When it comes to our values, morés, and patterns of behaviour, we tend to change slowly and grudgingly, but we can change. Thus, we could learn a mode of cultural evolution that is vigorous but not militaristic.

Once we accept the view that over generations, a maximally efficient cultural path, which values and mores steer us onto, exists in time itself, we are admitting that values are real. Thus, we must conclude that only certain values, those derived from our best world view—that is, Science—will be rational choices to guide humanity to greater health and vigor in the future. We all must live and survive in this same physical universe.

The courage-wisdom meme complex, along with the behaviour patterns it entails, is the human response to entropy; the love-freedom meme complex is our long-term response to quantum uncertainty. The optimal balance of them all is called virtue or the Tao. It is always subtly shifting its path. Especially in these nuclear-armed, climate-threatened times, we must see those shifts and respond effectively. Or die.

   

                                                   Statue of Lao Tzu (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The Tao Te Ching says: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” Lao Tsu was telling his disciples never to become confident that they have life figured out and can now become complacent about their capacity to handle life’s events; complacency is the harbinger of disaster. The way of all ways, the Tao, is always evolving. To live - as individuals, but far more importantly as nations—we must stay alert, resourceful, nimble, and sharp.

And values themselves? They are just our best guides to where the survival path, through the present and on into the future, lies.

Notes

1. “Convergent Evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 30, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution.

2. Richard Dawkins, “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 123–144.

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 78.