Cannons from the 1430's (credit: Greenshed, via Wikimedia Commons)

The most basic form that love takes is mutual respect, and it is realized by a code of laws. In a democracy, these laws are drawn up by elected representatives of the people. (In an autocracy, the laws are whatever the autocrat says they are, but since he or she is just one person, the law tends to be inconsistent and inadequate. This is why autocracies need more repression to keep their people in line.)

In a democracy, the citizens must cooperate to build and maintain a legal system that will enable them to live together, work, do business, raise families, and settle disputes.

But laws can only work if the people trying to live under them respect not so much the exact wording of their laws as the spirit or intent behind them. When large numbers of ordinary citizens begin to see their laws as temporary inconveniences to be corrupted or circumvented, those laws become less and less effective and more and more offenses go unpunished. These are ominous signs for any society.

In our work here as students of human cultural evolution, one thing to note is that in human history, causes and their effects can take generations to connect. A decadent society, whose citizens no longer believe in their values, only deteriorates gradually into actual corruption, rebellions, and anarchy. For students of History, mounds of irrelevant trivia can obscure their view and keep them from seeing how decay in a society’s belief system can produce effects in the daily lives of its people. Why did they win this war or lose that one? Did they fall because of this famine? This plague? Irrelevant. The real cause of any civilization’s fall is moral decay.    

But we should not be surprised at the gradualness of the processes of History. In truth, they only seem gradual in the limited view of the individual. A thousand years is fifty human generations. In the terms of biological evolution, fifty generations is trivial. In genetic evolution, a thousand generations often have to pass before a new anatomical or physiological feature in a species can prove its value.

On the other hand, the evidence of History indicates that a new belief, with its morés attached, even though it looks slow-acting in our eyes, occasionally can prove itself much more rapidly than a new anatomical or physiological trait can. We can see the workings of human cultural evolution in action if we know what to look for. For example, Renaissance Science – with its venturesome spirit, its freeing of minds from the superstitions of the Middle Ages, its belief in the physically-caused nature underlying all events, and its rigorous method of theory-forming and testing – created guns. For the people in those times, guns changed everything. In a generation, knights were out, guns were in.

Note also that even when it moves more slowly, the cultural kind of evolution, i.e. the human kind of evolution, is more efficient than the genetic one used by all non-human species: cultural evolution responds to changes in the environment more quickly and effectively than does genetic evolution. Since Enlightenment times, in fact, humans have been getting better and better at altering nature herself. We don't need to wait for nature to hit us with a challenge anymore; we have begun to dominate her much faster than she can dominate us.

In any case, the cause-effect connection between a human society’s ideals and its customs and finally its success in the material world is there for us to see if we look hard enough. We just have to study a lot of societies and a lot of belief systems; then we begin to notice the trends and connections between courage, wisdom, freedom, and love and their consequences in plentiful goods, control of disease, and military success.

Plagues, famines, wars, etc. are readily dealt with by a society that has the values of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love firmly in place. All natural disasters are just the uncertainty of the universe taking physical form. To meet universal uncertainty at its inception, successful societies learn and practice the prime virtues. Then the material achievements – the greater harvests, birthrates, territory, etc. – come.