But now let’s return to our main point. A kind of field underlies time. Two different types of codes guide living matter across that field, out of the past, across the present, into the future. These two types are the genetic and the cultural. Some beliefs and values appear to be installed genetically. Others, for sure, we learn as we grow. However, the point I emphasize in this book is that the cultural mode of evolution that emerged in our history so recently responds to environmental changes far more quickly than the genetic mode does. In short, it’s obvious that humans out-manoeuvre all other species on this planet.

Thus, a digression on the analogies that exist between the genetic way of evolution and the cultural one is in order here. The parallels have been noted before, by Social Darwinists in particular. However, the conclusions of the Social Darwinists are considered by most people today to be disgusting, and rightly so. To put it bluntly, Social Darwinists conclude that rich people are rich because they are superior. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society, while the workers, who in many places in the world are still living in squalor, deserve to live so because they don’t know how to run much of anything.

   

             "The storming of the Bastille" (credit: Jean-Pierre Houël, via Wikimedia Commons

A few generations ago, some rich Frenchmen lived by this code and found to their sorrow that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade any who still want to live by that code, I offer the harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.. And the very near miss in the US in 1931. This evidence contains some hard lessons for the nineteenth-century-style Social Darwinists in societies all over the world: if you want to live, be nice.

                            

                      Victorious North Vietnamese troops capture Saigon, 1975 (credit: Wikipedia) 

Experience in countries all over the world has shown that societies containing more compassion and justice can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today know this. They will not accept exploitation, bare subsistence, and misery as their necessary parts in society anymore. The code of values that can guide society to its highest levels of efficiency is one that balances courage with wisdom and freedom with compassion. Leaving mercy out of our picture of human society is not just cruel; it’s stupid. This is becoming clearer and clearer as we have more and more records, i.e. History, to study and spot patterns in.