Chapter 9.                            (conclusion) 

Like patriarchy, all our traditional values, morés, and roles once served useful purposes. Many of them don’t anymore. But it is like pulling teeth without anesthetic to get the reactionaries among us to admit that many of their cherished “good old ways”, in today's world, are only in the way.

However, overall, in general, in all areas of our lives – even those areas we think of as sacred, traditional, and timeless – we humans do change our beliefs, values, and patterns of behavior over time by the Bayesian way. The change may take generations, but we eventually adopt a new view of reality and the human place in it if that new view is more coherent with the facts we are observing, and especially if our lives clearly do improve when we switch over to the new way (of growing food, making tools, curing diseases, etc.). Societies that won’t evolve as the world changes die out. And the world is always changing.

We’ve come a long way in the West, for example, in our treatment of women and minorities. Our justice systems aren’t race or gender neutral yet, but they are much better than they were even seventy years ago. Values do evolve. As evidence for this claim, I offer the obvious facts that there are more of us than there used to be and we are living lives of greater health, life expectancy, security and material comfort than our ancestors did.

So here we can repeat our larger point: for deep social change, we do undergo the Bayesian decision process, but only in the most final sense. Sometimes it’s not the individual who has to learn to adopt new beliefs, values, and morés; sometimes it is a whole nation, i.e. when it changes some of the most general and profound beliefs and ways of its culture. The kids see that their parents’ ways are no longer working, so they experiment until they find a way to make joy increase and pain stop. And once in a while, a nation that simply gets overwhelmed by too much change too fast dies out as a culture completely. 

The El Molo culture in Kenya is almost gone. The Bo, Anasazi, and Beothuk ways of life are gone. Carthage is gone. None of these realities are fair. They’re just over.

 

 

                                                Demasduit, last of the Beothuk

                                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

In the more gradual adjustments that some societies manage to achieve, it also sometimes happens that subcultures within a society die out without the whole tribe undergoing suffering or dying out. Racism is still being eradicated from the minds of many Americans. But there is no doubt that African Americans of these times are better off than their forbears were in 1859.

And for all societies, there have been past trials that they have navigated through, and recovered from, only by pain. But for most of these, the larger society, in a seriously revised version, did go on.

For example, Hitler and his Nazi cronies ranted until their last hour that their “race” should fight on until they all went down in a sea of blood because they had shown in the most vital of arenas, namely war, that they were weaker than the Russians. Germany should die out. That is what the Germans deserved. That’s how sincerely Hitler believed in his Nazi philosophy. In the same era, the Japanese cabinet and High Command contained members who were adamant in arguing that the Japanese people should fight on, even in the face of hopeless odds. To do anything else was inconceivable to these men. (Yukio Mishima’s case was a last gasp of Japanese imperialism.³) Fortunately, people who could face the realities of occupying armies and new, imposed codes of laws did adapt and prevail in both Germany and Japan.

 

 

                                   Yukio Mishima (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

In a Computing Science metaphor, a culture is just the software of a nation. Or in a Biology metaphor, we can say a culture evolves and survives, or else falls behind and dies, in ways parallel to the ways in which a genome thrives or dies. If a nation’s culture – that is, its software – gets good practical results over generations, its carriers multiply; if not, they don’t, and then they and it fade out of homo sapiens’ total culture pool.  

What has been sad but true for centuries is that a culture’s fitness was sometimes tested by famine or epidemic or natural disaster, but most often it was tested by war. For centuries, when a tribe, operating under its culture, became too weak to hold its territory against invasions by neighboring tribes, it fought and lost. Its adults were killed or enslaved, its children were carried off by the enemy; its way of life dwindled and was absorbed, or in some cases, vanished. Thus, Joshua smote Hazor, the ancient Greeks crushed Troy, the Romans, Carthage. The examples could go on.

                                    

                

                                              Ruins of Carthage in modern Tunisia 

                                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

But was Hitler right? Is war inevitable? Even desirable? It depends. The key question is whether we will ever rise above our present, mainly war-driven system of cultural evolution to something even more effective. Reason. I think it is clear that we have to. Our weapons have grown too big. We have to learn a new way if our species is to live. By reason or suffering or both, we are going to have to arrive at a new way of regularly updating our values and our patterns of group behavior. Either war is obsolete, or we are. 

Changes in our environments are always coming at us. Some of them we even cause. We can cushion our way of life against them for a while, but over time, reality demands that we either evolve or die out; and in the case of whole human societies, “evolve” means “update our culture”. However, for now, we will leave the war digression and the sociocultural mechanism of human evolution to be more thoroughly discussed in later chapters.

For now, then, let’s settle for saying that the point critics of Bayesianism make about the way in which some human behaviors do not seem to be based on Bayesian calculations only looks at first like a successful criticism. If we study the matter more deeply, we see that we do indeed have attachments to some of our most counterproductive values and morés, but there are reasons for those xenophobic, warmongering programs embedded deep in our thinking. They were useful belief systems once, but they have become design flaws because they have long since fallen out of touch with our new reality and the challenges which we find ourselves facing. As President Kennedy said, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” ^4.

 

                                                

                                

 

        

                                 John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)    

 

The point to be drawn from this chapter then is simply this: the Bayesian model of human thinking still holds. Bayesianism can explain why humans hold on to obsolete ideas. Deeply held beliefs and morés do get changed by the Bayesian way, but, in the past, these changes often came by national-scale pain – famine, plague, or war. Today, we must learn to do better. 

At this point, I will also close one final escape from my argument that some detractors may be looking to. These claim that our articulating a moral code is optional. These types claim they will get to the task of articulating and explaining their values when they have time and inclination to do so. In short, they procrastinate the whole matter away.

Our having a values code in place can’t be called “optional”. We make the decisions of life, even the smallest decisions of daily life, guided by our values. We can be casual about our beliefs in Astronomy or string theory. But we have to live in communities and move through our day. Our values are not optional and not just “academic”. You must have some sorts of values in place in your brain, or you will sit catatonic, unable to move at all. And the old ones – for every society in the world right now – are no longer good enough. They have led us into desperate straits. We must update, but not by war. Reason, it seems clear, is the only way we have left, with Reason leading to rational argument, persuasion, and then deep social change.   

I’ll have more to say on these matters in later chapters. The first big criticism of Bayesianism has been dealt with. The Bayesian model, when it is applied at the tribal level of behavior, can account for the un-Bayesian behaviors of some individuals, and sometimes even majorities. The real histories of real nations are not “un-Bayesian” at all, when we analyze them intelligently.

In my next chapter, I will rebut the theoretical criticism of Bayesianism. And perhaps this is the point at which I should also say that the next chapter is fairly technical, and it isn’t essential to my case. But if you wish to think hard about moral values and where they come from, I’m asking you to hang in and read it. It is the only philosophically technical one in the book.

 

Notes

 

1. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869 essay). The Constitution Society website. 

http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women.htm

2. Albert North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (University of Virginia: Barbour-Page Lectures, 1927).

3. Biography of Yukio Mishima, Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 8, 2015.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima.

4. John F. Kennedy, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, NY, September 25, 1961.

     http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/DOPIN64xJUGRKgdHJ9NfgQ.aspx.