Chapter 9          Part C 

      Some of the behaviors that the tribe programs into its young may not be enjoyable to those young tribe members while they are young or later when they are adults either. Work is hard. Building shelters is work. Making clothes is work. Gathering food and preserving it for the winter is work. Raising kids is work. Work is tedious. But for survival, individual happiness is not what matters. Patterns of living which maximize the resources of the tribe over many lifetimes are what matter, and these ways of living do not always make sense to all of the people who are being programmed to do them. But then tribes that don't teach hard work and loyalty to family and tribe die out.

       To illustrate further, another example of a moré that seems counter-intuitive to Western minds, but that works, can be offered here. Polyandry allows and encourages one woman to have two or more husbands, legally and with the blessings of the community. It seems counter-intuitive to us. But the practice is not only viable in some cultures, it even promotes better survival rates. In some areas of the Himalayas, when a man knows he may have to be away for an extended period, he can pick a good second husband for his wife. Then he will know that she and the man's children and property will be protected. If she gets pregnant while he is away, it will be by someone that he has approved of. (5.)  

   

       This train of thought brings us to a deeper implication embedded in my argument.

       Close analysis of human behaviors reveals that complete explanation of how and why they occur as they do cannot be built up from a list of individual behaviors and the advantages that practicing them might give to the tribe that does so. What I am trying to say here is that we can't reason our way to a moral code for all humans without first understanding that humans are capable of forming very large patterns of thinking that we usually call "concepts".

        Behaviorism's model of human thinking is left behind at this point since Behaviorism does not adequately explain conceptual thinking. It connects stimulus to response in a mechanical way and then explains some individual behaviors where stimulus and response can be clearly described in very limited, detailed, and objective terms. "The organism sees and recognizes these colors, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward." I go to work at the big, grey factory, punch my time card at the clock beside the brown door, put bolts on widgets for nine hours, punch out, collect my pay, and go home.

               

        But a human can confront situations that aren’t exactly like, or by sensory evidence even nearly like, anything that the human has encountered before, and still the human can react effectively. The English hunter who had never seen a moose, kangaroo, or rhinoceros, in muskeg, outback, or veldt, still knew where to shoot in order to kill one. Polynesian sailors navigated quite well by the stars of a new hemisphere when they first came to Hawaii as did European sailors when they first began to explore the lands and seas south of the equator.  What these people had helping them in each of those situations was a set of concepts: terms and ideas underlying them that stand for common patterns found in large numbers of experiences. The heart of the animal lies at the center-bottom of the ribcage, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet. 

       Even one particular man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first trial run and quite differently in his next one, after he has contemplated the stimulus situation that is being presented to him for just a bit longer. He sees, hears, or feels a deeper, more general pattern that he now recognizes, and then, based on concepts stored in his memory, he plans and executes a more effective response to it. The lists of concepts and their uses could go on for pages. 

               

         Nearly every human past about eleven or twelve years old is capable of forming generalizations based on what he has learned from his individual experiences and, even more, what he has been taught by the adults of his society. Conceptual thinking is as human as having forty-six chromosomes. It comes to a child at the age when, for example, s/he realizes that the short, wide cup holds more soda than the tall, slim one. Volume is a concept. (I take Piaget and his successors as my guides here.) (6.)  

               

        The programmers of society (parents, teachers, shamen, etc.) make use of this faculty in the young subjects that they are programming, and greatly increase these persons’ chances of surviving, by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to sense data patterns that occur in recognizable repetitions in the tribe's territory. The young subject is ready to be programmed with “categories” and then, at higher levels of generality, with "principles" and “values”.

    Every tribe has labels (words) for large groups (categories) of similar things or events in the tribe's environment. These category-terms are taught to the young because they are useful in the quest for survival. The Sami (Laplanders) have many words for describing a reindeer because they sometimes need a short way to refer to a dark brown, pregnant doe who is pregnant for the first time in order to find her in a hurry. She is in labor, in distress, and in need of immediate care. And for Cro-Magnon tribes,  it probably was useful to have many terms for rock or stone or boulder or pebble or flint because only the flint could be used to make really effective weapons and tools. On the other hand, visitors speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, or may have no words for reindeer at all. 

     "Principles" are terms for patterns that are common in even larger groups of events. "Danger" and "edible" are very general in their range of application, but still very useful in real life. The first allows one tribe member to tell another to get away from some object or animal or area immediately. And stay away. The second allows one tribe member to tell another that the substance they are both looking at is worth gathering and keeping, even if, sometimes, it doesn't taste or smell very nice.

   The society or tribe has gradually learned that these very general terms are really widely useful in providing guidelines for the design of patterns of behavior that will be effective in the tribe's struggle to survive. And at last we come to "values" which are the most general of principles, ones that apply to huge patterns in our memories of sense data. We care about defining "good" because, deep down, we believe we need to know what it is in order to survive in increasing numbers over the long haul.   

  Principles and values, then, name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within the confines of the human skull. By using principles and values that we have learned from our elders, we form judgments about what we are seeing all of the time. Note, however, that we don't always, or even most of the time, take any action when an experience is evoking one of our principles. Sometimes we just see something pop into our locale, and we recognize that it's harmless so we cease to think about it. Being aware of, and wary of, the details in our surroundings all of the time does not always mean that we are going to be taking any action, even though we are always contemplating whole arrays of possible courses of action. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which ways have been getting good results lately, is a kind of internal behavior. Often, what shows on the outside – to the frustration of the behaviorists who insist on studying only what is objectively observable – is nothing at all.

  Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Those are the ways that tribes are seeking, constantly. The ways of thinking that seem to work most effectively over generations are the ones that we keep and then teach to our kids. On the other hand, people who live by concepts and principles that don’t work in reality don’t survive and, therefore, don’t have kids themselves. In short, principles and values can be understood as tested and proven useful thinking techniques. They help us to organize our sense data and our memories of sense data, and they help us to formulate effective plans of action for many people over many generations.

Notes 

5.http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/

when-taking-multiple-husbands-makes-sense/272726/

6.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Piaget's_theory_of_cognitive_development