Chapter 13               The War Digression

                                        

   

          

     Ruins of ancient Beit She’an  (credit: James Emery, via Wikimedia Commons)

This chapter contains a painful, but necessary, digression. But first let’s again review what we have had to say about cultural evolution.

All societies, prehistoric, historical, and contemporary, have always tried to integrate their values systems – the codes which guide their citizens’ actions in all phases of living – with their worldview, their best understanding of reality.

A society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favorable part of the energy flows that exist near that society. By their worldview, the folk decide where the crops,  animals, etc. can live. Thus, a society’s worldview, its way of picturing reality, informs its values. These then shape the tribe’s behavior patterns, which, finally, heavily influence the odds that the tribe will survive in both the short and long terms. Humans always try to live in line with their idea of reality.

A worldview is a way of understanding the real world. It is a way of organizing our sense data, memories of sense data, and concepts related to these data. Every society that survives arrives, by consensus of generations of its people, at a system for organizing their perceptions of their world and the human roles in that world. The people then are programmed over generations to perceive their society’s “way of life” as being correct, appropriate, and natural. "We are just humans being human", they say. It has been said in every society ever. 

Worldviews and the value systems and morés that go with them are subtly intertwined. A change in a society’s worldview, the values shifts which that change leads to, and the behaviors the new values foster all interact in one large complex in a nation’s ways of doing, thinking, talking, and living, its whole software package – its culture, in other words.

                         

           Aztec calendar (a graphic of a worldview) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Thus, a society’s world view, if it is analyzed closely, can be seen as a condensed guide to that society’s values. In conjunction with their basic view of what the world is, a society’s people design systems of values and attached behaviors that they teach to their children as being “right”. The word right has two meanings here: “right” in the sense of accurately describing things in the material world (“Is that thermometer right?”) and “right” in the sense of being morally correct (“Do the right thing.”). Upon close analysis, this ambiguity is not ambiguous at all. We want deeply to believe that our idea of moral rightness is consistent with the way the universe works. We want to believe our idea of right is right.

And now, a digression. 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 aim to be rigorously logical at this point, we may also become very discouraged. Every society has its own world view, values, and 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 more and more alien to, all other societies.

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 tribes 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 each will tolerate no other way and will feel motivated to kill other folk whose values and behaviors clearly differ from their own? We seem to first suspect, then fear, then hate, “others” as naturally as we breathe.

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 adapt to those changes. When new conditions arise, many different societies’ responses to them may all prove effective, as has happened, for example, in the animal world with lions and hyenas.

   

   lions and hyenas fight over a kill (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 basic operating codes are mostly cultural, rather than genetic, but whose competitive situations are analogous to those of lions and hyenas. Lions and hyenas exist as hostile neighbours, drive one another away from kills, and often fight to the death. Sometimes, lions win, sometimes they lose. Hyenas are numerous and have extremely powerful jaws.

Examples of human societies in similar circumstances don’t just riddle History; they are History (e.g. Apache and Pueblo, Huron and Iroquois, Pondo and Zulu, Gaul and German, Ghiljai and Durrani, Han and Mongol, Croat and Serb, Pole and Ukrainian, Catholic and Protestant, Sunni and Shia, etc., etc.).

                                       

In other words, the evidence indicates that estrangement between societies comes about by a natural process. Different, often neighbouring societies, each with its own values and customs, arise, diverge, become mutually hostile, and make war on each other as naturally as the world turns. Such has been the case for all of human history so far.

So, is war inevitable? Again, the evidence of History seems to answer with a firm “yes”. Wars are fought over these very differences. Following this line of argument, we see what Hitler thought of as his great insight: he accepted that war was an inevitable, periodic test of the cultural and, he said, “racial” vitality of a people. He held to, and ranted over, his worldview to his last hour. To geneticists, his racial theories are meaningless silliness. “Race” is a myth. We humans are all one species. But when his worldview is extended to an analysis of cultural groupings of humans (e.g. tribes and nations), and the conflicts that arise among them, it becomes more disturbing.                               

            

   

                                        Ruins of Nuremberg, Germany, 1945.

                   (credit: Keystone/Second Roberts, via Wikimedia Commons)

The ancient Greeks had two words for humans: Hellenes (themselves) and barbarians (everyone else). Similar in view and vocabulary are the Chinese. To many Chinese in China, I would be gwai lo, an evil alien. The word Masai – a famous African tribe’s name for themselves – means people, as do the words Innu, in Innu, and Cheyenne, in Cheyenne. For hundreds of years, Europeans divided the members of the species homo sapiens into Christians and heathens. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. All humans for centuries in Japan were either Japanese or gaijin. Jews were proud they were not Gentiles. Tutsis were not Hutus. In other words, people in all these cultures and most others that have ever existed believed that they were the only fully human humans. Thus, wars have occurred with discouraging regularity.

The evidence mounts on all sides against the hopes of those who love peace. People find it easy, even moral, to attack, subdue, assimilate, and sometimes even exterminate other humans whom they regard as members of an inferior subspecies. By this reasoning, Hitler was only exhorting the Germans to accept the inevitability of war and get to work at being winners.

By this reasoning, war is the way by which we have – through the sociocultural mode of evolution – become our own predators. We cut out the ineffective parts of our species’ total concepts-values-behaviors pool (its meme pool, rather than its gene pool) by war. Wars primarily kill the young and fit, the prime breeding stock. And modern wars kill much of the healthiest, smartest breeding stock on both sides. Clearly, wars don’t serve a genetic mode of evolution anymore, if they ever did. They haven’t since the first technological war, i.e. the US Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die and too much prime breeding stock is lost for anyone to claim that wars are part of the biological process of evolution. But wars do still serve a cultural mode of evolution.

                           

                      Gandhi (South Africa, 1906) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

For thousands of years, we have evolved culturally by this ugly means. For centuries, no other species and no change in our environment has been able to seriously shake us. Paradoxically, we save individuals born with genetically transmitted defects that in any other species would be fatal. These individuals live and go on to reproduce. We aren’t evolving genetically; if anything, we are genetically devolving. But we are evolving in a cultural-behavioral way.

We prey on ourselves, not eating corpses, but killing followers of other cultures, if they don’t kill us first. By this means, we cut out parts of our species’ total values/memes pool whose usefulness is fading. This system worked brutally, but efficiently, for a long time. Evidence that it worked lies, for example, in the way in which within a generation of being conquered, most people subjugated under the Romans were effectively “Romanized.” Rome had a more vigorous, efficient culture than did any of the lands it conquered – a culture that swallowed up neighboring tribes, their territories, populations, and ways of life. Similar cases fill History. For centuries, war worked.

Today, however, war has made itself obsolete. Our weapons have grown too big. Our species very likely would not survive a World War III. Combining what we know of human history and our war habit with what we know of our present technology leads us to envision a worldwide bloom of mushroom clouds, followed within a decade by images of our once beautiful, blue planet, burned almost bare and wrapped in drifting clouds of radioactive smoke and ash.

On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we ever give up war, will we devolve culturally, grow sickly, then die out, like a herd of deer that has no predators because it’s isolated on an island? Experts have said so. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They’re ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it.²

However, there is evidence to support the belief that humans may learn to live, multiply, and spread – that is, to remain vigorous – without constantly killing one another. The strongest evidence lies in how, in every society, there are some people who show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiation rather than by violence. Some people can stick to the ways of Reason even when they're being attacked personally, even physically. 

                             

                        

     Nelson Mandela (1937) (credit: author unknown, via Wikimedia Commons)

They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe any single set of values or worldview (even the ones they learned as children) necessarily leads to the only “right” way of life. From a social sciences viewpoint, we can say the value systems of these more peaceful members of society assign a higher value to the lives of other humans than to reducing the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that seem alien to them.

                      

         Martin Luther King, Jr. (credit: Dick DeMarsico, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

   

     Japanese sushi: "alien" food (credit: Laitr Keiows, via Wikimedia Commons)

Another bit of evidence supporting the hypothesis that maybe reason can be stronger than prejudice is the vigor evident in pluralistic societies, those that have succeeded in synthesizing several cultures. A community formed by merging many ways of life can work. Britain is a good example. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Normans, Danes, and more recently, people from all countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. People who call themselves Brits these days show genetic features and cultural traits from many different tribes/nations. Virtually every tribe on Earth.

Furthermore, we can see that after a war, living patterns and values change in major, radical ways not only for the vanquished, but often for the victors as well – ways not anticipated by the planners on either side.

           

   

                             German beer (credit: Ich, via Wikimedia Commons)

When I was a boy in the 1950s in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my city, and sushi and dojo were just words in novels. By the time I was a young man, delicatessens and karate dojos could be found all over my city, a city whose men had just won a war against Germany and Japan.

Today, Germany and Japan are two of the strongest economies in the world, and Edmonton schools contain students from almost every culture on earth. In retrospect, it seems so stupid that fifty-five million people had to die so the Japanese could learn to open up to the ways of the gaijin, and I could learn to love and trust people named “Kobayashi”.

We in the West were the victors in that war, yet today we have embraced many of the technologies and morés of the vanquished. This proves that we can integrate. The trick in the future will be to bring about these changes on both sides of every rivalry by planned interactions in commerce, sport, science, and art, and then by intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. This will be hard, but not impossible. In this age of the internet and the global marketplace, it is getting easier by the day.

   

                                         

            American hamburger (credit: Evan-Amos, via Wikimedia Commons)

One way or another, changes keep happening in every human culture, whether the changes originate from within or without. But changes in ways of living aren’t always accompanied by people hurting and killing each other. And given that in the end we all must answer with our cultural codes and morés to the same physical reality, there is reason to hope that peace-loving people, if they can become real-world-wise enough and motivated enough, may prove fitter for survival than the warmongers. Peace-mongers just have to get very subtle about how they program kids. Teach them to see the principles of right and wrong in the events of physical reality itself, then, to be both vigorous and respectful of others. Finally, to practice these principles in all their actions every day.  

   

      

                 Russian pelmeni (credit: Eugene Kim, via Wikimedia Commons)

The evidence says very clearly that humans are capable of being open-minded, creative, and adaptable. From within ourselves, we can add will. Commitment. Perseverance. Then, there is real hope for peace. For the memes of decency and sense hitting critical mass in our species. For the survival of our world. And us. 

   

             

                               Canadian poutine (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Before I close this chapter and return to the larger argument of the book, let me make one implicit point explicit: even though all values are tentative for humans, and a bewildering array of values codes have been tested violently against one another in the past, no values or beliefs should be called arbitrary. That word implies that our testing of cultures against one another is terrible but trivial. But wars are not due just to the whims of egotistical leaders. Much deeper matters - namely the worldviews of whole nations -  are tested by war. Thus, discussing our values matters more than anything else we could possibly talk about. The question for humanity now is: Can we learn to update our "ways of life" by reasoned, conscious choices instead of by war? If we can, then we can master ourselves and stop making war on each other, but still remain vigorous as a species. And maybe even, eventually, arrive at one hybrid code of values for all humans to live by.   

Our world, including the parts of it that we make, is always changing, so our morés and values must also. However, new values and morés are not arbitrary – that is, they are not all of equal merit – because they do not all lead to the same long-range survival odds for a nation or for the human species. Some new values, and the morés they foster, work well, some don’t. Some move society in unhealthy directions entirely. Values have major consequences for those who follow them; they should never be described by a casual term like “arbitrary”. 

For example, if we’re rational, we note and exploit energy supply opportunities and remedy energy supply problems by our chosen, thoughtful actions, not by luck. Nations’ energy policies are not arbitrary. 

As I noted above, the variety of morés and value systems of our societies has led some social scientists and philosophers to claim that every system of values is correct in its own context, and none is correct in any objective sense. This is a false and dangerous view to take. These people have the best of intentions: they want to encourage us all to feel tolerant toward one another and to get along. 

But their moral code is not assertive enough. If it can be said to aim at all, it aims to fill the gap left after the social scientists have deconstructed all existing moral codes. That task, like calculating an irrational number, neither repeats nor terminates. This analogy tells us that modern social science, with its view that values are arbitrary, leads to moral paralysis. It does not enable action.

Therefore, this “postmodernist” stance is not good enough. It will lead us into war, and that option, we have already seen, is no longer a rational option. 

Humans need strong, affirmative guidelines to act and live by. What the moral relativists seem to be aiming to produce is a cynical outlook that sees itself as above critique because in the realm of morals, it affirms nothing and therefore cannot be critiqued. But real humans have to make decisions in real life.

We need a global model of what is right, one that has a sense of direction and purpose and that is grounded in things we can see. In this Age of Science, we know the only thing we can all see is physical reality itself.

In the analogous situation for scientists themselves, they couldn’t do research without models and theories to guide them as they plan their experiments. Without a model to guide her research, a scientist would be a clown wandering through rooms full of computers, gauges, and beakers, with no clue as to what she was doing there. With no moral code grounded in reality to guide us in real life, we become absurd clowns. 

So, let me be blunt: relativism leads to the practical consequence of resigning this planet over to the bullies. When the tolerant citizens can say only what they are against and never what they are for, the bullies with their “will to power” (Nietzsche’s term) will sway the masses and get their way – by trickery, pain, promises, threats, and consciously, willfully inflicted horror. 

The Western Allies in the 1930's did not call themselves moral relativists, but relativist ways of thinking were already loose in the West, and the consequence was that most of the leaders of the nations that might have stopped Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan had no stomach for such action. In fact, many prominent citizens in the West admired the fascist states and leaders and said so openly. (Even Roosevelt said early on he was impressed by what Mussolini was doing in Italy.³⁾ The consequence of these leaders’ confusion and indecision was WWII and the deaths of fifty-five million people. Parallel situations fill the history texts right into our own time.

                                 

                                    

                           

              Benito Mussolini (credit: Martianmister, via Wikimedia Commons)

The practical problem for the moral relativists of the West is that, while they may see morals as being relative, other nations’ cultures are programming their citizens with the belief that their nation is the best, and thus, the further belief that they must spread their culture until it encompasses all of humanity. In such states, democracy is seen as a weak, pathetic delusion. 

Aggressive, self-righteous cultures have always existed. Democracies have to be motivated to face them if we are to have a world in which we can discuss our options at all.

But relativism paralyzes all motives. We must do better. Not moral relativism, but not nationalism either. 

We have to build a far more assertive moral code than moral relativism offers. Furthermore, such a code will only be considered acceptable by viable numbers in today’s world if it integrates our world view – that is Science, our best model of reality – with the values code itself. Until they are one. Even then, many sets of customs will be possible and many of these quite vigorous. Harmonizing them all is what will be required of us if we are going to survive. Thus, democracy.

The huge task of maximizing our species’ potential by creating a new, radically democratic way of life is daunting. Falling back on traditional, tribalistic ways is far more comforting. But the depth of our fear of this change to a global democracy is also a measure of how free we really are.

We can already see that some values don’t work. In today’s world, with the weapons we now have, both values that encourage militarism and values that create moral inertia are not survival-oriented. They no longer will work. We have to find a third way. Not a return to one of the traditional moral codes, but not moral relativism either.

Reason is our way out of this dilemma. It could give us a moral code that all of us could agree on because the code would be grounded in evidence that all of us can see in physical reality. That is the way of Science, the way of Reason. 

War is not inevitable, any more than ancient mores like rape or infanticide are, as long as we don't resign from our mission to outwit it and prevent it. 

 A universal moral code would not end the diversity of cultures on this planet; it would simply provide a means by which we could settle disputes between cultures without having to go to war. 

Then, through commerce, art, sport, intermarriage, etc. – international law, if all else fails – the integration of cultures could take place. The theory is sound. Gradually, nations would cease to be adversaries because, gradually, over generations, they would be one giant, pluralistic culture.

     

                          Artist’s conception of a park area inside a space station 

                                 (credit: Donald Davis, via Wikimedia Commons)

But for now, we must leave the war dilemma and return to proving our thesis, because ultimately, finding a universal moral code is our one way out of war.

We have arrived at the step in our reasoning showing that a society’s concepts and morés are all intimately connected to its world view. We have also dealt with the war digression. 

Now we move on to learning how worldviews work, how worldviews of the past shaped the lives of real nations. Then, we’ll discuss our best current worldview – that of Science – and what it is implying for us.

Notes

1. Layne Cameron, Nora Lewin, “Social Status Has Impact on Overall Health of Mammals,” Michigan State University Today, March 12, 2015.

http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2015/social-status-has-impact-on-overall-health-of-mammals/?utm_source=weekly-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=standard-promo&utm_content=image.

2. Dr. Stephen J. Cimbala, “War-Fighting Deterrence: Forces and Doctrines in U.S. Policy,” Air & Space Power Journal (May–June, 1983).  

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/may-jun/cimbala.htm.

3. “Benito Mussolini,” Wikiquote, the Free Quote Compendium. Accessed April 21, 2015.  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini.