Chapter 14.                                 (continued) 

For the citizens living in a given society, the ways in which values and behaviors arise can seem difficult to analyze. The values a society lived by when it was first growing strong can become lost for generations before the system starts to unravel. This is why trying to find constants in history can be so frustrating. When a tribe updates its code of values or becomes lazy in adhering to its old values, the consequences can take generations to show up and can be obscured under mounds of irrelevant trivia.

But then again, from our limited perspectives we should not be surprised at the apparent gradualness of history’s processes. A thousand years is fifty human generations. In evolutionary terms, a span of fifty generations is trivial. In normal, genetic evolution, a thousand generations often have to pass before a new anatomical or physiological feature can prove itself valuable in the survival game.

The evidence of history indicates that a new value, with the cultural-behavioral morés that are implied by it and attached to it, can prove itself much more rapidly than a new anatomical or physiological variation can. For example, science produced cannons and, for states, they changed everything. This evidence supports the view that the cultural-behavioral mode of evolution is superior to the genetic mode in a very basic sense. 

Cultural evolution responds to and even causes environmental changes in a timelier way and thus outruns genetic evolution. Cultural change seems slow in our limited view, but it is actually very quick compared to biological change. And most cultural experiments don’t take a thousand years. Only the very profound ones do.

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). 

   

                                            Poor scavenging at Payatas dump site, Phillipines 

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-centred morés 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 feeling 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 brought more and more revolutions 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, exploitative 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.