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, their citizens may come to believe they have found the answers to life’s riddles (as was the case in Rome and in Victorian England and is the case presently in some nations of the West). These citizens may create niches that are well insulated from harsh contact with the uncertainty and adversity of the material world. People of wealth and indolence can become so totally insulated that they come to take their lifestyle for granted; they think of values like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love as being old-fashioned notions for peasants, notions that don’t fit in with the self-centered ideas of the sophisticated. In reality, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality. It will keep right on being hard and unpredictable, demanding courage, wisdom, love, and freedom of each of us.

 

  

                                            Propaganda poster for the Cuban Revolution

Ultimately, all societies must exist in material reality. If some citizens are not experiencing adversity and thus feel no need to practice courage, wisdom, love, and freedom, this only means other citizens are handling more than their share and buffering or further insulating the lives of the spoiled and deluded few. In the past three centuries, complacency of a nation’s elites has increasingly frequently brought revolution and the overthrow of an old, corrupt order.(e.g., France, Russia, China, Cuba, and many other countries.). Marx was right in this at least: as civilization grinds forward, literacy spreads, ideas spread, and ordinary people in growing numbers become aware of their collective power. Arrogant, abusive aristocrats, bureaucrats, theocrats, and plutocrats are less and less likely to be tolerated, in societies all over this world, with each year that passes.

But we also must not lose sight of the larger view: even political revolutions are merely group behaviors that are contained within the larger cultural evolution model. They differ from social evolution in degree of chaos, but not in effect. Political revolutions nearly always are accompanied by widespread violence and so are more painful for the people living through them, than are the more gradual social, economic, and industrial revolutions, but in the end, political revolutions are just parts of the general trend toward greater and greater resilience and versatility in the human race. Society’s main mission is to find more dynamic balances among its values clusters and so to grow constantly more courageous, intelligent, free, and loving.

Some social changes contribute to the building of new values and morés and others contribute to the destruction of old ones. Some do both at once. The important point for the purposes of my argument is that this inclination toward unceasing positing and testing—an inclination that evidence in all human societies suggests is programmed into us genetically and that constantly places some people at odds with their society’s morés—is an unalterable part of our nature. And luckily so. It makes our cultures evolve. It gives us our statesmen, scientists, artists, and eccentrics, and they enable us to respond to this ever-changing physical reality and thus to evolve, economically and socially, in a timely way.

                               Slums of Manila, evidence of a society not dealing well with change

Externally, reality’s uncertainty and adversity are always weathering, eroding, and jolting the body of any society, compelling it to deal with change. When a society no longer deals effectively with these jolts and pressures (e.g., drought, war, famine, plague, overpopulation, pollution, economic, and technological advances) by one process or another, it is sooner or later superseded by a society that does.

  

               Bee sipping nectar while pollinating a flower, demonstrating mutualism in nature

Another interesting feature of how values drive society’s behavior patterns and morés is the paradoxical design that value clusters, at first look, appear to exhibit. Values are designed in matched pairs. As one value drives humans toward a particular set of behavior patterns, it is tempered with a complementary one which attenuates, gives focus to, and reduces the excesses that the undiluted use of the first value might lead to. Our guide here is nature. Nature creates endless arrays and clusters of relationships by balancing cooperating and competing forces.

If our young people were filled only with aggression—or daring or courage, as they might see it—they would die off continually, in large numbers, hurling themselves at cars, cliffs, ocean waves, outer space, and one another. But they are also encouraged to acquire judgment—wisdom, as their elders see it—that will direct them to practice courage in ways likely to benefit rather than harm them and their society. Be aggressive, assertive, and ambitious, but aim to use your drive to become an entrepreneur, a scientist, a doctor, an athlete, an artist, or a musician, rather than a criminal or a highway casualty. And, in the end, strive to bring your society together in a way that encourages peaceful compromise rather than savagery. And, importantly, consider what would exist today if, historically, there had been no human values at all.

Some societies and individuals within those societies don’t balance courage with intelligence very well, and excesses result. But over time, the overall movement for our species, despite the difficulties or pain incurred, is toward a social ecosystem of ever greater vigour, wisdom, tolerance, and diversity. On this earth, on Mars, and beyond our solar system, nothing living sits still; we either evolve or we die.

Freedom, as a value programmed into children, also is useful to society. It drives us all, the young especially, to develop talents and to live motivated lives. Yet even if it weren’t complemented and tempered with love, freedom as a social value would beget cliques and subcultures, then prejudice, then strife, then anarchy.

Seen objectively, brotherly love solves this dilemma for society. In Western society, for example, love seemed so crucial to Jesus that he asked his disciples to aim to live by love above all other virtues. He proclaimed that it was the one thing he’d taught them that they must not forget. Implicitly, he was saying that all other values—even courage and wisdom and their benefits—accrue from love.

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you. ³⁵ By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13: 34-35)

                          

Thus humans sustain and spread their societies by testing and practicing lifestyles that may seem paradoxical to anyone who looks for all phenomena to be reduced to simple parts. Our behaviors and the values that drive them mirror the balance principle of their prototype—that is, the ecosystem of the earth. A culture is a self-monitoring and self-regulating system that is designed to respond to reality within strategically set limits or parameters—that is, the values that it teaches to its citizens. Our morés can seem to be built on logical contradictions, but they are anything but. Rather, opposing forces, by their constant interactions, create dynamic equilibria. This is basic systems theory. We couldn’t survive long in this uncertain material reality, as individuals or societies, if our lives were otherwise.