To balance or focus this value called freedom, in the same way as wisdom balances and focuses courage, society must teach love. Brotherhood. Agape. As wisdom plus freedom yields work, so freedom plus love equals democracy.

A society with a wide range of behaviours or lifestyles practiced among its citizens must teach these same citizens to respect one another’s sensibilities and rights. If it doesn’t, the society will be constantly torn by violence between its various factions. No matter which wins, some of the society’s versatility will be lost, which amounts to a net loss for all. Thus, some form of brotherly love for one’s fellow citizens (or loyalty to one’s nation) is taught by the vast majority of long-enduring societies and has been for centuries.

        

                        Thomas Hobbes, English political philosopher (credit: Wikipedia) 

In a democracy, the majority of citizens must cooperate to build into their society an operating system that will enable them to live, work, do business, and settle disputes without violence. For enlightened modern nations in the twenty-first century, this process is the rule of law. The law is not perfect, but we do not live in a perfect world. However, people in the majority sense that whatever the flaws in our legal system, it is infinitely preferable to anarchy. As Hobbes famously put the matter, life for humans with no system of social order in place is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

For the citizens living in a given society, the ways in which values and behaviours 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 created cannons, which, for states, changed everything in a few generations. This evidence proves that the cultural-behavioural mode of evolution is superior to the genetic mode in a very basic sense: cultural evolution responds to and even causes environmental change in a timelier way than genetic evolution. Cultural change seems slow in our limited view, but it is actually very quick when compared to biological change.

Some societies have worked out sets of values and morés that have enabled them to handle their environments so effectively that for generations, 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). 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 take their lifestyle for granted; they think values like courage, wisdom, love, and freedom, are old-fashioned notions for peasants. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality. It keeps right on being hard and unpredictable, demanding courage, wisdom, love, and freedom of each of us.