Chapter 9      Part D 

        

       Now consider the ways in which early humans probably formed and used early principles. Early hunting and gathering tribes, for example, taught their young people ways to kill elk, fish, birds, mammoths, and so on. Crush the spine, right where it enters the skull, or pierce the heart. Or cut the throat. Study the tracks and droppings. If the tracks are in new snow, and if the droppings are still steaming, the animal is very close by. There were many species to hunt and many ways to stalk and kill game. Over time, the thought-full, resourceful hunting tribes thrived best and multiplied.

               

      Far too many behaviors needed to be in a hunter’s repertoire for those behaviors to be learned one at a time. However, in nearly all cases, the hunters found it useful to recall general rules about what they’d seen, and what they had been told, of the game in question’s habits in past encounters. Using these more general principles, the hunters would try to anticipate what the animal would do in the upcoming encounter, on this particular day and in this particular terrain. Then, the hunters would prepare themselves, psychologically, for violent, team-coordinated, physical action, if the hunt was to be a successful one.

         The exact process by which each kill would be made could not be known in advance, but the hunters knew that probably they would need to act with intelligence (in the planning stage) and skill and courage (in the implementation stage). In short, successful hunting tribes needed at the most general level to teach the values that we call "courage" and "wisdom" to their young in order for their young to have better chances of surviving, reproducing, and passing the same values on to their children. Again it is worth noting that the mechanism of human evolution being implied here is not a genetic one but a socio-behavioral-cultural one, and it requires conceptual thinking.

 

        Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherer ones and values such as patience, foresight, diligence, and perseverance quadrupled in importance. Farming requires them. These values, of course, would not replace the hunter-gatherer’s ones totally and immediately, but the farmers' values and their way of life grew until they, in their multiplying societies, had largely overrun the old hunters' values and ways. The new agricultural way of life was just better at making more humans over the generations.

       When hard grains that could be stored indefinitely were domesticated, cities became useful to store the community’s food wealth in a central, defensible site. Of course, the progress from stage to stage had many recursions. Nomadic tribes that had little food and plenty of aggression to spare were lurking, and the most aggressive of these tribes might for a time subjugate and exploit the city dwellers. Two ways of life tested themselves against each other. But in the end, the city dwellers won.

      Inside a city's defenses, governing bodies with nearly permanent administrative offices became necessary in order to ensure fair distribution of the tribe's food and to organize the tribe's members in ways that brought domestic order and protection from invaders. Following them, there came craftsmen and merchants who found a protected, central site with a larger, concentrated population more conducive to the full-time practice of their arts.

               

       Cities and their ways proved fitter than decentralized farm communities or nomadic tribes had. Values shifted toward making citizens that were comfortable while functioning in densely populated neighborhoods, causing the rise of respect behaviors that encouraged citizens to let their neighbors have their small space undisturbed. Don't bear false witness against your neighbor and don't covet the things that he has in his yard right next door. The Bible ordered believers not to covet their neighbors' goods; envy always leads to friction and violence.

               

       

       The city's laws weren't just the farmer's rough guidelines for living in a thinly populated farming community of familiar faces. The city's laws prescribed more precisely what kinds of behaviors were acceptable in nearly all of city life. Crowding demands more civility. Even the word "law" came to be associated with reverent feelings (e.g. for Socrates). (7.)  

               

       Most of all, the city had at its immediate beck and call, large numbers who could fight off an enemy attack. The city could even afford to keep, feed, arm, and train full-time soldiers, professionals who were capable of outfighting almost any swarm of amateurs. The farmers still out in the hinterland moved in closer to the city. Life was just better there. Even one generation of life close to, or inside of, the city taught you very deeply to love this homeland. Programming made loyalty to your city-state automatic because patriotism is a virtue that is necessary to the city-state's survival. Away from your city, people, morés, and values, you felt there was no true life.       

               

     Writing, metals, machines, and the technologies of communications, electricity, and computers all brought values shifts to the nations in which they first arose. When the ways of life that they fostered proved more vigorous than those of any of the nearby competing societies, the values shifts, mores, and behavior patterns that rose up with the new technologies were eventually adopted by other societies in the area (usually with accompanying revolutions, both violent and non-violent). Of course, societies that resist these value-moré shifts must find or create alternative behavior-generating programs within their own cultures, programs that are equally effective in the cultural evolution game. Or they get overrun.

    Further examples of morés which illustrate this generalization are easy to find. The fact that so many of the world’s cultures are patriarchal in design, for instance, is worth pondering.

       Female humans appear, in general, to be slightly less capable than males in some areas such as large muscle strength and co-ordination, and spatial and numerical reasoning ability. (8.) However, these differences are, in the first place, slight in comparison to the differences among members of the same gender, and in comparison to the differences between males and females in other species. In addition, they are differences that exist between mythical beings called the “average man” and the “average woman”. Real individual females and males vary considerably from the mean. Some women are weight lifters, some are mathematical geniuses, while some men are weak and moronic.

        

U. of Georgia (steroid-free) cheerleader, Anna Watson 

       

        Furthermore, objective, scientific analysis reveals that, again, on average, females are superior to males in other ways, such as in co-ordination of the muscles of the hands and in verbal communication skills. The fact that they were not the majority of doctors, lawyers, and political leaders, and in most of the world's societies, never have been in the majority in these jobs for which they seem better suited, is puzzling to say the least. (Women are finally beginning to close in on parity in medicine, for example, which was long overdue.) (9.) 

       Why were females stuck in positions of lower status and pay in nearly all of the world’s societies? That such was, and largely still is, the case seems not only unfair but illogical and inefficient. Aren’t such tribes wasting human resources? Unfortunately, logic and fairness were not the determining factors. Cultural efficiency, it turns out, is subtler.

    Actually logic and fairness are just values themselves. In other words, like all values, they’re tentative. They must serve a society’s survival in order to become entrenched in the value code of that society. If there are areas in a society’s life in which they work counter to the needs of survival, they will be superseded by what the society will come to call a “higher” value, or the society will die out. Motherhood was a higher value.

               

        Women bear the young, and a society’s children are its future in the starkest, most final sense. Women tend to become pregnant due to anatomy and hormones. We are programmed by our genetics to find sex pleasurable. We seek it without being instructed to. The biological drive toward sex can be, and often is, harnessed and redirected by society’s programming to serve several of society’s needs at the same time, but these need not concern us for now. Our line of reasoning has to continue to follow the developing child – society’s future – now in the female’s womb.

               

         Human females, like almost all mammalian females, are not as able to run, hide, dig, gather, and fight when in advanced pregnancy as when they are not pregnant. Then, after delivery, the human child requires years of care and nurture before it can mature, become able to fend for itself, and make adult contributions to the society of which it is a member. In short, for thousands of years, if a society was to survive, its males had to protect its females and to assist, at least indirectly, with the work required in the nurturing of children. A male was simply more likely to provide assistance and protection when he believed that the children were his. Individual males who loved all children were not enough in number to make a difference to the long term odds. Those odds were only improved significantly when nearly all of the men knew, or thought they knew, which kids were theirs.  

              

        Note also here that male arousal and orgasm are necessary to procreation, but female orgasms are not. Therefore, societies teaching males to be dominant and females to be passive and submissive thrived, while competing societies which didn’t teach such values did not. The logical upshot was that nearly all societies that reproduced at a rate which enabled them to grow taught their girls to be sexually faithful to, and generally submissive to, their husbands. Hunting societies, agricultural ones, and, later, industrial ones all grew steadily stronger under this patriarchal design. 

        In addition, they augmented it with supporting values and behaviors which, in most matters, gave the community's approval to male dominance. Other less patriarchal societies stagnated, or died out, or were assimilated by expanding, aggressive, land-seizing, patriarchal ones. But please also note that little of the history of these societies was guided or shaped by a gender-neutral concept of justice.

      The implication for post-industrial societies, with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), is that women can now contribute children to society and simultaneously contribute work other than child-nurturing in any of the areas of their culture’s ongoing development and life in which they can do the job. The imperatives of the past which dictated that girls had to adopt submissive roles in order to ensure the survival of their tribe and its culture are evolutionarily obsolete. Advances in birth control technologies (e.g. the oral contraceptive) and in child-nurturing technologies (e.g. infant-feeding mixtures) have made the chores and joys of child rearing possible for men, and even for single women, who in earlier eras had little choice but to forego the joys and trials of parenting or else condemn themselves and their children to society's stigmatization.

       

       In post-industrial societies, there is no survival-oriented reason for women not being afforded as large and varied a range of career and lifestyle choices as that previously open almost exclusively to men. There is no compelling, survival-oriented reason for any person’s not receiving pay and status commensurate with the value of his or her contribution to the nation’s ongoing life and development.

               

      In fact, what does appear to be true is that any limitations placed unduly or unequally on the opportunities of any citizens in the community – on the basis of sex, race, or age – is only reducing the community’s capacity to grow and flourish. Computer technology and the oral contraceptive have made a higher degree of gender neutral justice possible. If we wish to maximize our human resources, become as dynamic a society as possible, and compete ever more successfully in the environments of our planet and perhaps beyond, we must make educations and careers of the best quality that we have open to all citizens who can do the job. If we are going to maximize our human resources, then access to education and careers should be based on merit alone. At least, such is the conclusion we must draw from all of the reasoning and evidence that we have before us today.

     Furthermore, the authorities of society, out of a sense of efficiency only, are probably going to have to find ways of ensuring that quality nurturing of children receives pay and benefits matching the pay and benefits given to all other kinds of jobs in society traditionally driven by these incentives. Having kids will have to be a reasonable option, if we are to maintain a stable base population for our society in this new century.

   Driving women back into a domestic zone would be retrograde and counter-productive, like locking our bulldozers in sheds and digging ditches by hand in order to make work. For women and men who choose it, the nurture of children must be given real respect and pay, if we are to continue on the path of knowledge-driven and technology-based evolution that we have chosen. Simple logic says so.

 

        Whether future societies will see a profound and enduring redesigning of gender roles and child-rearing practices, and a concomitant redesigning of the roles of worker-citizens that will make women equal partners with men, remains unclear. Moves toward gender equity, in work and citizenship, and real change in the everyday life experiences of women and men have been suggested and tried (to some degree) before, and have faded away before. But the trends in the West especially at the start of the twenty first century seem widespread and strong. The ultimate question to be answered will be whether or not societies that contain a higher degree of gender equity will outperform those which do not. That question will eventually be answered, but the evidence proving the answer will only emerge gradually over the next hundred years or so.

               

       To sum up this digression, and in an attempt to be crystal clear, let me re-iterate here that the point of testing the socio-cultural model of human evolution with an example set of morés that we are familiar with, and can imagine being revised, is to emphasize the point that our morés and values are programmable. We can, at least in theory, learn to re-write them for the whole of our society by processes of rational discussion and debate, processes that are based on reasoning, evidence, and compromise. Difficult, yes, but preferable to the blind, trudging, painful way of doing social change that we have been using for centuries.

               

        Time for reason to take over. The hazards of continuing on in the old ways of prejudice, revolution, and war are too large. We have to find another way, one that rights gender injustices, and so many others, without resorting to the horror of war. And, if we can find a way to base our values on our best models of physical reality, ones we can all see the sense of, it can be done. Difficult. Not impossible.   

               

        But we must now return to our main line of argument, in spite of digressions that beckon. 

               

      It is clear that individual human behaviors and the internal running of the more complex, but vital, principles and values programs (which are mental meta-behaviors) almost all originate in the programming that the individual is given by his or here society. Furthermore, values get established in a given society when they direct citizens of that society toward patterns of behavior that enable the citizens to survive, reproduce, and territorialize with ever-growing success.

               

       By now some readers are probably inferring a profound insight about the higher order mental constructs that we call “values”. Clearly, the deepest principles which must underlie and guide all of our value systems – in big choices for the tribe and small ones for the individual – must be designed in such a way as to enable us to respond effectively to the physical universe itself. That universe is the one in which survival happens or does not happen. Values systems must have designs underlying them that complement, and respond to, the designs inherent in matter, space, and time.

   What are these principles? For impatient readers, I can only say that I am coming to them – by small steps and gradual degrees. But we have to discuss the network of ideas at the base of the new moral system very thoroughly before we try to build the middle and upper levels of that moral system. Proceeding with precision and care will maximize the chances that my readers will see that a universal moral code is possible for us to devise - in theory - and that such a code, if we can implement it, will offer the only path into the future that entails our species' surviving - in practice.             

             Notes 

7.http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?    doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DCrito%3Apage%3D50

8.http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/07/more-on-the-male-    female-sat-math-test-gap/

9.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2067887/

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