Chapter 13                     Exploring How Values Work

Early hunting tribes likely taught their young people methods of killing elk, fish, birds, etc. and also the useful general principles that underlay all of the tribe’s hunting practices. “Crush or sever the spine right where it enters the skull. Or pierce the heart. Or cut the throat. Study tracks and droppings. If the tracks are in new snow, or the droppings are still steaming, the animal is close by.” There were many species to hunt and many ways to stalk and kill each of them. Over time, "thought full" tribes that understood and taught general hunting principles thrived and multiplied.

A hunter needed far too many behaviors in his repertoire for those behaviors to be learned or called up one at a time, so hunting principles were invented. In nearly all cases, hunters found it useful to recall general rules about what they’d seen and been taught regarding their target game’s habits. Using these principles, the hunters would try to anticipate what the animal would do in the upcoming encounter on this day in this terrain. The hunters would then prepare psychologically for violent, team-coordinated, physical action. If the hunt was to be successful, they would need physical and mental preparation.

The exact process by which each kill would be made could not be known in advance, but the hunters knew that they would need to act with intelligence (in the planning stage), then skill and courage (in the implementation stage). At the most general level, successful hunting tribes needed to teach the values that we call courage and wisdom to their young. These values are so widely applicable in real-life experiences far beyond hunting that they enable us and our young to deal more effectively with nearly all of reality. They give us better chances of surviving, reproducing, and passing the same values on to our children. Again, it is worth noting that the mechanism of human evolution discussed here is sociocultural, not genetic, and it assumes conceptual thought.

   

              

                                Early human art that shows conceptual thinking

   (drawings in Magura cave, Bulgaria) (credit: Nk, via Wikimedia Commons)

                            

                                               

                     Planting and harvesting grain; ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs 

    (credit: Norman de Garis Davies and Nina Davies) (Wikimedia Commons)

Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherers, and values like foresight, diligence, and perseverance rose in importance. These values complement the farming way of life. They didn’t replace hunter-gatherer values totally and immediately, but the farmers’ values and way of life grew until they, in their well-fed, multiplying societies, made many old hunters’ values obsolete. The new agricultural way of life was better at creating more humans faster. At that time, a large population was a necessary ingredient in armies and power.

     

   

         

                                         Ruins of Ur, ancient Mesopotamian city 

                                 (credit: M. Lubinski, via Wikimedia Commons)

When hard grains that could be stored indefinitely were domesticated, cities formed. They were built to store a tribe’s food wealth in a defensible, central site. The progress from stage to stage had many recursions. Nomadic tribes with little food and much aggression were lurking. Aggressive nomads might even, for a time, subjugate city dwellers. Two ways of life were tested against each other. But city dwellers won. They had more food, weapons, and soldiers.

Inside the new cities, governing bodies with administrative offices became necessary to ensure fair distribution of the tribe’s food and to organize the tribe’s members in ways that brought both domestic order and protection from invaders. Following them came craftsmen and merchants who found a central, protected site with a large population more conducive to the practice of their arts than their old, more spread out rural settlements had been.

                                                               

                               An ancient skill: a potter in action at a potter’s wheel 

                                  (credit:  Yann Forget, via Wikimedia Commons )

More citizens working in increasingly specialized skilled tasks meant more and better goods and services available. Cities and their ways proved fitter for population growth than decentralized farm communities or nomadic tribes.

Values shifted toward making all citizens content to live in densely populated neighbourhoods, causing the rise of behaviors that trained citizens to respect their neighbours’ property. Don’t covet the things your neighbor has and don’t bear false witness against him. The Bible says these things exactly. It is an ancient book containing a code by which a real tribe lived in ancient times. Today we can see why this code worked well: envy, especially in crowded cities, raises the odds of citizens slipping into hostility and then violence.

The commandments make it easier for people to live together and get along. Thus, the commandments increased their tribe’s solidarity, wealth, numbers, and power over the long haul. And there were many tribes with similar codes. 

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 behaviors were acceptable in nearly all activities of city life. Urban crowding requires civility. Even the concept behind the Greek word for law came to be associated with reverent feelings (e.g. for Socrates¹).

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 any swarm of amateurs. Farmers in the hinterland moved closer to the city. Life was safer there. 

One generation of life in or near the city taught citizens to be patriotic to their new state. Cultural programming that successfully reproduced itself made loyalty to one’s city-state automatic; patriotism is conducive to a city-state’s survival. In short, patriotism is a value that perpetuates itself. Away from their city and its morés, people came to feel that they could not have a fully human life. Being “fully human” meant being Theban or Athenian or whatever was the term people of a culture used to refer to their homeland.

Citizens were programmed from childhood to cheer joyously and wildly when their nation triumphed over its foes and to tremble in fear for the nation’s safety, and weep if it lost in any major struggle to those same foes. Concepts, customs, and morés were imprinted into citizens’ thinking so deeply that when these bits of cultural software appeared under threat, the citizens rose up to respond to the threat with passions that shut out all voices of debate in the community and even within each citizen’s own thinking. Like patriarchy, patriotism is not logical, but it does tend to perpetuate itself.

    

                                  Ancient Egyptian image of carpenters working 

             (credit: Maler der Grabkammer der Bildhauer Nebamun und Ipuki)

                                                   (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 competing societies, the values, morés, and behavior patterns that rose up with the new technologies were adopted by, or forced on, those other societies. The values shifts usually also led to revolutions, nonviolent or violent. Factions that persevered in resisting these shifts in values and behaviors had to create alternatives within their own cultures – programs that were equally effective in the cultural evolution game – or they got overrun.

Further examples of morés that illustrate this generalization are easy to find. The fact that so many of the world’s cultures are patriarchal in design, for instance, is worth pondering a bit more deeply.

Female humans appeared for centuries to be generally less capable than males in some areas like large muscle strength and coordination, and in spatial and numerical reasoning ability.² 

But the differences have been shown to be small compared with differences among members of the same sex and compared with the differences between males and females in other species. In addition, they’re differences that exist between mythical beings called the “average man” and the “average woman.” Real individuals, male and female, vary considerably from the mean. Some women are bodybuilders, and some are Math geniuses, while some men are weak and/or moronic. Even the old methods of teaching and testing thinking skills, we now know, were biased in favor of males.

                                                    

   

                                                  Math genius Emmy Noether

                          (credit: unknown photographer, Wikimedia Commons) 

Furthermore, objective, scientific analysis reveals that, on average, females are superior to males in other ways, such as in coordination of the muscles of the hands and in verbal reasoning skills. That they have not become the majority of surgeons, lawyers, and political leaders in most of the world’s societies, jobs for which they seem, in general, to be better suited than men, is puzzling to say the least. (Women in the West are finally achieving parity in medicine, a social change long overdue.³)

Why have females been relegated to positions of lower status and pay in nearly all the world’s societies? This seems not only unfair, but illogical and inefficient. Aren’t such tribes wasting human resources? Unfortunately, logic and fairness have not been the determining factors. Cultural evolution is subtler and sometimes harsher than what is fair.

In fact, logic and fairness are just values themselves. In other words, like all values, they’re tentative. They must serve a society’s survival needs in order to become entrenched in the value code of that society. If they work counter to a society’s survival needs, logic and fairness will be superseded by what that society will come to call a “higher” value. For centuries, in societies all over the world, motherhood was seen as a higher value.

Women bear the young, and a society’s children are its future in the starkest, most final sense. Women become pregnant due to anatomy and hormones. We are all programmed by our genetics to find sex pleasurable. We seek it pretty much automatically from the day we enter puberty. The biological drive toward sex is even harnessed and redirected by society’s programming to serve several of society’s needs at the same time, but these need not concern us for now. Our line of reasoning has to continue to follow the developing child – society’s future – in the female womb.

Human females, like most mammalian females, are not as capable of running, hiding, gathering, and fighting when in advanced pregnancy as when they are not pregnant. Then, after delivery, the child requires years of nurture before it matures and becomes able to fend for itself and make adult contributions to society. In short, for thousands of years, if a society was to survive, its females were needed to raise kids. Males, in some societies, were then programmed into a role which aided the subjugation of women and the nurture of children.

It is important to note here that a male was more likely to provide assistance and protection when he believed that the children were his. These needs led to patriarchal societies which programmed women into nurturing, submissive roles. Societies needed females as willing moms who stayed home and obeyed men: first their fathers, then their husbands.

Individual males who loved all children were not numerous enough to make a difference to the long-term odds. Those odds were improved most significantly when most of the men knew (or thought they knew) which kids were biologically theirs. Let me say again that this cultural design wasn’t fair. But it was effective. Patriarchy made population, and thus, it made power. 

"Made" – past tense. Today, in post-industrial society, patriarchy is a cultural design that has become obsolete. It therefore should be allowed to go extinct. We will discuss this point more in coming chapters. 

Note also that male arousal and orgasm are necessary to procreation; female orgasm is not. Therefore, societies teaching males to be dominant and females to be submissive thrived, while competing societies that didn’t teach such values did not. The logical upshot was that nearly all societies that reproduced at a rate that enabled them to grow taught their girls to be sexually faithful, and submissive, to their husbands. Hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural ones, and industrial ones all grew stronger under patriarchy.

In addition, these societies evolved toward augmenting their belief in female submissiveness with other values and morés that, in most matters, gave the community’s approval to male dominance. Other less patriarchal societies stagnated or were assimilated by expanding, land-seizing, patriarchal ones. Whatever increased male commitment to child nurture raised the tribe’s odds of going on. Again, note that the history of these societies was often not shaped by a gender-neutral concept of justice. Justice bowed to nurture. Survival.

In today’s post-industrial societies with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), women can contribute children and work other than child nurturing to all areas of their nation’s ongoing development and life. The imperatives of the past that dictated that girls had to adopt submissive roles to ensure the survival of their tribe are obsolete. Advances in birth control (e.g. oral contraceptives) and in child-rearing and nurturing technology (e.g. artificial insemination, infant-feeding mixtures) have made the chores and joys of child-rearing possible for men and for single women who in earlier eras had little choice but to forego parenting or else suffer cruel social stigma. “Bastard” is an ugly word.

          

   

    Dad with infant daughter (credit: Kiefer Wolfowitz, Wikimedia Commons) 

In post-industrial societies, there is no survival-oriented reason for women not having as large and varied a range of career and lifestyle choices as those open previously only to men. There is no survival-driven reason for any person not receiving pay commensurate with the open market value of her/his contribution to the nation’s ongoing life and development.

   

                         

              Computer programmer  (credit: Joonspoon, via Wikimedia Commons)

In fact, what appears to be true is that any limitations placed unduly or unequally on the opportunities of any citizens in the community on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, or race are only reducing the community’s capacity to grow and flourish. Computer technology and oral contraceptives have made a higher degree of gender-neutral justice possible. If we wish to maximize our human resources, become as dynamic a society as possible, and compete ever more successfully in the environments of our planet and perhaps beyond, we must make education and careers of the highest quality open to all citizens. If we are to maximize our human resources, then access to education and careers should be based on merit alone. At least, such is the conclusion we draw from the reasoning and evidence we have before us today.

Furthermore, the authorities of society, if only for efficiency’s sake, probably will have to find ways of ensuring that quality nurturing of children receives pay and benefits matching the pay and benefits given to other similar jobs in a society traditionally driven by these incentives. Having kids will have to be a reasonable option for individuals to choose if we are to maintain a stable base population for our society in this new century.

Driving women back into the domestic zone would be counterproductive, like locking our bulldozers in sheds and digging ditches by hand in order to create jobs. For women and men who choose it, nurturing children must be given real respect and pay if we are to continue on the path of knowledge-driven evolution that has now become our way of life.

Whether this expanding of gender roles and child-rearing practices will endure is still unclear. Will women be, finally, equal partners with men? Moves toward gender equity, in work and citizenship, and real change in the everyday life experiences of women and men, have been tried (to varying degrees) before. And have faded away before. But the trends in the West, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, look widespread and strong. The question will be whether societies that contain a higher degree of gender equity will outperform those that do not. The answer will emerge gradually over the next century.

This digression on the sociocultural model of human evolution and examples of familiar morés that we can imagine being revised is intended to emphasize the fact that our morés and values are programmable. We can rewrite them by rational discussion and processes that are based on reasoning, evidence, and compromise. Then, we could put them in the schools in which we instruct our young. For the betterment of the whole of human society, we can remake us. Difficult, but infinitely preferable to the painful mode of social change that we have been using for centuries. We can end famine, plague, and war.

It is time for reason to take over. The hazards of continuing the old ways of prejudice, superstition, revolution, and war are too large. We have to find another way.

A major goal of this book is to show that we can find a new way to design our values, a moral code and way of life founded on our best models of reality. Then, we must search for, and test against historical records, our theories of what that way of life should look like. Then, when we have an effective model of cultural evolution ready, we can transform the world’s tribes into one.   

Human behaviors and values almost all originate in the programming put into each individual by his or her society. In addition, values become established in a society when they direct that society’s citizens toward patterns of behavior that enable the citizens to survive, reproduce, and spread in the real world.

Changes in values and customs do not come from inscrutable processes not accessible to human detection or analysis. We can see what needs to change and change it. For most of us, the changes we can bring about are small, but for a Newton, a Darwin, a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, those changes can transform our culture. We can change. By reason. There is hope. 

We are now able to conclude this chapter with a major insight into cultural evolution, what it is and how it works. After looking over many examples of human beliefs and the customs they foster, we can conclude that the deepest, most general principles that should guide how we build our values – in big choices for the tribe and small ones for individuals – should be the most general principles we can discern in the world around us. In the long term, the principles of physical reality are the ones that we must match in our patterns of behavior. We must ground our values in empirical reality. Where we live.

Therefore, if we want to survive, avoid pain, and enjoy life, first, we have to understand the principles of the place in which we do those things. Our universe. Not our families, societies, or even lands, but all of physical reality.  

So, what principles of reality are relevant to how we build our moral codes? For impatient readers, I can only say I am coming to them – by small steps and gradual degrees. But we have to thoroughly discuss the network of ideas at the base of the new moral system before we try to build the middle and upper levels.

First, we build an Epistemology, then an Ontology, then a Moral Philosophy.

My proceeding with care will maximize the chances of readers seeing that a universal moral code is possible for us to devise, and that this code of decency and sense, if we can implement it, offers the only path into the future by which we may survive. Logically, at this point, I should test our proposed model of cultural evolution by discussing more societies of the past, their worldviews, and how their worldviews shaped their ways of life.

But first, I must digress again for a while. A sad but necessary digression.

Notes

1. Plato, Crito, Perseus Digital Library. Accessed April 20, 2015.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DCrito%3Apage%3D50

2. Mark J. Perry, “U.S. Male-Female SAT Math Scores: What Accounts for the Gap?” Encyclopedia Britannica blog, July 1, 2009.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/07/more-on-the-male-female-sat-math-test-gap/

3. Jenny Hope, “Women Doctors Will Soon Outnumber Men after Numbers in Medical School Go up Tenfold,” Daily Mail online, November 30, 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2067887/Women-doctors-soon-outnumber-men-numbers-medical-school-fold.html.