Chapter 17.                               (conclusion) 

But what about the second big trait of physical reality, quantum uncertainty?

As with courage and wisdom, a balanced pair of values shapes the behavior of citizens as societies strive to deal with uncertainty.

To maximize its chances of handling the uncertainty of the physical reality in which we live – the unexpected events that keep coming at us – a society must contain as wide a variety of possible responses to the challenges of the world as people in the society can learn to master. In a scary world, if you’re smart, you try to learn skills that will make you resourceful and versatile so that you can be ready for almost anything. 

 

             

                        Democratic pluralism: the first cabinet of Barack Obama 

                         (credit: Chuck Kennedy, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Encouraging individuals to be versatile (the Renaissance man concept) helps, but the really important value a wise society instills into all its members is a love of freedom: a desire in every child to develop his/her talents. And it works best if it partners with a generosity that encourages others to do the same. 

To be equipped to meet the widest range of futures possible, a society must contain the widest range of humans possible, with skills and talents of every sort imaginable. If an unforeseeable crisis threatens a freedom-loving society, that society has a higher likelihood of containing a small group of people, or even just one individual, who will be able to react effectively to the situation than a more homogenous society ever can. Then, the effective ones can teach the rest how to survive the current crisis. A free society is resilient because it has many kinds of folks to draw its resources from.

In addition, in more ordinary times, when a society is maintaining a steady state, the people in a diverse society pursue a wide range of activities, research a wide range of topics, and develop a wide range of goods and services any of which may yield benefits for the whole society. Against the uncertainty of the universe, societies that are free and courageous even become proactive.

Which activities will turn out to be more than just hobbies in a decade or two can’t be known in an uncertain universe. Some of these hobby activities will fit into the society’s social ecosystem and, in a decade or so, simply become parts of the division of labor. Others will prove to be silly wastes of time. Still others will lead to innovations that will make that society leap forward.

Therefore, a wise society cultivates diversity and also cultivates its dreamers. Occasionally, an eccentric invents something that is amazingly useful to all. The presence of eccentrics in a society is proof that freedom is part of that society’s moral code. In any society, in the long run, the more uniform its people are, the lower its odds of survival are. On the other hand, pluralistic societies adapt better to challenges, and thus, over generations, they survive and thrive.

Thus, to balance this value called freedom in the way wisdom balances courage, society must teach love. Left unbalanced, freedom leads to fissioning. Factions tend to form, and gradually become mutually hostile. To balance the hazards of freedom, we teach brotherhood, respect, and love. As courage plus wisdom yields work, so freedom plus love yields democracy. Love makes us strong.

A society with a wide range of behaviors and lifestyles practiced among its citizens must also teach these citizens to respect one another. If it does not, that society will be constantly torn by violence between  the varied factions that will inevitably arise in its free ethos. No matter which wins, some of that society’s versatility will be lost, a net loss for all. Thus, in long-enduring societies, some form of love – or at minimum, respect – for one’s fellow citizens has always been taught to each new generation.

When a society becomes highly intolerant of any persons who diverge from what its citizens think of as “normal”, it is ready, in a few generations, to die out, due to its being unable to handle a plague, or a famine, or more likely, an invasion by a more versatile neighbor.

 

 

 

                                          New technology: cannon (ca. 1430)

                                     (Jan Rehschuh, Wikimedia Commons)

 

The most basic form that this love takes is mutual respect, and it is realized, most basically, in the rule of law. In a democracy, 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 laws tend to be arbitrary, inconsistent and inadequate. (This is why most autocracies end up using repression to keep their people in line.) 

Thus, in a democracy, the citizens must cooperate to build and maintain a legal system that will enable them to work, exchange goods, raise families, settle disputes, and through all these activities, live in communities and get along.

But laws can only work if the people living under them respect not just the exact wording of their laws, but the spirit or intent behind them. When large numbers of citizens begin to see their laws as unjust, they start to circumvent those laws. The justice system becomes less and less effective. Then, too many offenses go unpunished, a bad sign for any society. Anarchy is about to ensue.

In our work as students of cultural evolution, one more thing to note is that, in History, causes and their effects can take generations to connect. A decadent society, whose citizens no longer live by their values, deteriorates gradually into 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 produces 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 or this plague? The wars, famines, and plagues are usually not the prime causes of any civilization’s fall. The cause of a civilization’s fall is moral decay. When most of a nation’s people are living by their values, it handles challenge. When its people’s values decline below a critical threshold, that society will fall to the next hard challenge it encounters.    

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 terms of biological evolution, fifty generations is trivial. In genetic evolution, hundreds of generations often have to pass before a new anatomical or physiological feature in a species can prove its usefulness.

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, often 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 curious spirit, its freeing of minds from the superstitions of the Middle Ages, its belief in the physically-caused nature underlying events, and its rigorous method of theory-forming and testing – created better and better guns. For people in those times, guns changed everything. In one generation, knights were out, musketeers were in.

Note also that even when sometimes it moves more slowly, cultural evolution is much more efficient than genetic evolution: 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 at altering Nature herself. We don't wait for Nature to hit us with a challenge anymore; we go over to the offense and dominate Nature faster than we once did. A drug may cure a disease, but a vaccine may prevent that disease.

In any case, the cause-effect connection between a human society’s ideals and customs and its success in the material world is always 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 see the balances among, and connections between, courage, wisdom, freedom, and love and their consequences in plentiful goods, longevity, lower infant mortality rates, control of disease, military success, etc.

Plagues, famines, wars, etc. are readily dealt with by a society that has the values of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love in place. Natural disasters are just the uncertainty of the universe taking physical form. These too are dealt with by democratic societies. To meet universal uncertainty at its inception – whatever form disaster is about to take – successful societies teach and practice courage, wisdom, freedom, and love. Then, material achievements – greater technical advances, harvests, birthrates, territory, etc. – keep arriving.

It is also worth pointing out here that some societies in the past even worked out sets of beliefs and customs that enabled them to live and multiply so well that for generations, their elites came to believe they had found the answers to life. These citizens created niches that were insulated from contact with the adversity and uncertainty of the material world. Then, their belief in their values deteriorated till they came to regard the values that had first enabled their society’s success as obsolete, old-fashioned notions.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality. It keeps being adverse and unpredictable, demanding courage, wisdom, freedom, and love of all citizens if their society is going to stay strong. What can confuse an analysis of History is that when citizens do begin to get lazy about living their values, the crash of their society may take a while to arrive, and its cause may be hidden by a lot of trivia. But that crash will come.

It is also worth noting again that the numbers of cultures possible that would qualify as brave, smart, free, and kind is near infinite. If we brought together all the records from all the cultures that have ever existed, this would still give us only a tiny fraction of the number of cultures possible. We’ll never observe in History every way by which we might respond to adversity and uncertainty.

Therefore, we must scrutinize the records of all human societies and discern the larger principles and try to accumulate what knowledge we can about them if we are to steer our species as it moves forward through time. This wisdom –  knowledge that gets results – has been long, hard, and slow in coming.

But however hard all that reading, thinking, debating, and writing has been, as much in our own times as in any past era, it has to be continued. From those mounds of historical data, our minds must extract the principles that we need to save ourselves. The alternative is to resign ourselves to disaster.

 

 

          

                                          University of Virginia: Modern scholars

                                      (credit: Mmw3v, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Some people in every era don’t want to study the past. Such studies might lead to change. They resist change as automatically as they breathe. They want to stay with the values and morés they were raised to because that feels secure. But we can’t hide from change. So if we don’t learn from the past, if we don’t constantly strive to get wiser and adapt more rationally to changes in reality, then reality comes for us. The one alternative strategy is to go at life hard. 

Freedom, as a value programmed into children, is vital to society. It drives us to develop our talents and live motivated lives. It pushes us to handle change. But, if it weren’t complemented with love, freedom would beget cliques, gangs, and factions, then prejudice, hostility, violence, and anarchy.

Brotherly love, as a widely held value, solves this dilemma. In ancient times, for example, love seemed so crucial to Jesus that he told his disciples to place love above all other virtues. He said that it was the one thing he’d taught them that they must not forget. Implicitly, he was saying all other values – even courage and wisdom and their benefits – arise from love. Similar messages occur in all religions that endure because they enable those who live by them to endure.

“A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13: 34-35)

Thus, humans sustain and spread their societies by practicing lifestyles that seem paradoxical to any who look for all phenomena to be reduced to simple parts. Freedom must be balanced with love. In balancing these values in our daily lives, we mirror the balance principle of the ecosystems of the earth. Competition and cooperation are always in balance in every creature’s life, even for a shark. She can’t reproduce by killing everything she encounters.

This is basic systems theory. A “system” that deserves the name will – when stressed – adjust balances within itself and adapt to the stressor, whatever that may be, by reaching a new equilibrium. The stressed system adjusts from within itself. We couldn’t survive in this uncertain reality, as individuals or societies, if our lives were otherwise. 

And balances are tricky to find and maintain. But who really expects life to be easy? Freedom is a precious, beautiful thing. If the price of it is maintaining a loving attitude and standard of respectful conduct as we deal with our neighbors, there is a deep sense of symmetry to that picture. A decent way of life for an individual or a society requires constant adjusting and is hard to sustain. But not impossible.

Therefore, we need internal tensions in our communities. Pluralism is a sign of a vigorous society. Monolithic, homogeneous societies lack resourcefulness. A democracy may seem to its critics to be enervated by the energy its people waste in endless arguing. But over time, in a universe in which we can’t know what hazards may be coming in the next day or century, diversity and debate make us strong. Wishing to escape the anxiety of uncertainty leads us away from love for our neighbors, away from pluralism and freedom. And love is not just “nice”: it’s crucial. It has carried us this far; it is all that may save us.

A basic Buddhist truth is that life is hard. Another is that only love can drive out hate. Jesus’s prime command to us all: love one another as I have loved you. These codes have not survived because some old men said they should; they have survived because they enable their carriers to survive. In short, our oldest, most general values have survived in us because they get results. They work.

                                    

 

                 

                                                The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia

                                       (by Monsiau) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Now let us sum up this chapter. Courage is the cultural response to entropy. Wisdom balances courage. Freedom is the cultural response to uncertainty. Love balances freedom. Diligence, humility, and many other values are hybrids of the four prime ones. They are not easy to see in action; they only show their usefulness on a huge scale as we study the daily actions of millions of people over thousands of years to see how values keep evolving and keep getting – for the followers of the best tuned values codes – better and better results. 

But values are not, as moral relativism tells us, trivial or arbitrary preferences like preferences for certain flavors of ice cream or brands of perfume. Values are cultural responses to what is real.

In the next chapter, we shall strengthen the case for belief in the empirical realness of moral values by showing some ways in which the cultural model of evolution closely parallels the biological model of evolution, the one by which we understand life on this planet and how it grows and changes. At that point, the case for moral realism will be proven. Perfectly? No. In quantum reality, we don’t get perfect proof. But more than adequately, by Bayesian standards.

And for theistic readers, I will also say that theism is coming. Hang in there.

 

Notes 

1. Kenelm Henry Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour; or, The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry, Vol. 2 (London: B. Quaritch, 1976).

https://archive.org/details/broadstoneofhono02digbiala.

2. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Chapter 11 (1843; The Literature Network).

http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/34/.