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”. We are eager to learn better farming practices and medical procedures, 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, but only grudgingly. (John Stuart Mill, a nineteenth-century British philosopher, political economist, and civil servant, discusses the obstinacy of old ways of thinking about women, for example, in the introduction to his essay, The Subjection of Women.³)

The moral beliefs that humans hold most deeply are eradicated, if at all, only from an entire 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 become ill and die young, or fail to reproduce, or fail to program their values into their young, or the whole tribe may be overrun. By one of these mechanisms, a tribe’s entire culture and value system can finally die out. The genes of the tribe may go on in children born from the merging of two tribes, the victors and the vanquished, but one tribe’s set of beliefs, values, and morés—its culture—becomes a footnote in history.

The mechanism of cultural evolution being described here deserves some digression. The fact is that humans often do behave in ways that seem irrational by purely Bayesian standards. Even in our time, some adults still spank kids. Some men still bully women. Some states still execute their worst criminals. Research that includes careful observation and analysis of these patterns of behaviour suggests strongly that they don’t work; these behaviours do not achieve the results that they aim for. In fact, they reduce the chances that we will achieve those results. These behaviours and the beliefs underlying them are exactly what is meant by the term counterproductive. Therefore, we must ask an acute question: Why do we as rational humans who usually operate under a rational, Bayesian belief-building system hold on so obstinately, in a few areas of our lives, to beliefs that cause us to act in utterly irrational ways?

•                                        Electric chair, used to execute criminals

The reply is that we do so because our culture’s most profound programming institutions—the family, the schools, and the media—continue to indoctrinate us with these values so deeply that once we are adults, we refuse to examine them. Instead, our programming causes us to bristle, then defend our good old ways, violently if need be. If the ensuing lessons are harsh enough, and if there is a reasonable amount of available time, sometimes a society learns, expels the reactionaries, and then adapts. But the process of deep social change is always difficult and fraught with hazards. Alfred Whitehead, in his 1927 essay Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, wrote, “It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”⁴

                                           

                                                Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher

It is also worthwhile to say the obvious here, however politically incorrect it may be. All our obsolete but obstinate beliefs, moral values, morés, and behaviour patterns did serve useful ends and purposes at one time. For example, in some but not all early societies, women were programmed to be submissive, first to their fathers and brothers, then to their husbands. The majority of men in such societies were far more likely, in purely probabilistic terms, to help to nurture the children of their socially sanctioned marriages because they were confident the children of these submissive women were biologically their own.

Raising kids is hard work. In early societies, if both parents were committed to the task, the odds were better that those children would grow up, marry, have kids of their own, and go on to program into those kids the same values and roles that the parents themselves had been raised to believe in. Other non-patriarchal societies taught other roles for men and women and other designs for the family, but they weren’t as prolific over the long haul. Patriarchy isn’t fair. But it creates populations.

        

                                          Magazine image of the American family, 1950s

Traditional beliefs about male and female roles didn’t work to make people happy. But they did give some tribes numbers and thus power. They are obsolete today partly because child nurturing has been taken over to a fair degree by the state (schools), partly because no society in a post-industrial, knowledge-driven economy can afford to put half of its human resources, that is the female half, into homes for the stagnant, bored, and dejected, and partly because there are too many humans polluting this planet now. Population growth is no longer a keenly sought goal because it no longer brings a tribe or nation power. But more on this matter later. It is enough to say here that all of our traditional values, morés, and roles once did serve useful purposes. Many of them clearly don’t anymore, even though it is like pulling molars without anaesthetic to get the reactionaries among us to admit that many of their cherished “good old ways” are just in the way in today’s world.