This is probably as good a time as any to extend my theory of cultural evolution into areas that are really controversial. So let's consider why belief in a moral code is practical and, in fact, is vital if a nation is going to get strong and stay strong. Keep in mind all through this discussion that the kind of moral code that I am speaking of is composed of values that inform and guide the big majority of the actions of every individual citizen, even when no one is watching and there is no direct reward in it for the individual living by the code. 

Virtues like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are not just vague, nice-sounding terms. Living by a balance of courage and wisdom, for example, drives the believer to the same old tedious pattern that we are all wearily aware of, namely hard work. But people who generally accept that life is built around toil make a strong, vigorous, dynamic society. Thus, those people survive, and their way of life goes on and spreads. There have been societies of people who by luck have found their way into environments where the living was easy and who then chose to live pretty much that way. But sooner or later they always came into contact with people from more driven cultures, and the easy going then became easy prey. 

Not a nice picture, but in this blog I have to put truth before political correctness. Colonialism was mostly pretty ugly for those who were not the colonizers, but it worked in the sense that it gave powerful nations, mostly European in the last few centuries. huge new areas of land with resources to exploit, making those nations even more powerful. This was not justice, but it was reality. The Europeans now are trying to right the injustices in most parts of their former empires, but it's taking a lot of time and money. Shocking whole peoples - militarily, politically, economically, and culturally - takes a long time to repair. But we are getting there. Justice is a higher value for most people in most societies than are power or profit. 

It is also worth noting here that corruption has pretty much nothing to do with race. Some of the worst and best of government officials are white, or black, or Asian, or aboriginal. The countries of the former Soviet Union, whose populations are almost entirely white, currently have worse cultures of bribery and corruption than the better ones in Asia and Africa. 

And we can examine some other values as well. For example, love combined with wisdom yields honesty. If you really love people, you don't lie to them. When you can see the old way of life of a whole people is obsolete, that it doesn't work anymore, and that it probably never will again, you have to tell them what you really think. For example, the buffalo are gone. They aren't coming back, therefore, the way of life built around the buffalo is over. Someone needs to say that bluntly for all to hear before we can make any progress toward righting the wrongs done to the plains tribes of North America. 

In fairness, the same teller should be part of the program which helps those tribes to write a new cultural code for their people, one that will enable them to keep the parts of their old culture that are still viable (e.g. sports, public speaking, dance, the fine arts, and especially their spiritual belief system) while also writing new roles for themselves in the larger society and then educating their kids to fill those roles. 

But now, let's look at an even larger view of human culture in order to see how values yield survival. For example, consider the role that honesty has in history's strongest societies. 

The single biggest hurdle that countries and tribes all over the world have to overcome as they try to build what is called an "economy of scale" is corruption. Bribes and kickbacks paid to government officers and in the private sector drain the economy like parasites. The monies involved in the shady, corrupt exchanges do not represent any real "wealth" in the economy. No goods or services are being produced, or bought, or sold in such exchanges. As a result, the corrupt country's currency keeps sinking in value. The country's economy has fewer and fewer real goods or services present in it. 

Aid monies sent into the country dwindle away and fizzle out. Few to no new facilities, goods, or jobs come out of the aid monies. They mostly end up being spent by crooked government officials to buy foreign goods. Thus, those aid monies exit the needy country's economy having done little to no good. Or they end up in foreign bank accounts, secreted away by corrupt ministers and their families and friends with an eye to the day when they will leave public service and retire rich. Buildings, roads, and bridges collapse because they are built by engineers who bought their degrees and in reality can't do long division. Doctors trained in little more than skipping class ease no pain and cure no disease. And the list of ills goes on.

The people in these poorer, developing world countries often had ways of life in which the family and the tribe were the limits of one's culture. Inside these smaller populations, most people were hard workers and honest citizens. It was only when nation states with huge territories and populations began to emerge in these areas of the world that temptation grew too strong and disconnection between one's crimes and their consequences became too easy to slip into. Which is all only to say that the larger a political entity becomes, the more its officials must be programmed to live by moral values. And even then, the efficiency of the system can decay if it is not constantly policed. China had an excellent, merit-driven civil service for centuries, but it fell into decay when the nation had things too easy for too long.   

I offer all of this explication simply to show that values or virtues, if you prefer that term, really do cause more idealistic and disciplined cultures to grow and ones that are less so to shrink. Note again that it is not enough for values to be recited by the general run of the population. The values must be lived if they are to make an economy of scale possible. 

Whether people have to believe in a deity of some sort to be really virtuous or whether, alternatively, they can acquire the habits of honesty, hard work, etc. without having to believe that God is watching is a subject worthy of another discussion on another day. But this much is clear: economies of scale are impossible in countries where hard work is thought of as what you do when you have no other choice and honesty is for chumps. A country where such is the general attitude will stay poor. An economy of scale is not possible in a country until its people have a realistic moral code programmed into them, and those morals are believed and lived.