Cities and their ways proved fitter for economic progress than decentralized farm communities or nomadic tribes. More citizens working in increasingly specialized skilled tasks meant more and better goods and services available and thus, over time, helped to increase the population. 

Values shifted toward making all citizens content to live in densely populated neighbourhoods, causing the rise of behaviours that encouraged citizens to respect their neighbours’ property. Don’t bear false witness against your neighbour and don’t covet the things he has in his yard next door. The Bible, for example, contains an ancient moral code and it told citizens not to covet their neighbours’ goods. Today we can see why: envy, especially in a crowded urban setting, raises the odds of citizens slipping into friction and then violence.

The commandments may please God; we don't know for sure. But for sure we know that these commandments make it easier for people to live together and get along. 

The early city’s laws expanded the farmer’s guidelines for living in thinly populated farming communities of familiar faces. These laws prescribed more precisely what kinds of behaviours were acceptable in nearly all activities of city life. Urban crowding requires more civility. Even the word law came to be associated with reverent feelings (e.g. for Socrates⁷).

Most of all, the city had at its immediate beck and call large numbers who could fight off an enemy attack. Successful cities even progressed to the point where they could afford to keep, feed, arm, and train full-time soldiers, professionals who were capable of outfighting almost any swarm of invading amateurs. The farmers remaining in the hinterland moved closer to the city because life was safer there. 

One generation of life in or near the city taught citizens to be patriotic to their new state. The cultural programming that survived made loyalty to one’s city-state automatic; patriotism is conducive to a city-state’s survival. In short, patriotism is a program that perpetuates itself. Away from their city and its morés and values, people came to feel that they could not have a fully human life. To be fully human meant being Theban or Uran or whatever was the term that people of your culture used to brag about their home town.

                                                  

   

                                             Ancient Egyptian image of carpenter working 

(credit: Maler der Grabkammer der Bildhauer Nebamun und Ipuki, via Wikimedia Commons)

Literacy, metals, machines, factories, and computers all brought values shifts to the nations in which they first arose. When the ways of life they fostered proved more vigorous than those of nearby competing societies, the values, morés, and behavior patterns that rose up with the new technologies were adopted by, or forced on, those other societies (usually with accompanying revolutions, nonviolent or violent). Societies that persevered in resisting these shifts in values and behaviors had to create alternate behaviour-generating programs within their own cultures – programs that were equally effective in the cultural-evolution game – or they got overrun.