Chapter 6.                 Part C 

It is also important to state here that, for most new paradigms and practices, the tests applied to them over the days or decades only confirm that the old way is still better. Most new ideas are tested and found to be less effective than the established ones. Our forefathers were striving hard, and they were pretty smart. 

But the more crucial insight is the one that comes next. Sometimes, if a new paradigm touches on a tribe’s most sensitive central beliefs, then the Bayesian calculations about what individuals and their society are going to do next break down. When a new idea challenges those sensitive central beliefs, then most tribes continue to adhere to the old beliefs. The larger question here is whether the Bayesian model of human thinking, when it is taken up to the level of human social evolution, can account for these apparently un-Bayesian behaviors. 

     

Many of our most deeply held beliefs are ones that have to do with those areas of our lives that govern our interactions with other humans – family members, neighbors, co-workers, fellow-citizens, etc. These are the areas of our lives which we have long seen, and mostly still see, as being guided not by reason but by “moral beliefs”, beliefs derived in ways that are different from our beliefs about the physical world. In anthropological terms, these are the beliefs that enable the members of the tribe to live together, interact, work in teams, and get along.

In our time, the exploitation of women, the execution of murderers, and the other anomalies described in earlier paragraphs are merely consequences of the fact that in spite of our worries about the failures of our moral code in the last hundred years, much of that code lingers on. In many aspects of our lives, we are still drifting with the ways that were familiar, even though our confidence in those ways is eroding around us. We don’t know what else to do. In the meantime, these traditional ways are so deeply ingrained and familiar as to seem, for many people, natural, even automatic, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

What we are dealing with when we study the deepest and most profound of these "traditional" behaviors and beliefs are those beliefs that are very deeply programmed into every child by all of the tribe’s adult members. These beliefs aren’t subject to the Bayesian models and laws which usually govern the learning processes of the individual human. In fact, they are almost always viewed by the individual as the most important parts of not just his culture, but himself. They are guarded in the psyche by layers of emotional associations that elicit anger and fear when disturbed. They are the beliefs and practices that your parents and your teachers, storytellers, and leaders enjoined you to hang on to at all cost. For most people in most societies, these beliefs and the morés that they elicit are viewed as being simply “normal” and “human”.

    

Our moral meta-belief, that is to say our belief about our moral beliefs, for centuries, was that they were set down by God and, therefore, were universal and eternal. When we made such a distinction, we were in effect, placing our moral beliefs in a separate category from the rest, one meant to guarantee their inviolability.

                                                        

                      

                                                  John Stuart Mill 

But are our moral beliefs really different in some fundamental way from our beliefs in areas like Science, Athletics, Automotive Mechanics, Farming, or Cooking? The answer is ‘Yes and no’. Better farming practices and medical procedures we are eager to learn, and who doesn’t want to win at the track meet? However, in their attitudes about the executing of our worst criminals or the exploitation and subjugation of women, many in our society are more reluctant to change. Historical evidence shows societies can change in these sensitive areas of their lives, but only grudgingly. (John Stuart Mill discusses the obstinacy of old ways of thinking about women, for example, in the introduction to "The Subjection of Women".) (3.)

  

These beliefs which humans hold most deeply, the ones that most obstinately resist change in the belief set shared by a whole nation, are ones that are nearly impossible to amend by rational persuasion of individuals. They only get eradicated at all if they are eradicated from a whole nation when evidence shows glaringly that they no longer work. They fail to provide effective real-world guidelines by which the humans who hold them can make choices, act, and live their lives. They fail so totally in this role that the people who hold the old values begin to die out. They die young, or fail to reproduce, or fail to program their values into their young, or the whole tribe may even be overrun. By one of these mechanisms, a tribe’s whole culture and values system can finally die out. The genes of the tribe may go on in kids born from the merging of two tribes – the victors and the vanquished – but one tribe’s set of beliefs, values, and morés, i.e. its culture, becomes a footnote in history.