Chapter 9.                                            (continued) 

By this point in our argument, explaining the benefits of more of these moral commands should be unnecessary. A major fact is becoming clear: a moral belief and the behaviors attached to it become well established in a tribe if the behaviors help tribe members to survive in both the short and long hauls. It is also clear that individuals usually do not see the large, long-term picture of the tribe’s survival. They just do what they were raised to believe is right.

   

                                                Modern children planting rice (India, 2012)

Children may not enjoy some of the behaviours their elders dictate, nor may they enjoy them later when they are adults. Work is hard. Building shelters is work. Making clothes is work. Gathering food and preserving it for the winter is work. Raising kids is work. Work is tedious. But for survival, individual happiness is not what matters. Patterns of living that maximize the resources of the tribe over many generations are what matter, and these ways of living do not always make sense to the people being programmed to do them. But tribes that don’t teach hard work and loyalty to family and tribe die out.

   

 

To illustrate further, another example of a custom that seems counter-intuitive to Western minds but that works can be offered here. Polyandry allows and encourages one woman to have two or more husbands, legally and with the blessings of the community. It seems counter-intuitive to us in the West, even redundant. Clearly, one man can keep many wives producing babies, but not vice-versa. However, the practice is not only viable in some cultures, it even promotes better survival rates. In some areas of the Himalayas, when a man knows that finding work may require him to be away for an extended period, he can pick a good second husband for his wife. Then he will know that she, his children, his property, and the children and property of the other man will be protected. If she becomes pregnant while he is away, it will be by a man he has approved of.⁵ As long as all three are faithful to the marriage, the risks of any of them getting an STD remain small.

This train of thought brings us to a deeper implication embedded in my argument.

Close analysis of individual human behaviors reveals that they cannot be completely explained by their collective advantages to the tribe. We can’t reason our way to a moral code for all humans without first understanding that humans are capable of forming very large patterns of thinking—patterns we usually call concepts or beliefs.

Behaviorism’s model of human thinking is left behind at this point since this model does not adequately explain conceptual thinking. It connects stimulus to response in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then explains some individual behaviors for which stimulus and response can be clearly described in limited, detailed, objective terms. The behaviorist reports that “The organism sees and recognizes these colors, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward.” For example, I go to work at the big, grey factory, punch my time card at the clock beside the brown door, put bolts on widgets for nine hours, punch out, collect my pay, and go home.

   

But a human can confront situations that are not, by sensory evidence, like anything the human has encountered before, and still the human can react effectively. The English hunter who had never seen a moose, kangaroo, or rhinoceros in muskeg, outback, or veldt still knew where to shoot in order to kill one. Polynesian sailors navigated well by the stars of a new hemisphere when they first came to Hawaii as did European sailors when they first began to explore the lands and seas south of the equator. In each of those situations was a set of concepts—ideas underlying those terms, ideas based on patterns found in large numbers of experiences. For example, the animal’s heart lies at the bottom of the rib-cage, slightly to the left of center, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet. Another killing shot is to the base of the skull. Faced with a leopard seal, that one is probably the smart choice for a human in fear for her/his life. 

   

                                                                              Leopard seal (Antarctica) 

Further, a man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first attempt at something and quite differently in his next attempt, after he has contemplated the stimulus situation for just a bit longer. He sees, hears, or feels a deeper, more general pattern that he recognizes, and then, based on concepts stored in his memory, he plans and executes a more effective response to it. The lists of concepts and their uses could go on for pages.