Chapter 6   Part C 

The mechanism of cultural evolution being described here is profoundly disturbing; it deserves some digression. What is being said here is that humans often do behave in ways that seem irrational by purely Bayesian standards. Even in our time, some adults still spank kids. Some men still bully women. Some states still execute their worst criminals. Research, as well as careful observation and analysis of these and many other patterns of behavior, suggests strongly that they don’t work; these behaviors do not achieve the results at which they aim. In fact, they reduce the chances that we will achieve those results. These behaviors and the beliefs underlying them are exactly what is meant by the term “counterproductive”. Therefore, we must ask an acute question: “Why do we do them?” Which is to say: “Why do we, as rational humans who usually operate under a Bayesian belief-building system, hold on so obstinately, in a few areas of our lives, to beliefs that cause us to act in utterly irrational ways?”

 Electric chair (used to execute criminals) 

The reply is that we do so because our culture's most profound programming institutions –  the family, the schools, the media, etc. – continue to indoctrinate us with these values so deeply that once we are adults, we refuse to examine them. Instead, our programming directs us to bristle, and then defend our "good old ways", violently if need be. When deep moral beliefs, and the morés that they foster, begin, by one mechanism or another, to die out, some folk are even willing to die out with them. If the ensuing lessons are harsh enough, and if there is a reasonable amount of available time, sometimes the larger society learns, expels the reactionaries, and then adapts. But the process of deep social change is always difficult and fraught with hazards. "The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur." (A.N. Whitehead) (4.)

Alfred N. Whitehead 

It is also worthwhile to say the obvious here, however politically incorrect it may be. All of our obsolete but obstinate beliefs, moral values, morés, and behavior patterns did serve useful ends and purposes at one time. For example, in some, not all, early societies, women were programmed to be submissive, first to their fathers and brothers, then to their husbands. The majority of the men in such societies were far more likely, in purely probabilistic terms, to help to nurture the children of their socially-sanctioned marriages because they were confident that the children they had with these submissive women, and that they were being asked to help to nurture, were theirs. Biologically theirs.

Raising kids is hard work. In early societies, if both parents were committed to the task, the odds were simply better that those kids would grow up, marry, have kids of their own, and go on to program into those kids the same values and roles that the parents themselves had been raised to believe in. Other, non-patriarchal societies taught other roles for men and women and other designs for the family, but they simply weren’t as prolific over the long haul. Patriarchy isn’t fair. But it makes populations.

Magazine image of the American family (1950's) 

“Traditional” beliefs about male and female roles didn’t work to make people happy. But they did give some tribes numbers and, thus, power. They are obsolete today partly because child nurturing has been taken over to a fair degree by the state (schools), partly because no society in a post-industrial, knowledge-driven economy can afford to put half of its human resources into homes for the stagnant, bored, and dejected, and partly because there are too many humans on this planet now. Population growth is no longer a keenly sought goal because it no longer brings a tribe/nation power. But more on this matter later. It is enough here to say that all of our traditional values, mores, roles, etc. once did serve useful purposes. Many of them clearly don’t anymore, even though it is like pulling back molars without anesthetic to get the reactionaries among us to admit that many of their cherished “good, old ways” are usually just in the way in today’s world.   

       

Thus, in all areas of their lives, even those that they think of as “sacred”, “traditional”, and “timeless”, humans do change their beliefs, values, and patterns of behavior in the manner suggested by Bayesianism. We do always adopt a new view of reality and the human place in it if that new view is more coherent with the facts that we are observing and experiencing, and it gets us better lives. We’ve come a long way in the West in our treatment of women and minorities. Our justice systems aren't race or gender neutral yet, but they're much better than they were even one hundred years ago.

The larger point, however, can be reiterated. For deep social change, we do undergo the Bayesian decision process, but in the most final of senses. Sometimes what has to learn to adopt new beliefs, values, and mores isn’t the individual; sometimes it is a whole community or even nation.

The evidence proving that a given, deeply imprinted, old value and the behaviors that it fosters have become counter-productive and outmoded is often not even recognized by the ones who hold and live by that value. Rather, the evidence is recognized by the nation, or even by the whole human race, when those people, their values, and their way of life don't survive as well as their competitors do. Then, they slowly adjust, by modifying some of their ways, if that is possible in the available time, or they, their values, and their ways die out altogether. The El Molo are almost gone. The Canninites, Bo, Anastazi, and Beothuk are gone. Troy and Carthage are gone. None of this is fair. It’s just over.

Demasduit (one of the last Beothuk) 

In the more gradual adjustments that some societies have managed to achieve, it sometimes also happens that sub-cultures within a society die out without the whole tribe dying out, and thus some values and beliefs in the culture die out while the larger culture itself, after sustaining major trauma and healing, adjusts and goes on.    

          

For example, Hitler and his Nazi cronies ranted until their last hour that their "race" should fight on till they all went down in a sea of blood and flames because they had shown in the most vital of arenas, namely war, that they were weaker than the Russians. He sincerely believed his Nazi philosophy. In the same era, the Japanese cabinet and High Command contained members who were willing, eager, and adamant in arguing that the Japanese people should fight on, even in the face of hopeless odds. To do anything other than to fight on was literally inconceivable to these men. (Yukio Mishima's case was a curious last gasp of Japanese imperialism.) (5.) Fortunately, people who could face reality, learn, adapt, and then thrive eventually prevailed, in both Germany and Japan.

Yukio Mishima 

For centuries, human "nature" has not enabled humans to assess value systems by our cognitive abilities, and then adopt or drop these systems in that vacillating cognitive way. In our tribalism, we are built to see the values that we grew up with as being “right” and “good”. Humans are thus designed by evolution to fight to the death to defend and promulgate what we in the West call our “way of life”. When the ways of life of two different cultures come into confrontation, for whatever set of reasons, the war that often follows then decides which is the more vigorous way of life. The stronger society/culture goes on and expands; the weaker one fades and is absorbed. Or dies out. By this mechanism of cultural evolution, the total human culture-meme pool, for eons, has grown strong. For eons, this was good for the culture-meme pool, but bad for those caught up in the confrontations.   

A culture is just the software of a nation. A culture evolves and survives or else falls behind and dies in ways that are analogous to the ways in which a genome survives or dies. If a culture-program gets good practical results over generations, its carriers multiply; if not, they don't, and then they and it fade out of our species’ total culture pool. What was sad but true for centuries was that a society's fitness to survive was sometimes tested by famine or epidemic disease or natural disaster, but more often it was tested by war with one of its neighbors. For centuries, when a tribe, guided by its culture, was no longer vigorous enough to hold its territory against invasions by neighboring tribes, it fought and lost. Its men were killed, its women and children were carried off by the enemy; its way of life dwindled and was absorbed, or in some cases, died out altogether. Thus Joshua smote Hazor, the ancient Greeks crushed Troy, and the Romans crushed Carthage. Out of existence. The examples could go on. 

ruins of Carthage in modern Tunisia 

  

   So was Hitler right? Is war inevitable or even desirable? It depends. The question that we are left with is whether we will ever rise above our present, mainly war-driven system of cultural evolution. By reason or suffering or both, we are going to have to arrive at a new process for evolving culturally, which means continually adopting, in a timely way, constantly updated, more efficient values and the behavior patterns that are fostered by, and, therefore attached to, these values.

Changes in our environment always come. Some of them we even cause. We can cushion our way of life against them for a while, but over time, reality demands that we either evolve or die out.

But for now, I will leave the war digression and the socio-cultural mechanism of human evolution to be more thoroughly discussed in later chapters.

For now then, let’s settle for saying that this point that Bayesianism’s critics make about the way in which some areas of human behavior do not seem to be based on Bayesian types of calculations only seems at first to be an apt criticism. If we study the matter more deeply, we see that there are reasons for our apparently un-Bayesian attachments to some of our most counter-productive values and morés. They are just crude, upsetting, warmongering reasons -- design flaws that we are going to have to deal with because they have long since fallen out of touch with the physical reality that surrounds us (a physical reality that, in large part, we have created) and with the dilemma in which we find ourselves. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." (John Kennedy) (6.)

John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the U.S. 

Most importantly, for the purposes of this essay, we can see that the Bayesian model of human thinking still holds. Deeply held beliefs, values, and morés do get changed – sometimes even in whole nations – by the Bayesian mechanism. We do get rid of old beliefs and adopt new ones when the old ones are no longer enabling us to handle the physical and social realities that we are seeing before us. If the father and mother can’t drop ineffectual old beliefs and adopt new ones, then the son and daughter must, or else the tribe dies out altogether. In other words, we humans do learn, change, and adapt, both as individuals and as whole nations. Individuals can learn and change on most ordinary, practical matters, but by and large they won’t willingly alter their deepest, most general, core beliefs - especially the ones called “moral values”. But these do get changed when a whole nation gets taught a very large, painful lesson and then re-configures. And once in a long while, a stubborn culture dies out altogether. 

   

But more of these matters in later chapters. The first big criticism of Bayesianism has been dealt with. The Bayesian model, when it is applied at the tribal level of human behavior, can fully account for the apparently un-Bayesian behaviors of individuals. We now must move on to the second big criticism of Bayesianism, the theoretical one.

And perhaps this is the point at which I should also say that the next chapter is fairly technical, and it isn’t essential to my case. If you want to skip a chapter, my next chapter is one that you can skip and still not lose the train of thought leading to the conclusion of the whole argument.

Notes 

4. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima

6. www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/DOPIN64xJUGRKgdHJ9NfgQ.aspx