Chapter 18.                                   (conclusion) 

It is true that many differences between the cultures – the memes, concepts, and morés of different societies – can be found. 

 

But to say, as some moral relativists do³, that cultures are incommensurable – that they can never learn from each other or use shared concepts to create institutions for settling disputes between their tribes, and so get along – is to abandon humanity to war for all time. Furthermore, that idea – that cultures are incommensurable – simply isn’t true, as events of real life show over and over again.

 

                                            

                                            

 

    A greeting custom: American handshake (Pres. Obama greets Pope Francis)

                     (credit: Tech. Sgt. Robert Cloys, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

 

In the first place, though there are differences, there are many similarities in our various cultures. Some of the top peaks in the meme-scapes of all cultures coincide. Everywhere on earth, people respect and value courage, wisdom, love, and freedom (as their mythologies show). Different cultures often adhere to similar moral values, and the patterns of behavior that they lead to, in varying ways, degrees, and combinations. But the areas of thinking we have in common far outweigh our differences. As Sting said in the 1980s, “The Russians love their children too.” (A deep love for our children is a universal value.)

 

 

 

                                  English poet-musician Sting (Gordon Sumner)

                              (credit: Helge Øverås, via Wikimedia Commons) 

In the second place, we can learn. We can learn to fish in four ways instead of just one. We can learn to speak several languages. We can learn to restrain violent impulses that cause men to beat women or each other or engage in war. We can learn to imprison rather than execute murderers. We can learn regular exercise and moderate eating habits. People from many tribes, across History, have done these things and other similar ones many times.

 

In the third and most important place, we can educate the kids to do better than we do. They can learn work as a way of life. Push themselves. Train their bodies and minds. And they can learn to show love for their neighbors by treating them with respect and courtesy every day.

 

The values discussed in this book – values that derive from the physical universe in which we live – point us toward a society that will place ever greater emphasis on self-discipline, good will, imagination, education, and citizenship. Balance.

 

We can make a society in a state of dynamic equilibrium, capable of responding effectively to an ever-greater range of challenges, both short and long term. We can become tougher and smarter, overall, than we are now. Without war.

 

Then we can spread our species out to our destiny – the stars. The potential is there; all it needs in order to be made real is us. Our grand destiny is calling to each of us now, asking: How much character do you have?  

 

It is true that when it comes to our values, morés, and patterns of behavior, we tend to change slowly and grudgingly. But we can change. Thus, we could learn a code and a mode of cultural evolution that is vigorous, but not militaristic.

 

Only certain values, ones derived from our best world view – that is, Science – will be rational ones to write into that code. To guide humanity to greater health and vigor in the future. We all survive in the same physical universe. It is only reasonable for us to seek out and follow the values that reasoning and evidence say will give us the best odds of surviving in that universe over the long haul.

 

The courage-wisdom meme complex, along with the behavior patterns it entails, is our long-term response to entropy; the freedom-love meme complex is our long-term response to quantum uncertainty. The optimal balance of them all is called virtue or the Tao. The Way. It is always shifting. In this nuclear-armed, global-warming era, we must see the shifts and respond wisely. Or die. Our current moral codes are working less and less effectively, but our living together in a global village without any universal moral code is no longer an option. So we must find that third way that bypasses both of these dead ends.

 

 

                     

        

                   Statue of Lao Tzu (credit: Tom@HK, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

The Tao Te Ching says: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” Lao Tsu was telling his disciples never to feel confident that they had life figured out or feel complacent about their capacity to handle its challenges. Complacency is the harbinger of disaster. The way of all ways, the Tao, is always shifting. To live as individuals, but far more importantly as nations, we must watch our surroundings, stay alert, resourceful, nimble, and sharp while remaining true to our largest values, the ones that we can see match the most general constants in reality. Then, when we must act, we are ready.  

 

Our most general basic values are not tied to how we fish or cut our hair or talk or dress or make bread. They are far more pervasive and general than that. But they are found in all cultures in varying degrees, combinations, and styles because they work. They are our tested, tried, and true best guides to where the shifting path of long-term survival lies. Our basic values will apply even on a planet to which we must bring our water because the planet is so dry.  

So what do all these analogies between the biological and cultural modes of evolution tell us? Non-human species are programmed mostly by their genes to behave in ways that are well-suited to life in their environments. Species adjust to changes in their environments, mostly, by testing variations of their gene codes in the physical world and keeping the variations that work. Evolution.

 

Human tribes, on the other hand, survive and adapt almost entirely by cultural variation and testing. This chapter’s analogy between genetic evolution and cultural evolution helps us to understand cultural evolution more deeply because the cultural mode of evolution mirrors the genetic one in many ways. 

 

And to close this chapter, I need also to underline the most important way in which memes can be compared to genes and social species to biological species.

 

A society is an ecosystem. It can contain millions of individuals and hundreds of “social species”, sub-cultures which sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete and switch from one role to the other even with the same neighbors, as evolution advances. Entrepreneurs. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Artists. Farmers. Tradesmen. Academics. Soldiers. These and many others can be seen as “species” within the social ecosystem. To those who seek a rigid, prescriptive set of beliefs and morés for all members of their tribe to live by, I will repeat that such thinking is, in the first place, a vestige of tribalism that we can no longer tolerate. In the past, it set tribe against tribe. Out of the wars that ensued, yes, our species got stronger. But today, either that way is done, or we are. By pushing us to invent and build deadlier and deadlier weapons, war has made itself obsolete. Our climate problems also have become planet threatening. Thus, either, we take over our own evolution or we die. It’s that simple.

 

In the second place, rigid, prescriptive thinking just is not consistent with what we know from Biology about how ecosystems work. A society, like any living ecosystem, to stay healthy, does better and better the more diversity it contains. Then, it can adjust its internal balances and interactions in many different ways, and adapt to changes in its environment, and still remain stable and vigorous. As biodiversity is good for an ecosystem, cultural diversity is good for a human society, as long as citizens do not let themselves break into mutually hostile factions. Which means, as long as they love each other, they will discover or devise ways to make their social ecosystem work. This is the purpose for which our species evolved the intelligence we now have. We are designed by evolution to take over managing evolution: the evolution of our species, our fellow species, and the biosphere of Earth. Then, to carry this incredible miracle – life – to the stars.

 

Tolerance and diversity are the most telling hallmarks of freedom. Thus, at least some anxiety comes with being human, especially in the most vigorous of societies – namely democracies. We are genetically hard-wired to feel nervous when we encounter other humans who look, talk, and act different from the ways we grew up with. That is why war comes so easily to us.

But we can also reprogram ourselves. That too comes with being human.

 

Reason is the gift of our recent evolution, and it tells us that social diversity is good for us in the long haul. We can see that truth in the evidence of our own history. So? We must teach the kids to get used to pluralism and the occasional nervousness that comes with it.

 

And to the depths of your soul, dear reader, know this: it is just smart to respect your neighbor’s “ways”, even the ones that you find strange. In this real, uncertain, physical world, your neighbor’s “ways” may one day save your life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. “Convergent Evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 30, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution.

 

2. Richard Dawkins, “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 123–144.

 

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 78.