Chapter 9.                                             (continued) 

Nearly every human past the age of eleven or twelve is capable of forming generalizations based on what he has learned from his individual experiences and, to an even greater degree, what he has been taught by the adults of his society. Conceptual thinking is as human as having forty-six chromosomes. It comes to a child at the age when, for example, he realizes that the short, wide cup holds more soda than the tall, slim one. Volume is a concept. (I take Piaget as my guide here.⁶)

The programmers of society—parents, teachers, shamans, and others—make use of this faculty in their young subjects, greatly increasing these children’s chances of surviving by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to recognizably repetitive sense data patterns in the tribe’s territory. The young subject is ready to be programmed with categories and then, at higher levels of generality, with principles, beliefs, and values.

   

                                                        young Sami herdsman with his herd 

Every tribe has labels (words) for large groups (categories) of similar things or events in the tribe’s environment. These category terms are taught to the young because they are useful in the quest for survival. The Sami (Laplanders) have many words for describing a reindeer because they sometimes need to differentiate between them. A single word to describe a dark brown, pregnant doe is useful if she is in labor, in distress, and in need of immediate care. And for Cro-Magnon tribes, it probably was useful to have many terms for rock or stone or boulder or pebble or flint because only certain types of flint could be used to make effective weapons and tools. By contrast, most visitors to Lapland speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, and some visitors may have no words for reindeer at all.

The word principle is a term for patterns that are common in even larger groups of things or events. Terms like danger and edible name very general principles that a tribe has spotted in many, many real life experiences of many tribe members. The terms are harder to learn than tiger or nuts, but also very useful in real life. The term danger enables one tribe member to tell another to get away from something quickly and stay away. It covers tigers, snakes, bears, crocodiles, unstable cliff faces, avalanche zones, poisonous plants, and so on. It’s an efficient term and one worth learning and keeping. 

The term edible covers nuts, berries, maggots, eggs, frogs, fish, lizards, and many more things an individual may come upon within the tribe’s environment. It enables one tribe member to tell another that the substance they’re looking at is worth gathering because it can be eaten, even if sometimes it doesn’t smell or taste very nice.

The society or tribe has gradually learned that these general terms are useful in providing guidelines for the design of patterns of behavior that will be effective in the tribe’s struggle to survive. Finally we come to values, which are the most general of principles, ones that apply to huge patterns in our memories of sense data. We care about defining good because, deep down, we need to know what good is in order to survive in increasing numbers over the long run.

Terms for values name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within the confines of the human skull. By values terms learned from our elders, we continually form judgments about what we are seeing. Note, however, that most of the time we don’t take any action when an experience is evoking one of our values. Sometimes we recognize a thing or an experience is harmless so we cease to think about it. Being constantly aware of, and wary of, the details in our surroundings does not always mean we‘ll take action, even though we are always contemplating whole sets of possible actions. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which of them have been getting good results lately, is internal behavior. Often, what shows on the outside—to the frustration of the behaviorists, who want to study only what is objectively observable—is nothing at all.

   

                                             Vaccination of Chinese babies (government mandated) 

Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Tribes are constantly seeking those ways. The ways of thinking that seem to work most effectively over generations are the ones we keep and teach to our kids. Conversely, people who live by principles and values that don’t work in reality don’t survive and, therefore, don’t have children. In short, principles and values can be understood as tested and proven techniques for sorting and responding to real life. They help us to organize our sense data and our memories of sense data. Over generations, they guide tribe members, individually and jointly, to formulate effective plans of action in timely ways.