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)

                                   Widespread custom: handwashing  (Indonesia)  (2021)

                                (credit: Achmad Wibisono, via Wikimedia Commons) 

9. The Roots of Religion

Note also that very general values, etc. – if they get reliable results over the long haul of generations – are the ones most carefully saved and passed on in a tribe. This makes sense. Concepts of greater generality, if they have been proven to work, may be used as guides more often in more decision situations to enable the tribe to survive more of the time than is the case for their competitor tribes. But the reasons why they work are often too buried among reams of irrelevant sense data and sense data memories for tribe members to see the large patterns which show how these concepts, values, customs, and morés work. Thus slow-working concepts get turned, by cultural evolution, into religion in the tribe’s cultural programming package. Beliefs accepted without logical explanation.  

Or to put the matter another way, in the past, very general concepts, values, etc. became more and more deeply entrenched in the tribe’s myths if, in the first place, they worked to improve the tribe’s survival odds, but also, in the second place, if the reasons why they worked couldn’t be explained in everyday terms by the tribe’s shaman. These were so important that they needed to be retained and followed consistently in practice by tribe members. But to be retained in the tribe’s lore, they had to be gradually turned into beliefs that tribe members had to take on faith so that they were followed without question. Such beliefs, along with their attached behaviors, were assiduously adhered to, even during times when the beliefs and values might appear ineffective for a while.  

In this way, these pieces of wisdom became myths. Any tribe that didn’t have these very general, but effective, apps in some form in its culture, eventually fell behind its competition and died out.

For example, some early tribes gradually learned to value cleanliness. We didn’t have to know about germs to come to value cleanliness. It worked; it made more of the tribe survive longer so we kept it, even when we didn’t know why we kept it. Or in another example, cooking food. When a tribe first began to cook food, it probably happened just due to curiosity on the part of one tribe member who held a piece of meat on a stick over the campfire to see what would happen.

At first, most of the tribe likely didn’t think cooked meat was tasty. They were used to raw meat, and cooking it took longer. But the tribe that cooked its meat got sick less often. Soon, cooking became familiar for at least a few tribes, and these outbred other tribes with whom they competed, then drove them out of the area. Thus, over generations, hard experience, including loss of lives, turned some tribe’s ways toward washing and cooking as less clean tribes died out. 

                                        Ruins of Ancient Roman baths, Santorini, Greece

                                                         (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Over many generations, a few tribes came to adopt daily rituals of cleanliness and cooking because their cleaner ways led them to survive in greater numbers than their competition. Consciously, they believed their religion required these practices. Below conscious choice, their beliefs led them first, to outbreed, then, to outnumber, and then, to outfight less clean neighbors.

Hestia was the ancient Greek goddess of cooking and the home. Hygeia was the goddess of cleanliness. So, you cook and wash. Why? For the Ancient Greeks, it was because the gods said so. In time, for reasons they little understood, they defeated less clean tribes and took their land. Analogous beliefs existed in many cultures, including Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, etc. They bathed and cooked.  

All of this occurred even though likely none of those involved knew anything about germs. (“Invisible little animals! Absurd!”) In this way, effective beliefs and customs get embedded in culture by becoming myths. Like Hestia.

In short, tribes that survive keep alive the beliefs and customs that keep them alive. Especially revered are the very general beliefs that significantly improve a tribe’s survival rates over the long haul of generations.

On the other hand, tribes whose models of reality become obsolete die out. For complex reasons, the Mycenaeans, Beothuk, Anasazi, and others are gone.

         

                                      Handwashing at school in Ghana, Africa   (2021) 

                                                  (credit: Amuzujoe, via Wikipedia) 

 

                                               Hunting buffalo using a buffalo jump (1892)

                                                        (a useful hunting custom) 

                                (artist: Ernest E. Thompson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

8. Humans’ Perceptions of Changes to Their Culture/Way of Life

Note that, in society in general, the process of cultural change is little discussed or understood. This is because in the struggle by a tribe to survive better than its competition, tribe members are typically unaware of why they think with the concepts that they do, follow the customs they follow, and worship as they do. If asked to explain their way of life, they say things like “we’ve always done it this way” or “our gods decreed it”. We must get past that chauvinism. 

For most people, the reasons for why their culture is as it is aren’t opaque: those reasons are more like invisible. Like water is to fish.   

Small updates to cultures occur in subtle ways that can only be seen when one takes an objective view of a lot of different tribes of people. Or to put the matter another way, we can say that in any tribe, updates are happening, gradually, all the time. Old ‘ways’ get replaced in people’s daily lives by new ‘ways’ that work more efficiently. Societies do update their programming, usually gradually. The core concepts called ‘values’, however, are almost, but not quite, unchangeable.

“We’re knapping flint into blades this way now, Dad. Sister discovered it. Yeah, I miss the old days, too. But this way is better. We knap flint this way now. ”

On the other hand, major updates to a culture are scary for any tribe, and most of these tend to happen only after major shocks: famines, epidemics, or wars. A big update only occurs, of course, if at least some of the tribe members survive the shock that is calling for the update, and even then, systemic change is hard.

To be clear, we should reiterate that for millennia, human evolution has been driven by culture, not by genes. Our genome doesn’t adapt to changes in our environment nearly as nimbly as our cultural codes do. When climate change caused catastrophic flooding for some of our forebears, they didn’t develop gills over the next hundred generations. They learned ways to build homes on stilts or boats, and fishing replaced hunting in two or three generations.

We learn to handle changes in the world around us, we keep what we learn, and we pass it on to our kids. With pain, sometimes. But we’re good at this ‘cultural change’ trick. Much better at it than any other species. For better or worse, we’ve become culture driven creatures because culture enables us to evolve and adapt to change more nimbly, profoundly, and effectively than our genome can.  

                                                Teddy Roosevelt on an elephant hunt 

                                            (white man learning new hunting skills) 

                                    (credit: Edward van Altena, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                   

 

                                                   Boy eating cooked termites (Zimbabwe, 2016)

                                                        (credit: Cecil Dzwowa, via Wikimedia) 

                                      

7. The Society-Species Analogy

A better understanding of the Moral Realist model of society can be reached by considering an analogy between species with their genomes and societies with their cultures.

Every species is being tested by its environment all the time. Species gradually, over generations, undergo changes to their genomes so that they change their coloring or grow taller, etc. as they adapt to changes in their surroundings. Analogously, every tribe is being tested by its environment all the time. Tribes gradually, over generations, undergo changes to their cultures so that they change their beliefs and customs: they learn to eat a new kind of fruit or hunt with a new weapon, in response to changes in their environment.  

Sometimes a tribe’s way of getting food gets tested when a species of plant the tribe has gathered for generations gets wiped out by an invasive blight. Sometimes the tribe’s way of bunching into a tight circle to face predators gets tested when a new species of large predator migrates into the area. However, more often, the testing comes in subtle, nearly invisible ways over generations.

Like obsolete parts of a genome go silent when they no longer provide any useful physical traits for a species, so obsolete parts of a culture get cut, sometimes in a generation, when they no longer guide the tribe to any useful behaviors. For example, knowing how to handle horses was a basic part of many cultures all over the world for centuries. For men in particular, learning horse skills was just part of growing up. Today, however, horse knowledge is all but gone for the vast majority of people in all tribes. Why? Because, in this era, few need it.

                                                       Boy with horse (India, 2013)

                                              (credit: Sidheeq, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Note also that, as is the case with genes, each part of a cultural code is retained if and only if it works, i.e. it enables the people of the tribe who live by that culture to get food, raise kids, fight off invaders, handle epidemics, etc. High quality code enables a tribe to respond effectively to the challenges of life. 

Furthermore, it integrates the activities it teaches into a working package that enables the tribe that lives by that code package to survive and adapt at least as successfully as neighboring tribes against whom that tribe competes. 

Any major part of a cultural code that, perhaps quite suddenly, gets tested and fails to work – because of code decay over long periods of inactivity of that part, or because of changes in the environment, or because of the tribe being invaded – must be updated to handle the tribe’s new reality, or the tribe will die out.

“They kill us with those bow things that fire the little spears they call ‘arrows’. We must learn how to make those things, or we’re going to be wiped out.”

“I know these fruit are new to us, but I’ve seen the chimps eating them. I think they’re safe for us. Fruits that chimps eat usually are. And these are so tasty!”

Thus, by cultural variation and natural selection, instead of gene variation and natural selection, cultural evolution is going on all the time. And occasionally, a war, a famine, or an epidemic – a major challenge – culls a less fit tribe and its culture completely from the total set of human cultures on this planet.

This picture of tribes and their cultures is true almost all the time in all aspects of culture but for a few core beliefs which are universal. Note what I imply here: all tribes have a few core beliefs that keep being reaffirmed in every era. In English, these are called moral values. They are essential to a tribe’s survival. The rest of our programming changes and evolves over time.

What those essential core values are, what they look and sound like, is the point of this essay. We’re coming to them. Hang in there.  

                                 

                                          Chimp eating fruit (Serengeti Park, 2017) 

                                        (credit: Frank Schwichtenberg, via Wikimedia)