The early city’s laws expanded on the farmer’s rough guidelines for living in a thinly populated farming community of familiar faces. The city’s laws prescribed more precisely what kinds of behaviors were acceptable in nearly all activities of city life. Urban crowding requires more civility. Even the word law came to be associated with reverent feelings (e.g. for Socrates⁷).

Most of all, the city had at its immediate beck and call large numbers who could fight off an enemy attack. Successful cities even progressed to the point where they could afford to keep, feed, arm, and train full-time soldiers, professionals who were capable of outfighting almost any swarm of invading amateurs. The farmers remaining in the hinterland moved closer to the city because life was safer there. 

One generation of life in or near the city taught citizens to be patriotic to their new state. The programming that survived made loyalty to one’s city-state automatic; patriotism is a virtue conducive to the city-state’s survival. Away from their city and its morés and values, people came to feel that they could have no truly human life. To be fully human meant being Athenian or Roman or whatever was your home town. In short, patriotism proved to be a program that vigorously replicated itself. 

                                      

    

                             Ancient Egyptian image of carpenters working (credit: Wikipedia) 

Literacy, metals, machines, factories, and computers all brought values shifts to the nations in which they first arose. When the ways of life they fostered proved more vigorous than those of nearby competing societies, the values shifts, morés, and behavior patterns that rose up with the new technologies were eventually adopted or forced on those other societies (usually with accompanying revolutions, nonviolent or violent). 

Societies that persevered in resisting these shifts in values and behaviors had to create alternate behavior-generating programs within their own cultures - ones that were equally effective in the cultural evolution game - or those societies got overrun.