Standard of Ur (early use of the wheel)

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1.                       (concluded) 

It is also worthwhile to emphasize here that pre-historic tribes didn’t first study their environments, then calculate what morés, customs, and myths they should adhere to in order to improve their survival odds. Cause and effect were almost certainly the other way around. Early tribes, by trial and error, sometimes by lucky chance, tried many morés and customs. A tribe that fell into a particular way of life that worked better overall than the ways of its neighbors outbred, outnumbered, outfought, and outlasted its neighbors. Over centuries, winner cultures flourished; others faded and died out, probably with a lot of pain and by the thousands.

We today are all descended from winners of many survival contests. In other words, the cultural evolution process parallels biological evolution. No herd, pride, pod, pack, or tribe of the past designed or chose its genome. Nature constantly offers each species a variety of possibilities for the design of the next generation. Then, the ones best fitted to handle the ups and downs of reality survive and pass survival-oriented genes on to their young. Similarly, whole tribes tinker continuously with their cultures and then, once in a while, they happen upon useful behaviors by luck or curiosity. Societies that discover, practice, and pass on life-supporting morés and customs flourish. Tribes that slip into morés that don’t work die out.

Finally, note again here that science changes this picture.

We humans, among us, carry a lot of lethal genes around in our cell nuclei. But thanks to science, we are now able to block lethal genes or cull them out of our genome completely. My major point here is that we must learn to do the same with lethal morés in our cultures.

If enough of us say war is over, then it is. War as a cultural phenomenon is no more ineluctable than slavery, burning witches, or gladiatorial games. We must identify the social causes – the memes, morés, and customs – that lead to war and stop practicing them by blocking them or culling them from our cultures.

Whatever evolutionary purposes war may once have served for our species, it has made itself obsolete. After centuries of arms races, our weapons have simply gotten too big. They could extinguish the species that built them. But with a knowledge of cultural evolution, we can design into our cultures, morés and customs that push people to great achievements while still not going to war. We do not have to drown our planet in a radioactive sea of blood and flame.

To sum up this chapter, then: for the purposes of building a universal moral code, I am going to assume entropy, quantum uncertainty, evolution, ecology, and cultural materialism. They are evidence-backed tenets of our best current models of reality, and therefore, they should inform all that we do in these times.

What do we come to, then, if we try to create a modern moral code for all tribes?

                                       Titan II missile (70+ feet tall) in its silo 

                    (credit: US Department of Defense, via Wikimedia Commons)