A culture is just the software of a nation. A culture evolves and survives or else falls behind and dies in ways that are analogous to the ways in which a genome survives or dies. If a nation’s culture—that is, its software—gets good practical results over generations, its carriers multiply; if not, they don’t, and then they and it fade out of homo sapiens’ total culture pool. What was sad but true for centuries was that a society’s fitness to survive was sometimes tested by famine or epidemic disease or natural disaster, but most often it was tested by war with one of its neighbors. 

For centuries, when a tribe, guided by its culture, was no longer vigorous enough to hold its territory against invasions by neighboring tribes, it fought and lost. Its men were killed, its women and children were carried off by the enemy; its way of life dwindled and was absorbed, or in some cases, vanished entirely. Thus Joshua smote Hazor, the ancient Greeks crushed Troy, the Romans crushed Carthage. Out of existence. The examples could go on.

                                                  

   

                        Ruins of Carthage in modern Tunisia  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

But was Hitler right? Is war inevitable, even desirable? It depends. The question remaining is whether we will ever rise above our present, mainly war-driven system of cultural evolution. I think it is clear that we have to learn a new way if we are to live. By reason or suffering or both, we are going to have to arrive at a new means of evolving culturally, continually adopting, in a timely way, updated, more efficient values and the behaviour patterns that are fostered by, and attached to, these values.

Changes in our circumstances always come. Some of them we even cause. We can cushion our way of life against them for a while, but over time reality demands that we either evolve or die out. However, for now, I will leave the war digression and the sociocultural mechanism of human evolution to be more thoroughly discussed in later chapters.

For now, then, let’s settle for saying that the point Bayesianism’s critics make about the way in which some areas of human behaviour do not seem to be based on Bayesian types of calculations only looks at first like an apt criticism. If we study the matter more deeply, we see there are reasons for our apparently un-Bayesian attachments to some of our most counterproductive values and morés. They are upsetting, warmongering reasons. They are design flaws we will have to deal with because they have long since fallen out of touch with the physical reality that surrounds us (a physical reality that, in large part, we have created) and with the dilemma in which we find ourselves. As John F. Kennedy said, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”⁶

                               

                            John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the U.S. (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Most importantly, for the purposes of this book, we can see that the Bayesian model of human thinking still holds. Deeply held beliefs and morés do get changed—sometimes even in entire nations—by the Bayesian mechanism.

I will have more to say on these matters in later chapters. The first big criticism of Bayesianism has been dealt with. The Bayesian model, when it is applied at the tribal level of human behaviour, can fully account for the apparently un-Bayesian behaviours of individuals. I now must move on to the second big criticism of Bayesianism, the theoretical one.

And perhaps this is the point at which I should also say that the next chapter is fairly technical, and it isn’t essential to my case. If you want to skip a chapter, the next is one you can skip and still not lose the train of thought leading to the conclusion of the full argument.

Notes

1. Jan Degenaar, “Through the Inverting Glass: First-Person Observations on Spatial Vision and Imagery,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12, No. 1 (March 2013). 

http://www.academia.edu/4029955/Degenaar2013_Through_the_Inverting_Glass.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869 essay). The Constitution Society website. http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women.htm.

4. Albert North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (University of Virginia: Barbour-Page Lectures, 1927).

5. Biography of Yukio Mishima, Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 8, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima.

6. John F. Kennedy, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, NY, September 25, 1961. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/DOPIN64xJUGRKgdHJ9NfgQ.aspx.