All our traditional values, morés, and roles once did serve useful purposes. Many of them don’t anymore, but it is like pulling teeth without anaesthetic to get the reactionaries among us to admit that many of their cherished “good old ways” are just in the way in today’s world.

But in general, in all areas of our lives, even those areas we think of as sacred, traditional, and timeless, we humans do change our beliefs, values, and patterns of behavior over time by the Bayesian way. We eventually adopt a new view of reality and the human place in it if that new view is more coherent with the facts we are observing and especially if our lives clearly do improve when we switch over to the new way of growing food, making tools, curing diseases, etc. A society that absolutely refuses to do so dies out. We’ve come a long way in the West, for example, in our treatment of women and minorities. Ideas do evolve. Our justice systems aren’t race or gender neutral yet, but they’re much better than they were even fifty years ago.

The larger point can be reiterated. For deep social change, we undergo the Bayesian decision process, but only in the most final of senses. Sometimes it’s not the individual who has to learn to adopt new beliefs, values, and morés; sometimes it is a whole community or even nation. And once in a while, a nation that simply gets culturally overwhelmed - by too much change too fast - dies out, as a nation/culture, completely. 

The El Molo ethnic group in Kenya is almost gone. The Canaanite, Bo, Anasazi, and Beothuk peoples are gone. Troy and Carthage are gone. None of this is fair. It’s just over.

                                     

                                         Demasduit, last of the Beothuk (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the more gradual adjustments that some societies have managed to achieve, it sometimes also happens that subcultures within a society die out without the whole tribe dying out, and thus some values and beliefs in the culture disappear while the larger culture itself, after sustaining major trauma and healing, adjusts and goes on.

For example, Hitler and his Nazi cronies ranted until their last hour that their “race” should fight on until they all went down in a sea of blood because they had shown in the most vital of arenas, namely war, that they were weaker than the Russians. Hitler sincerely believed his Nazi philosophy. In the same era, the Japanese cabinet and High Command contained members who were adamant in arguing that the Japanese people should fight on, even in the face of hopeless odds. To do anything other than to fight on was literally inconceivable to these men. (Yukio Mishima’s case was a curious last gasp of Japanese imperialism.⁵) Fortunately, people who could face reality, learn, adapt, and then thrive eventually prevailed, in both Germany and Japan.

                              

                                                    Yukio Mishima (credit: Wikimedia Commons)