Chapter 10.                        Part B 

           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 sentient beings? Will people in the world's many different human societies continue to be loyal to incompatible sets of values? Even worse, will citizens of the world's societies continue to follow their own codes of values so rigidly 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 happened 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 about. (Apache/Pueblo, Huron/Iroquois, Ghiljais/Durranis, Croats/Serbs, Poles/Ukrainians, Gauls/Germans, Catholics/Protestants, etc.)  

 

                                            police confronting Catholic rioters in Belfast

                   

                                         police confronting Protestant rioters in Belfast

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