The Death of Socrates 

                              (credit: Jacques-Louis David, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 2.                                  (continued) 

And we can emphasize the point here. In the past, we often tested “ways of life” against each other by war. We can’t do that anymore. Not if we want to survive.

It is also interesting to note here that in the cultures of the West, some of our most enduring myths are the ones in which we have embedded our beliefs in freedom and love and the morés and customs that are informed by these values.

Over centuries, our basic ideas of the free way of life, democracy, have become shrouded in myth. In the West, we look to Athens as our cultural ancestor, but, in the first place, other areas of the world contained democracies, and in the second place, Athens was far from a model democracy. Most of its citizens were bigoted and jingoistic by today’s standards, i.e., not our mythic view of Athens.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were not myths. They were real men of Athens, sometimes wise and free, sometimes not so much. But we’re as close to certain of the fact that they were real men as we can be of any fact that we believe in.

However, Aristotle did not think women could be citizens of democracy. Plato’s Republic describes an oligarchy, not a democracy. Socrates felt the idea that anyone could be a wise leader just because he won an election was absurd. More generally, Athens the city was not respectful and fair with other city states. In fact, its behavior toward its “allies” was closer to bullying than supportive.  

In short, Athens was not a model democracy: but we like to believe it was.

Jesus’ existence is surrounded by uncertainty, but most historians, even atheist ones, believe Jesus really did exist in the time of the Roman emperor Augustus. However, even the original four evangelists record that he sometimes lost his temper. Did the buyers and sellers in the temple deserve whipping? They were only behaving in ways that everyone around them endorsed.

Furthermore, what we even indirectly know of Socrates is what we can glean from Plato’s accounts of him. Plato could have been putting into Socrates’ voice ideas that Plato wanted us to believe. Socrates, as far as our best research has been able to determine, never wrote any of his ideas down. His devoted student, Plato, did that. We think.

Jesus as well did not write his ideas down. His disciples wrote down what they or others close to him could remember of his words, and even they, likely with the best of intentions, differ in their accounts.

The wisdom of the Greeks balances the wisdom of the Hebrews in the two most dominant morés of the West: democracy and Christianity. Freedom and love.

Socrates, in Plato’s account, was intensely loyal to Athens. Even when its courts sentenced him to death, he would not run away. He felt he wouldn’t be a true citizen of Athens if he ran away just because its courts had come to a decision not in his favor. In short, he believed he had to be true to the morés of his homeland: its way of life with its freedom to think and speak for oneself. But also, its rule of law. He was so loyal that he was willing to die for his belief.

Or at least this is the picture of him that is believed here in the West. He was, and still is in millions of people’s eyes, the exemplar of the free-thinking way of life because he could apply the methods of reason to any subject, and he did so, over and over again. Athens had made him into the free-thinking man that he was. If his homeland’s democracy decreed that he should die, then so be it.

Or so we’re told. How much of his story is myth, we don’t really know. But we like the story just as it is.

Jesus would not run away, even when he had a chance to. In our stories, he went so far as to ask the god he believed in to pardon the ones who were killing him, while they were killing him. He believed that profoundly in brotherly love. In the end, even his loving disciples deserted him. Yet still he forgave them all.  

In short, for us in the democracies of the West, Athens and Christianity have become integral parts of our mythology. We are still learning how to balance them, but that they have mythic status in our culture is very clear. Seeing how they function as modern myths further affirms our Moral Realist model.  

Freedom is balanced by love. As a moré, love fosters in its adherents a readiness to accept others as they are, and therefore, love creates and supports diversity and pluralism: freedom. If you can love your neighbor not in spite of the ways in which s/he differs from you, but because of those very ways, you improve the odds that your neighbor’s strange ways may one day, during a crisis, save your life, the lives of all the people you love most, and maybe even your nation.

That’s what the moral code for these times is telling us. Love all people as long as they treat you with respect in return. Love them for the ways in which they differ from you, not in spite of those ways.

After our species’ performance in the twentieth century, I feel we must add the caveat that we aim to balance our society so that no single way of life allows its adherents to physically force their ways onto others. No one has the truth about the human condition. In a quantum universe, there is too much too know and even more that for the foreseeable future will remain unknowable. Too many surprises are possible for any one person to pretend to be superior to the rest.

                                                       Jesus in Gethsemane 

                            (credit: Heinrich Hofmann, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                           Moses with the Ten Commandments 

                               (credit: Anton Losenko, via Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 2.                                      (continued) 

However, there is more to a nation or tribe's survival than just work.

If courage and wisdom were all the morés we needed to value in our culture in order to survive, life would be hard. But courage and wisdom are not enough. Life is harder still. Courage and wisdom aren’t enough because entropy is not the only profound trait of the real, physical world that we have to live with.

There are also morés with attached customs that arose, over generations, out of our dealing with uncertainty. As a species, we are only beginning to understand the science behind the probabilistic quality of reality. But we long ago acquired morés that help us, as whole tribes, to deal with it, nonetheless. Again, they are very general and also myth driven.

Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. These are examples drawn from my own culture. Rules purportedly given to us by God 3,000 years ago. They are not suggestions; they are commandments. They are revered by adherents of Judaism, Islam and Christianity because, in traditional lore, they came directly from God.  

Hindus live by similar commandments of similar mythic status. So do Buddhists. The native peoples of Africa and the Americas have similar commandments, and they are embedded in similar myths. Why these commandments are revered as they are and embedded in the myths that they are has for too long been a matter of mystery in cultures everywhere. However, scientific modeling of culture via moral realism uncovers explanations for the myths.

These profound memes have been revered by so many for so long because they equip those who live by them to respect each other’s rights. Tribes that teach respect for all fellow tribe members survive better than tribes that don’t.  

Why is this so? Because in facing a probabilistic universe, a tribe does best over the long haul of generations if it, first, achieves tribe solidarity, mutual support, etc. and, second, contains a lot of different kinds of people with widely varied sorts of talents/aptitudes.

When a tribe gets hit by an unexpected challenge, which is how uncertainty usually impacts humans in the real world, the tribe has better chances of handling the challenge, surviving it, and going on to flourish if tribe members face the challenge as a team, and if the team contains a lot of different kinds of people. A tribe in which members think and act almost completely alike is less nimble than a more pluralistic one.

Again, the trait of balance is obvious. The toughest, most durable tribes contain people who work well in teams, but whose teams also contain within them a lot of varied folk with varied talents. A tension between contrary forces. Balance.

Note that it helps tribes dealing with the uncertainty of reality to teach young people to strive for versatility. Having individual tribe members who are multi-talented, i.e., who can hunt, cook, farm, fight, sing, sew, heal injuries, etc., improves a tribe’s survival odds. But versatile individuals are not enough. No matter how hard I study and practice, I will never be a good carpenter, warrior, or dancer compared to people who have more natural talent for those things.

Then, what value should we teach young people to revere and try to live up to?

The answer is freedom. Our survival odds improve if each of us pursues what their “hearts urge them to”. Hearts don’t literally urge humans toward any one lifestyle, of course. Such expressions are metaphors. But such expressions do tell young people to follow those of their talents and interests that stir them emotionally. That way of living – freedom – in the long haul, is good for the tribe’s survival odds because encouraging all tribe members to do what they love creates diversity. Over generations of hazards and opportunities – i.e., of uncertainty – pluralistic tribes outbreed, outwar, and outlast the competition.   

As years and generations pass, the tribe that loves freedom develops its way of life in more detail, more subtle divisions of labor and interrelationships among tribe members, than do rival tribes that don’t value freedom. A freer tribe contains more members who try many different ways of living. As a result, its economy becomes a more vigorous ecosystem, with many social species, i.e., many different types of people, filling many complex niches in the overall community.

We don’t just have hunters, we have deer hunters who are distinctly different from rabbit hunters and duck hunters. We don’t just have farmers, we have corn farmers, pig farmers, chicken farmers, etc. We have framing carpenters who do different tasks than finishing carpenters and cabinet makers, and we value them all. Thus, most importantly, many new morés and customs get tried and a few that prove keenly useful to the tribe develop further.

Gerald may be short-sighted, but he may have amazing mathematical skills. He may never bring down a single deer nor find one berry, but he may figure out how to build a bridge across a deep canyon that is keeping his tribe from rich hunting grounds on the other side. Gerald turned out to be a good man for the tribe’s leaders to tolerate and even grant some precious food to.

Wanda may never be a good gardener. She has no “feel” for plants. But her dancing entertains the whole tribe, unites them in shared feelings of joy, and maybe even inspires some members to try harder at their own work. Her tribe’s leaders cherish her for making joy. They do not ostracize her for being lazy.

I stress again here that courage and wisdom and their hybrid, work, are good, but are not enough. When we add freedom, it grants a tribe the capacity to meet each new challenge or opportunity with more than just labor. Freedom lets a tribe develop new morés to handle challenges, a useful thing when the challenge or opportunity is one the tribe has not faced before and has no lore about. Over centuries, the best cultural response to ubiquitous uncertainty is freedom.  

However, as was the case with courage and wisdom, freedom by itself is still not enough. Practicing freedom without a balancing moré will cause a tribe’s social ecosystem to break up, too much of the time. In a few years, the tribe will form sub-factions that regard each other with hostility. “Those dancers! They don’t bring in a harvest. They have no perseverance. But still, they expect to eat! Kick 'em out!”   

A tribe that teaches freedom without any balancing morés won’t grow. It will fission repeatedly for any of a long list of reasons. It also won’t learn. Its culture will not gain the flexibility and nimbleness that pluralism bring because many of its best thinkers, artisans, warriors, and leaders will get separated from each other, and thus won’t build a vigorous social ecosystem, with the flexibility and toughness that pluralism brings. Many of the tribe fragments then will die out.

The balancing moré is love. Brotherly love. Love your neighbor. Most of the commandments of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam come down to this: respect your neighbor’s rights as a human being. Extend that respect to all your fellow tribe members. Our culture exhorts all citizens to aspire to these morés.  

Again, note that whether freedom as a moré came before brotherly love or love came before freedom is not useful for us to try to discover. The origins of both came millennia ago and the likely explanation is that they grew up together in a balanced way similar to the way in which the courage/wisdom moré complex developed. A way that, today, we don’t have enough evidence to analyze.  

What matters is that while our most profound values emerged millennia ago in unknown ways, those values do not need to stay vague, and they do not need to evolve by societies violently mixing and re-mixing memes as they have in the past. In short, by war. We can build a science of society that tells us how to get control of this process and ameliorate it. (N.B. Stopping the process is never an option. Not in a quantum-uncertain, changing universe. We must evolve or die.) We could learn to be the tribe of homo sapiens, just as readily as we learn a new language or a new job. All of us.

                               Martin Luther King Day at Nazareth College 

                                               Rochester, New York

                            (credit: Nazareth College, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                                Japanese family bath house

                                  (credit: Kusakabe Kimbei, via Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 2

At the start of this chapter, we need to reiterate that as morés and customs prove more and more useful to a tribe, they are often surrounded in the tribe’s lore with more and more layers of myth. This is so because effective, very general morés are so valuable for tribes to incorporate into all they do that they must be respected and practiced even when the tribe members don’t understand them in the terms of their own best science. Or to be more exact, cultures that came to see their most effective morés as “sacred” survived. Those that didn’t died out.

Often, the parts of this process were not consciously understood by most of the tribe members in each generation. Instead, long-term effective morés/customs were stumbled onto by luck or by one genius’ insight, then given explanations like “the will of the gods.” What mattered to the tribe that learned to do a thing like washing hands, food, etc., was not how logical the explanation for the moré or custom was. One does not need to understand in order to do (and so survive).     

“Avoid snakes” and “Stay clean” are general rules that are valuable for whole tribes to practice, even though they aren’t invariably true. Note also here that the usefulness of the first is obvious: things bitten by snakes die. The usefulness of “Stay clean” is less obvious. But it was given semi-mythical status in society by frequent repetition of adages like, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” (much earlier in Japan and the Islamic empires than in the West).

Respect for elders is a very common moré. Why? Because in pre-historic times, an elderly person with a good memory was a walking encyclopedia, full of knowledge of ways for hunting different kinds of game, finding the best berries, curing illnesses, healing injuries, dealing with breech births, etc.

However, the fact is that some elders are not valuable storehouses of knowledge. If they get dementia, they will soon remember little to nothing. But respect for elders is a moré that holds on tenaciously in most cultures because in the past, it helped those who practiced it to survive in greater numbers over hundreds of generations. Handwashing also can be a bad idea if one is in a public washroom where many who touch the taps have a high incidence of infectious disease. One would be better off to enter, urinate, and exit touching as few of surfaces as possible. And still, most of the time by far, hand washing is a good practice.

The point here is that morés and customs with very wide ranges of application do not have to be reliable 100% of the time in order to be valuable pieces of wisdom to incorporate into the tribe’s culture.

Thus, the morés that humans have hit upon to respond to the most general traits of the physical universe are, not surprisingly, of this most general and often sacred type. Therefore, it is only logical that our most general beliefs, morés, and customs are our responses, as tribes, to the most general truths of physical reality: entropy, uncertainty, evolution, and ecosystem balance.     

Entropy is so ubiquitous that it is in all that we do, and therefore, our most general morés and customs arise in response to it. Over generations, virtually all tribes developed morés and customs that guided their fight against entropy. Entropy – the constant destructiveness of physical reality – deeply shaped us.

Nearly all tribes teach some version of courage to their young. This is likely because in the times of the little bands of hominids that were our forebears, a few bands – for reasons about which we can only speculate – began to teach courage to their young. “Face danger. Seek challenge. You’ll be a hero. We’ll all love you.” They then survived in greater numbers over the long haul than did their timider neighbors. Over millennia, courageous tribes gained control of the area – the best hunting grounds, fishing spots, berry patches, etc.  

Trying to prove your courage can get you killed, but it may enable your tribe to kill more game, drive more lions out of warmer caves, and claim good berry patches and hunting areas. Because of courage morés taught to young tribe members, braver tribes outfought, outhunted, and outbred timider tribes in their area. Braver tribes lost a few members here and there, but they won the things that supported the survival and flourishing of the whole tribe and its way of life over the long haul of centuries.  

For individual tribe members, trying to increase their stature in the eyes of the tribe might be fatal. But courage gets the whole tribe past bears, past threats that the tribe couldn’t have foreseen, and on to victory over their competition – those “evil” neighbor tribes. This is cultural evolution at a profound level.

It is also important for us to stress here that the braver tribes that survived in greater numbers over the long haul of generations in pre-historic times likely discovered the value of wisdom at about this same time. They had to. By itself, courage as a moré would get too many eager young tribe members killed. Thus, a love of wisdom/knowledge is the second, profound, entropy-driven value.

Did knowing more about the habits of bears or rival tribes – in other words, having more wisdom – give a tribe more courage? Or did having the courage to study the habits of bears and rival tribes – sometimes even from nearby – lead a tribe to the wisdom that it would need to outmaneuver and outfight those predators or competitors? Which came first, courage or wisdom?  

The concept of balance that we get from our knowledge of ecosystems helps us here. It is not possible for us to know now whether courage came from wisdom or wisdom grew out of courage. And it doesn’t matter. The choice is not binary. These two values probably grew up slowly together, over many generations.

The point is that morés informed by courage and wisdom are connected to patterns of behavior – ones both brave and clever – that favor tribal survival.

Courage and wisdom, in a balanced complex of beliefs/morés, are our response, as whole tribes, over millennia, to entropy. The theory of cultural materialism also leads us to expect that morés and customs of courage and wisdom will be present, embedded in myths in all societies that have survived over centuries.   

As evidence that this is so, we can look to the way that nearly all societies contain courage-wisdom myths in their cultures. As parts of a general survival strategy, courage and wisdom work. Thus, most human tribes condense these morés into hero myths, and each hero has a mentor: Achilles, Chiron; Aeneas, Anchises; Arthur, Merlin; Dorothy, Glinda; Luke, Yoda; Katniss, Haymitch. Young men and women all over the world want to be heroes. Their cultures tell them that to do so, they must learn from the wisest in the tribe. Courage …meet wisdom.

What does this have to tell us in our time about our codes of right and wrong?

The answer to that question may seem cliché, but we would do well to remind ourselves here that clichés get to be clichés because they say something true.

In our time, every society will do better and better the more it trains its young people to pursue self-discipline and knowledge. This generalization further tells us to predict that societies whose members practice self-discipline and diligent study outfight, outbreed, and outlast societies less disciplined and less studious.

It is enough for us to say at this point that physical and mental toughness and wisdom/knowledge have long been valued by tribes in every part of the world because these morés steer us toward patterns of behavior, as whole tribes, that improve our odds of dealing effectively with entropy. Tribes that didn’t learn some form of this courage/wisdom way of life, almost all died out long ago.

The moré which is a synthesis of courage and wisdom is work, the chief value by which we currently live. Toil that is both brave and focused. Note that young people are exhorted to follow these values even in societies that have long since secured enough of the basics of life for all their members.   

                                      Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                      Standard of Ur (early use of the wheel)

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1.                       (concluded) 

It is also worthwhile to emphasize here that pre-historic tribes didn’t first study their environments, then calculate what morés, customs, and myths they should adhere to in order to improve their survival odds. Cause and effect were almost certainly the other way around. Early tribes, by trial and error, sometimes by lucky chance, tried many morés and customs. A tribe that fell into a particular way of life that worked better overall than the ways of its neighbors outbred, outnumbered, outfought, and outlasted its neighbors. Over centuries, winner cultures flourished; others faded and died out, probably with a lot of pain and by the thousands.

We today are all descended from winners of many survival contests. In other words, the cultural evolution process parallels biological evolution. No herd, pride, pod, pack, or tribe of the past designed or chose its genome. Nature constantly offers each species a variety of possibilities for the design of the next generation. Then, the ones best fitted to handle the ups and downs of reality survive and pass survival-oriented genes on to their young. Similarly, whole tribes tinker continuously with their cultures and then, once in a while, they happen upon useful behaviors by luck or curiosity. Societies that discover, practice, and pass on life-supporting morés and customs flourish. Tribes that slip into morés that don’t work die out.

Finally, note again here that science changes this picture.

We humans, among us, carry a lot of lethal genes around in our cell nuclei. But thanks to science, we are now able to block lethal genes or cull them out of our genome completely. My major point here is that we must learn to do the same with lethal morés in our cultures.

If enough of us say war is over, then it is. War as a cultural phenomenon is no more ineluctable than slavery, burning witches, or gladiatorial games. We must identify the social causes – the memes, morés, and customs – that lead to war and stop practicing them by blocking them or culling them from our cultures.

Whatever evolutionary purposes war may once have served for our species, it has made itself obsolete. After centuries of arms races, our weapons have simply gotten too big. They could extinguish the species that built them. But with a knowledge of cultural evolution, we can design into our cultures, morés and customs that push people to great achievements while still not going to war. We do not have to drown our planet in a radioactive sea of blood and flame.

To sum up this chapter, then: for the purposes of building a universal moral code, I am going to assume entropy, quantum uncertainty, evolution, ecology, and cultural materialism. They are evidence-backed tenets of our best current models of reality, and therefore, they should inform all that we do in these times.

What do we come to, then, if we try to create a modern moral code for all tribes?

                                       Titan II missile (70+ feet tall) in its silo 

                    (credit: US Department of Defense, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

   "The Return of Persephone" (as in the ancient explanation for the seasons)

                       (credit: Frederic Leighton, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1.                (continued) 

Note also here some subtleties about cultural materialist theory: a belief like “all green grapes are sour” is an example of a nearly useless generalization. It is a well-formed sentence in English, but it isn’t a true statement about grapes. Experience with grapes is going to show us firsthand that some green grapes are actually sweet, juicy, and nutritious. And none of them are deadly poisonous. 

On the other hand, if we are members of a primitive tribe, we probably should avoid certain kinds of berries. White berries are nearly always poisonous, as are yellow ones. The general rule, “all white berries are poisonous” may not be universally true, but it’s near enough to always being true that our forbears were best off obeying the rule and avoiding white berries.

Note also how a moré’s value is seen by a tribe as being directly proportional to first, its range of applicability (i.e., the more different contexts it applies to) and second, its usefulness in contexts that are crucial to the tribe’s survival (hunting, gathering, curing illnesses, etc.). Lore about berries matters more than lore about stars. “Snakes are deadly” isn’t always true, but many snakes are so dangerous that pre-historic tribes were best off avoiding snakes altogether.  

Over generations, we also come to value statements like “snakes are deadly” more than ones like “the stars in the bear constellation are getting dimmer”. Whether we watch dimming stars or not likely will have little effect on our survival odds. Whether or not we get bitten by a snake very likely will.

Thus, the first big principle we get from social science also tells us that morés and customs which most improve the survival probabilities for a tribe are likely to be very generally applicable ones that arise in response to the most general traits of physical reality. “Don’t eat white berries” is generally a good rule to follow all over the world, as is “Avoid snakes”. In most parts of the world, there are berries.  

This brings us to the second big principle we learn from social science. It tells us that the most profound morés and customs improve the odds of survival for a tribe only when they are practiced over generations by the whole tribe. Harris showed this was the case for the sacred cows in India. Such morés may not help the survival of all individual tribe members in the short term. What they do is create better survival odds for the whole tribe and its culture over generations when the whole tribe observes those morés devoutly. Treating cows as sacred beings whose slaughter is forbidden does not seem logical when one is starving, but in the long haul, it is. The hard truth for its adherents is that it is a moré that takes a long time to pay dividends. But eventually, it does pay off.

Note further how such widely applicable mores sometimes become surrounded in the tribe’s lore by myths that defy further explanation or that are explained in the tribe’s lore as having been decreed by gods. A tribe might be able to explain the logic of putting a small fish into the ground with each corn seed they plant, in terms consistent with their science, but the same tribe may use myths to explain why the seasons change, and why we put away food for the winter. If one lives in temperate latitudes, winter always comes.    

From social science, then, we learn: first, that morés and their attached customs become established if they improve the survival odds of the tribe that adheres to them; second, tribes value most highly those morés that guide tribal life in matters crucial to long term survival. Third, tribes tend to create myths to explain morés/customs which their science can’t explain.

                                     Poisonous white berries (dogwood)

                               (credit: David Whelan, via Wikimedia Commons)  

          Marvin Harris (cultural anthropologist, founder of cultural materialism) 

                         (credit: Jennifer Tanabe, via newworldencyclopedia.org) 

Chapter 1.  (continued) 

Unfortunately, many anthropologists in the world right now adamantly assert that nomothetic statements about societies can’t be made; a few go so far as to claim that even trying to make such statements is morally wrong. All humans, they say, come from traditions of thinking, every tradition just as inherently biased as any of the others. Since no one can get outside of the model of thinking their society instilled in them, no thinker can presume to view the customs of any society – their own or any other – objectively. We’re all locked irretrievably inside our prejudices. Therefore, any attempt by European-style thinkers to analyze the cultures of other societies via the thinking mode we call “science” is just Euro-styled bullying. It is immoral. This view is called moral relativism and is often seen as a component of the philosophical view called postmodernism.

For the purposes of this essay, I am going to ignore postmodernist claims. It seems to me that the scientific method is the way out of their blind alley. Some models of reality can be tested in reality. Then, sometimes the data confirm the model, thus pointing us toward subtler research and more effective cultures and technologies. So science advances. On the other hand, it seems to me that under their own terms, postmodernists aren’t qualified to say anything about anything. If every viewpoint is inescapably, hopelessly biased, then so is theirs.

The main alternative to moral relativism/postmodernism in Anthropology, looks for laws under which all human societies operate. Most of its adherents today call this theory cultural materialism.

This theory was first developed by Marvin Harris. In his view, anthropologists should formulate and test hypotheses about how cultures arise, function, and change as they struggle to survive in their environments.

In other words, what cultural materialists study is how morés and customs connect a tribe to its environment. Under this model, we can study why modern humans think and act using the concepts, models, and morés that they do. Why is my life, or your life, the way that it is?

This line of reasoning brings us to re-state the first morally relevant principle we can draw from social science: the morés of a tribe all influence how members of that tribe act toward other entities in their environment – inorganic objects, other life forms, other tribes, and fellow tribe members. These patterns of action either enhance or reduce a tribe’s odds of surviving. Then, the overall most vigorous tribe in each region gains control over the area.  

For example, what survival edge is gained by a people who come to believe that every tribe member should bury their feces? Tribe members’ beliefs may tell them that they must keep their feces from being found by their enemies as those enemies might use it to cast an evil spell on them. But what is really going on here? Knowing germ theory enables cultural materialists to show that burying excrement lowers the tribe’s odds of getting typhus and other diseases spread by feces. A tribe that teaches all members to bury their feces outbreeds and soon outnumbers rival tribes. With numbers, it wins control of the area.

This is an example of how cultural materialist thinking works. It studies data observed in the community life of real tribes just living their lives. It seeks to identify cause-effect relationships in the lives of real societies interfacing with reality. It's also worth noting here that the tribe in question may know nothing of germ theory. But they avoid typhus and cholera epidemics just the same. Cultural materialism records the explanations that a tribe gives for its actions, but it focuses its attention most closely on morés and customs associated with them: the physical world mechanisms by which those morés/customs work.

Some customs in some societies might seem at first contact to have little or no impact on that society’s survival odds, but cultural materialists believe that this is hardly ever the case. Customs come from forebears, and those forebears adhered to their customs for what turn out to be sensible, material reasons.

Thus, we can reiterate this first large principle from social science: the morés and customs of a tribe connect to its survival. They are not random; they arise out of the tribe’s past experiences and experiments, and they heavily affect the tribe’s long-term survival odds. They also can be subjects of a scientific study of culture because they are testable.  

                  transmitting culture: Idris Shah telling a story to his children

                          (credit: Secretum Mundi, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                                                cow on Delhi street 

                                  (credit: John Hill, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1. (continued) 

In the meantime, as we strive to survive in our own times, if Durkheim’s view is correct (I think it is) a whole wide-ranging model of human behavior becomes available to us.    

From what we can observe in the archeological evidence left by pre-historic and historic tribes, we can reasonably infer that in the early years of human pre-history, each tribe had its own culture – its own detailed view of the world, how it works, and how humans are supposed to act in it. Informed by their tribe’s culture – its set of morés and customs – tribe members lived in ways they had been programmed as children to see as “normal” and “appropriate”.

There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tribes, most of them of less than two hundred members. Tribes whose cultures were better tuned to the demands of their environments survived in greater numbers over many generations than did tribes whose morés were less well-tuned to their environments. A well-tuned way of life, a culture, reproduces itself because it enables tribe members who live by it to survive till they have their own young and successfully program the tribe’s culture/way of life into those youngsters, generation after generation.

Almost certainly, early tribes did not purposely write their cultures, i.e., choose their morés and customs. Tribes fell into ways of life by trial and error, luck, genius individuals, even whim. Cultures that worked lived on in their carriers – the members of the most successful tribes. The rest died out as they starved, caught plagues, or were absorbed after wars with more vigorous rival tribes.   

Thus, the first big principle that we get from Social Science says that a tribe’s morés and customs make up the programming that equips that tribe’s members to live in their environment: to get food, fight off invaders, maintain solidarity, choose mates, have young, and program their culture into those youngsters.

Note also, however, that culture as a tool for survival must still be thought of as an add-on to the human genome. Our forebears were apes: their anatomy and physiology were inherited genetically from their forbears. The programming we call culture came to them only after they’d been apes for a very long time and then finally evolved into homo sapiens, a species capable of accumulating knowledge, in the form of culture, over generations.

It is also worth noting that while the cultural mode of evolution does look a bit shaky when compared to the genetic mode – a small tribe that finds a useful custom can get wiped out by one rockslide or tsunami – cultural evolution has proven itself very nimble. Our species outmaneuvered nearly all competing species centuries ago. We outlasted ground sloths, cave bears, mammoths, and so many other species. Today, we’re even getting control of microorganisms. Sometimes, we wipe out other species, but none of them have been near to wiping us out for millennia. We’re tough because we work well in teams, and because we pass knowledge on through generations efficiently, thus enabling cultural evolution. Progress. 

How many morés with their attached customs could it be possible for human tribes to invent? That number is incalculable. But as we follow this train of thought, it soon occurs to us that some ways of thinking and acting wouldn’t be practiced by any tribe for long simply because some ways of thinking and acting are very likely to get those who practice them killed.

If you and your tribe somehow come to believe you must eat only beaver meat, you could run out of beaver in your area in two years. Even more improbably, if your tribe came to believe that this year you must find winter shelter in a cave now occupied by cave lions, your tribe would likely not be around next spring.

Similarly, there are many kinds of berries that no tribe today eats because the people that tried to eat them in the past died. Some customs are unlikely to have been practiced for very long by any tribe. Investigating each of these customs almost always tells us why this is so. Poison berry eaters die before they have kids and thus their cultures too die out.

Note, however, that real tribes and societies interact with their environments in much subtler ways than those portrayed in these simplified examples. Natives in parts of the Amazon rainforest approach Golden Dart Frogs cautiously; these frogs are extremely poisonous. But these tribesmen aren’t so frightened of the frogs that they avoid them entirely. The tribes’ hunters carefully gather the frogs’ poison to coat the tips of their blow darts. This trick increases their hunting success rate which then increases their survival odds and therefore, over generations, their numbers. (Here’s meat. Let’s eat.) They keep the custom of gathering frog poison going because it keeps them going.   

Of course, morés and customs that increase, rather than lessen, a tribe’s long term survival odds take time to prove themselves. But over generations, subtler and more vigorous morés and customs do prove themselves because tribes that live by them outlast other tribes that don’t. In short, cultural evolution is not driven by luck, nor by mysterious, inscrutable forces; it is driven by survival.

On the other hand, no moré or custom guarantees survival for a tribe that takes it up. There are too many other factors that may doom the tribe. But the idea that there are morés/customs which enhance survival odds and that hypotheses about these morés and customs can be drawn up and tested by applying reason to evidence observed in the lives of real tribes is basic to Anthropology.

Can other examples of such morés be cited? A famous one is documented in the 1974 book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris. He saw that cows in India became sacred for Hindus there ostensibly because they were precious living symbols of the fertility of Mother Earth. However, he argued, what was really going on at a subtler level was that over many generations, cows proved more useful to an early tribe of India for pulling plows and supplying milk and dung than when they were eaten as beef. Thus, over centuries, a tribe that held cows sacred survived in greater numbers, gained power over rival tribes, and eventually became the dominant tribe of India.  

The larger point is that morés/customs are not arbitrary. They obey nomothetic laws. They may first find their way into a tribe’s culture by luck or through the curiosity of one tribe member. But they have effects associated with them that have survival value, high or low, and if their survival value is high, they last and spread. At the very least, all morés/customs, even the strange ones, had survival value in some way when they were first incorporated into a tribe’s culture, even though they may have little to no survival value in modern times.

Cultural evolution proceeds in a way that is closely analogous to biological evolution, with genomes being analogous to cultures, and genes being analogous to memes. Even today, humans are constantly – sometimes by luck and more and more in our times by at least some human choice – mixing and re-mixing their morés. We trade, travel, invent, and intermarry. Over generations, species shuffle their genes. Over generations, tribes shuffle their morés. Early tribes fell into varied morés and customs because humans are curious, or, once in a while, lucky. But morés and customs only endure long term if they work.  

                           Golden Poison Dart Frog (world's most poisonous species)  

                                     (credit: Wilfried Berns, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                         French sociologist, Emile Durkheim 

                                 (credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1.    (continued) 

But our scientific view must be extended even further if we are to define and clarify the scientific model on which we can build a new moral code.

At this point, we should move from Biology into the social sciences, and in a moment, we will. But first, we must clarify a profound general concept, one we must agree on if we are to say anything meaningful about social science.  

For a statement to qualify as being worthy of consideration in science, it must make a claim that is testable in the real, empirical world. A statement that meets this condition is called “nomothetic”. For example, here's a nomothetic statement: “Any two bodies in space are drawn together by a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them”. It is a verbal statement of the Law of Gravitation (which can also be stated mathematically). Nomothetic statements can be made in all branches of science. A nomothetic statement is one that, at least in theory, can be decisively proven wrong by tests done in the real, physical world.

On the other hand, whether nomothetic statements can be made about human societies is a matter of bitter debate. Can I devise a hypothesis about societies that is testable in the way that the law of gravitation is testable? In short, can we make nomothetic statements in Social Science?  

One study that is often cited to support the idea that we can make nomothetic statements about societies was done by sociologist, Emile Durkheim. In the late 1800s, he studied suicide statistics in France. He saw that Catholics committed suicide at a higher rate than Protestants. He hypothesized that this was because Catholics, generally, as a sub-group within his society, felt more connected to their communities than Protestants did. Statistics supported his hypothesis.

In other words, we can’t understand why one person committed suicide while others with similar troubles did not if we look only at the psychological profiles of individuals. In order to understand why a suicide victim took that ultimate step, we do need to look at his individual profile, but also at his whole society and how it influenced and shaped his thinking.

In other words, most of who you are is heavily shaped by the concepts, values, morés, and customs that you learned growing up in your society. Each of us is, mostly, a product of her/his culture. Individuals, Durkheim said, could only be fully understood if we looked at those individuals through the lenses of their societies. This was true, he said, with nearly all phenomena observed across whole societies.

In short, there are social facts – facts that are true of whole societies and that can be studied objectively. In addition, they are greater than the sums of the psychological profiles of the individuals in those societies. All societies are built around programs for human living – cultures – which underlie, permeate, and inform the thinking of every person in the whole society. 

It offends many people to think that every human is mostly a products of her/his culture. Nevertheless, we speak and act in ways that have been subtly informed and shaped by the ways that the adults around us spoke and acted as we were growing up. For most of us, most of the time, we model what we saw. There is still room for individual agency in this model, but by and large, you respond to an event in your environment by choosing and implementing one of a set of beliefs, models, or customs which your culture has programmed into you.

For example, if a man you are working near gets injured, you will likely respond with the first aid that you learned in your culture. Clear airways, with a finger if necessary; put direct pressure on serious bleeding; if breathing and/or heartbeat have stopped, begin mouth to mouth resuscitation and heart massage, as you learned in your first aid/cpr class. This is the set of responses known to most people in my culture, which is a typical Western one.

Similar decision processes are used in almost all branches of Western culture; we have a set of options from which to choose in almost all situations. Wisely picking one of these choices and implementing it, in the example, requires learning first aid theory and getting practical training within the institutions available in my culture.

The options for action available in my culture are not familiar in some cultures. On the other hand, other cultures often have their own responses to injuries, some that we in the West are just beginning to learn. For example, in some cultures, plants whose juices coagulate bleeding in open wounds are well-known and used.

The point in all cases is that the customs of a culture aim to increase the range of options available to a tribe member for him/her to use in response to situations that have occurred before in that culture. All cultures contain many concepts, morés, customs, etc. that enable the tribe that lives by that culture to respond effectively to reality. But the options differ from culture to culture, as would logically be expected given that environments of different tribes vary widely. Even inside a given culture, the individual almost always has options, or in short, agency. I’m not always going to do cpr if I come upon an accident victim. I use my knowledge and judgement to make a decision. Then I act.

In any case, offended or not, all people think and act nearly all of the time in ways that are consistent with their cultural programming. Even their wish to be free is a way of thinking that they were culturally programmed to believe in.

Furthermore, there is also room for tribe leaders to shape a whole tribe’s future. If s/he is wise, a leader may see, for example, that the tribe must move if it is to live. The plant species that they have long used for food in their homeland is dying out.

The culture each human learns usually has the aim of increasing human control over real events, especially over those events that repeat in patterns that can be learned and anticipated by humans. I don’t know how cold this winter will be, but I do gamble with a high degree of confidence that there will be a cold season in which food will be hard to find. Therefore, I set aside food now when it is plentiful. It may require hard, hot work when I would rather swim or play tag. But I do the work. Members of my tribe all do and have done so for generations.

A culture programs those who live by it not to have fun, but to survive. Most of the customs that I have been programmed to follow, even if I resent the ways that they infringe on my personal freedom, turn out to have long term beneficial effects for me and my offspring. Eating meals of porridge and root vegetables all winter is not pleasant, but it’s preferable to starving. So, I till, plant, and harvest my fields as my grandfather did. And his before that.    

In a paradoxical but very real way, the whole point of the morés and customs in a culture is to steer tribe members toward making choices and acting in ways that enhance survival odds for them, their children, and their whole tribe. Thus, the view of human life offered in this essay does leave room for human freedom.

We don’t build up a way of life – knowledge, understanding, and skilled action to elude uncertainty. That can’t be done. We build up our cultures in order to deal more and more effectively with uncertainty. To improve our odds. Decision by decision, action by action, we are free to use what we have learned to inform and guide what we do next. Or to try something new if the old ways simply are not working. This is the nature of human freedom.  

Our smartest seers are people who can see beyond their programming, people who find ways to amend their culture so that their lives and the lives of their fellow tribe members keep getting healthier and more satisfying. I become a loyal child of my culture in order to keep practicing it, but also improving it, if I can.

  accident victim, Jeremy Brunson with man who saved his life, Sgt. John Jackson 

                                           (April, 2014) 

            (credit: Maj. Fred Williams, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)