Cutthroat Trout                                                                                                                          (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

15. The First Universal Trait and its attached Beliefs/Values

So, what might some of these universal, values-shaping traits of reality be?

It is important for us at this point to insert a caveat for readers to keep in mind. The listing and explaining of the major values-shaping traits of reality and of the values that humans have evolved to deal with these basic traits that I go into below is a simplification of the real processes that are occurring in human social evolution all the time. An analogy between the species in an ecosystem and the many societies of the Earth will help to clarify here.

In a living ecosystem, like a patch of forest in a valley in the Rocky Mountains or in an isolated lake, we can study the system in detail. For example, wolf and elk populations in Yellowstone National Park may vary from year to year with the severity of the winter, pressures by humans, and hosts of other factors like disease, parasites, etc.. But they tend toward a median point for both species. Trout and freshwater shrimp populations in a lake vary in analogous ways.

For us to speak of these relationships as if they are the only variables affecting each other’s populations would be totally misleading. A small hayfield near the lake being sprayed with a new pesticide may hugely affect the populations of all of the species in the lake, perhaps even causing some species to die out entirely. Global warming bringing steadily milder winters might cause elk populations in a park to soar to levels wolves can no longer control.

The point is that simplifications of these relationships can be misleading. So we keep these caveats in mind. Scientists who study wildlife know that a new invasive species or dry summer or mosquito control spray mandated by a nearby city – any of these may radically change the big picture. Sociologists keep analogous factors in mind as they study human tribes. 

However, the simplifications are also useful, as long as other factors stay fairly constant. The wolf population is a good – not perfect – indicator of the overall health of the park. The trout population is a good indicator of the health of the lake. Even the population of probiotic bacteria in my intestines is an indicator of my health. So, in the discussion below of the values our societies have arrived at as cultural programming, please keep in mind that these values must be seen as usually reliable indicators of a society’s health. But they’re simplifications. When we view them with caution, they are useful for clarifying how a society’s values affect its long term survival. Thus, we could ask what volunteering levels in a society tell us? Or the numbers of new business starts? Or fentanyl deaths?    

All concepts, terms, and models in all sciences are provisional. Even the concept of “life” in Biology turns out to be fuzzy at the edges (dormant viruses) as do “real numbers” in Math and “time” in Physics. The key question is whether the concept leads us to useful, testable results. Moral Realism, as a model in Philosophy and Sociology, leads us in that useful way.

                  

                                                            Wolf in Yellowstone Park                                                                                                               (credit: NPS, via Wikimedia Commons)

The first principle is balance. Even more valuable than cleanliness, balance is the profound general principle that shapes atoms, molecules, and solar systems in the non-living world, and cells, organs, creatures, ecosystems, and tribes in the living world. At all levels, a balance of forces pulls the universe into existence out of nothing. Thus, respect for balance has become a value in cultures all over.

In all tribes, adults teach kids to look for a range of effects for every decision and action. Advantages and disadvantages. This is what it means to ‘grow up’. To ‘cut your wisdom teeth’ people used to say in English.

Most crucially, this means that human tribes all over – each in its own way – recognize that balance means existing in ecosystems. Human tribes and other living species interact to find, and stay in, balance. Systems theory tells us that systems are dynamic: they work to maintain equilibrium, internal and external. Tribes that survive over centuries come to recognize the balance principle of reality and use it to guide their choices as they live in the world. Some of their other values may change over time, but balance does not.  

Aristotle emphasized to his followers that they must do all things in moderation, nothing to excess. He said the best life is a life of balance between extremes. The Tao of Taoism is, essentially, balance. Buddhism is called ‘the middle way’.

For centuries, Chinese culture has taught its young about yin and yang: balance as a deep universal principle. For centuries, Christianity has taught children of God’s wrath, God’s mercy, and the human need to achieve grace (balance).

For many native tribes of the Americas, this reverence for balance was even more profound. Europeans took a while to grasp that if they wiped out a species in an area, that action would likely precipitate changes in the ecosystem that would be bad for humans. They lacked a profound understanding of balance as it worked in the wilder ecosystems of the new continents they had come to.  

The first European farmers who came to the Americas learned the hard way that they couldn’t simply shoot hawks and owls to protect their chickens and not suffer consequences. If they killed off the hawks, the rodents, in many areas, multiplied grossly in a few years.

But indigenous people knew why this was so. They also knew that the wolves keep the moose strong by culling the less fit from the moose herd’s gene pool. Less fit moose are easy prey. Over generations, the fit ones then survive, breed, and toughen the gene pool. Native people used these concepts to guide their own actions, and they too stayed strong.

Other tribes elsewhere in the world have similar ideas about balance and the guidelines for achieving it. Most strive to restore their nation’s balances even during crises (“peace, order, good government”: the Canadian constitution).

As a value, balance has endured because it has guided its adherents, ancient and modern, to study tasks to find ways to make their responses to them more nuanced and effective with less labor to yield more good results for more folk more of the time. And thus, to raise the tribe's survival odds over the long haul.

Respecting balance begets tribal efficiency and durability. It teaches humans to scrutinize real world situations carefully and invest their energies wisely. If a reward for a task looks too good to be true, it probably is. A balancing downside will be found in the bigger picture somewhere.                      

Balance as a guide permeates successful cultures. As an idea, it goes on because it enables people who grasp it, live by it, and pass it on to make smart decisions and thus, they go on. They act to maintain balanced systems around them. The tribe then survives well and carries that value forward over generations.  

Furthermore, we should emphasize here that the first human tribes likely did not understand ecosystems. If they had a chance to pick every fireweed root in a patch or kill all the deer in a valley, they probably did. A respect for balance is still in our values programming probably because it gave a survival edge to the earliest tribes that did learn it. They were our forebears.  

                                                        Neanderthal Flintworkers                                                                                                                   (painting by Charles Robert Knight, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                            Native American dancer (2010)                                                                                                           (a ritual linking a people to a way of thinking about reality)

                         (credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alaina_marie/4550730637/ )

14. Note a subtler insight here also: most of the time, changes to our ways of life occur in response to changes in our environments. We learn to gather a new plant or hunt a new species when we must do so or die out. 

But the connection between our cultural codes -- i.e. our ideas of ‘right’ behavior -- and facts in reality sometimes can flow the other way, from ideas to reality. In other words, we can change how we live and even the physical facts of where we live, by creating and using new, man-made processes or tools to change our behavior and then, as a consequence, profoundly change the physical reality around us.

It is worth emphasizing this point: the interaction between the concrete realm of a tribe’s environment and the abstract ideas of a tribe isn’t, as cultural materialists and Marxists portray it, a one way path from the concrete to the abstract. There is interplay in both directions. Most often, the causal arrow points from concrete facts to abstract ideas; a change in reality forces a tribe in that area to change its ways of living and then of thinking (adapt or die out). But now and then a tribe living in a stable environment finds a new idea that enables the tribe to change its physical environment, altering the tribe’s way of life dramatically.  

A new way of thinking – a new “app” – comes to a tribe by pure luck, slow trial and error, an individual genius, or diffusion through a visitor from another tribe. Then, this new way of thinking enables a new way of behaving in the tribe, and the new mode of behaving enables the tribe to change its environment in ways that improve their survival odds in the new homeland they have made.  

In other words, the interaction between ways of thinking and the physical world is a dynamic one. Physical facts, technologies, behavior patterns, ideas for responding to all of these modify each other, back and forth, from environmental change to modifications in behavior to new ideas/models about reality and back again. 

Usually, the cause-effect arrow points from reality to ideas. For example, when a new species of herbivore comes into an area, tribes there respond with new ways of hunting that species, then new weapons that improve the hunt, then beliefs that support the new ways of hunting, toolmaking, and thinking the tribe has acquired.

But this flow from reality to beliefs and ideas once in a while can point back the other way. A clever app sometimes can guide a tribe to act in ways that change physical reality profoundly: now and then, an idea enables the people who learn it to change their world. Or to put this point in Anthropology’s terms, a change in a tribe’s superstructure (ideas and values) can, now and then, alter its structure (technologies and morés) so profoundly that the tribe is then able to transform its infrastructure (its physical environment – forest, prairie, coast, or desert, etc.) in ways that favor that tribe’s more vigorous survival.   

Agriculture was a breakthrough of this sort. Farmland is not bush or prairie. It is profoundly different from either. When humans realized that plants grow from seeds, and that they could plant those seeds where and when they chose to, they learned to farm. Then, by thoughtfully guided labor, they changed their environments. They made bush into fields covered with wheat, barley, rice, etc.

It’s also worth noting here that agriculture didn’t make farming tribes happier in their daily lives than competing nearby hunter-gatherers were. Research has indicated that much of the time, hunter-gatherers probably led easier lives than farmers did then or have since. But farming tribes had higher long-term survival rates. Agriculture makes population, not joy. Then, population makes power. Joy was never the point.

 

                                                 

                                                   Image of early Egyptian farmer                                                                    

                            (credit: Maher der Grabkammer des Sennudem, via Wikimedia)  

 

Guns, metals, steam engines, germ theory, etc. were similar (Jared Diamond): understanding new, human-devised ideas about how reality could be manipulated enabled tribes who learned them to make new tools, alter their worlds, and then, as a long term consequence, make more of their tribe.

On a side note, it is worth saying here that Einstein believed our harnessing the power of the atom – which began from an idea that came first from him – is the most dangerous change so far in all the sets of ideas that have occurred to humans.

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”    

                                                           (Einstein) 

Which is only to say what was said at the beginning of this essay: we can’t keep building more nuclear weapons indefinitely. That process has only one ending.

Now let us return to our main task by reiterating that the most general beliefs and values that are present in all tribes’ cultures are in all those cultures because they enabled all those tribes in all their varied environments to survive, even as those environments kept changing. They improve survival odds in all lands and climates because over the long haul, they work in all lands and climates. 

Wildlife conservation values and behaviors arise in areas where there are animals that humans can hunt and eat. Water conservation values develop in lands with low rainfall. But the largest point is that our core values rose out of our interactions with the even more basic forces of the universe, the ones that are ubiquitous. 

The set of core values that work for us all exists because those values fit all realities. No other explanation for our ‘common humanity’ makes sense. Our problem now is to articulate those core values, then live by them and teach them to our kids.

A moral code is analogous to what in Computing Science is called a kernel, the core of an operating system (culture) that enables a human tribe to survive in this harsh world. Our cultures are software built up from memes that have been arrived at by eons of trial and error.

Every sane human has in their brain a moral/behavior code mostly like the one that is in their fellow tribe members. It’s what gives the tribe its daily routines, and, to a profound degree, it makes each tribe member who he or she is.

Even seen as an individual, each of us is mostly what his culture programmed him or her to be. As Herodotus said three thousand years ago, “Custom is king."

                                           Balut (fetal duck), a delicacy eaten in Vietnam                                                                            (credit:   Marshall Astor, via Wikimedia)                                  

 

Schematic of Moral Realist model

 

Physics         ßà    |       Biology                |          ßà            Social Science

Matter, energy      ßà       |     Protoplasm, DNA              |               <- ->                   Human Nations

Laws of Physics   ßà       |     Laws of Biology                |                ßà                  Social Science           

                                  (code: DNA)                           (code: Culture)                          

 

 

Cosmos Evolution       Biological Evolution                   Social/Cultural Evolution

Physical universe             Living universe                               Human universe 

 

__________________________________________________________________

 

This graphic is intended to show how life, and especially human life, works. By Physics alone, life should not exist. Entropy and uncertainty should destroy any entity that is maintaining itself as discrete. Entropy normally chills and scatters everything into smaller and smaller, cold, dead bits. But life forms maintain. Life is the most indisputable reality our minds are aware of, and it defies Physics.  

So how does life sustain? There is code written physically into each living thing, gene code that guides that entity to elude physical forces, even exploit them.  

In short, a living thing’s interfacing with the universe is run by its gene code.

In analogous ways, the interface between a tribe and its environment is further enhanced by code we call culture, a set of apps encoded into the memes of a tribe, which enables that tribe to practice its own communal way of functioning.

All living things have code in their genes that guides them to handle the forces of the world, both physical and biological. Humans have a genome like all other species, and over generations, it is being constantly updated. (Human genome evolution is why our responses to malaria and tuberculosis are more nuanced and more effective now than in 4 B.C.)

But in addition, humans also have a culture-driven mode of living that enables them to adapt as whole tribes to changing hazards and opportunities. We update our cultures so that we survive. We do the updating mostly by processes we aren’t aware of, but, more and more frequently in recent centuries, we have been learning to shape and implement effective, culturally-guided behaviors for surviving.

By Physics alone, life should not exist. But it does because of the code written into genes. And genes are programmable. 

By Biology alone, humans are weak and slow. We should not dominate the living world. But we do because of the code written into our cultures. And cultures are programmable. We could and should be updating our cultural code in ways that enable us to take control of our survival and our destiny as a whole species now, while we still can.

 

 

                                         Aspasia Conversing With Socrates and Alcibiades                                                                   (credit: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 

13. The Major Conclusions of the Argument So Far

So, what are the major conclusions of this argument so far? Most crucially, we need to see that a few very general concepts, values, and customs are present in the cultures of almost all human tribes in all lands and eras. But it is also true that all of our concepts, beliefs, values, etc. affect how we act toward the things around us – other people, animals, plants, and non-living entities. Before they do an act, humans must conceive of it. Software -- i.e. thinking that is shaped by our cultures -- directs the actions of the hardware, the 'meat robots', namely each one of us.

It is further true that ideas and values can shape reality because they enable us to shape reality: to think of ways to respond to events and objects, then to act in the ways we’ve thought up, sometimes making clever new tools and ways of using them. The inference we can draw from these facts is that the few general principles that we call ‘moral  values’ must be connected, ultimately, to a few very general traits of the physical universe itself, traits so pervasive in the world that the values we’ve found to respond to those traits work in reality in all lands and eras.

A few very general ideas about how humans should behave massively improve the survival odds of any humans who live by them. These general ideas about how humans should behave are called ‘values’, and the best of them work for human tribes in all kinds of environments. Forests, coasts, grasslands, etc.

Thus, we can infer that our values must be shaped to fit traits of reality. No other explanation exists for the way that a few core values are found in cultures all over the world.

Now, let’s re-word this major conclusion in different terms and emphasize it again.

     (a) Every part of a culture – every belief, value, custom, etc. – has an effect of some kind on the behavior patterns of the tribe programmed with that culture. Cultural software shapes human behavior in the physical world.

     (b) All behaviors have a survival index. This is true even for behaviors that, at first glance, seem like silly, but harmless, wastes time that tribe members could have spent could on other, more obviously productive activities. All values, beliefs, and customs in a culture are relevant to tribe survival because they shape behavior, and it’s through our behavior that we interface with the world. Cultural programming is, therefore, the key factor that determines survival odds for humans.                                  

     (c) Virtually all human cultures share a few, recognizable core beliefs and values that guide and inform the whole tribe’s patterns of behavior.

     (d) Thus, the few values common in all human cultures must arise from common traits in the physical reality that all humans live and survive in.

For example, recall the fact that bathing customs are found in many cultures. This is because bathing is useful all over. Everywhere humans are, germs are. Habits of cleanliness kill germs and so improve a tribe’s odds of growing its population over generations. Then, tribes with more workers, hunters, soldiers, etc. get more done and survive wars, famines, and epidemics better than less sanitary rival tribes. Successful tribes value cleanliness because it works. It enhances survival odds. It makes ‘our folk’ multiply.  

In this model, over the long haul, physical reality is the base on which human beliefs, values, and morés must operate. It is reality that shapes our cultures.

Our ideas of right and wrong do not exist in a non-material, ideal dimension.

Our ideas of right and wrong are also not arbitrary cultural constructs.

The most important thing this essay offers is a third alternative: effective ideas of right and wrong are grounded in the most ubiquitous traits of physical reality itself.

In the real world, human cultures must interface with, and respond to, the living world, which runs by the laws of Biology, and the living world must interface with, and respond to, the non-living world, which runs by the laws of Physics. 

Our ideas about right are core concepts of our cultures; they became our most trusted values because they work. They enabled their followers to multiply. 

Furthermore, all tribes have a few core values in common. This ‘common humanity’ leads us to the conclusion that we have these values in common because they enable us to respond effectively to our common reality - the things about the world that are true everywhere.

This insight is essential if we are to survive: our values are not arbitrary; over generations of us experimenting, they have been shaped by the physical world. 

Note that these survival-boosting values and the customs/morés they lead their followers into aren’t usually worked out consciously in advance of any tribe’s adopting them. The process has usually been slower and harsher than that for most of human history. We do get wiser, but it sometimes takes centuries, and it has almost always, up to this point, been by pain: war, famine, and plague.  

Tribes that follow up-to-date values live practicing behavior patterns informed by those values. Thus, if the members of a tribe adopt new ideas that respond to reality well, the tribe flourishes and then absorbs less vigorous, rival tribes. The survival edge lies with the tribe that sees the advantages of effective ‘new ways’ and adopts them in timely fashion. Vigorous tribes embrace changes that they think make sense because that flexible attitude works. A tribe that can recognize new ideas, values, and morés that get results, and readily integrate them into its culture, is going to win in that area’s tribal competitions, like wars and markets.

Values are called ‘values’, not ‘customary ways of thinking’, because they are valuable. They are precious to know and follow over generations. They are far more valuable than any material things. We value our values because over the long haul, they have guided us to patterns of behavior that kept us alive.

Note again also how important the concept of increasing generalizability is. It’s good to know the path to the water hole that all large animals in your area have to use to get water daily. But it’s better to know where to aim spears at an animal in order to kill it. It’s even more generally true, therefore, to understand, that a heart shot will kill any vertebrates: elk, pigs, fish, mammoths, crocodiles, etc. all have hearts. It is still more valuable to believe you raise your survival odds most when you do not kill fifty animals and use only the tasty cuts, but instead kill only ten and use every bit of every kill.

Wildlife conservation values favor a tribe’s long term survival. Once you begin to live by a belief that requires you to kill only as many animals as you need to feed your folk – and you formulate a myth to justify that belief for your tribe – you will outlast rival tribes that don’t conserve the game. Then, to instill the value of conservation into your  kids, you teach them to see game conservation as being the way of the Great Spirit and the time-honored way of your people.

Note also how mythmaking has kept on into modern times even in the West. Two very general ideas that we in the West value are the ideas of brotherly love and democracy. Thus, we speak respectfully of Jesus and of Ancient Athens.  

The truth is that Ancient Athens was not a model democracy. She bullied other, less powerful cities in the Delian League, pressuring and threatening those other cities into paying taxes to be used to build the Acropolis and other works. Those works likely weren’t praised by most of the visitors from smaller cities in the Delian League. They knew whose money had built those magnificent structures.

And to be a citizen in Ancient Athens one had to be male, Athens-born of two Athens-born parents, past 18, and to have served in the military. Most of those who walked around Athens in 400 B.C. weren’t citizens and never would be.  

Aristotle thought women were too flighty to be citizens. Socrates thought an election win proved nothing and qualified the winners for nothing. These men weren’t believers in, or supporters of, democracy as we think of it today.

Jesus was very kind to many in his times, but he showed questionable judgment sometimes. The buyers and sellers that he took a whip to in the temple were only doing what had been done there for decades and accepted by the majority of the Jews. And some of the miracles attributed to him later by his followers sound very much like many earlier myths of other tribes. (e.g. Zoroaster)

But many in the West today need myths as much as any of the tribes of the past. We cling to our ideas of Socrates and Jesus. We aren’t interested in hearing why our ideas about them might be mainly wishful thinking, and we generally don’t listen when someone tries to tell us his reasons for why he says they are. And our idea sets about both Ancient Greece and Ancient Christianity, I repeat, are at least half myth. The real people in their time were not as smart, strong, kind, or dedicated as we like to think they were.

In the meantime, what about the large general ideas of kindness and democracy?They have endured. Why? Because, I say again, over the long haul, they work. 

 

To sum up then, our most treasured values are very general beliefs which:

(a) guide most of our actions daily

(b) lead us to act in ways that enhance our tribe’s long term survival odds

(c) respond to the deepest traits of both physical and biological reality

(d) are difficult to explain in everyday, common sense terms

(e) often get turned into myths that are surrounded by emotion and superstition

(f)  are extremely resistant to amendment or replacement

                                            Sermon on the Mountain (artist: Arsene Robert)                                                      (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

            

                                                    Buddha image, Sri Lanka   (credit: Wikipedia)                                                             

12. Reiteration of the Argument So Far

To reiterate: in the first place, we do have principles that we rely on in practice to guide our behavior in the world. In the second place, these beliefs got deeply ingrained in the lore and behavior of a few tribes because they work: they enabled those who lived by them to survive in greater numbers over the long haul than was the case for competing tribes who didn’t have these beliefs .

In the third place, these beliefs were kept not because they guaranteed hunters or farmers success in every project, but because they improved their adherents’ long-term survival odds, as experience showed. Tribes who lived by them grew.

Fourth, tribes come, by trial and error, to imprint a few very general values, customs, etc. very deeply into their young by transforming those values into myths/religion. This very human trait of making myths is due to two facts: first, these very general ideas, values, etc. kept working, gradually, for centuries, enabling more members of tribes who believed in them to survive and flourish; second, the tribe’s lore as told by its shaman couldn’t explain in everyday terms why these values/principles worked. They needed myths to justify their culture.

Tribes that survived did so because, by trial and error, they made a few useful generalizations into tenets of the tribe’s religion. Useful generalizations then became surrounded by ritual, mystery, and emotion. Then, they would not be lost by the tribe, even if, for a while, the evidence happening around the tribe didn’t seem to support those generalizations. Over decades, sound values work.

“We find dry wood for the fire because wet wood will not burn. You can’t burn wet stuff, son. But we don’t worship dry wood like we do the elk. We conserve and respect the elk because they were given to our people by the Great Spirit.”

“The buffalo may be almost gone now, son, but the Great Spirit’s ways still rule. One day, white people will pay for how they treat His world.”

                                       All Saints Catholic Church (San Francisco, US)                                                                              Christian Religious Symbolism

                                                (credit: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons )

                                           Multiple species drinking at a waterhole                                                                       (credit: Pekandjelo Himufe, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                             (generalization: Game we hunt come here often;                                                                          we can kill game on paths leading to here.)

11. The Human Capacity for Forming Generalizations

These widely useful ideas called ‘generalizations’ deserve some more discussion. A generalization is a statement of what human minds see as a common pattern in many individual experiences. A generalization worth adhering to is one that guides a tribe’s behavior to better survival rates. Thus, it is an app for human brain-computers that helps them to sort sense data and memories of them. Really useful generalizations guide humans to sort incoming sense data quickly and accurately, then come to smart decisions promptly and act in timely ways to exploit opportunities and/or to avoid painful outcomes.

In the real world, once a generalization that works is learned by a tribe, it gives the tribe members guidelines to use to direct action so as to yield more success more often for longer periods of time than was the case for the tribe before they got this programming. If you know where every vertebrate’s heart lies, you can kill more game and so feed your folk. Then, over time, your tribe multiplies.

This whole process of generalization-spotting and behavior-designing does not guarantee its adherents anything on any single hunt. But it does inform their behavior patterns over the long haul in ways that improve their survival odds. It’s arguably the most valuable capacity we, with our minds, have over other animals. We’re better at formulating, using, and passing on, generalizations.  

All living things have at least some capacity to spot patterns in sense experiences and memories of them. Even an amoeba can tell when it must get out of direct sunlight or die. Life is only possible when this ability to categorize and sort sense data, then formulate generalizations, then use these generalizations to guide the creature’s action, is present in a creature via its genes, its culture, or both.

All living things have this aptitude. For most species, it is mostly acquired and passed on genetically. Humans are nimbler at adapting because in addition to an effective gene code, we also have culture.  

We humans can form, test, use, and teach generalizations to generation after generation of our young. To more limited degrees, wolves and chimps can hunt intelligently, and teach their skills to their young, but not with the perseverance, subtlety, or deadly effectiveness that humans do. Rules about hunting are rules for getting rich protein foods reliably. Such rules are precious; our forebears passed them diligently to the next generation for eons. Following this thought, we see our moral values are simply the most general of all our generalizations.

We should also note that our concepts, beliefs, etc. are not all either particular or general. They lie along a continuum from very particular (Memorize this watering hole path) to very general (Love this earth). In addition, the reasons behind them that we’re consciously aware of, and that we give to justify our adhering to them, tend to become more and more mystical/sacred as we move toward the higher generalizability end of this continuum of beliefs/concepts.

 

                                                Doe with fawn (credit: USFWS, via Wikimedia) 

                      Grizzly sow with cubs (credit: Yellowstone NP, US, via Wikimedia)

                            Wolf mother with cub (credit: Bob Haarmans, via Wikimedia)

                       (Generalization: mammal females will fight to protect their young)

 

                                                               Wapiti elk   (US)   (2009)                                                                                                   (credit: Kaldari, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                                           

10. The Usefulness of the Very General

I should emphasize here that general concepts and customs – if they work well to guide us in reality – are extremely important for a tribe to acquire and follow, though they take a while to learn. Consider an example: in a hunter-gatherer tribe, hunter knowledge is sacred. It is valuable to know and teach to our young that elk in our land almost always drink at a certain watering hole and visit that spot every day. Knowing the paths around it helps a hunter to feed the tribe.

Note also that it is even more general and valuable to know an elk can be killed by a spear shot into its heart. That works anywhere. And an elk’s heart is just to the left of the spot on the animal’s torso where its ribs curve together. Finding elk is good, but bagging one is better. Knowing where to aim helps to end the hunt quickly. Reduce the chances of one of your hunters getting hurt.  

It’s even more general and valuable for a hunter to grasp that this heart-spot principle applies to all vertebrates, including lions, lizards, deer, fish, birds, etc. Knowing the heart generalization enables hunters to kill much more game.

Over generations, it is still more valuable for a hunter to believe he has a sacred right to harvest only as much game as is needed to feed his tribe. In his tribe’s religion, the elk are seen as gifts from the Great Spirit. They must be killed, cooked, and eaten in moderation and reverence. Then, always, there will be elk to hunt. If He is respected, myth says, the Great Spirit gives generously.

Note again the quality of increasing generalizability here; note especially how very generalizable beliefs – if they keep proving true over generations – are valued more and more by any tribe that learns them.

“This watering hole may dry up, son, but the Great Spirit and our belief in Him will not change. He is the one who tells us to love the elk as our brothers who give their lives to sustain us. So, we kill elk with restraint and thanksgiving.”

 

                                              Woolly mammoths (artist's conception)

                                (Charles Robert Knight, via Wikimedia Commons)