But in general, in all areas of our lives, even those we think of as sacred, traditional, and timeless, we humans do change our beliefs, values, and patterns of behavior over time in the manner suggested by Bayesianism. We eventually always adopt a new view of reality and the human place in it if that new view is more coherent with the facts we are observing and experiencing, and our lives improve. We’ve come a long way in the West in our treatment of women and minorities. Our justice systems aren’t race or gender neutral yet, but they’re much better than they were even fifty years ago.

The larger point can be reiterated. For deep social change, we undergo the Bayesian decision process, but only in the most final of senses. Sometimes it’s not the individual who has to learn to adopt new beliefs, values, and morés; sometimes it is a whole community or even a nation.

The El Molo ethnic group in Kenya is almost gone. The Canaanite, Bo, Anasazi, and Beothuk peoples are gone. Troy and Carthage are gone. None of this is fair. It’s just over.

                           

                                                Demasduit, one of the last Beothuk women.

In the more gradual adjustments that some societies have managed to achieve, it sometimes also happens that subcultures within a society die out without the whole tribe dying out, and thus some values and beliefs in the culture disappear while the larger culture itself, after sustaining major trauma and healing, adjusts and goes on.

For example, Hitler and his Nazi cronies ranted until their last hour that their “race” should fight on until they all went down in a sea of blood because they had shown in the most vital of arenas, namely war, that they were weaker than the Russians. He sincerely believed his Nazi philosophy. In the same era, the Japanese cabinet and high command contained members who were adamant in arguing that the Japanese people should fight on, even in the face of hopeless odds. To do anything other than to fight on was inconceivable to these men. (Yukio Mishima’s case was a curious last gasp of Japanese imperialism.⁵) Fortunately, people who could face reality, learn, adapt, and then thrive eventually prevailed, in both Germany and Japan.

   

                                                               Yukio Mishima

A culture is just the software of a nation. A culture evolves and survives or else falls behind and dies in ways that are analogous to the ways in which a genome survives or dies. If a nation’s “culture program”—that is, its software—gets good practical results over generations, its carriers multiply; if not, they don’t, and then they and it fade out of our species’ total culture pool. What was sad but true for centuries was that a society’s fitness to survive was sometimes tested by famine or epidemic disease or natural disaster, but more often it was tested by war with one of its neighbours. For centuries, when a tribe, guided by its culture, was no longer vigorous enough to hold its territory against invasions by neighbouring tribes, it fought and lost. Its men were killed, its women and children were carried off by the enemy; its way of life dwindled and was absorbed, or in some cases, vanished entirely. Thus Joshua smote Hazor, the ancient Greeks crushed Troy, the Romans crushed Carthage. Out of existence. The examples could go on.

  

                                                   Ruins of Carthage in modern Tunisia

But was Hitler right? Is war inevitable, even desirable? It depends. The question remaining is whether we will ever rise above our present, mainly war-driven system of cultural evolution. By reason or suffering or both, we are going to have to arrive at a new process for evolving culturally, which means continually adopting, in a timely way, updated and more efficient values and the behaviour patterns that are fostered by, and therefore attached to, these values.

Changes in our circumstances always come. Some of them we even cause. We can cushion our way of life against them for a while, but over time reality demands that we either evolve or die out. However, for now, I will leave the war digression and the sociocultural mechanism of human evolution to be more thoroughly discussed in later chapters.

For now, then, let’s settle for saying that the point Bayesianism’s critics make about the way in which some areas of human behaviour do not seem to be based on Bayesian types of calculations only looks at first like an apt criticism. If we study the matter more deeply, we see there are reasons for our apparently un-Bayesian attachments to some of our most counterproductive values and morés. They are crude, upsetting, warmongering reasons. These are now design flaws we will have to deal with because they have long since fallen out of touch with the physical reality that surrounds us (a physical reality that, in large part, we have created) and with the dilemma in which we find ourselves. As John F. Kennedy said, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”⁶

  

                                     John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States

Most importantly, for the purposes of this book, we can see that the Bayesian model of human thinking still holds. Deeply held beliefs and morés do get changed—sometimes even in entire nations—by the Bayesian mechanism.

I will have more to say on these matters in later chapters. The first big criticism of Bayesianism has been dealt with. The Bayesian model, when it is applied at the tribal level of human behaviour, can fully account for the apparently un-Bayesian behaviours of individuals. I now must move on to the second big criticism of Bayesianism, the theoretical one.

And perhaps this is the point at which I should also say that the next chapter is fairly technical, and it isn’t essential to my case. If you want to skip a chapter, the next is one you can skip and still not lose the train of thought leading to the conclusion of the full argument.

Notes

1. Jan Degenaar, “Through the Inverting Glass: First-Person Observations on Spatial Vision and Imagery,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12, No. 1 (March 2013). http://www.academia.edu/4029955/Degenaar2013_Through_the_Inverting_Glass.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869 essay). The Constitution Society website. http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women.htm.

4. Albert North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (University of Virginia: Barbour-Page Lectures, 1927).

5. Biography of Yukio Mishima, Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 8, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima.

6. John F. Kennedy, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, NY, September 25, 1961. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset Viewer/DOPIN64xJUGRKgdHJ9NfgQ.aspx.