Chapter 13.                           Part F                                     

                                                      

                                                    Thomas Hobbes, English political philosopher

            At minimum, citizens have to cooperate in large majority to create and use a process built into their society that will enable them to live, work, do business, and settle disputes without violence. For enlightened modern nations in this twenty-first century, this is the rule of law. The law is not perfect, but we do not live in a perfect world. However, people in the large majority sense that whatever the flaws in our legal system, it is infinitely preferable to anarchy. As Hobbes famously put the matter, life for humans with no system of social order in place is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".   

            We should note here that for the citizens living in a given society, the ways in which values and behaviors arise can seem very difficult to analyze. The values that a society lived by when it was first growing stronger can get lost for generations before the whole system starts to unravel. This is why trying to find constants in history can seem so frustrating. The consequences of a tribe's devising updates for its code of values, or its laziness in adhering blindly to its old programs, can take generations to show up, and the consequences can be obscured under mounds of irrelevant trivia.

            But then again, we should not be surprised at the apparent gradualness, from our limited perspectives, of history's processes. A thousand years is fifty human generations. In evolutionary terms, a span of fifty generations is trivial. In normal, genetic evolution, a thousand generations often have to pass before a new anatomical feature can prove itself. 

            The evidence of history indicates that a new value, with the cultural-behavioral morés that are implied by it, and attached to it, can prove itself much more rapidly than a new anatomical or physiological variation can. Science produced the cannon, for example, and it changed everything. This evidence, therefore, supports the view that the cultural-behavioral mode of evolution is superior to the genetic mode in a very basic sense. Cultural evolution responds to, and even causes, environmental changes in a more timely way and thus outruns genetic evolution. Cultural change seems slow in our limited view, but it is actually very quick compared to biological change. And most cultural experiments don't take a thousand years. Only the very profound ones do. 

            Some societies have worked out sets of values and behaviors that have led them to deal with their environments so effectively that for generations, even centuries, the citizens of such a society may come to believe that they have found the answers to life’s riddles (as was the case in Rome and in Victorian England and is presently the case in some nations of the West). These citizens may create sub-environments that are well insulated from harsh contact with the uncertainty and adversity of the material universe. People of wealth and indolence can get so insulated that they come to take their lifestyle for granted; values like love, courage, wisdom, and freedom then come to be thought of, by the nation’s elites, as being old-fashioned notions for peasants, notions that subtle, worldly adults no longer need. In reality, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality, and it will keep right on being hard and unpredictable, demanding courage and wisdom, love and freedom of us.