When it comes to our values, morés, and patterns of behavior, we tend to change slowly and grudgingly, but we can change. Thus, we could learn a mode of cultural evolution that is vigorous but not militaristic.

Once we accept the view that over generations, a maximally efficient cultural path, which our values and morés steer us onto it, exists in time itself, we are admitting that values are real. Our values connect us to physical reality. Thus, we must conclude that only certain values, ones derived from our best world view —that is, Science—will be rational choices to guide humanity to greater health and vigor in the future. We all must live and survive in this same physical universe. It is only reasonable for us to seek out and follow the values that we can see will give us the best odds of surviving over the long haul.

The courage-wisdom meme complex, along with the behavior patterns it entails, is the human response to entropy; the love-freedom meme complex is our long-term response to quantum uncertainty. The optimal balance of them all is called virtue or the Tao. It is always subtly shifting its path. Especially in these nuclear-armed, climate-threatened times, we must see those shifts and respond wisely. Or die.

   

                            Statue of Lao Tzu (credit: Thanato, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Tao Te Ching says: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” Lao Tsu was telling his disciples never to become confident that they have life figured out and can now become complacent about their capacity to handle life’s events; complacency is the harbinger of disaster. The way of all ways, the Tao, is always shifting. To live—as individuals, but far more importantly as nations—we must stay resourceful, alert, nimble, and sharp while remaining true to our largest values, the ones that we can see fit reality. A fine balance. The Tao. 

Our most general values are not tied to how we fish or cut our hair or dress or make bread or talk. They are far more general, that is, more abstract than that. But they are found in all cultures in varying degrees, combinations, and styles because they work. They are our tested, tried, and true best guides to where the shifting path of long-term survival lies.  

Notes

1. “Convergent Evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 30, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution.

2. Richard Dawkins, “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 123–144.

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 78.

Some meme complexes we call values or principles steer us toward creating institutions that are advantageous for the tribe and especially for those subgroups that believe in the effective values most devoutly. The values survive because they enable behavior patterns that work. Then, the tribe members that hold these values and practice them most conscientiously survive to pass the values on to their young.

    

                                        Maori warrior hongi-greeting American soldier                                                         (credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Shane A. Cuomo, via Wikimedia Commons) 

             

   

     Traditional Indian Namaste greeting (credit: Saptarshi Biswas, via Wikimedia Commons) 

It is true that many differences between the meme combinations and morés of different societies can be found. You have to make adjustments to your ways when you move to another culture. 

But to say, as some moral relativists do³, that these cultures are therefore incommensurable – that they can never learn to get along – is to abandon humanity to war for all time. And that idea - that we can't learn to live together - simply isn’t true.

                                            

   

                                               American handshake (Pres. Obama greets Pope Francis)                                                             (credit: Tech. Sgt. Robert Cloys, via Wikimedia Commons ) 

       

                                      

                                          English poet-musician Sting (Gordon Sumner)                                                                                         (credit: Helge Øverås, via Wikimedia Commons) 

In the first place, though there are differences, there are many similarities in our ways of life. Some of the top peaks in the meme-scapes of all cultures coincide. Everywhere on earth, people respect and value wisdom, love, courage, and freedom. Different cultures adhere to moral values, and the patterns of behavior that they lead to, in varying degrees and in varying ways and combinations. But the areas of thinking we have in common far outweigh our differences. As Gordon Sumner (Sting) said in the 1980s, “The Russians love their children too.”

In the second place, we can learn. We can learn to fish in four ways instead of just one. We can learn to speak in several languages. We can learn to refrain from giving in to violent impulses that cause men to beat women or children or each other or engage in crime or war. We can learn to imprison rather than execute murderers. We can learn regular exercise and moderate eating as habits of all rational adults. People already have done these things. Many times.

In the third and most important place, we can teach the kids better than we were taught. To work as a way of life. Train their bodies and minds. Daily. Love their neighbors. All their neighbors. Actively. Daily.

The values discussed in this book – values that derive from the physical universe in which we all live – point us toward a society that will place ever greater emphasis on self-discipline, good will, imagination, education, and citizenship. 

We can make a society in a state of dynamic equilibrium, capable of responding effectively to an ever-greater range of challenges, both short and long term. Tougher than we are now. 

Then we can spread our species out to our destiny – the stars. The potential is there; all it needs in order to be made real is us. Our grandest destiny is calling to each of us now and asking its first big question: How much character do you really have?  

Useful concepts—that is, meme combinations that correspond to peaks on the fitness landscape—are “found” by the people in a culture over generations of that culture’s evolution because through trial and error, the concepts prove effective. They enable people who are capable of thinking with them and using them to design behavior patterns to survive and flourish. They are never the only combinations of concepts or behavior patterns that could work in that environment. People of other cultures could use their own concepts and morés to survive there. Human societies are very capable and versatile, as are the various species in a living ecosystem.

                                             

   

                    Stilts fishermen, Sri Lanka (credit: Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                               

   

  

                                                          Fishermen with traditonal fish traps, Vietnam                                                             (credit: Petr Ruzicka from Prague, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                       

   

                              Ice fishing, Canada (credit: mattcatpurple, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                             

   

                   Bow fishing, Philippines (credit: James David Givens, via Wikimedia Commons)  

But whichever society or tribe settles in a given ecosystem, it will come to think with memes, concepts, values, and morés that enable the people to survive. For example, people can learn to fish with hooks or nets or spears or gaffs or baskets, depending on what materials are available in the region and what technologies are already familiar to the people. But the chances are very good that if there are lots of fish in a lake, then any tribe that settles next to it will learn to fish, by one method or another.

People in varied cultures all over the world also establish markets in the middle of their towns for commercial activities like the selling of fish, and they hire police to patrol the market to stop thieves. Getting fish out of the water and into human stomachs is healthy for those humans who learn to catch fish and set up markets. They get stronger and out-multiply less vigorous neighboring tribes. Marketplaces, police officers, and currencies are efficient social constructs because they help societies that invent them to maximize the usefulness of what their citizens produce; they allow capital, even surplus goods working as barter capital if the people have no currency yet, to flow, in a timely way, to where it can do the most good. Fresh fish are a healthy source of protein. Rotten fish benefit no one. Hence, marketplaces. 

Courage and wisdom are core values everywhere. These values are so common that they are seen as basic parts of the human condition, but they aren’t that automatic at all. 

There is nothing in the genes of the human animal to predict that these values will occur in human societies everywhere, as naturally as walking on two feet does. Bipedal motion arises automatically out of our genetic design. But values like, for example, respecting elders don’t. Certain values are found in societies all over the world because they work—they enable a human society to survive and flourish. This is convergence in social evolution. We are analogues of cactus flowers. Other concepts in the biological sciences also apply in analogous ways. 

                            

   

          Graphic of fitness landscape concept (credit: Randy Olson, via Wikimedia Commons)

One of the subtlest of these concepts is what evolutionary biologists call a fitness landscape, which is the model from which the concept of cultural convergence derives.¹ If we draw a graph showing how two genetic traits, say size and colouring, interact to give a size-colour survival index for a given species in a given environment, we can find the place on the graph where the two traits combine to provide the best survival chances for that species in that environment. 

Next, we can plot a similar graph but in three dimensions, with an x axis, a y axis, and a z axis. The resulting picture in three dimensions would show a theoretical landscape with ridges and peaks and valleys. The peaks indicate where the best combination of colouring, size, and, let’s say, coat density lie for that species’ survival in our three-dimensional graph’s environment.

Geneticists speak of fitness landscapes of ten, fifty, and two hundred dimensions as if what they are talking about is completely clear. No graph of any such landscape could be pictured by the human mind, of course, but with the mathematical models we have now and with computers to do the calculations, geneticists can usually predict what niches in an emerging environment will contain which kinds of species and how long it will take for the species in that ecosystem to settle into balance.

The concept of a fitness landscape—one that exists only in imaginary, mathematical space—can then be applied to the combinations of memes in human cultures, combinations that produce morés and patterns of behavior in the real people living real lives. The concept of a meme—a basic unit of human thinking—is a tenuous one, and it is still considered by some social scientists to be unproven and of uncertain value. (see Richard Dawkins’s “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” ch. 10 in Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I for a basic explanation of the meme concept.²) But for now, if we take it as a given, the thinking enabled by the meme concept supports this book's thesis.

We can construct, in imaginary, mathematical space, a fitness landscape for memes—in other words, for unit-ideas—that humans use to build up systems of beliefs about what the universe is made of and what forces give direction to the movements of the things in it. Those things include the thinking things, us, and what we can be doing in this mix. 

That fitness landscape, that multi-dimensional graph of human thought patterns, will be very similar for all individuals in a given culture. I will reason my way to accepting and adopting the same patterns of behavior as my parents lived by. What I mean by red and round and sweet and tangy is pretty close to what other English speakers mean by these terms. So is what I mean by the terms apple or plum. I like fruit and eat it all the time. 

My idea of beauty also coincides with other Canadians’ ideas of beauty. Even our definitions of terms like good, wise, justice, and democracy largely coincide. They enable us to communicate effectively, work in teams, and live in community most of the time. I am a son of my culture.

   

                          Wolves closing in to kill bison (credit: Doug Smith, via Wikimedia Commons)

In this book, wisdom is seen as being a prime virtue. For example, in the economic sector of our society, we all need to be wise enough to grasp a lesson. When there is a lesson as glaring as this one to be found in the history recorded by our forebears, refusing to learn that lesson would not just be unwise; it would be suicidal. Modern business leaders and union leaders, however much they may dislike one another, have by and large grown wise enough to see that they need one another. Dynamic balances make our society work. It is only in adjusting the balance that we argue. Over time, the wolf pack keeps the caribou herd strong, and vice versa. Management and union leaders keep each other economically strong.

And this discussion of the ways in which social evolution driven by cultural adjustments can be compared to genetic evolution driven by genetic variation can be pursued further. The discussion is worth the trouble because it reiterates a main claim of this book, namely that the analogy between memes and genes is not a mere figure of speech. Cultural adaptation is the driving force in human evolution.


   

                     Prickly pear cactus, USA (credit: mark byzewski, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                       


                                     

                       Flowering cactus, Jordan (credit: Freedom's Falcon, via Wikimedia Commons)

For example, in biology, convergence is the term describing the phenomenon seen in species that are widely separated geographically, but that, after millennia of evolution, are found using nearly identical strategies for survival. Desert plants of widely differing species, in widely separated deserts, have waxy leaves. They also put off flowering and reproducing for years until that rare desert downpour arrives.


   

                                            Native elder Agnes Pilgrim with granddaughter 
                                        (credit: José Murilo Junior, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                                      


                            

                                                           Old Man and His Grandson (Ghirlandaio) 
                                                    (credit: Domenico Ghirlandaio, via Wikimedia)

Similarly, nearly all human societies that have made it into the present age, with vastly disparate cultures and from widespread geographic areas, respect, value, and heed their elderly. In pre-literate tribes, an old person was a walking encyclopedia of the tribe’s knowledge – of hunts, crops, diseases, etc. What the old had stored in their heads can save lives, even save a whole tribe. Thus, honoring one’s father and mother being a value in so many tribes all over the world demonstrates convergence in the cultural realm.

   

           Teamsters’ union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Let’s briefly consider an example that shows how values in real life must reach dynamic equilibrium in order for us simply to function. This particular example of how values shape human relations is relevant because it can be seen as a paradigm of how humans today really do use their beliefs and values to relate with each other in all areas of their lives, professional and personal.

A captain of industry in the West today has times when he despises unions, but he has come to accept that if workers are not paid a fair percentage of the company’s earnings, they will work less and less efficiently. He may find ways of retaliating through punitive measures, but he knows those will simply cause the cycle to deepen and worsen. If the obstinacy on both sides becomes hardened enough, violence is inevitable. If those who own the means of production—farms, dams, mines, factories, etc.—become even more incorrigible in their attitudes, the whole society will eventually break down into revolution and chaos. To prevent such chaos and to preserve his way of life, the smart CEO must have ambition/drive (courage), but also wisdom. A smart owner or CEO works with, not against, his workers.

Thus, we have learned, by trial and painful error, to aim for balance. For example, workers in Western democracies have rights to safe working conditions and free collective bargaining via their unions. Smart business people negotiate with unions, and contracts are arrived at by debate and compromise. In fact, the most successful business people in the West today are those specifically trained in labour-management negotiations.

   

        union leaders with Ford executives (contract signing 2007) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

For their part, most union leaders today know they have to respect a company’s ability to pay. They ask for reasonable wages and benefits for their members, but most of them don’t try to push the owners to the brink of insolvency. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders must have drive and wisdom in balance as well. Furthermore, most business leaders in the West have accepted that as long as prices go up, workers will expect wages to go up accordingly. 

Making their business or factory more efficient by smarter management and ongoing research and development rather than by union-busting is what the ethical, deserving business people do. Thus, attempts at strike-breaking today are generally viewed as being rooted in managerial incompetence. Finding balance between the parties trying to interact and relate with each other is the key to making the whole corporate/economic system work. 

And clearly, the system is not random. It does not find a working balance by lucky chance, nor by one individual's choice. Many parties, guided by their concepts and values, interact, give a bit, demand a bit in return, and reach agreements that are viable in the real world. Values drive human behavior which, in turn, must interact with reality. The values that reflect the forces driving the empirical world are the ones that will produce the best working compromises of all. Companies whose workers and management strive to balance enthusiasm with judgement and innovation with respect produce useful, top-quality goods and thrive. Those that don't don't.   

There are also some even more nuanced ways of seeing balance in this labour-management subsystem within our society. One truth is that while most smart business leaders secretly hope they can achieve a modest settlement with their workers, they also hope the rest of their society’s workers will get generous new contracts. That will mean more disposable income in the economy, money that workers, who are just consumers during their time off, can spend on the smarter business leader’s goods and services.

The corollary is that while any one group of workers wants generous rates of pay in their new contracts, they don’t want to see too generous pay packets being handed out in all the contracts signed in other sectors of their society. If settlements in general are modest, workers know that goods will be cheaper, relative to their wages, than those goods were just a few months ago. If they are honest, most workers will admit to wanting their own company to succeed above others. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding at times, but smart workers know that managers who watch the bottom line, as long as they also know how to adapt to innovations and to market their goods in creative ways, are the ones the company needs if it is to stay in business and keep workers employed.

In short, in the modern business world, smart business people don’t espouse Social Darwinism and smart workers don’t espouse Marxism. Democracy in all its sectors runs by interactions and tensions between complex, balanced systems of concepts and values, or, to put the matter more exactly, between groups of people who carry those concepts and values in their heads and then think, talk, and live by them.

But now let’s return to our main point. A kind of field underlies time. Two different types of codes guide living matter across that field, out of the past, across the present, into the future. These two types are the genetic and the cultural. Some beliefs and values appear to be installed genetically. Others, for sure, we learn as we grow. However, the point I emphasize in this book is that the cultural mode of evolution that emerged in our history so recently responds to environmental changes far more quickly than the genetic mode does. In short, it’s obvious that humans out-manoeuvre all other species on this planet.

Thus, a digression on the analogies that exist between the genetic way of evolution and the cultural one is in order here. The parallels have been noted before, by Social Darwinists in particular. However, the conclusions of the Social Darwinists are considered by most people today to be disgusting, and rightly so. To put it bluntly, Social Darwinists conclude that rich people are rich because they are superior. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society, while the workers, who in many places in the world are still living in squalor, deserve to live so because they don’t know how to run much of anything.

   

             "The storming of the Bastille" (credit: Jean-Pierre Houël, via Wikimedia Commons

A few generations ago, some rich Frenchmen lived by this code and found to their sorrow that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade any who still want to live by that code, I offer the harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.. And the very near miss in the US in 1931. This evidence contains some hard lessons for the nineteenth-century-style Social Darwinists in societies all over the world: if you want to live, be nice.

                            

                      Victorious North Vietnamese troops capture Saigon, 1975 (credit: Wikipedia) 

Experience in countries all over the world has shown that societies containing more compassion and justice can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today know this. They will not accept exploitation, bare subsistence, and misery as their necessary parts in society anymore. The code of values that can guide society to its highest levels of efficiency is one that balances courage with wisdom and freedom with compassion. Leaving mercy out of our picture of human society is not just cruel; it’s stupid. This is becoming clearer and clearer as we have more and more records, i.e. History, to study and spot patterns in.  

Chapter 15 – Cultural Evolution and Genetic Evolution: Parallels

                       

   

                    Earth seen from space (credit: NASA/Apollo 17 crew, via Wikimedia Commons)

What makes the earth’s biomass—its living ecosystem—so different from any other entity we have discovered in the universe so far is the way the whole interconnected system tends to keep becoming more in its mass, in the space it occupies, and in its complexity as we move forward in time. All other entities in the known universe shred and spindle out across the time axis. But life on this planet has formed a system that somehow keeps pulling in more atoms and molecules of matter and energy, trapping them, organizing them, and using that mass and the programming in it to continue and expand the process.

We know that the main program for most of the species on earth is the one written in DNA, the basic molecule in the genetic system of life‘s programming.

But in the case of one living strand, namely the one that composes the human species, the main programming uses not copies of a code written in DNA molecules, but small coded energy exchanges (words, facial expressions, etc.) between individual units in the human strand to upload the program that we call culture. We teach the kids and we teach each other how to live so as to keep the process going on into the future. This metaphor of threads and weaving tries, inadequately, to portray a miracle. Life goes against the natural flow of entropy, the normal flow of the universe. Life is a true-blue miracle because it shouldn’t be, but there it is. Even though we can’t say precisely how or why it is, we have to get on with it. 

The model is an inadequate one, but then so are physicists’ models of matter and energy. All models used in the sciences prove limited. Electrons are not tiny bullets, even though that’s how they’re portrayed in high school physics texts.

                                              

   

       Sprinkled iron filings show magnetic field around a bar magnet (credit: Wikipedia)

But the key point to see is that the largest general principles embedded in our programming are our values, and these have been designed, by the pressures of evolution, to respond to the real, material world. Living matter, with humanity as a small but growing strand within it, moves forward through time not randomly, but in certain patterns. Just as electrons may inhabit only certain energy shells around a nucleus or iron filings scattered about a magnet come to rest along the lines of force in the magnet’s field, so protoplasm moves forward through time only in those channels of energy flow that suit it and its ways of existing and enduring. 

Genetic programs—and, in the human species, cultural programs—make it possible for living things to find and widen the life-suitable channels through the physical universe. In short, we learn from our parents/mentors the skills and knowledge we need to preserve ourselves and our homelands and to find or make new ones. All life is miraculous, but humans are the most of all. We pass our survival skills down to our progeny almost entirely by communication rather than by genetic replication and we flourish and spread like nothing else.  

                

   

                                        NASA artist’s imagining of first humans to explore Mars 

                           (credit: NASA/John Frassanito and Associates, via Wikimedia Commons)

There are patterns here. We have decades of research in Evolutionary Sociology ahead of us, designing models of cultural evolution, testing them against History, then planning—jointly, as citizens of a democracy—how we may best use the knowledge gained to shape our society, in ways that will lead to our finding or making more and more biospheres, on Earth and beyond.

However, accepting that there are patterns to human cultural evolution and that it is not random has enormous implications before we even begin our research. If this model of reality is roughly correct, time can be viewed from outside of time as a kind of field. In order to survive and flourish, all living things must practice behaviors that steer them into the life-sustaining, Goldilocks zones of the energy streams (not too hot or too cold, not too fast or too slow, not too large or too small). The best values codes steer us into patterns of movement that maximize our survival probabilities. At this early stage of our history, we don’t understand and don’t see down the path to survival very well. But we can see that the largest of these patterns are the ones we describe with the terms freedom, love, courage, and wisdom.

                          

               

                       Allegory of Prudence (Titian)  (credit: Titian, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Dear readers:

I am in Oregon to see the total eclipse of the sun. I will not be posting for a few days. Wherever you are, enjoy this eclipse if you can. They only come once or twice in any person's lifetime. The fact that they can be predicted to within a few minutes in time and a few meters in geographic location by astrophysicists is by itself a miracle of Science.

As I recommence with posting my book in a couple of days, I will affirm over and over again that I absolutely believe that Science is our best way to truth, to ways of understanding the universe that work, i.e. that enable us to successfully predict future events sometimes with good degrees of probability, sometimes excellent degrees of probability, and sometimes virtual certainty.

As we shall see in my last three chapters, I do not believe God in spite of the fact that I believe also in Science. I believe in God because I believe in Science. In fact for me, the theistic belief is not just compatible with the scientistic belief; the first is the second.

But more on these matters starting on Thursday of this week. For now, grandkids and total eclipse in Oregon. Enjoy your next few days.

                                                                 Dwight  

Some people in every era don’t want to really study the past. That might lead to change. They resist change as automatically as they breathe. They want to stay with what they were raised to because it feels secure. But if we don’t learn from the past, if we don’t constantly strive to grow, change, and adapt, then always, in a while, the universe comes for us. Famine. Plague. War.

Change is the one constant in this universe. This is very scary for many people. So many paths, so many hazards. We don’t want to be this free. But we have no other choice.  

An implicit assumption of this book is that we can’t hide from change. We must go at life, hard, or go under.  

Freedom, as a value programmed into children, is vital to society. It drives us to develop our talents and live motivated lives. It pushes us to handle change. But, if it weren’t complemented with love, freedom would beget cliques and subcultures, then prejudice, strife, and anarchy.

Brotherly love, as a widely accepted basic value, solves this dilemma for society. In Roman times, for example, love seemed so crucial to Jesus that he told his disciples to aim to place love above all other virtues. He said that it was the one thing he’d taught them that they must not forget. Implicitly, he was saying that all other values – even courage and wisdom and their benefits – accrue from love.

“A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13: 34-35)

Thus, humans sustain and spread by practicing lifestyles that may seem paradoxical to anyone who looks for all phenomena to be reduced to simple parts. Freedom must be balanced with love because in balancing these values in our daily lives, we mirror the balance principle of the ecosystem of the earth.

This is basic systems theory. We couldn’t survive long in this uncertain reality, as individuals or societies, if our lives were otherwise. And the balances are tricky to find and maintain, but who really expects easy? Freedom is a precious, beautiful thing. If the price of it is maintaining a loving attitude and standard of conduct as we deal with our neighbors, there is a deep sense of symmetry to that picture. A good way of life for an individual or a society takes constant work. Attention. Adjusting. It is hard create and sustain. But it’s not impossible.

Therefore, we need internal tensions in our communities. Pluralism is an sign of a vigorous society. Societies that are monolithic and homogenous lack resourcefulness. A democracy may seem to its critics to be enervated by the energy its people waste in endless arguing. But over time, in a universe in which we can’t know what hazards may be coming in the next day or century, diversity and debate make us strong. Wishing to escape uncertainty and anxiety leads us away from love for our neighbors, from pluralism and from freedom. But love is not just “nice”: it’s vital. It has carried us this far; it is all that may save us.

A basic Buddhist truth is that life is hard. Another is that only love can drive out hate. Jesus’s prime command to us all: love one another as I have loved you. These codes have not survived because a bunch of old men said they should; they have survived because they enable their human carriers to survive in the real universe. In short, our oldest, most general values have survived because they work.

   

                 The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia (by Monsiau) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Now let us sum up this chapter: courage is the human answer to entropy, the adversity of the universe. Wisdom tempers courage. Freedom is the human response to (quantum) uncertainty. Love guides freedom. Diligence, responsibility, humility, and many other values are hybrids of the four prime ones. They are not easy to see in action; they show their value only on a huge scale as the daily actions of millions of people over thousands of years keep evolving and keep getting, for the truest values, good results.

But values are not trivial theories or arbitrary preferences, like preferences for specific flavours of ice cream or brands of perfume. They are large-scale, human responses to what is real.

Notes

1. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Part XXXIV, “Self-Surpassing” (1883; Project Gutenberg). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0004.  

2. Kenelm Henry Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour; or, The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry, Vol. 2 (London: B. Quaritch, 1976). https://archive.org/details/broadstoneofhono02digbiala.

3. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Chapter 11 (1843; The Literature Network). http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/34/.