In a Computing Science metaphor, a culture is just the software of a nation. Or in another metaphor, we can say a culture evolves and survives or else falls behind and dies in ways that are analogous to the ways in which a genome thrives or dies. If a nation’s culture—that is, its software—gets good practical results over generations, its carriers multiply; if not, they don’t, and then they and it fade out of homo sapiens’ total culture pool. 

What was sad but true for centuries was that a culture’s fitness was sometimes tested by famine or epidemics or natural disaster, but most often it was tested by war with one of its neighbours. For centuries, when a tribe, operating under its culture, was no longer tough enough to hold its territory against invasions by neighbouring tribes, it fought and lost. Its men were killed, its women and children were carried off by the enemy; its way of life dwindled and was absorbed, or in some cases, vanished entirely. Thus Joshua smote Hazor, the ancient Greeks crushed Troy, the Romans crushed Carthage. The examples could go on.

                                                  

   

                             Ruins of Carthage in modern Tunisia  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

But was Hitler right? Is war inevitable, even desirable? It depends. The key question is whether we will ever rise above our present, mainly war-driven system of cultural evolution. I think it is clear that we have to. We have to learn a new way if our species is to live. By reason or suffering or both, we are going to have to arrive at a new way of regularly updating our values and our patterns of group behavior.

Changes in our circumstances are always coming at us. Some of them we even cause. We can cushion our way of life against them for a while, but over time reality demands that we either evolve or die out, and in this case, “evolve” means “update our culture”. However, for now, I will leave the war digression and the sociocultural mechanism of human evolution to be more thoroughly discussed in later chapters.

For now, then, let’s settle for saying that the point critics of Bayesianism make about the way in which some human behaviours do not seem to be based on Bayesian types of calculations only looks at first like a successful criticism. If we study the matter more deeply, we see that we do indeed have attachments to some of our most counterproductive values and morés, but there are reasons for those attachments. Upsetting, repulsive, warmongering programs that are deeply embedded in us. They are design flaws we must deal with because they have long since fallen out of touch with the physical reality that surrounds us and with the dilemma in which we find ourselves. As John Kennedy said, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”⁶

                                               

                           

                 John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States (credit: Wikimedia Commons)