As with courage and wisdom, a balanced pair of values guides the behavior of citizens in successful societies’ attempts to handle the second trait of reality, quantum uncertainty. For a society to maximize its chances of handling the uncertainty of existence—the way unexpected events keep coming at us—that society must contain as wide a variety of potential responses to the demands of the physical world as the people in it, individually and jointly, can learn to perform. In a scary world, if you’re smart, you try to be ready for anything. Encouraging each individual to be versatile—the Renaissance man/woman concept—helps here, but the really important values a wise society should instill in each upcoming generation are freedom, a desire to become one’s best self, and a generosity of spirit and empathy that encourages others to do the same.

To be equipped to meet the widest range of futures possible, a society must contain the widest range of humans possible, with skills and talents literally of every sort imaginable. If an unforeseeable crisis threatens a freedom-loving society’s continued existence, it has a higher likelihood of containing a small group of people or even just one individual who will be able to react effectively to the situation and also direct others to react effectively than does a uniform, totalitarian society.

In addition, in more ordinary times, when a society seems to be merely maintaining a steady state, the people in a vigorous and diverse society are pursuing a wide range of activities, doing research on a wide range of theories, and developing a wide range of skills, services, and products, any of which may reap benefits for all citizens in the future. Which activities will turn out to be more than just hobbies in a decade or two can’t be known in a truly uncertain universe. Some of these hobby activities will fit into the society’s economy and, in a decade or so, become simply parts of the division of labor. Others, in a truly free society, will prove to be silly wastes of time. Still others, in rare instances, will become brilliant innovations that benefit all of society.

However, a wise society cultivates its dreamers. Once in a while, an eccentric will invent something amazingly useful to all. In addition, the freedom that allows these folk to carry on being eccentric is vital to everyone. The presence of eccentrics in a society is proof that the value called freedom is part of that society’s moral code. Uniformity in a population is an enemy of survival in the very long view.

Individualism and cultural pluralism grow out of a society’s basing its values code on freedom. Teaching our young to value freedom is always good long-term strategy. In the long haul of centuries of time and generations of citizens, this practice enables a society to respond to the world’s fundamental uncertainty because change that you can plan for isn’t real change. On the other hand, life brings real change over and over—events that at first may baffle us and, if we’re caught in complacent smugness or if we’re dulled and out of shape, may deplete or eradicate our way of life and even ourselves.

 

  

                                         Pluralism: a community of modern professionals

To balance or focus this value called freedom, in the same way as wisdom balances and focuses courage, society must teach love. Brotherhood. Agape. As wisdom plus freedom yields work, so freedom plus love equals democracy.

A society with a wide range of behaviors or lifestyles practiced among its citizens must teach these same citizens to respect one another’s sensibilities and rights. If it doesn’t, the society will be constantly torn by violence between its various factions. No matter which wins, some of the society’s versatility will be lost, which amounts to a net loss for all. Thus, some form of love for one’s fellow citizens is taught by the vast majority of successful societies and has been so taught for centuries.

       

                                               Thomas Hobbes, English political philosopher

In a democracy, the majority of citizens must cooperate to build into their society a process that will enable them to live, work, do business, and settle disputes without violence. For enlightened modern nations in the twenty-first century, this process is the rule of law. The law is not perfect, but we do not live in a perfect world. However, people in the 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.”

For the citizens living in a given society, the ways in which values and behaviors arise can seem difficult to analyze. The values a society lived by when it was first growing strong can become lost for generations before the system starts to unravel. This is why trying to find constants in history can be so frustrating. When a tribe updates its code of values or becomes lazy in adhering to its old values, the consequences can take generations to show up and can be obscured under mounds of irrelevant trivia.

But then again, from our limited perspectives we should not be surprised at the apparent gradualness 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 valuable in the survival game.

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 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.