Externally, reality’s uncertainty and adversity are always weathering, eroding, and jolting the body of any society, compelling it to deal with change. When a society no longer deals effectively with these jolts and pressures (e.g. overpopulation, pollution, drought, war, famine, plague, and economic and technological advances) by one process or another, it is sooner or later superseded by a society that does.

 

  Mutualism: bee sipping nectar while pollinating a flower (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Another interesting feature of how values drive society’s behavior patterns and morés is the paradoxical design that value clusters, at first look, appear to exhibit. Values are designed in matched pairs. As one value drives humans toward a particular set of behavior patterns, it is tempered with a complementary one which attenuates, gives focus to, and reduces the excesses of the undiluted use of the first value. Our guide here is nature. Nature creates endless clusters of relationships by balancing cooperating and competing forces.

If our young people were filled only with aggression—or daring or courage, as they might see it—they would die off continually, in large numbers, hurling themselves at cars, cliffs, ocean waves, outer space, and one another. But they are also encouraged to acquire judgment—wisdom, as their elders see it—that will direct them to practice courage in ways likely to benefit rather than harm them and their society. Be aggressive, assertive, and ambitious, but aim to use your drive to become an entrepreneur, a scientist, a doctor, an athlete, an artist, or a musician, rather than a criminal or a highway casualty. Strive to participate in your society in a way that encourages compromise rather than cruelty. Most importantly, remember what would exist today if, historically, there had been no humans with values at all.

Some societies and some individuals within those societies don’t balance courage with intelligence very well, and excesses result. But the corrections come, and over time, the overall movement for our species, despite the difficulties or pain incurred, is toward a social ecosystem of ever greater vigor, wisdom, tolerance, and diversity. There were once a few hundred of us; there are now over seven billion. On this earth, on Mars, and beyond our solar system, nothing living sits still; we either evolve or we die.