Chapter 11            Part D

         It is interesting to note at least once in this book the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies which seems to have reached equilibrium always contain a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted worldview, values, and behavioral morés. These people and their disciples are often the young, which tells us that adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society.

   However, what is more important to understand is that many people in the rest of society see these new thinkers and their followers as delinquents, and only a few see them as great men. What is even more important to see is that the numbers involved on each side really don't matter. What does matter is whether the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers and whether the ideas work, which is to say, whether the followers then live better than the rest of the society.

     A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many of its citizens may bitterly resent the means by which it does so and may do all within their power to quell the process. Often they can, but not always. For Western society, until the more effective features of its Classical values were integrated with its more respectful, humane Christian ones, Europeans just did not love or support thinkers with ideas and mores that focused on the life of this material world before death. 

    

      Philosophers, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are, by their very nature, eccentric. They don't support the status quo, they threaten it. But the dreamers are the ones who move the rest of us forward in a timely way toward newer, better ways of doing things. They only really flourish in a society that is not just tolerant of, but proud of, its eccentrics. In a truly dynamic society, cleverness is melded with kindness. In short, European culture needed a thousand years to even begin to meld all of its values into a single smoothly functioning whole or as the saying goes to “get its act together".

 A society, to survive, must use resources and grow in the times when it has opportunity to do so or it will lose out later when events in the physical universe grow harsher or when the competition gets fiercer. How do new ways of doing things become established ways of doing things in a society? One means is by war, as has been mentioned, but the peaceful mechanism can work, and it is seen when the people who use the new ways are allowed to do so mostly undisturbed, and then they just live better.

    Then, in a society that values tolerance, other citizens will by their own choice begin to try out and take up the new ways. Gradually, more and more of them will choose not to be left behind in what is obviously becoming a stagnating cultural backwater. This market-driven way is the way of peaceful evolution. Worldwide, we have taken a long time to reach it, but we are, as a species, almost there.

             Renaissance pocket watch 

        Thus, a more tolerant Renaissance society rose out of the new ideas that melded respect for the individual and even exaltation in the creative potential of the human condition with an equal respect for the inherent worth and rights of other citizens. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

   In Renaissance thinking, a man could be patriotic, moral, and independent. The ideas of Greece and Rome and of Christianity could be blended in a way that was not impracticable or inconsistent. The new system of ideas worked, and it was exciting because it was empowering.

replica of Gutenberg's printing press

   Even though the growing focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (such as the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, etc.), these were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was perfectly clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by reason, or more accurately, to live by the most reasonable interpretations of the new, scientific, physical-world-centered world view that people of the new era could articulate. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the “Enlightenment”.

Duc d'Enghien at the Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years War 

        To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church's traditional views were deficient in any way, or that the views of the scientists like Galileo were better ones. But decades of experience in which people who lived by the ways of individualism, science, and inductive reasoning outperformed those who lived by the old ways (based on blind obedience to authorities whose authority came from texts that were not to be analyzed or criticized) gradually won over more of the citizens in every new generation.                               

      William Harvey

       Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval types of thinkers – but they worked. They enabled this "enlightened" sub-culture within society to solve problems (e.g. navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and especially make deadlier and deadlier weapons). This new sub-culture within Europe's nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old church and aristocracy could not match. As was noted above, Science keeps getting new followers because the miracles of Science can be replicated over and over again; Science works.

Antoine Lavoisier with his wife Marie

  

      This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Newton, Harvey, Faraday, Lavoisier, etc. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of the people who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats. Some worked out compromises, and some merely got old and died, still resisting the new ways and preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences. The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

       Other societies which also operated under world views that portrayed humans as having little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and in all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, around the planet, was the one which we call “scientific”, the Enlightenment view.

Chapter 11              Part C 

conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity (Rubens) 

            What followed, in the West, was the rise of the early Christian Church. Did Christianity grow strong because it offered a way out of the ennui of life in the late Roman Empire? Or did it just happen to coincide with that ennui? All that is certain is that the decline of the Romans' old beliefs and the rise of the monotheistic, compassionate Christian ones happened at the same time. To the Romans of Constantine's day, it all just seemed "right", as needed social changes do. All the peoples of the Empire began then to built a society based on a more spiritual view of the universe, a view under which material rewards and sensual pleasures were to be disregarded. Eternal salvation was what mattered.

               

       Under this worldview, Earth was the center of the universe, specially created by God to house man, His most beloved creation. But man’s role was not to enjoy life to whatever degree he could (as the ancients had) in this garden turned, by man's sin, to a barren plain. Man was here to praise God and gratefully accept all that God sent man’s way, all joy and all suffering. Getting ready for the next life after death was what mattered. This sounds like a backward step, and in many ways it was. 

               

         But Christianity added some useful ideas of its own. Each Christian was taught to act humanely toward all other people, to behave honestly and compassionately in his dealings with them, and to commit in a deeply personal way to Christ's kind of faith and his compassionate way of life. Christians learned to live most of the time as if being kind to all other humans was a desirable, moral way to be, even if any particular act of kindness might not get us any rewards in this lifetime. 

        This was a huge change from the ways of the slave-owning, gladiator-loving, sensual, militaristic, mid-Empire Romans. Why the Church later got to be so cynical as to conduct wars and own property, while the individual serf was not to even contemplate such things, unless the pope told him to make war on the heathens, became vague. But the grip of Christianity's good ideas was so strong that the hypocritical authorities, for centuries, found ways to manage ordinary people's perceptions around the Church's inconsistencies.

For twelve centuries, the Church's explanations of the whole universe and human experience in it were adequate to develop and retain a large following for the Church and the values and morés it endorsed, which was all that mattered. Christian communities, over and over, enjoyed long terms of growing prosperity because they were stable, even though they were not very progressive by modern standards. After the chaos that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire, stability meant a great deal.

               

         The behaviors these values produced had seemed effete to most of the citizens of the middle Roman Empire. What was this "Crysteanism" that was stealing their children into its cult! The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers. But that system, which gave legal status to all humans (even serfs had rights), mutual support through all tribulations (aid during war, famine, and plague), and honesty in all dealings (God was always watching!) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. More and more people, especially young people, became dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life, one that offered material comfort, physical pleasure, and little else. Meaninglessness.

  Christianity offered something else, a more spiritual worldview, one that felt personal, and a way of life that made sense because it was what God had clearly said he wanted of us and because, over the long term, it fostered a kinder, more inclusive society. As contemptible as Christianity seemed to the mid-Empire Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as Christians were fed to lions, it nevertheless assimilated the old Roman system under which it had arisen. Its ideas didn’t just sound nice; over millions of people and hundreds of years, they worked.

               

       The loss of much of the Roman's practical skill, especially their administrative abilities, along with a lack of any strong form of humanism, kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until the Renaissance. Then these more worldly values were re-born due to a number of factors too familiar to scholars (i.e. the fall of Constantinople, the rise of Science, the discovery of the America’s, etc.) to need further description. Or perhaps, in another view, we could say that the Christian way, which asked every citizen to respect every other citizen, built Western society's levels of overall economic efficiency up to a critical mass that made the flowering of Western civilization called the “Renaissance” inevitable. The new hybrid values system worked. Greek knowledge, Roman practical skills, in a Christian social mileu.

Hanseatic League city of Lubeck 

               

         Western culture finally integrated its most fundamental values systems, Classical and Christian. It took over a thousand years for people who lived lives that focused on worldly matters, instead of only on seeking salvation in the world after death, to be seen as moral citizens in the eyes of the community.

   To be clear, we should also say that the Renaissance artists, scientists, merchants, and explorers gradually came to see their own worldly achievements as ways of glorifying God. It just took them a long time to convince the majority of other citizens that making useful, profitable, and beautiful things in this material world could be a good way of living for a true Christian. 

   However, handling the physical world, by Commerce, Science and Art did gradually become acceptable as a way to serve God. The world views, values, morés and behavior patterns, i.e. the total culture package of Christianity, with the value it placed on every individual human being, was finally integrated in a functional way with the knowledge, abstract and practical, that had been passed down from the ancient Greeks and Romans. That breakthrough unleashed a deluge. Individuals who defied convention began to prove that they could be unbelievably valuable to the greater community, even if, at first, they did upset people. 

Chapter 11           Part B 

          Therefore, in Western history, the next important world view is the Roman one. Operating under it, people became even more practical, more focused on physical power, and less interested in, or even aware of, ideas considered for their own sake. This feeling expressed itself among many of the early Romans simply and directly in an out-and-out hatred for the ways of the Greeks; the truth was that the Romans borrowed much from the Greeks, especially in theoretical knowledge, but they loathed having to admit it. 

Roman coliseum around 80 A.D. (Note the staged sea battle.)

          The Romans in their heyday no longer feared the gods in the way that the ancient Greeks and the Romans’ own ancestors once had. As the Republic faded and the Empire took over, the Romans went so far from that way of thinking that they lost much of the Greek, especially the Athenian, capacity for the things called “abstract” – wonder, idealism, pure intellectual speculation, and flights of imagination. The Roman built their state to a large degree on Athenian-style, democratic principles, values, and behaviors, but they also, more like the Spartans, loved results and power, not speculation.

Pont du Gard: Roman aqueduct (in present day France) 

          It is tempting here to see in the Romans a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and the ways of the Spartans. This would be an example of Hegel’s famous dialectic. One way of thinking, along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows and then an opposite way of thinking rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way.  The two struggle, interact, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not like a compromise because it is a new way with a life of its own. 

         The people who are born into the new way are not aware of using some elements from one philosophy and some from the other. The new way is simply their way, and the supporting ideas that are added to the new system make it seem like a neat, smooth, seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system always spiraling up toward greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

               

        It is tempting. It’s a fairly simple model and with a little stretching it can be made to at least seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is, to put the matter bluntly, simply too simple. The Roman way of thinking and way of life did contain some of the Athenian ideas and morés and some of the Spartan ones, but there was too much else going on in the thinking and living of the Romans for us to be satisfied with Hegel’s model. Human societies are subtler than that. What makes more sense is to look at each society and see what its world view, values, morés, and behavior patterns were like and how they coordinated in the lives of the people who operated under them to produce a whole culture and way of life that met the survival demands of the time.

               

          The point is that the model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as all encompassing as Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model is because the process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit that model. Rather, the real process of human cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution by genetic variation and natural selection that underlies the rest of the much larger, non-human, living world.

    Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the mechanism that Hegel describes. In the past, conditions in the non-living world like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down or opened up opportunities. Then, life forms, usually but not always, moved in opportunistically. In addition, odd combinations of genes sometimes then came together in ways that most models of evolution would only have given a very low probability of occurring. Life spreads forward across time and space not like a chain or a road or a ladder, but like a bush branching and bifurcating over and over onward from that primal trunk started from a few cells long ago.

          The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for cognitive attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But life isn’t that neat, and it is in the realm of the living that human culture must exist. The model that we are going to explore here can do what we need it to do. It can give us enough insights into how human cultures work, and what right and wrong are, for us to then be able to build a moral code, and that is all we need. But let’s return to our main line of thought.

       The Romans put more practicality, discipline and efficiency into the Athenian values and morés. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great size and engineering sophistication, by employing mathematical principles that they had learned from the Greeks, mainly the Athenians, and the Romans' own neighbors, the Etruscans (or Tuscans). Similarly, in other areas, such as war, law, medicine, and agriculture, the Romans achieved practical successes unmatched in their times.

Tuscan Wrestlers (from a painting in a tomb in Tarquinia, Italy)  

       In addition, it is important to note that the Roman republic, as cruel as it could be to outsiders, was dearly loved by Romans. They were citizens of a democracy. They were like family. They knew that they deserved to rule because there had never been any state like Rome. It had been chosen by the gods to be specially unique, gifted, and destined. The Aeneid said so. Thus, the Roman worldview, by a direct chain of logic, assigned to the Romans the most important role that had ever existed in the history of the world. Their gods did not rule them and their universe with cruelty and capriciousness. Instead, the Romans, for generations, were very sure of where they stood: the gods (and later, God) loved Rome.

Ancient Rome (as depicted by T. Cole, American artist) 

    This worldview produced a patriotism that had an Athenian kind of character to it because it was built around a model that gave democratic rights and duties to all Roman citizens, or at least all “true” citizens, namely adult Roman males who owned property. There were aristocratic families, as had been the case in almost all previous states, and these folk were used to the idea of privilege. But there were also plebeians, and they too were full citizens with rights to vote, run for office, have a fair trial if they were charged with a crime, and so on. How could you not love such a country? What would you not endure for her? 

   The slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, but the Romans thought that this situation was just part of the natural order.  This view, by the way, that the superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals did not originate with the Romans. It was Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons very similar to the reasons that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people just knew without thinking about it that their country’s system and the patriotism that it fostered, patriotism that had been displayed over and over by them, their fellow citizens, and their ancestors, made them so superior that they deserved to be the masters of others from inferior cultures.

        A society built on slaves and materialism, and restrained only by a warrior’s code of discipline and loyalty, had to collapse when the warriors ran out of territories to conquer and sank into boredom, sloth, envy, and internal strife. In other words, the cultural code was bankrupt. (“We have all we and our forbears ever dreamed of. What do we do now?”)By the time that they realized Rome really could fall, it was too late. 

late Roman decadence (as conceived by artist T. Couture) 

        Note how the decline of the Romans' values system, the laziness of the later Romans about ideals of citizenship and honesty, presaged that fall. Note also how we today understand intuitively the crucial roles that values play in the shaping of citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of the state that they are citizens of. We know of this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. When the Romans became hypocritical and corrupt, we say, the collapse of their state became inevitable. (This idea is common among modern scholars, but it comes from Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still the most famous and respected of all time.) (3.)   

        But values and their consequences are not obvious; the relationship between a society's moral values and its survival has eluded analysis for too long. In this twenty-first century, we must do better.

Notes 

3. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.htm

Chapter  11          World Views, Old

Part A

               

         Every society must work out and articulate a view of the physical universe, a way of seeing the world, a way which then becomes the base on which the society's values system is to be built. This is no minor matter; while philosophers may dally over the questions in a theoretical way, real folk have to deal with just life. They have to have some code in place that tells them how to act. World view, values, and behaviors must form a coherent thinking and doing system under which each individual can be empowered to make decisions and take action, and the whole society can efficiently operate and so can survive in its always-changing, always-demanding environment.

    All societies in some deep way know this, even though societies up until our time have worked out their world views, values, mores, etc. and lived their lives almost entirely in unselfconscious ways. But people everywhere have always placed great stock in their society’s model of how the material universe is constructed, how it operates, and where it is going. They know that their world view must be used as their guide when they are trying to decide whether an act that feels "right" (i.e. moral) is "right" (i.e. practicable).

 

          So let us keep moving forward in this task of building a new, universal moral code, but let us also move with all the prudence we possess. What is at stake is everything. Before we begin building a new universal moral system, we need to get our thinking into the necessary mindset by considering at least the most salient peaks in the histories of some of the societies of the past, in order to see how systems of world views, values, and behaviors coordinate and evolve.

           G.W.F. Hegel 

     In this chapter, Philosophy students will notice similarities between some aspects of what I have to say and the philosophy of Hegel, and I admit freely that there are similarities. But I have some major points of disagreement with Hegel which I will explain along the way in this chapter. For those readers who are not Philosophy students, I also should say here that even when I bring him up I am going to give only a very superficial version of my way of understanding Hegel. If you find the ideas presented here at all interesting, you really should give Hegel a try. His writing is difficult, but not impossible, and he also has been interpreted by some disciples who write more accessibly.(1.) But in this book, let’s now get back to our analysis of the world views, values, morés, and behavior patterns that are discernible in the history of some of the societies of the West. 

artist's conception of Trojans dragging wooden horse into Troy

        For an instance, let's consider the very ancient Greeks, the ones who came long before Socrates’ time. They portrayed the universe as an irrational, dangerous place. For these people, the gods who ran the universe were capricious, violent, and cruel. This is a quick way of describing these people's world view, in other words. Under their worldview, human beings could only cringe fearfully under the gods' testy humors. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, Hades, Athena, Apollo, et al were all lustful, jealous, cruel, and unpredictable, and Zeus especially had thunderbolts while Poseidon could inflict earthquakes.

            

         But as Greek culture advanced, this world view evolved. By the Periclean Age, many Greek stories and plays portrayed humans challenging the gods. At the same time, the Greeks evolved their system of values towards a braver, smarter lifestyle. They began to try to explain the world in ways that left room for the possibility of people understanding and manipulating at least some of the events in the world around them. Once their world view included that possibility, they did begin to create action plans that empowered humans to cause, hasten, or forestall events in the physical world. They tried out the daring action plans and some worked. More and more daring plans followed. (Edith Hamilton articulates these ideas well.) (2.)

Aristophanes, Greek comic playwright 

     It is important to see that human individuals and groups will normally not attempt any action which they believe is not appropriate for humans. In fact, such actions were usually labeled as taboo. Ancient tribes who randomly happened upon an action which seemed contrary to, or outside of, what was seen as appropriate for humans in their worldview only grew upset and fearful. Whether the action got promising results or not, the only thing most of these people learned or wanted to learn in such situations was how to avoid putting themselves in the situation again. They sought to avoid it for fear of bringing divine wrath down upon themselves. Once in a long while, a daring genius might question his society’s worldview and imagine and act on an alternative one, but he or she often paid dearly for such audacity – by being ostracized or put to death.

               

 Euripides, Greek tragic playwright 

            However, changes in a society’s world view and then in the society’s values and morés can also evolve more gradually, helped on by whole bunches of lesser geniuses. By the Golden Age of Athens, writers, artists, and philosophers were attempting all kinds of things that only a few centuries earlier would have been literally unthinkable. Their worldview had evolved to allow for at least some degree of human free will. The works of Euclid, Plato, Euripedes, Archimedes, and Aristotle could only have been produced under a world view in which a person could conceive of actions challenging the orthodox beliefs of the tribe and even the forces of the universe, even though the challenge might succeed only once in a hundred tries. Sadly, also, of course, at the same time the Spartans were evolving their society, the perfect military state. The clash called the Peloponnesian War was inevitable and Athens lost. A few years later, the Macedonians out-Spartanned the Spartans, and then in a generation or two, of course, the Romans ended the matter by conquering them all.

        Spartan warrior 

Notes 

1.Fox, Matthew Allen; "The Accessible Hegel"; Humanity Books;    2005.

2.Hamilton, Edith; "Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and    Heroes"; Warner Books, pp. 16-19; 1969. 

Chapter 10              Part B 

  On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we give up war, will we grow weak and sickly, and then die out, like the deer on the island that has no predators? There have been experts who said so, flat out. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They are ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it. (2.)       

  However, there are some pieces of evidence which support the belief that humans may learn to live, multiply, and spread without constantly fighting one another. One of the best lies in how, in every society, there are some people that show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiating rather than by violence. Implicitly, they are then acknowledging that they do not believe any one world view or set of values (even the ones that they learned as children themselves) necessarily leads to the only appropriate, viable, “right” way of life. From the view of the social sciences, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members that can be found in all societies assign a higher priority to the lives of other humans than to the reducing of the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that are alien to them.

        modern British school-children 

  Another bit of evidence to note is the vigor that is evident in pluralistic societies, ones that have succeeded in synthesizing (which is different than compromising) several cultures. Merging ways of life can work. Britain is an excellent example here. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Danes, and lately people from all of the countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. Who calls him or herself a “Brit” these days may show genetic and cultural features from any of these tribes and/or nations.

               

        Furthermore, we can see that after a war, people's living patterns and values change in major, radical ways, for the vanquished, of course, but often for the victors as well, ways not anticipated by the planners on either side. When I was a boy in the 1950's in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my town, and "sushi" and "dojo" were just words in a novel. By the time that I was a young man, these things could be found all over my town, one whose men had just won a war against Germany and Japan a few years before. 

    modern public school students in Canada 

      Today, Germany and Japan are two of the strongest economies in the world and Edmonton schools contain students from almost every culture on earth. It seems so stupid now that fifty-five million people had to die so that the Japanese could learn to open up to the ways of the gaijin, and I could learn to love and trust people named "Kobayashi". 

       We were the victors in that war yet today we have embraced many of the technologies and morés of the vanquished. We can integrate. The trick in the future will be to bring about these changes on both sides by planned interactions in commerce, sport, science, art, and finally intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. Hard but not impossible. In this age of the internet and the global village, getting easier by the day.

        One way or another, changes keep happening in every human culture, whether the changes originate from within or without. But changes in ways of living aren't always accompanied by people hurting and killing each other. And given that, in the end, we all must answer with our cultural codes and morés to the same material reality, there may even be reason to hope that peace-loving people, if they can become clever and motivated enough, may prove more fit for long term survival than are the war-mongers. From these and many other observations of the open-mindedness, adaptability, and improvisational capacities found in major segments of all societies, we can draw hope for peace.

               

        Further discussion of whether war can be avoided or at least reduced in destructiveness and duration is, however, premature at this point. Even this most pressing and distressing of issues must be subsumed under our discussion of world views, a discussion which is yet to come in my argument. But a few words on the larger picture are appropriate here.

               

       In an objective analysis, even though all values are tentative for humans, no values should be called "arbitrary". Yes, our world, including the parts of it that we make, is always changing, so our values must also. But new, different values and morés are not arbitrary, i.e. they are not all of equal merit, because they do not all lead to the same survival odds for a nation or the human species. Some new values, and the morés they foster, work well, some badly. Some are moving society in an unhealthy direction entirely.

        Values have consequences that are too crucial for us ever to describe those values by a term as casual-sounding as the word "arbitrary". The whole point of formulating a universal moral code would be to guide us all so that we can clearly see the new patterns of energy flow emerging in our environment and then devise new ways of living that will give our species the best chances of surviving over the long haul. We have to learn to live consciously and by reason. If we don't find a code of values that is reasonable and easy to keep in mind, the lessons of History and the trends of technology combine to say that we are doomed to scorch or poison our planet – or both. 

 

         As I have said above, the wide variety of the morés and values systems of the societies of this planet has led some social scientists and philosophers to say every system of values is "correct" in its own cultural context. But this is a dangerous and false conclusion to draw. These people have the best of intentions: they want to encourage us all to feel tolerant toward one another's cultures and to get along. But as noted above, their moral code is not assertive enough. It aims to fill the gap left after they have deconstructed - with a kind of cerebral, detached amorality - all of the traditional moral codes.

               

        However, humans need strong, affirmative guidelines to live by. What the moral relativists seem to be aiming to produce is a cynical, judgmental outlook that aims to be above critique because in the realm of morals it affirms nothing. But real humans have to make decisions in real life. We need a model of what is right that has a sense of direction and purpose to it. In the analogous situation for scientists themselves, real scientists couldn't do science, i.e. could not do research, without models and theories which guide them to plan their experiments and studies. Without a model of the phenomena being studied, a model that can be used to guide his research, a scientist would be a mere buffoon wandering among rooms full of gauges, beakers, and computers, with no clue as to what he was doing there.    

               

         The practical consequence that moral relativism leads to is a resigning of this planet to the bullies. When the tolerant citizens can say only what they are against and never what they are for, the bullies with their “will to power” will get their way, by trickery, promises, threats, or blood. The Western Allies in the 1930's did not call themselves "moral relativists", but the moral relativist way of thinking was already loose in the universities of Europe, and the consequence was that most of the leaders of the nations who might have stopped Hitler and Mussolini had no stomach for such action. In fact, many prominent citizens in the West quite admired the fascist states and leaders and said so openly. FDR himself said he was deeply impressed by what Mussolini accomplished.(3.) The consequences of this indecision were WWII and the deaths of fifty-five million people. Parallel situations abound in the History texts right into our own time.

       Benito Mussolini 

               

       The core of the problem for the moral relativists of the West is that other nations' cultures may very well be telling them that they must spread their culture until it encompasses all of humanity and that democracy is a dangerous delusion. Their belief system requires that they conquer, subdue, or eliminate altogether, the other cultures of the world. And aggressive cultures have always existed. Democracies have to be motivated to face them, if we are to have a world in which we can discuss any options at all. (I will discuss more completely why pluralistic democracy really is a wiser, more strategic social design than totalitarianism in coming chapters. For now, let's return to developing the main argument.)   

               

       We have to have a far more assertive code than moral relativism offers. Furthermore, such a code will only be acceptable to most people in the science-driven world of today if it integrates our world view - i.e. our best models of  reality - with the code's guidelines. Even under this constraint, many different value and moré systems are possible, and many of those that are possible could be used to equip a given human society to survive and flourish. 

       However, some values clearly don’t work. In today's world, values which teach citizens the virtues of war or, alternatively, of moral inertia are among the least survival-oriented. Again, then, I must reaffirm: we have to find that third way. Not a return to one of the traditional moral codes, but not moral relativism either. 

       A universal moral code would not end the diversity of cultures on this planet; it would simply give people in those different cultures a means by which they could settle disputes between cultures without them having to go to war. Then, by art, sport, commerce, intermarriage, etc., in two or three generations, the integration of cultures could and would take place. The theory is sound: we could build one world, beautiful, vigorous, evolving, and peaceful.  

       artist's conception of a utopian future 

               

       For now in this essay, however, we must return to our main line of thought. 

      We had arrived at the step in our reasoning which states that all of a society’s morés/approved behaviors are implicit in its world view. Now we can move on – still by small steps and gradual degrees – to examine the question of whether any world view, along with its concomitant sets of values, morés, and behaviors, can be shown by logic and evidence to be so directly derived from the deep principles of material reality itself that it deserves to be adopted by the whole human race as a beginning point for a new moral system.  

Notes 

2.http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/may-jun/cimbala.htm

3. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini

Chapter   10           World Views And The War Digression

              

Part A 

     Protoplasm moves forward through time only in certain limited ways. If a branch of the living community of the earth strays outside of those shifting boundaries, it is cut off from the energy flow patterns of the planet’s ecosystem, it shrivels, and it dies. The extinction, from the Earth's perspective, of a species, a culture, or an individual is neither sad nor ironic nor comic: it is simply over. Humans cannot, even in complex, nation-sized groups, ignore this truth for long.

               

          ruins of ancient Beersheba 

       Recognizing that survival, if it is to happen at all, must happen in material reality, not the dimension of the forms or the soul or cyber-space, all societies, including pre-historic ones, historical ones, and contemporary ones, have always tried to integrate their value systems – the codes by which their citizens choose and carry out their actions in all phases of living – with their society’s world view. Thus, a society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favorable part of the streams of the energy flowing around it. A society's worldview, its way of picturing reality, gives rise directly to its values system, thence to its morés and behavior patterns, and finally, to its survival.

               

         A “worldview” is a way of understanding or organizing all of our sensory perceptions, memories of sensory perceptions, and categories of perceptions of the material universe in which we exist. Every society that survives arrives, by the consensus of generations of its people, at a way of organizing the people’s perceptions of their universe (and the roles of humans in that universe) which the people in that society perceive as being correct, appropriate, and natural.

     Whether a worldview precedes, parallels, or follows a set of values entailed by that worldview is difficult to say. Worldviews and the values systems and morés that go with them are subtly and inextricably intertwined. A change in a society's worldview, the values shifts that the change leads to, and the behaviors that the new values foster, probably all arise in starts here and there as one large complex in a nation's ways of thinking, talking, and living – its culture, in other words.

               

      Aztec calendar

        But in any case, a society’s worldview, if it is analyzed closely, can be thought of as a condensed version of, and guide to, that society’s values. In conjunction with their basic view of what the universe is, a society's people design systems of values and then behaviors which they teach to their children as being “good” and “right”. Note the two meanings of the word "right" here: "right" in the sense of "accurately describing things in the material world" ("Is that thermometer right?"), and "right" in the sense of being moral ("Do the right thing."). In a close analysis, this ambiguity is not ambiguous at all. We want deeply to believe that our idea of moral rightness is consistent with the way that the universe really works.   

               

     Another digression is in order here. It is a large digression, but it has been lingering at the edge of this essay for several chapters already. It is such an important one that I am going to indulge in it for a few pages.

      If we strive to be rigorously logical and objective at this point, we can also become very discouraged. Every society has its own worldview, its own values, and its own morés (accepted patterns of behavior). The natural trend for human societies seems to be for each of them to keep moving ahead with its way of life while simultaneously diverging from, and becoming more and more alien to, all other societies and their ways of life.

      Does an analysis of human value systems entail the corollary that we can never arrive at a set of values that would be good and right for all humans? Will people in the world's many different human societies continue to be loyal to incompatible sets of values? Even worse, will the citizens of the world's societies continue to believe so wholly in their own codes of values that they will tolerate no other way and will feel motivated to kill other folk whose values and behaviors clearly differ from their own?

       Analyzing the background physical situation in which societies evolve adds to our depression at this point. The environment around us is always changing so our values systems and morés must too. When new conditions arise, several different societies' responses to them may all prove effective, as happens with lions and hyenas. 



     hyenas attacking a lioness 

        Lions and hyenas occupy the same habitat and hunt the same prey. Their relative competitive advantages/disadvantages interact in extremely complex ways, but they can and do both flourish at the same time in the same habitat. (1.) In this, they are very like human societies, whose bases are socio-culture, rather than genetic, but whose competive situations are very analogous to those of lions and hyenas. Lions and hyenas co-exist in the same habitats and remain extremely, mutually hostile. They exist as hostile neighbors, drive one another away from kills, and fight to the death regularly. Examples of human societies in similar circumstances don't just riddle history; they are what history is.(Apache/Pueblo, Huron/Iroquois, Ghiljais/Durranis, Croats/Serbs, Munster/Mide, Poles/Ukrainians, Gauls/Germans, Catholics/Protestants, etc.)  

Protestants throwing petrol bombs at Catholic homes in N. Ireland

                

       In other words, estrangement between societies comes about by a natural process. Widely different, often neighboring, societies, each with its own values and customs, arise inevitably as the real world simply rolls along. Such has been the case for all of human history so far.

               

          So, is war inevitable? The evidence of history seems to answer with a firm "Yes". Wars are fought over these very differences. Following this line of argument, we see what Hitler thought of as his great insight: he accepted that war was an inevitable, periodic test of the cultural and (he said) “racial” vitality of a people. He held to, and ranted over, his worldview to his last day. To geneticists, his racial theories are meaningless silliness. Humans are all one species. But when his world view is extended to an analysis of cultural groupings of humans(tribes/nations) and the conflicts which arise among them, it becomes more disturbing.

      ruins of Nuremberg, Germany  1945

          The ancient Greeks had two words for humans: “Hellenes” (themselves) and “barbarians” (everyone else). Similar in view and vocabulary were, and are, the Chinese. In China, I would still be "gwai lo", an "evil alien”. The word “Masai” – a famous African tribe’s name for themselves – means “people”, as do the words “Innu”, in Innu, and “Cheyenne” in Cheyenne. For Europeans, for hundreds of years, the members of the species homo sapiens were divided most basically into Christians and heathens. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. In Japanese, for centuries, all humans were either Japanese or gaijin. Jews are not Gentiles. Tutsis are not Hutus. In other words, people in all of these cultures and nearly all others that have ever existed have believed that they are - or were, in the cases of those now vanished into history - the only fully human humans. Thus war.

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

     Under this reasoning, war is the way by which we have, through the socio-cultural mode of evolution, become our own predators. We cut out the ineffective parts of our species' total concepts-values-behaviors pool (rather than its gene pool) by war. Wars kill the young and fit, the prime breeding stock, first. And modern wars kill much of the best breeding stock on both sides. Wars don't serve a genetic mode of evolution anymore, if they ever did. They haven't, arguably, since the first technological war, i.e. the U.S. Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die. On all sides. But wars do still serve a cultural mode of evolution.

    For thousands of years, we have evolved – culturally – by this ugly means. For centuries, no other species and no change in our environment has been able to shake us. We even save individuals who are born with genetically transmitted defects that in a jungle environment would be fatal every time, and these individuals go on to reproduce. We aren't evolving genetically anymore; if anything, we’re likely devolving. But we are evolving culturally-behaviorally.

    We prey on ourselves, not eating corpses, but cutting out parts of our values-behaviors pool whose usefulness is fading. This system has worked brutally, but efficiently, for a long time. Evidence that it works lies in the way that, for example, within a generation of being conquered, most of the people subjugated under the Romans were effectively "Romanized". Rome was a more vigorous, efficient, and prosperous culture than were any of the cultures that it conquered. A vigorous, efficient, aggressive culture swallowed up its neighbors, their territories, peoples, and ways of life. Parallel cases abound in the history books. For centuries, war worked.

artist's conception of post nuclear war Moscow 

    Today, however, war has made itself obsolete. We very likely would not survive another world war. Combining what we know of human history and of our war habit with what we know of our present levels of technology leads us to envision a worldwide bloom of huge mushroom clouds, followed within a decade by an image of our once beautiful, blue-green planet, burnt almost bare and covered over with drifting clouds of ash.

Notes 

1.http://hyenas.zoology.msu.edu/