Moses with the Ten Commandments 

                               (credit: Anton Losenko, via Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 2.                                      (continued) 

However, there is more to a nation or tribe's survival than just work.

If courage and wisdom were all the morés we needed to value in our culture in order to survive, life would be hard. But courage and wisdom are not enough. Life is harder still. Courage and wisdom aren’t enough because entropy is not the only profound trait of the real, physical world that we have to live with.

There are also morés with attached customs that arose, over generations, out of our dealing with uncertainty. As a species, we are only beginning to understand the science behind the probabilistic quality of reality. But we long ago acquired morés that help us, as whole tribes, to deal with it, nonetheless. Again, they are very general and also myth driven.

Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. These are examples drawn from my own culture. Rules purportedly given to us by God 3,000 years ago. They are not suggestions; they are commandments. They are revered by adherents of Judaism, Islam and Christianity because, in traditional lore, they came directly from God.  

Hindus live by similar commandments of similar mythic status. So do Buddhists. The native peoples of Africa and the Americas have similar commandments, and they are embedded in similar myths. Why these commandments are revered as they are and embedded in the myths that they are has for too long been a matter of mystery in cultures everywhere. However, scientific modeling of culture via moral realism uncovers explanations for the myths.

These profound memes have been revered by so many for so long because they equip those who live by them to respect each other’s rights. Tribes that teach respect for all fellow tribe members survive better than tribes that don’t.  

Why is this so? Because in facing a probabilistic universe, a tribe does best over the long haul of generations if it, first, achieves tribe solidarity, mutual support, etc. and, second, contains a lot of different kinds of people with widely varied sorts of talents/aptitudes.

When a tribe gets hit by an unexpected challenge, which is how uncertainty usually impacts humans in the real world, the tribe has better chances of handling the challenge, surviving it, and going on to flourish if tribe members face the challenge as a team, and if the team contains a lot of different kinds of people. A tribe in which members think and act almost completely alike is less nimble than a more pluralistic one.

Again, the trait of balance is obvious. The toughest, most durable tribes contain people who work well in teams, but whose teams also contain within them a lot of varied folk with varied talents. A tension between contrary forces. Balance.

Note that it helps tribes dealing with the uncertainty of reality to teach young people to strive for versatility. Having individual tribe members who are multi-talented, i.e., who can hunt, cook, farm, fight, sing, sew, heal injuries, etc., improves a tribe’s survival odds. But versatile individuals are not enough. No matter how hard I study and practice, I will never be a good carpenter, warrior, or dancer compared to people who have more natural talent for those things.

Then, what value should we teach young people to revere and try to live up to?

The answer is freedom. Our survival odds improve if each of us pursues what their “hearts urge them to”. Hearts don’t literally urge humans toward any one lifestyle, of course. Such expressions are metaphors. But such expressions do tell young people to follow those of their talents and interests that stir them emotionally. That way of living – freedom – in the long haul, is good for the tribe’s survival odds because encouraging all tribe members to do what they love creates diversity. Over generations of hazards and opportunities – i.e., of uncertainty – pluralistic tribes outbreed, outwar, and outlast the competition.   

As years and generations pass, the tribe that loves freedom develops its way of life in more detail, more subtle divisions of labor and interrelationships among tribe members, than do rival tribes that don’t value freedom. A freer tribe contains more members who try many different ways of living. As a result, its economy becomes a more vigorous ecosystem, with many social species, i.e., many different types of people, filling many complex niches in the overall community.

We don’t just have hunters, we have deer hunters who are distinctly different from rabbit hunters and duck hunters. We don’t just have farmers, we have corn farmers, pig farmers, chicken farmers, etc. We have framing carpenters who do different tasks than finishing carpenters and cabinet makers, and we value them all. Thus, most importantly, many new morés and customs get tried and a few that prove keenly useful to the tribe develop further.

Gerald may be short-sighted, but he may have amazing mathematical skills. He may never bring down a single deer nor find one berry, but he may figure out how to build a bridge across a deep canyon that is keeping his tribe from rich hunting grounds on the other side. Gerald turned out to be a good man for the tribe’s leaders to tolerate and even grant some precious food to.

Wanda may never be a good gardener. She has no “feel” for plants. But her dancing entertains the whole tribe, unites them in shared feelings of joy, and maybe even inspires some members to try harder at their own work. Her tribe’s leaders cherish her for making joy. They do not ostracize her for being lazy.

I stress again here that courage and wisdom and their hybrid, work, are good, but are not enough. When we add freedom, it grants a tribe the capacity to meet each new challenge or opportunity with more than just labor. Freedom lets a tribe develop new morés to handle challenges, a useful thing when the challenge or opportunity is one the tribe has not faced before and has no lore about. Over centuries, the best cultural response to ubiquitous uncertainty is freedom.  

However, as was the case with courage and wisdom, freedom by itself is still not enough. Practicing freedom without a balancing moré will cause a tribe’s social ecosystem to break up, too much of the time. In a few years, the tribe will form sub-factions that regard each other with hostility. “Those dancers! They don’t bring in a harvest. They have no perseverance. But still, they expect to eat! Kick 'em out!”   

A tribe that teaches freedom without any balancing morés won’t grow. It will fission repeatedly for any of a long list of reasons. It also won’t learn. Its culture will not gain the flexibility and nimbleness that pluralism bring because many of its best thinkers, artisans, warriors, and leaders will get separated from each other, and thus won’t build a vigorous social ecosystem, with the flexibility and toughness that pluralism brings. Many of the tribe fragments then will die out.

The balancing moré is love. Brotherly love. Love your neighbor. Most of the commandments of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam come down to this: respect your neighbor’s rights as a human being. Extend that respect to all your fellow tribe members. Our culture exhorts all citizens to aspire to these morés.  

Again, note that whether freedom as a moré came before brotherly love or love came before freedom is not useful for us to try to discover. The origins of both came millennia ago and the likely explanation is that they grew up together in a balanced way similar to the way in which the courage/wisdom moré complex developed. A way that, today, we don’t have enough evidence to analyze.  

What matters is that while our most profound values emerged millennia ago in unknown ways, those values do not need to stay vague, and they do not need to evolve by societies violently mixing and re-mixing memes as they have in the past. In short, by war. We can build a science of society that tells us how to get control of this process and ameliorate it. (N.B. Stopping the process is never an option. Not in a quantum-uncertain, changing universe. We must evolve or die.) We could learn to be the tribe of homo sapiens, just as readily as we learn a new language or a new job. All of us.

                               Martin Luther King Day at Nazareth College 

                                               Rochester, New York

                            (credit: Nazareth College, via Wikimedia Commons)