Chapter 14               The War Digression

                                        

              

                                                Ruins of ancient Beit She’an 

                                 (credit: James Emery, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

This chapter contains a painful, but necessary, digression. But first let’s again briefly review the whole case so far for our overall argument. 

Every society, prehistoric, historical, and contemporary, must have a moral code by which its citizens can sort and understand sense data, make choices, and do actions. Societies also have always tried to integrate their values systems with their understanding of physical reality. We aim to what we see as “right” consistent with what we believe is “real”. No sane person wants to expend her or his energies on pursuing what that person believes is not possible.

A society’s way of seeing reality, i.e. its worldview, is crucial to its staying in a favorable part of the environment around it. Guided by their worldview, the folk decide where the crops, animals, etc. should be placed, what provision to make against famines, plagues, etc.. A society’s worldview informs its values. Then, the values shape the tribe’s behavior patterns which then profoundly influence the odds that the tribe will survive. Humans always try to live in ways that are consistent with their model of reality, i.e. their worldview.

A worldview is a way of understanding the physical world. It is a way of bringing order to reams of sense data – the things we see, hear, etc. – and our memories of sense data. Every society that survives comes, by consensus of generations of its people, to a way of organizing perceptions of the world and of people’s roles in that world. Their worldview controls what they notice and what they miss in their surroundings. The people then are programmed to think of their worldview and way of life as being natural – just humans being human. 

Worldviews and the value systems and morés that go with them are subtly interdependent. Every change in a society’s worldview leads to values shifts, and values shifts lead to changes in the behaviors of the folk. Concepts, values, and behaviors all interact in a complex. Changes in a tribe’s worldview lead to changes in its concepts and values and, subsequently, to its people’s ways of talking and acting, i.e. its culture. If you re-write the code, you will change the folk’s actions.

For example, if a tribe discovers that a new fruit just come into their area is edible and tasty, they may explain this piece of luck as a gift from one of their gods. The phenomenon will even be seen as proof that this god does love them. Holding a festival and gathering his fruit is …just logical. If the tribe comes to believe diseases are caused by breathing the vapors near an evil god’s swamp, tribe members will steer widely away from that swamp from then on. When Newton saw and expressed his laws of motion and gravitation, the people of his country, England, then of Europe and then, in time, of the world, shifted their values and behavior patterns. In the view of the Newtonian “modern”, distant planets fall into orbits governed by the same laws as those that shape the earth’s orbit. A marvelous way of structuring the cosmos, but the Earth was not at the center of all. What did that mean about the Bible and its worldview? 

Darwin’s model of evolution applies just as comprehensively to humans as it does to finches and barnacles. The values shifts that come with understanding the theory of evolution are still being painfully worked out in our society. And what of Relativity and, even more profoundly, Quantum Theory? We’ve barely begun to understand what they are telling us about “decency” and “sense”.

And these are simple features of a tribe’s worldview. Worldviews, and the behaviors they cause, get much more complex in the histories of real tribes.

 

                                           

       Aztec calendar (a graphic of a worldview) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Thus, a society’s worldview, if it is analyzed closely, can be seen as a condensed guide to that society’s values. In conjunction with their basic view of how the world works, a tribe’s people, by trial and error, arrive over many generations at a system of values and behaviors that they teach to their young as being right. The word right has two meanings here: right as in “accurate in the physical world” (Is that thermometer right?) and right as in “morally correct” (Do the right thing.).

However, when we closely analyze this ambiguity, we see that it is not really ambiguous at all. We long deeply to feel that our idea of “moral” is consistent with reality. We long to believe that our idea of right (good) is right (accurate).

Worldviews, concepts, values, and behaviors are all interacting and evolving all the time in every society’s culture. This is the gist of our argument so far.

And now, a digression. It is an important digression that has been lingering at the edge of our argument for several chapters. I must deal with it.

If we aim to be rigorously logical at this point, we can also become very discouraged. Even a little investigation into History tells us that every society has its own worldview, values, and morés (accepted patterns of behavior): its culture. The natural trend for every human society is to keep moving ahead with its way of life while simultaneously diverging from, and becoming more and more alien to, all other societies.

Does an analysis of human values systems imply that we can’t ever arrive at a set of values that would work – i.e. create a society with order and prosperity – for all humans? Will the people in the world’s many different tribes continue to be driven by incompatible sets of values? Even worse, will citizens of the world’s societies continue to follow the narrowest definitions of their values so devoutly that the folk in each will tolerate no other way and will feel hostile toward other folk whose values and behaviors differ from their own? A study of History tells us that we tend to first suspect, then fear, then hate “others”.

Analyzing the physical environment in which societies evolve further adds to our feelings of hopelessness. The environment around us is always changing so our values systems and behaviors adapt to those changes. When new conditions arise, many different societies’ responses to them may all prove viable. Each society will have its own “way” in the changed environment. This variety shows how free we are. But it also, so often, is a harbinger of conflict. This sort of deadly rivalry happens even in the animal world, e.g. with lions and hyenas.

 

        

                                      Lions and hyenas fight over a kill

                              (Kruger Sightings, via Wikimedia Commons)

Lions and hyenas occupy the same habitat and hunt the same prey. Their relative competitive advantages and disadvantages interact in complex ways, but they both flourish at the same time in the same habitat.¹ In this, they are akin to human societies, whose basic operating codes are mostly cultural, rather than genetic, but whose competitive situations are analogous to those of lions and hyenas. Lions and hyenas exist as hostile neighbors, drive one another away from food, and often fight to the death. Sometimes, lions win, sometimes not. Hyenas are numerous, fight as packs, and have powerful jaws.

Examples of rivalries between human societies like that between lions and hyenas fill History: English/French, Apache/Pueblo, Croat/Serb, Pondo/Zulu, Han/Mongol, Iroquois/Huron, Ghiljai/Durrani, Ukrainian/Pole, Sunni/Shia.

In short, the evidence indicates that wars between societies come about very naturally. Different, often neighboring, societies – each with its own values and customs – arise, diverge, become mutually hostile, and make war on each other as naturally as the world turns. Such has been the case for all of human history so far. Cultural competition is just the human form of species competition.

So, is war inevitable? The evidence of History seems to answer with a firm “yes”. Wars are fought over these very differences. Following this reasoning, we see what Hitler thought of as his great insight: he accepted that war was an inevitable, periodic test of the cultural and (he said) “racial” fitness of every nation. He ranted his worldview literally to his last day. To geneticists, his racial theories are meaningless silliness. “Race” is a myth. We humans are all one species. But when his worldview is extended to an analysis of cultural groupings of humans (e.g. tribes, societies, and nations) – and the conflicts among them – it becomes more disturbing.             

                  The consequences of war: ruins of Nuremberg, Germany, 1945.

                   (credit: Keystone/Second Roberts, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

The ancient Greeks had two words for humans: Hellenes (themselves) and barbarians (everyone else). Similar in view and vocabulary are the Chinese. To many Chinese in China, I would be gwai lo, an evil alien. The word Masai – an African tribe’s name for itself – means people, as do the words Innu in Innu and Cheyenne in Cheyenne. For hundreds of years, Europeans divided the members of homo sapiens into Christians and heathens. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. Jews were proud they were not Gentiles. Tutsis were not Hutus. In short, people in all these cultures believed they were the only fully human humans. Thus, wars keep coming, everywhere. 

The evidence mounts on all sides against the hopes of those who love peace. People find it easy, even moral, to attack, conquer, assimilate, sometimes even exterminate other humans whom they regard as members of an inferior subspecies. By this reasoning, Hitler was only exhorting the Germans to accept the inevitability of war and get to work at being winners.

By this reasoning, we see that war is the way by which we have become our own predators. In the animal world, if a species falls out of step with its environment, it dies out. Starvation, disease, inability to reproduce, a rapidly acquired vulnerability to predators – any of these can wipe out a species.  In humans, it is ineffective parts of our species’ total values-behaviors pool –  its meme pool, rather than its gene pool – that are cut out by war.

Note that we are different in this from other species. Wars mainly kill the young and fit – prime breeding stock. Wars don’t serve a genetic mode of evolution anymore, if they ever did. They certainly haven’t since the first technological war, i.e. the US Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die; too much prime breeding stock is lost for anyone to claim that wars serve the biological process of evolution. But wars do serve the cultural mode of evolution. Wars test, re-write, and sometimes eliminate, cultures.

 

                                       

                       Gandhi (South Africa, 1906) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

For thousands of years, we have evolved culturally by this ugly means. For centuries, no other species and no change in our environment has been able to seriously shake us. We even save individuals born with genetically transmitted defects that in any other species would be fatal. These individuals live and go on to reproduce. Thus, for centuries, we did not evolve genetically; if anything, we have been genetically devolving. But we were evolving culturally. (Worth noting is the fact that just in the last century or less, we have begun to mix genetically more and more, with less and less concern about so-called “miscegenation”, a point that supports this book’s claim that a new values code, a pluralistic one, is already emerging.) 

We preyed on ourselves, not eating corpses, but killing followers of other cultures, if they didn’t kill us first. Eventually, fitter cultures won. By this means, we cut out parts of our species’ meme pool whose usefulness was fading. This system worked brutally, but efficiently, for a long time. Evidence that it worked lies, for example, in the way in which, within a generation of being conquered, most people subjugated by the Romans were effectively Romanized. Rome had a more efficient culture than did any of the lands it conquered – a culture that made surpluses, produced humans, and swallowed up neighboring tribes, their territories, and ways of life. Aqueducts, sanitation, order, wine, education, public baths, etc. Rome worked. A child could see that. Similar cases fill history.