Chapter 9.                                      (continued) 

   

In today’s post-industrial societies with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), women can now simultaneously contribute children and work other than child nurturing to most areas of their culture’s ongoing development and life. The imperatives of the past that dictated girls had to adopt submissive roles to ensure the survival of their tribe and its culture are evolutionarily obsolete. Advances in birth control technologies (e.g. the oral contraceptive) and in child-rearing and nurturing technologies (e.g., artificial insemination, infant-feeding mixtures) have made the chores and joys of child rearing possible for men, and even for single women, who in earlier eras had little choice but to forego the joys and trials of parenting or else condemn themselves and their children to society’s stigmatization.

   

In post-industrial societies, there is no survival-oriented reason for women not to be afforded as large and varied a range of career and lifestyle choices as those previously open almost exclusively to men. There is no compelling, survival-oriented reason for any person’s not receiving pay and status commensurate with the value of his or her contribution to the nation’s ongoing life and development.

In fact, what appears to be true is that any limitations placed unduly or unequally on the opportunities of any citizens in the community on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, or race is only reducing the community’s capacity to grow and flourish. Computer technology and the oral contraceptive have made a higher degree of gender-neutral justice possible. If we wish to maximize our human resources, become as dynamic a society as possible, and compete ever more successfully in the environments of our planet and perhaps beyond, we must make education and careers of the highest quality open to all capable citizens. If we are to maximize our human resources, then access to education and careers should be based on merit alone. At least, such is the conclusion we must draw from all the reasoning and evidence we have before us today.

Furthermore, the authorities of society, if only for efficiency’s sake, will probably have to find ways of ensuring that quality nurturing of children receives pay and benefits matching the pay and benefits given to all other kinds of jobs in a society traditionally driven by these incentives. Having kids will have to be a reasonable option if we are to maintain a stable base population for our society in this new century.

Driving women back into a domestic zone would be retrograde and counterproductive, like locking our bulldozers in sheds and digging ditches by hand in order to provide more jobs. For women and men who choose it, the nurturing of children must be given real respect and pay if we are to continue on the path of knowledge-driven and technology-based evolution that we have chosen. Logic says so.

It remains unclear whether future societies will see a profound and enduring redesigning of gender roles and child-rearing practices and a concomitant redesigning of the roles of worker-citizens that will make women equal partners with men. Moves toward gender equity, in work and citizenship, and real change in the everyday life experiences of women and men have been suggested and tried (to varying degrees) before and have faded away before. But the trends in the West, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, look widespread and strong. The question will be whether societies that contain a high degree of gender equity will outperform those that do not. That question will be answered, but the answer will only emerge gradually over the next generation or so.

To sum up this digression, let me reiterate that the point of illustrating the sociocultural model of human evolution with some example morés that we are familiar with and that we can imagine being revised is to emphasize the fact that our morés and values are programmable. At least in theory, we can rewrite them for the betterment of the whole of society by processes of rational discussion and debate, processes that are based on reasoning, evidence, and compromise. Difficult, yes, but preferable to the blind, inefficient, painful methods of social change that we have been using for centuries.

It is time for reason to take over. The hazards of continuing the old ways of prejudice, revolution, and war are too large. We have to find another way, one that rights gender injustices and so many others without resorting to the horror of war. And if we can find a way to base our values on our best models of physical reality, ones we can all see the sense of, it can be done. Rational thinking and evidence-gathering can tame our atavistic urges. Difficult, but not impossible.

Now let’s return to our main argument, in spite of digressions that beckon.

It is clear that individual human behaviours and the internal running of the more complex but vital values programs (which are mental meta-behaviours) almost all originate in the socialization that the individual is given by his or her society. Furthermore, values become established in a society when they direct its citizens toward patterns of behaviour that enable the citizens to survive, reproduce, and territorialize with ever-growing success.

By now some readers are probably inferring a profound insight about the higher-order mental constructs that we call values. Clearly, the deepest principles that must underlie and guide our value systems—in big choices for the tribe and small ones for the individual—must be designed in such a way as to enable us to respond effectively to the largest general principles of the physical universe itself. That universe is the one in which survival happens or does not happen. Value systems must have designs underlying them that complement and respond to the designs inherent in matter, space, and time.

What are these principles? For impatient readers, I can only say that I am coming to them—by small steps and gradual degrees. But we have to discuss the network of ideas at the base of the new moral system thoroughly before we try to build the middle and upper levels. Proceeding with precision and care will maximize the chances of our seeing that a universal moral code is possible for us to devise—in theory—and that such a code, if we can implement it, will offer the only path into the future that enables the survival of our species—in practice.

Notes

1. “Feral Children,” Learn Stuff website, December 5, 2012. http://www.learnstuff.com/feral-children/.

2. “Enculturation,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enculturation.

3. “Sociocultural evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution#Contemporary_discourse_about_sociocultural_evolution.

4. Pearson Higher Education, “Anthropology and the Study of Culture,” My Anthro Lab, Chapter 1, p. 17. http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205949509.pdf.

5. Alice Dreger, “When Taking Multiple Husbands Makes Sense,” The Atlantic, February 1, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/when-taking-multiple-husbands-makes-sense/272726/.

6. “Piaget’s theory of cognitive development,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget’s_theory_of_cognitive_development.

7. Plato, Crito, Perseus Digital Library. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DCrito%3Apage%3D50

8. Mark J. Perry, “U.S. Male-Female SAT Math Scores: What Accounts for the Gap?” Encyclopedia Britannica blog, July 1, 2009. http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/07/more-on-the-male-female-sat-math-test-gap/

9. Jenny Hope, “Women Doctors Will Soon Outnumber Men after Numbers in Medical School Go up Tenfold,” Daily Mail online, November 30, 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2067887/Women-doctors-soon-outnumber-men-numbers-medical-school-fold.html.