Another digression is in order here. It is an important digression that has been lingering at the edge of this topic, the connection between culture and survival, for several chapters already, so I will indulge in it for a few pages.

If we strive to be rigorously logical and objective at this point, we can also become very discouraged. Every society has its own world view, its own values, and its own morés (accepted patterns of behavior). The natural trend for human societies seems to be for each to keep moving ahead with its way of life while simultaneously diverging from and becoming ever more alien to all other societies and their ways of life.

Does an analysis of human value systems imply also that we can never arrive at a set of values that would be good and right for all humans? Will the people in the world’s many different societies continue to be loyal to incompatible sets of values? Even worse, will citizens of the world’s societies continue to follow their own values so rigidly that they will tolerate no other way and will feel motivated to kill other folk whose values and behaviors clearly differ from their own? The answer in History, sadly, seems to be “yes”.

Analyzing the background physical reality in which societies evolve adds to our sense of hopelessness. The environment around us is always changing, so our value systems and morés must too. When new conditions arise, different societies’ responses to them may all prove effective, as has happened in the animal world with lions and hyenas.

   

           lions and hyenas fight over a kill (credit: Kruger Sightings, via Wikimedia Commons)

Lions and hyenas occupy the same habitat and hunt the same prey. Their relative competitive advantages and disadvantages interact in complex ways, but they both flourish at the same time in the same habitat.¹ In this, they are akin to human societies, whose bases are cultural rather than genetic, but whose competitive situations are analogous to those of lions and hyenas. Lions and hyenas coexist in the same habitats and remain extremely mutually hostile. They exist as hostile neighbours, drive one another away from kills, and regularly fight to the death. 

Examples of human societies in similar circumstances don’t just riddle History; they are what History is about (e.g. the Apache and Pueblo, Huron and Iroquois, Gauls and Germans, Ghiljais and Durranis, Croats and Serbs, Poles and Ukrainians, Catholics and Protestants, Sunnis and Shia, etc.).

                                       

In other words, estrangement between societies comes about by a natural process. Different, often neighbouring societies, each with its own values and customs, arise and make war on each other as naturally as the real world simply rolls along. Such has been the case for all of human history so far.