel

Chapter 9.                                             (continued) 

Nearly every human past the age of eleven or twelve is capable of forming generalizations based on what he has learned from his individual experiences and, to an even greater degree, 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, 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, shamans, and others—make use of this faculty in their young subjects, greatly increasing these children’s chances of surviving by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to recognizably repetitive sense data patterns 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.

   

                                                        young Sami herdsman with his herd 

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 to differentiate between them. A single word to describe a dark brown, pregnant doe is useful if 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 effective weapons and tools. By contrast, most visitors to Lapland speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, and some visitors may have no words for reindeer at all.

The word principle is a term for patterns that are common in even larger groups of things or events. Terms like danger and edible name very general principles that a tribe has spotted in many, many real life experiences of many tribe members. The terms are harder to learn than tiger or nuts, but also very useful in real life. The term danger enables one tribe member to tell another to get away from something quickly and stay away. It covers tigers, snakes, bears, crocodiles, unstable cliff faces, avalanche zones, poisonous plants, and so on. It’s an efficient term and one worth learning and keeping. 

The term edible covers nuts, berries, maggots, eggs, frogs, fish, lizards, and many more things an individual may come upon within the tribe’s environment. It enables one tribe member to tell another that the substance they’re looking at is worth gathering because it can be eaten, even if sometimes it doesn’t smell or taste very nice.

The society or tribe has gradually learned that these general terms are useful in providing guidelines for the design of patterns of behavior that will be effective in the tribe’s struggle to survive. Finally 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 need to know what good is in order to survive in increasing numbers over the long run.

Terms for values name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within the confines of the human skull. By values terms learned from our elders, we continually form judgments about what we are seeing. Note, however, that most of the time we don’t take any action when an experience is evoking one of our values. Sometimes we recognize a thing or an experience is harmless so we cease to think about it. Being constantly aware of, and wary of, the details in our surroundings does not always mean we‘ll take action, even though we are always contemplating whole sets of possible actions. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which of them have been getting good results lately, is 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 Chinese babies (government mandated) 

Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Tribes are constantly seeking those ways. The ways of thinking that seem to work most effectively over generations are the ones we keep and teach to our kids. Conversely, people who live by principles and values that don’t work in reality don’t survive and, therefore, don’t have children. In short, principles and values can be understood as tested and proven techniques for sorting and responding to real life. They help us to organize our sense data and our memories of sense data. Over generations, they guide tribe members, individually and jointly, to formulate effective plans of action in timely ways.

Chapter 9.                                            (continued) 

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 attached to it become well established in a tribe if the behaviors help tribe members 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.

   

                                                Modern children planting rice (India, 2012)

Children may not enjoy some of the behaviours their elders dictate, nor may they enjoy them later when they are adults. 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 that maximize the resources of the tribe over many generations are what matter, and these ways of living do not always make sense to the people being programmed to do them. But tribes that don’t teach hard work and loyalty to family and tribe die out.

   

 

To illustrate further, another example of a custom 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 in the West, even redundant. Clearly, one man can keep many wives producing babies, but not vice-versa. However, 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, his children, his property, and the children and property of the other man will be protected. If she becomes pregnant while he is away, it will be by a man he has approved of.⁵ As long as all three are faithful to the marriage, the risks of any of them getting an STD remain small.

This train of thought brings us to a deeper implication embedded in my argument.

Close analysis of individual human behaviors reveals that they cannot be completely explained by their collective advantages to the tribe. 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—patterns we usually call concepts or beliefs.

Behaviorism’s model of human thinking is left behind at this point since this model does not adequately explain conceptual thinking. It connects stimulus to response in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then explains some individual behaviors for which stimulus and response can be clearly described in limited, detailed, objective terms. The behaviorist reports that “The organism sees and recognizes these colors, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward.” For example, 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 are not, by sensory evidence, like anything 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 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. In each of those situations was a set of concepts—ideas underlying those terms, ideas based on patterns found in large numbers of experiences. For example, the animal’s heart lies at the bottom of the rib-cage, slightly to the left of center, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet. Another killing shot is to the base of the skull. Faced with a leopard seal, that one is probably the smart choice for a human in fear for her/his life. 

   

                                                                              Leopard seal (Antarctica) 

Further, a man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first attempt at something and quite differently in his next attempt, after he has contemplated the stimulus situation for just a bit longer. He sees, hears, or feels a deeper, more general pattern that he 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.

Chapter 9.                                   (continued)


But let’s return to this attempt to discover a workable model that will support moral realism.

The gradual process of adoption of morés into the cultural code of a society is vital to the survival of the morés themselves. None of the phases in a society’s adopting a new more necessarily entails any of the others. A behaviour recently acquired by one person on a trial basis may make that individual healthier and/or happier, but this does not automatically mean he will reproduce more prolifically or nurture more effectively or teach his morés to his children more efficiently. Other factors can and do intervene.

Many examples can be cited as evidence to support this generalization. Some of the tribes in Indonesia taught every member of the community to go into the forest to defecate. The individual had to dig a hole in the earth, defecate in it, then cover the excrement with earth before returning to the tribe’s living spaces. Children were taught to hide their excrement so no hostile shaman would find it and use it to cast an evil spell on such a careless child.⁴

In the view of most of us in Western societies, the advantages of the practice lie in the reduced risk to the community of diseases such as cholera. Similar practices are taught to people in Western societies (and described in cultural codes as early as those found in the Old Testament of the Bible).

Orthodox Jews and Muslims have long been taught not to eat pork. What survival value lay in eating beef, chicken, and fish 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 Muslims did not know that such was the case; trichina eggs and worms are microscopic. But Jewish and Muslim communities nevertheless benefited over the long haul by eliminating pork from their diets.

                      

For centuries, many Europeans drank large quantities of malt liquor, wine, and beer, and later, tea and coffee. This custom was based in tradition rather than religion, but its beneficial effect was felt just the same, since local water often contained dangerous bacteria. While the benefits were mixed because they were offset by the negative effects of alcohol and caffeine abuse, 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 that enabled them to survive in greater numbers over the long term. 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.

Another example of the morés that guide our cultures can be found in a different area of life, in the laws of Moses. These instruct followers of the Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim faiths to “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land that the Lord thy God hath given thee.” (Exodus 20:12) The faithful are instructed to care for, treat respectfully, and consult their parents (therefore, by a small logical extension, all citizens of the community should be cared for in their old age).

   

Honouring our elders means consulting with them on all kinds of matters. Before writing was invented, an old person was a walking encyclopedia to be consulted for useful information on treatment of diseases and injuries, planting, harvesting, and preserving food, making and fixing shelters and tools, hunting, gathering, and much more. 

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 if they had simply abandoned their elderly as soon as they became a net drain on the tribe’s physical resources. An elder’s knowledge often solved both small problems and major crises for the entire tribe. Over many generations, societies that respected and valued their elders gradually outfed, outbred, and outfought their competitors.

Imagine an elder in a primitive tribe. She might very well have said: “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 read, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long …” and so on. “Thy” days, not “their” days. At first glance, this seems odd. If I honor my parents, they will likely enjoy a more peaceful and comfortable old age, but that 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 we treat our elders with respect in their last years, consult their opinions on a wide range of matters, include them in social functions, and so on, we model for our children behaviors that are imprinted on them for a lifetime, and they, in turn, will practice these same behaviors in twenty years or so. The commandment turns out to be literally true.

Note also that there is a 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’s 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.

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 the nurturing behaviors of males, as each man’s confidence that he is truly the biological father of the child he is asked to nurture increases. Not stealing and not bearing false witness have benefits for the efficiency of the whole community, in commerce especially.