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/