In the meantime, as Romanticism raged on, what of the Enlightenment world view? Inside the realm of Science, the Enlightenment was solidly in place and, in fact, was getting stronger. The Romantic revolt left it untouched, even invigorated. Science came to be envisioned, by scientists, as the best way to fix society’s flaws.

Under the scientific world view, as Newton and Laplace had said, all events were to be seen as results of previous events that had been their causes, and every single event and object became, in an inescapable way, like a link in a chain that went back to the start of the universe. The giant universal machine was ticking down in a mechanical way, like a giant clock.

While the Romantic revolt ran its radical course, governments, industries, businesses, armies, schools, and nearly all of society’s other institutions were still quietly being organized along the lines suggested by the Enlightenment world view. The more workable of the Romantic ideals (e.g., relief for the poor, protection of children) were absorbed into the Enlightenment worldview as it kept spreading until it reigned, first in the West, then gradually in more and more of the world.

   

                       Crewe locomotive works, England, c. 1890 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

At this point, it is important to stress that whether or not political correctness approves of the conclusion we are heading toward, it is there to be drawn and therefore should be stated explicitly. The Enlightenment worldview and the social system that it spawned got results like no other ever had. It just worked. European societies that operated under it kept increasing their populations, their economic outputs, and, more tellingly, their control of the physical resources of the Earth. A steam shovel could outwork a thousand human shovellers.  

But, it is also important to stress that the Westernizing process often was not just. Western domination of this planet did happen, but in the twenty-first century, in most of the West, we are ready to admit that while it has had good consequences, it has had some evil ones as well.   

                                                                

   

         Naval gun being installed, New York Navy Yard, 1906 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the Enlightenment worldview, with the moral code that attends it, is no longer an adequate code for us to live by. It is ready for an update. In the midst of its successes, it has also produced huge problems such as the oppression of women and minorities, class inequities, economically-driven wars, colonialism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and pollution levels that will soon destroy the Earth’s ecosystem if they’re allowed to continue unchecked. Some problems are out of control, and even more frightening, the Enlightenment worldview appears to have run out of ideas for ways to solve them.

The crucial point of this long discussion of the rise of the West is that world views give rise to value systems and value systems give rise to morés. The morés then cluster to form a culture or way of life that has a survival index in the real world. Furthermore, some morés and habits of living, when they come to be believed and practiced by the majority of a society’s citizens, increase that society’s survival odds more than others do. By our mores, and the patterns of behavior they foster, we interface with physical reality. Then, if the values are tuned to reality, in a timely way, we thrive.

But I stress again that the world views, values, morés, and behavior patterns that we humans live by are not all, as cultural relativism claims, of equal survival value and are not part of our way of life because of random events in the world or random impulses in us. The point of my last two chapters has not been to show that the ways of the West are invariably the best. 

What my last two chapters have shown is that beliefs have consequences in the physical world for the people who hold those beliefs and some systems of beliefs get better results than others. We need to understand the mechanism of human cultural evolution in order to move on with our discussion. We must show, first, that human history does have a kind of system to it, and second, that we can intervene in that system and maybe, if we act together with a coherent vision, we can learn to direct that system toward maximum health and vigor for us all.  

Other civilizations have also had eras during which they were in ascendancy. In fact, many economic and political signs today indicate that the dominance of the West may be ending. The new worldview Science is offering and the values and morés it fosters are so different from the ones out of which the successes of the West grew that cultures of the West, as they try to adjust, sometimes seem to be verging on self-destruction. The obsolete parts of the Western worldview will be replaced, but we must work hard to ensure that they are not replaced by others that simply lead to new forms of injustice. With the problems and hazards that we have before us now, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for our species if we can’t learn to manage us.

Lesser sideshows in the swirls of human history happen. These are analogous to similar sideshows that have happened in the biological history of this planet. Species and subspecies of animals and plants meet, compete, mingle, and then thrive or die off. So do species of societies. But the largest trends are still clearly discernible. The dinosaurs are long gone, and so it also goes in human history. New species of societies constantly keep emerging, by the process Hegel called synthesis, all the time. It is also worth stressing again that war is not the only path by which this process can work.

In a compromise, two opposing parties each give up a bit of what they want in order to get a bit more of what they need. But what happened during the Romantic upheaval was a synthesis, a melding between a thesis and its antithesis, but it was also something more than melding. As conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, the synthesis that arose was a new species of society: modern representative democracy. A new life form, vigorous and unique.

   

     Occupy Wall Street protesters, 2011 (credit: David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons)

The idea of democracy evolved until real democratic states formed that were built around constitutions, not positions or traditions. These constitutions stated explicitly that protecting of the rights of every citizen is the most important reason for democracy’s existence. All of this came about from the synthesis of Christian respect for the value of every single human being, Roman respect for order and discipline, and Greek love of abstract thinking: thinking that questions all the forces that be, even those in the physical world.

Representative democracy based on universal suffrage was the aim of the Renaissance and Enlightenment world views when they were applied by human societies to themselves. The Romantic Age simply simply showed that the adjusting and fine-tuning takes a while. A state that says it values human rights has to deliver them. Or die.  

   

                                                     Aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863 

                                     (credit: Timothy H. O'Sullivan, via Wikimedia Commons)

In the United States, the idealism of the American version of the Romantic revolt attempted to integrate the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order with Romantic ideals that re-asserted the value of the individual. This produced painful excesses in America as well: the genocide of the native people, enslavement of millions of Africans, and, one of history’s worst horrors, the US Civil War. 

The example of the indigenous peoples of the "New World" and how they were viewed by Europeans is an instructive one. For the Enlightenment thinkers, Europeans were clearly living in superior societies and were bringing civilization to the other "races" of the world. Therefore, some short-term excesses by European traders or priests or armies could be overlooked. The long-term effect would be for these "primitive" peoples' benefit. That made it all okay. 


                      

            Stu-mick-o-sucks, Blood tribe chief (credit: George Catlin, via Wikimedia Commons)


For Romantic thinkers (Rousseau is famous for this one), the indigenous peoples of the "New World" were "noble savages" morally superior to the Europeans who were exploiting them. Europeans should be seeking to live more like them, close to nature, not try to make them more like Europeans. Both of these views were extremes that lacked nuance and solid commitment to looking at evidence in the real world. Neither had followers that eased the interfacing of the two cultures much at all. 

For example, the indigenous peoples needed access to vaccines long before they began to get them. European-based diseases were ravaging their tribes, sometimes killing over 90% in a generation. Smallpox, in particular, was preventable by vaccine from the early 1800's on, but epidemics continued to occur long after the vaccine had been discovered. 

On the other hand, as we are finding out now, the indigenous people by and large understood the basic ideas of ecology long before any Europeans began to understand them. If we kill off the birds of prey in an area, for example, the rodent populations will rise drastically. The wolf keeps the caribou strong, by killing off the weak and sick, allowing only the fit to breed. In other words, this was an area in which the indigenous people's wisdom might have helped European farmers and ranchers if they had been willing to listen.  

The sensible view would have told us that each society had things to learn from the other. That would be the moral realist view. But if it is any consolation, we are beginning to see now that every society that has made it this far in human history has valuable parts in its cultural code, parts that other societies may learn about and profit by.   

America had to undergo some difficult adjustments before it began to integrate the Christian belief in the worth of every individual with the respect for the law that enables individuals to live together in peace. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to compensate the native tribes and take them into the American mainstream, or rather, to be more accurate, America began moving toward these more balanced ideals with more determination, and she continues to do so into this era, as do all modern states.

Thus, in the larger picture of all these events, the upheaval called the Romantic Age imprinted into the Western value system a deeper respect for the ways of balance and compromise. The result was modern, representative democracy. Its values guide people toward balance between progress and order and keep democratic countries from devolving into chaos. Democracy was, and is, our best hope for creating institutions by which people use reason and debate instead of war to find an updated balance in each generation between the security-loving conservatism of the establishment and the passions of the reformers.

                                                          

                                Marie and Antoine Lavoisier (credit: J. L. David, via Wikipedia)

This scientific way of thinking was used by geniuses like Newton, Harvey, Faraday, Lavoisier, and others. They piled up successes in the hard market of practical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some went down in military defeats, some were converted by reason, some worked out compromises, and some simply got old and died, still resisting the new ways and still preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences.

The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

Other societies that operated under world views in which humans were thought to have little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, everywhere on this planet, was the one we call scientific, also called the Enlightenment view. Human minds can solve anything, they believed. Reason will keep producing new waves of progress. A Golden Age is coming.

The one significant interruption in the spread of the Enlightenment’s values is the period called the Romantic Age. The meaning of this time is still being debated. I see it as a period of adjustment, of finding a new balance. In the cultural evolution of our species, values and ways of life keep evolving into more vigorous versions of human society all the time. The Romantic Age was a period of finding a new balance between values that freed individuals and values that created stability in communities. But, there are a couple of especially interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (mid-1700s to the mid-1800s).

                     

                            

                          

               Art in the Romantic Age (credit: Caspar David Friedrich, via Wikimedia Commons)

First, Romanticism affirmed and expanded the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far. Some prominent Enlightenment thinkers (Kant especially) had made duty—to one’s family, city , or state—seem like the prime value, the one that should motivate all humans as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted passionately that the individual had a greater duty to her/his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to them.

Note also that, paradoxically, this philosophy of individualism can be very useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and multiple generations. This is because even though most dreamers create little that is of practical use to the larger community, and some even become criminals, a few create brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends. (Steam engines, vaccines, universal suffrage, Impressionism, etc.)

                         

   

                        Drawing of guillotining during the French Revolution (credit: Wikipedia)

In the second place, however, we should note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced painful excesses. In France, for example, the citizens were indeed passionate about their ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but once they had overthrown the hereditary kings and nobles and set up their people’s republic, they didn’t know how to administer a large, populous state. In a short while, they fell into disorder and internal wrangling. Then, as their new state began to unravel, they simply traded one autocrat for another (Louis XVI for Napoleon). Their struggle to understand how a system of government that truly harmonized with the best of human nature could be created took longer than one generation to evolve.

But the French did begin evolving resolutely toward it. After Napoleon’s fall, a new Bourbon dynasty got control, but the powers of the monarchs were now much more limited, and after more turmoil, the Bourbon gang was ousted altogether. Democracy evolved – in erratic ways and by pain, but it evolved and grew strong, and is still evolving in France, as is the case in all modern states.

Chapter 12          Worldviews Since the Renaissance

                          

   

                    Renaissance watch (credit: Melanchthon's watch, via Wikimedia Commons)

Renaissance society rose out of the ideas that synthesized respect for the individual and even exaltation in his or her creative potential with an equal respect for the social order that values and protects the inherent worth and rights of every individual. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

In Renaissance thinking, a person could be pious, moral, creative, thoughtful, practical, and original. The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity blended in a way that was coherent and real-world effective. The new system of ideas worked, and as the new printing presses made books affordable, those ideas began to spread like a wildfire.

                                                               

The growing Renaissance focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (e.g., the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War) as those who longed for change fought those who did not, but these excesses were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by Reason, or more accurately, the most reasonable insights of Reason’s darling child, Science, and Science’s materialistic worldview. Practical acts done well glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the Enlightenment.

                 

   

                                           

 Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years War (credit: Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau, via Wikimedia Commons)

To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church’s traditional views were in any way deficient, or that the views of the Enlightenment scientists, like Galileo, were better. But experiences in which people who lived by the new ways of Science and Reason outperformed those who lived by the old ways of blind obedience to authorities gradually won over more citizens in each new generation.

                                      

                            

                 

            English physician William Harvey (credit: Daniel Mytens, via Wikimedia Commons)

Some of the new beliefs were infuriating to medieval thinkers—but the new beliefs worked. They enabled an “enlightened” subculture within society to solve problems (e.g. navigate oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make increasingly deadly weapons). This new subculture within Europe’s nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old Church and aristocracy, in the end, could not match. Science kept attracting more new followers because the miracles of Science can be replicated; Science works.

                  

                         The Glasses Apostle (credit: Conrad von Soest, via Wikimedia Commons)


To flourish, a society must use resources and grow when it has opportunities to do so, or it will lose out later when events in the environment grow harsher or when competition gets fiercer, and it has few or no savings accumulated. How do new, improved ways of doing things become established ways of doing things? One means is by war, as has been mentioned. But the peaceful mechanism can also work, and it is seen in tolerant societies when the people who use new ways are allowed to do so undisturbed, and then they live better. At that point, the majority begins to pay attention and to take up the eccentrics’ ways. ("Wow! These eyeglasses gadgets work.")

This market-driven way is the way of peaceful cultural evolution, the alternative to the war-driven one. Humans have taken a long time to reach it, but as a species, we are almost to the point of being able to evolve culturally without resorting to war.

Now, where are we? We have already shown that humans must have a general code, usually called their moral code, to live by just so they can organize their communities and do the activities that they must do in order to get food, build shelters, care for the sick and injured, and nurture kids. Furthermore, the code that the West has lived by is due for some major updating. It has not worked very well over the last century and its trajectory for the people of the world, if it is not updated/rewritten, ends in disaster for the whole human race. We have to have a code in place just to live, but the old one will not do. The problem for this twenty-first century is to figure out what a new code for society should contain. What moral code would be rational for us all?

What has been discussed in this chapter is a quick and simplified summary of what Western civilization has been doing in terms of writing and re-writing its code for the last few millennia. What has also been shown along the way is that values endure down generations, if and only if, they work, i.e. they create nations that function well.

In the nations of the West, Judeo-Christian tolerance and compassion took a thousand years to synthesize with Greek abstract thought and Roman practicality, but once the Western nations learned to see commerce, Science, and exploration as ways of glorifying God, material progress had to result. ("Do your best to get results in the material world. God loves you when you do.")

Whether that material progress produced an accompanying moral progress I will deal with later in this book. For now, let’s keep following what really did happen in the West and save what it meant in moral terms for just a little longer.

Notes

1. Matthew Allen Fox, The Accessible Hegel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005).

2. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1999), pp. 16–19.

3. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776; Project Gutenberg). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.html.

The loss of much of the Romans’ practical skill, especially their administrative abilities, kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until the Renaissance. At that time, these more worldly values that encouraged trade and invention were reborn due to a number of factors familiar to scholars (e.g., the fall of Constantinople, the rise of science, the discovery of the Americas, etc.). Or perhaps, in another more causally focused view, we could say that the Christian way, which required every citizen to respect every other citizen, built Western society’s levels of overall efficiency up to a critical mass that made the flowering of Western civilization now called the Renaissance inevitable. The new hybrid value system worked: Greek theoretical knowledge and Roman practical skills in a Christian social milieu synthesized into a single, functioning whole. (This synthesis is clearly visible, for example, in the cities that formed the Hanseatic League.)

                 

   

                                 Map showing cities in the Hanseatic League (credit: Wikipedia)

It took over a thousand years for people whose lives focused on worldly matters, instead of on seeking salvation in the world after death, to be seen as good Christian citizens. Architects, artists, and even merchants, explorers and conquistadores finally could do what they had always done, but now as ways of glorifying God. From the perspective of the life of a single human being, this transition seems so slow, but in evolutionary terms, a thousand years is almost nothing. Fifty generations. Insects do that in a summer. Germs in a day.

It is interesting to note the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies that seem to have reached equilibrium always contain a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted world view, values, and morés. These people's disciples are often the young, which suggests adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society. Teenagers make us look at our values and, once in a long while, they even make us realize that one of our familiar values is due for overhaul or retirement. Surprise, surprise, adult world: teenage revolt serves a larger purpose in the evolutionary process of cultural change.

However, it’s more important to understand that many people in the rest of society see these new thinkers and their followers as delinquents, and only very rarely are they seen as valuable. It is even more important to see that the numbers involved on each side don’t matter. What does matter is, first, whether the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers and second, whether the ideas work. Whether the followers then live better, healthier, happier lives than the rest of the society.

A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many citizens in its establishment may resent the means by which it does so and may do everything in their power to quell the process. Most often, they can. But not always. For Western society, until the practical features of its Roman beliefs were integrated with its more humane Christian ones, most Europeans did not support people whose ideas and morés focused on life in this material world.

Artists, scientists, inventors, explorers, and entrepreneurs are eccentric. They don’t support the status quo, they threaten it. But the dreamers are the ones who move the rest forward toward newer, better ways of doing things. They only really flourish in a society that not only tolerates its eccentrics, but takes pride in them. In a dynamic society, cleverness is melded with tolerance, acceptance of those who are different. In short, European culture needed a thousand years to “get its act together” and meld all its values into a single functioning whole.

   

                     Gutenberg inspecting a press proof (circa 1440) (engraving created in 1800’s)  

                              (credit: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Gutenberg)

Under the Christian world view, the earth was the centre of the universe, specially created by God to house man, his most beloved creation. But man’s role was not to enjoy life as much as he could (as the ancients had) in this garden turned, by human’s sin, to a barren plain. Humans were here to praise God and gratefully accept all God sent their way, all joy and all suffering. Getting ready for the next life after death was what mattered. Humility and prayer. “Memento Mori” (Remember Death) was carved into the plaster base holding up the human skull on every scholar’s desk. This sounds like a backward step, and in many ways, it was.

                                      

                                      The Good Samaritan (credit: Aimé Morot, via Wikimedia Commons)

But Christianity added some useful ideas of its own. Christians were taught to act humanely toward all other people, not just other Romans; to behave honestly and compassionately in their dealings with others; and to commit in a personal way to Christ’s kind of faith and his simple, honest, compassionate way of life. Christians were programmed to live as if being kind to all was a desirable, moral way to be, even if kind actions might not get any material rewards for their doer in this lifetime.

This was a big change from the ways of the slave-owning, gladiator-loving, sensual late-Empire Romans. Why the Church later became so cynical as to own property and then engage in wars while individual serfs were not to even contemplate such things (unless the pope told them to make war on the heathens) became vague. But the emotional grip and the social utility of Christianity’s ideas was so strong that hypocritical Church authorities found ways to steer ordinary followers’ thoughts past these inconsistencies.

For ten centuries, the Church’s explanations of the the universe and human experience in it were enough to attract, build, and retain a large following for the Church and the values and morés it endorsed. The values, in turn, fostered more honest and diligent communities, ones that began to get observable results. In evolutionary terms, that was all that mattered. 

Christian communities began to enjoy periods of increasing prosperity as their values created more and more internal stability again. Even though by modern standards, they were not very progressive, and by the standards of the glory days of Rome, not very affluent, the later Middle Ages were a big improvement on the violence and chaos that had come for several centuries right after the fall of Rome.

The synthesis of Roman patriotism and Christian compassion got more and more viable as the contradictions were worked out in the minds and daily lives of the citizens. Gradually, Europe began to climb its way back to order and prosperity once more. But it did so under a moral operating system very different from that of most people for most years of the Roman Empire. 

The behaviors Christian values recommended had seemed effete to the citizens of the middle Roman Empire. Compassion for the indigent? That was just stupid. A good horse was worth a thousand of them. Who was this Chrestus? What system had he offered that was luring Roman youth into its cult? The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers.

But that system, which gave moral status to all humans (even serfs had rights), mutual support through all tribulations (war, famine, and plague), and honesty in all dealings (God watches us all) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. Dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life, a life filled with material comforts and pleasures but devoid of ideals, more and more people became converts. When Constantine made the Christian faith Rome's official one, he was only acknowledging the social reality of his times. Christians had impressed a lot of people. They lived decent lives. Christianity was becoming popular.

   

                      gladiators in ancient Rome (credit: J. L. Gerome, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Christianity offered something new—a worldview that felt personal, a way of life that made sense as over the long term, it created more efficient, inclusive communities. As contemptible as Christianity seemed to mid-Empire Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as men killed each other, it gradually assimilated the old Roman system under which it had risen. Its beliefs didn’t just sound nice; over millions of people and hundreds of years, they worked.

Note how the decline of the later Romans’ value system and their laziness regarding ideals of citizenship and honesty presaged that fall. Note also how we today understand intuitively the crucial roles values play in the shaping of citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of their state. Ideals shape behavior and behavior determines whether a society will rise or fall. We know of this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. When the Romans became hypocritical and corrupt, the collapse of their state became inevitable, we say. (Note that this idea is common among modern scholars, but it comes from Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still, arguably, the most respected of all time.³)

But values and their material consequences are not obvious; the relationship between a society’s moral values and that society’s chances of surviving has eluded us for too long. In this twenty-first century, we must do better if we are to end the madness of war before it ends us.

   

                                                 Conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity 

                                                    (artist: Rubens) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

What followed as Rome began to fade was the rise of Christianity. Did Christianity get strong because it offered Romans a way out of the cynical boredom of life in the late Roman Empire, i.e. programmed them to be driven by abstract values again? Or did it just happen to coincide with that cynicism? My position is that changes in values coincide with social changes because values changes lead to new patterns of behavior, ones that either help or hinder a society in its struggle to survive. Neither causes the other. They are both symptoms of deeper changes in a nation’s consciousness, but they are useful indicators of what’s going on in the consciousness of the whole nation. In this century, if we can learn how to plan and implement our own social evolution, we can end the horrors of our species’ past. That is what will happen if reason can defeat greed.

Christianity told people that the highest state for a human to aspire to is not citizenship. It is a state of grace, i.e. peace with God. This was easier to achieve in a monastery or nunnery. Renounce the world in all its tempting forms; focus on eternity. The balance between Christian values and Roman ones was hard to strike. When the Visigoths’ challenge came, too many Romans had let their ideals and behaviors decay for too long. The Christian community, in the meantime, had been taught to shut it all out. People who had integrated the two value sets, who could be passionately loyal to Rome and also to the rigorous moral code of Christianity, were too few to stop the barbarian tide. 

Rome fell, in an agony that we today cannot imagine. But the challenge was bound to come. One hundred fifty years is six generations – almost nothing in evolution’s terms. It took another thousand years for Europe to find a way to synthesize the ideals of democratic citizenship and those of Christian spirituality into a single, vigorous, practicable way of thinking and living. I will have more to say in coming chapters on that step in the cultural evolution of the West.  

So, let’s return to our main line of thought. The Romans had a system that contained more discipline, efficiency, and practicality than the Athenian one. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great size and engineering sophistication by employing knowledge they had learned from the Greeks, mainly the Athenians, and from their own neighbours, the Etruscans (or Tuscans). And some useful ideas were the Romans’ own creations, of course. Similarly, in other areas such as agriculture, medicine, law, and war, the Romans achieved practical successes unmatched in their times.

                                                                                

   

            Etruscan scenes tomb painting in Tarquinia, Italy (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In addition, it is important to note that the Roman republic, as cruel as it could be to outsiders, was dearly loved by Romans. They were citizens of a democracy. They were a family. They truly thought that they deserved to rule because there had never been any state like Rome. It had been chosen by the gods to be specially gifted and destined. The state religion said so. The Aeneid said so. Thus, the Roman world view, by a direct chain of logic, assigned to the Romans the most important role that had ever existed in the history of the world. For them, their gods did not rule them and their universe with cruelty. Instead, for generations, the Romans were certain of where they stood: clearly, the gods (later, God) loved Rome.

                                 

   

                   Glory days of ancient Rome (credit: Thomas Cole, via Wikimedia Commons)

This worldview produced an Athenian style of idealistic patriotism because it was built around a model that gave democratic rights to all Roman citizens, or at least all “true” citizens, namely adult Roman males who owned property. There were aristocratic families, as had been the case in almost all previous states, and these were accustomed to the idea of privilege. But there were also plebeians, and they too were full citizens with rights to vote, run for office, have a fair trial if they were charged with a crime, and so on. Ideals above any human individuals. How could one not love such a country? What would one not endure for her?

When slaves eventually became half of the population of southern Italy, the Romans viewed this situation as just part of the natural order. This view, by the way, that superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals and activities, did not originate with the Romans. It had been Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons similar to those that the Romans subscribed to. These people were convinced, without thinking about it, that their country’s system and the patriotism that it fostered made them superior. They deserved to be the masters of inferior cultures.

But as the generations passed, Rome became a society built more and more on slaves and materialism, restrained only by a warrior’s code of discipline and loyalty. It had to collapse when the warriors ran out of territories to conquer and sank into boredom, sloth, envy, and internal strife. 

In short, the cultural code of Rome stopped evolving. Nevertheless, its remnants were used doggedly by its carriers, the Romans, until it became dangerously out of touch with the larger forces in its environment, many of which had been produced by the Romans’ own success. For example, neighboring tribes learned better ways of making war from the Romans themselves. And the problems of victory can be worse than those of defeat: people with too much wealth and time on their hands slip more and more into envy, plotting, corruption, vice, and greed. The natural direction of most humans is toward laziness, foolishness, and self-indulgence. 

A cultural code, like a computer operating system’s code, needs constant updating in order to stay effective in the environment that it must interface with every day. Code that does not stay updated leads to whole programs becoming obsolete as more efficient routines are devised by competing software companies. The consequences for societies whose code falls out of touch with reality, however, are more drastic than the consequences for an obsolete set of computer operating system protocols.

By the time the Romans realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late.

   

                     Late Roman decadence (credit: Thomas Couture, via Wikimedia Commons) 

   

                 

        early Roman army attacking a city (credit: Juan de la Corte, via Wikimedia Commons)

It is tempting to see in the Romans’ culture a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and those of the Spartans. This is an example of Hegel’s dialectic: one way of thinking, along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows, and then an opposite way of thinking rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way. The two interact, struggle, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not a compromise because it is a new, coherent, unified way with a life of its own. Thesis, anti-thesis, and after a while, synthesis. That’s Hegel.

The people born into the new way are not aware they are using some elements from one philosophy and some from another. The new way is simply their way, and they add ideas to the new system till it feels like a seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system spiralling upward to greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

It is tempting. It is a fairly simple model, and with a little stretching it can be made to seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is too simple. The Roman ways of thinking did contain some ideals similar to those of both the Athenians and the Spartans, but we know there was too much else going on in the thinking and living style of the Romans for us to accept Hegel’s model today. 

The Romans also came into power in the ancient world by a culture that was their own, evolved over generations of farmers who banded together to protect their farms and their families and built a city as a central fortress that would facilitate their realizing this goal. The Romans weren’t Atheno-Spartans. They were alien to all the Greeks in those times. They were, more accurately, first, a society that contained some elements that looked Athenian and some that looked Spartan, and second, capable of defeating any Greek army that was assembled against them. In short, History is subtler than Hegel's model. 

What makes more sense is to examine each historical society’s worldview, values, morés, and behavior patterns and observe how they coordinated to produce a whole culture and way of life that met the citizens’ survival needs at the time. Under that humbler view, we can learn much more about how human societies really work.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as all-encompassing as Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model simply because the process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit Hegel’s model. Rather, the process of human cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution in the rest of nature—by genetic variation and natural selection and accident and disaster.

Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the mechanism that Hegel describes. In the past, events like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down, or opened up, reams of opportunities. Then, usually, life forms moved into new habitats opportunistically. Life spreads across time and space not like a chain or road, but like a bush branching and bifurcating from that primal trunk started from a few cells eons ago.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But both animal life and human cultural life aren’t that neat. Our models of human culture must be grounded in the realm of the living. The model explored here can do what we need it to do. It can give us enough insights into how human cultures work, and what right and wrong are for us to be able to build a rational moral code. One that maximizes our odds of survival. And that is all we need.