Chapter 13                     Exploring How Values Work

 

Early hunting tribes likely taught their young people methods of killing elk, fish, birds, etc. and also the useful general principles that underlay all of the tribe’s hunting practices. “Crush or sever the spine right where it enters the skull. Or pierce the heart. Or cut the throat. Study 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, "thought full" tribes that understood and taught general hunting principles thrived and multiplied.

A hunter needed far too many behaviors in his repertoire for those behaviors 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 taught regarding their target game’s habits. Using these principles, the hunters would try to anticipate what the animal would do in the upcoming encounter on this day in this terrain. The hunters would then prepare psychologically for violent, team-coordinated, physical action. If the hunt was to be successful, they would need physical and mental preparation.

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), then skill and courage (in the implementation stage). At the most general level, successful hunting tribes needed to teach the values that we call courage and wisdom to their young. These values are so widely applicable in real-life experiences far beyond hunting that they enable us and our young to deal more effectively with nearly all of reality. They give us better chances of surviving, reproducing, and passing the same values on to our children. Again, it is worth noting that the mechanism of human evolution discussed here is sociocultural, not genetic, and it assumes conceptual thought.

 

 

 

 

               

                                Early human art that shows conceptual thinking

   (drawings in Magura cave, Bulgaria) (credit: Nk, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

                                              

                     Planting and harvesting grain; ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs 

    (credit: Norman de Garis Davies and Nina Davies) (Wikimedia Commons)

Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherers, and values like foresight, diligence, and perseverance rose in importance. These values complement the farming way of life. They didn’t replace hunter-gatherer values totally and immediately, but the farmers’ values and way of life grew until they, in their well-fed, multiplying societies, made many old hunters’ values obsolete. The new agricultural way of life was better at creating more humans faster. At that time, a large population was a useful ingredient for making armies and power.

When hard grains that could be stored indefinitely were domesticated, cities formed. They were built to store a tribe’s food wealth in a defensible, central site. The progress from stage to stage had many recursions. Nomadic tribes with little food and much aggression were lurking. Aggressive nomads might even, for a time, subjugate city dwellers. Two ways of life were tested against each other. But city dwellers won. They had more food, weapons, and soldiers.

Inside the new cities, 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 both domestic order and protection from invaders. Following them came craftsmen and merchants who found a central, fortified site with a large population more conducive to the practice of their arts than their old, more spread-out rural settlements had been.

 

 

                                           

                               An ancient skill: a potter in action at a potter’s wheel 

                                  (credit:  Yann Forget, via Wikimedia Commons )

 

More citizens working in increasingly specialized skilled tasks meant more and better goods and services available. Cities and their ways proved fitter for population growth than decentralized farm communities or nomadic tribes. 

Values shifted toward making more citizens content to live in densely populated neighbourhoods, causing the rise of behaviors that trained citizens to respect their neighbours and the neighbors’ property. Don’t covet the things your neighbor has and don’t bear false witness against him. The Bible says these things exactly. It is an ancient book containing a code by which a real tribe lived in ancient times. (It is also worth noting here that much of it now is out of date. Our way of life in the West is due for a major update.) Today we can see why this code in its heyday worked so well: envy in crowded cities raises the odds of citizens slipping into hostility and then violence. Cities need to lower those odds.

The commandments make it easier for people to live together and get along. Thus, the commandments increased their tribe’s solidarity, wealth, numbers, and power over the long haul. Similar codes have long existed in other societies.

The early cities’ laws expanded on the farmer’s guidelines for living in thinly populated farming communities of familiar faces. These laws prescribed more precisely what kinds of behaviors were acceptable in nearly all activities of city life. Urban crowding requires civility. Even the concept behind the Greek word for law came to be associated with reverent feelings (e.g. for Socrates¹).

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 afford to keep, feed, arm, and train full-time soldiers, professionals who were capable of outfighting any swarm of invading amateurs. Farmers in the hinterland moved closer to the city. Life was safer there. 

One generation of life in or near the city taught citizens to be patriotic to their new state. Cultural programming that successfully reproduced itself made loyalty to one’s city-state automatic; patriotism is conducive to a city-state’s survival. In short, patriotism is a value that perpetuates itself. Away from their city and its morés, people came to feel that they could not have a fully human life. Being “fully human” meant being Theban or Athenian or whatever was the term people of a culture used to refer to their homeland.

Citizens were programmed from childhood to cheer joyously and wildly when their nation triumphed over its foes and to tremble in fear for the nation’s safety and weep, if it lost in any major struggle to those same foes. Concepts, customs, and morés were imprinted into citizens’ thinking so deeply that when these bits of cultural software appeared under threat, the citizens rose up to respond to the threat with passions that shut out all voices of debate in the community and even within each citizen’s own thinking. Like patriarchy, patriotism is not logical, but it does tend to perpetuate itself.

 

 

                

                                  Ancient Egyptian image of carpenters working 

             (credit: Maler der Grabkammer der Bildhauer Nebamun und Yuki)

                                                   (Wikimedia Commons)