Japanese family bath house

                                  (credit: Kusakabe Kimbei, via Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 2

At the start of this chapter, we need to reiterate that as morés and customs prove more and more useful to a tribe, they are often surrounded in the tribe’s lore with more and more layers of myth. This is so because effective, very general morés are so valuable for tribes to incorporate into all they do that they must be respected and practiced even when the tribe members don’t understand them in the terms of their own best science. Or to be more exact, cultures that came to see their most effective morés as “sacred” survived. Those that didn’t died out.

Often, the parts of this process were not consciously understood by most of the tribe members in each generation. Instead, long-term effective morés/customs were stumbled onto by luck or by one genius’ insight, then given explanations like “the will of the gods.” What mattered to the tribe that learned to do a thing like washing hands, food, etc., was not how logical the explanation for the moré or custom was. One does not need to understand in order to do (and so survive).     

“Avoid snakes” and “Stay clean” are general rules that are valuable for whole tribes to practice, even though they aren’t invariably true. Note also here that the usefulness of the first is obvious: things bitten by snakes die. The usefulness of “Stay clean” is less obvious. But it was given semi-mythical status in society by frequent repetition of adages like, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” (much earlier in Japan and the Islamic empires than in the West).

Respect for elders is a very common moré. Why? Because in pre-historic times, an elderly person with a good memory was a walking encyclopedia, full of knowledge of ways for hunting different kinds of game, finding the best berries, curing illnesses, healing injuries, dealing with breech births, etc.

However, the fact is that some elders are not valuable storehouses of knowledge. If they get dementia, they will soon remember little to nothing. But respect for elders is a moré that holds on tenaciously in most cultures because in the past, it helped those who practiced it to survive in greater numbers over hundreds of generations. Handwashing also can be a bad idea if one is in a public washroom where many who touch the taps have a high incidence of infectious disease. One would be better off to enter, urinate, and exit touching as few of surfaces as possible. And still, most of the time by far, hand washing is a good practice.

The point here is that morés and customs with very wide ranges of application do not have to be reliable 100% of the time in order to be valuable pieces of wisdom to incorporate into the tribe’s culture.

Thus, the morés that humans have hit upon to respond to the most general traits of the physical universe are, not surprisingly, of this most general and often sacred type. Therefore, it is only logical that our most general beliefs, morés, and customs are our responses, as tribes, to the most general truths of physical reality: entropy, uncertainty, evolution, and ecosystem balance.     

Entropy is so ubiquitous that it is in all that we do, and therefore, our most general morés and customs arise in response to it. Over generations, virtually all tribes developed morés and customs that guided their fight against entropy. Entropy – the constant destructiveness of physical reality – deeply shaped us.

Nearly all tribes teach some version of courage to their young. This is likely because in the times of the little bands of hominids that were our forebears, a few bands – for reasons about which we can only speculate – began to teach courage to their young. “Face danger. Seek challenge. You’ll be a hero. We’ll all love you.” They then survived in greater numbers over the long haul than did their timider neighbors. Over millennia, courageous tribes gained control of the area – the best hunting grounds, fishing spots, berry patches, etc.  

Trying to prove your courage can get you killed, but it may enable your tribe to kill more game, drive more lions out of warmer caves, and claim good berry patches and hunting areas. Because of courage morés taught to young tribe members, braver tribes outfought, outhunted, and outbred timider tribes in their area. Braver tribes lost a few members here and there, but they won the things that supported the survival and flourishing of the whole tribe and its way of life over the long haul of centuries.  

For individual tribe members, trying to increase their stature in the eyes of the tribe might be fatal. But courage gets the whole tribe past bears, past threats that the tribe couldn’t have foreseen, and on to victory over their competition – those “evil” neighbor tribes. This is cultural evolution at a profound level.

It is also important for us to stress here that the braver tribes that survived in greater numbers over the long haul of generations in pre-historic times likely discovered the value of wisdom at about this same time. They had to. By itself, courage as a moré would get too many eager young tribe members killed. Thus, a love of wisdom/knowledge is the second, profound, entropy-driven value.

Did knowing more about the habits of bears or rival tribes – in other words, having more wisdom – give a tribe more courage? Or did having the courage to study the habits of bears and rival tribes – sometimes even from nearby – lead a tribe to the wisdom that it would need to outmaneuver and outfight those predators or competitors? Which came first, courage or wisdom?  

The concept of balance that we get from our knowledge of ecosystems helps us here. It is not possible for us to know now whether courage came from wisdom or wisdom grew out of courage. And it doesn’t matter. The choice is not binary. These two values probably grew up slowly together, over many generations.

The point is that morés informed by courage and wisdom are connected to patterns of behavior – ones both brave and clever – that favor tribal survival.

Courage and wisdom, in a balanced complex of beliefs/morés, are our response, as whole tribes, over millennia, to entropy. The theory of cultural materialism also leads us to expect that morés and customs of courage and wisdom will be present, embedded in myths in all societies that have survived over centuries.   

As evidence that this is so, we can look to the way that nearly all societies contain courage-wisdom myths in their cultures. As parts of a general survival strategy, courage and wisdom work. Thus, most human tribes condense these morés into hero myths, and each hero has a mentor: Achilles, Chiron; Aeneas, Anchises; Arthur, Merlin; Dorothy, Glinda; Luke, Yoda; Katniss, Haymitch. Young men and women all over the world want to be heroes. Their cultures tell them that to do so, they must learn from the wisest in the tribe. Courage …meet wisdom.

What does this have to tell us in our time about our codes of right and wrong?

The answer to that question may seem cliché, but we would do well to remind ourselves here that clichés get to be clichés because they say something true.

In our time, every society will do better and better the more it trains its young people to pursue self-discipline and knowledge. This generalization further tells us to predict that societies whose members practice self-discipline and diligent study outfight, outbreed, and outlast societies less disciplined and less studious.

It is enough for us to say at this point that physical and mental toughness and wisdom/knowledge have long been valued by tribes in every part of the world because these morés steer us toward patterns of behavior, as whole tribes, that improve our odds of dealing effectively with entropy. Tribes that didn’t learn some form of this courage/wisdom way of life, almost all died out long ago.

The moré which is a synthesis of courage and wisdom is work, the chief value by which we currently live. Toil that is both brave and focused. Note that young people are exhorted to follow these values even in societies that have long since secured enough of the basics of life for all their members.   

                                      Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)