Chapter 14.                                      (continued) 

Over thousands of years and billions of people, values enable the survival of a human society only if they complement the forces underlying physical reality, or, to be more precise, successful values must cause humans to behave in ways that complement and accommodate adversity and uncertainty, especially for whole societies over the long term. Successful values, riding in their human carriers, can thus go on.

Our values in modern democracies have been fairly effective at guiding us to survive and spread, though admittedly not always in humane ways. Over millennia, the demands of survival in a hazardous reality have caused us to work out a set of values, morés, and behaviours that (mostly) guide us to handle both adversity and uncertainty. If we and our forebears had not learned and implemented our lessons at least moderately well, we would not be here. Having children is hereditary: if your parents didn’t have any, you won’t have any.

 

   

                                                   American children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance

 

                                   

                                                                           Chinese children saluting their flag

   

                                                                        Children's Day in Iran (2008) 

But we don’t yet comprehend the biggest of these truths in a conscious and self-aware way. Most people of every nationality still see their values as being exempt from analysis because via early childhood imprinting we have been programmed to be deeply, unswervingly loyal to those values. This style of programming has made the vast majority of people in most societies, both historical and modern, into unwitting pawns of their society’s way of life. A major purpose of this book is to help thoughtful readers become consciously aware of values and turn them into concepts that are available for analysis and discussion.

First, then, what are the values that enable humans to respond to the main consequence of entropy, the unceasing, uphill struggle of life, the quality of life we know as adversity?

A whole array of values should be taught to young people to enable them to deal with adversity. In order to deal well with adversity, a society needs large numbers of people willing, even eager, to face constant struggle, exertion, exhaustion, and pain. In fact, a society proves most effective and durable if its citizens take up the offensive against the relentless decay of the universe. 

Children taught to embrace challenge become adults who seek to bring new territories (perhaps even planets) under their tribe’s control, to devise new ways of growing and storing food and building shelters, to use technology to accomplish more work with less human exertion, and, in general, to perform the tasks of survival more efficiently.

When we generalize about what these entropy-driven behaviour clusters have in common, we derive two giant values that are found in all cultures; these are courage and wisdom.

In different cultures all over the world, courage is instilled in the young, which is what we would expect if it really does work. Bergson spoke of élan, Nietzsche of the will to power.¹ Japanese samurai women and men lived by bushido, their code of total discipline, and European nations lived by a similar code, chivalry, right into modern times. But beyond the difficulties of translation from culture to culture and era to era, we see in all these values a common motif: they all direct their disciples to train themselves to persevere through challenges and obstacles of all kinds, even to seek challenge out. Achilles chose a brief, hard life of honour over a longer, easier one of obscurity. For centuries, the ancient Greeks considered him to be a model of a man, as do some people in nations that have absorbed ancient Greek culture to this day. Many other cultures have similar heroes.

 

   

                                             Achilles dragging body of Hector behind his chariot

 

                              

                                                             alleged photo of Apache leader Crazy Horse

                            

                                                  statue of Shaka, Zulu leader 

                            

                                                                          Huo Yuanjia, Chinese martial artist 

Confucius said that the superior man thinks always of virtue, while the common man thinks always of comfort. Nineteenth-century English writer K.H. Digby put it this way: “Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world.”²

The exhortation to meet and even seek adversity echoes through all societies. Young people everywhere are especially encouraged to face hazards in defense of their nations. We can sum up the gist of all of these values by saying that they are built around the principle that in English is called courage.