Chapter 9 – The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution

In order to build a universal moral code, we must now do two things: first, explain how moral codes become established and amended, and second, extract from our best modern models of the physical universe the principles we should use to guide us in building a moral code so that it is consistent with, not disconnected from, all our other knowledge in modern times. We need to make our ideas of good connect to our most coherent and effective ideas of real.

Most of us are raised and conditioned to be fiercely loyal to the way of life we grew up with, so we can expect that analyzing the roots of morality will be difficult. Powerful and subtle internal programming steers us toward affirming the morals and morés that we grew up with. But difficult does not mean impossible. Most importantly, we have the evidence of history and of life as it is lived by real people in real societies today to check our theories against.

And what do we notice about moral code systems if we closely analyze various human ways of life, that is, the cultures of a variety of human societies, present and past? Human beings baffle one another and each even sometimes baffles him or her self. Why do we do the things we do?

                                        

The reasoning process that answers this question contains several steps. To begin with, we can analyze the everyday actions of the people around us. Why does this man get up when his alarm clock rings? Why does he even have an alarm clock? Why does this woman shampoo her hair and then dry it with a hot-air blowing electrical device? In similar ways, dozens of mundane questions may be posed about the everyday life of our society or any society. Of course, these actions and the motivations behind them seem obvious to the people who live in the society in which they are practiced. To the people in a given society, their actions seem simply to involve people being people. But to people in other cultures, the reasons for them are often not merely obscure, they’re unknown.

   

                                                     

                                                                      (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Another interesting example of a custom that is commonplace in some societies but not others is the one that trains men to shave their beards. In some cultures, men who are clean shaven are seen as being neat, presentable, and attractive. In other cultures, a man without a beard is seen as being weak or alien. In some cultures, men are forcibly shaved as a form of punishment. The fascinating questions come when we ask “Why?” Why shaving? Is there some survival advantage in some environments for men who were trained by their fathers to shave their beards? For example, do men who shave daily appear younger or more attractive to women? Do they reproduce more successfully and prolifically and thus pass their ways on to more progeny, especially the sons who watch them shave?

                                         

Research on such shaving questions is sparse and inconclusive. However, in our present context it is important to see that asking questions about cultural morés and customs in terms of their possible advantages in the survival game entails thinking scientifically about morés in general. Under this view, none of our actions or habits are trivial or meaningless. They all matter. Under this view, the mundane rapidly becomes the fascinating.