Poverty in North Korea (2010) 

                                (credit: Roman Harak, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                               (continued) 

In answer to the critics who deride the difficulty of rigorously testing Moral Realism, we can also reply that studies called ex post facto can be done in Social Science. Anthropologists and historians can study existing societies, each as it currently is and compare it to earlier versions of itself or to other societies with similar traits. From these observations, scientists can form hypotheses about how beliefs/morés/customs – once they enter into the culture of a tribe – connect to outcomes further along in time for that tribe. In ex post facto studies, again, the scientists do not intervene in the flows of life of that tribe, no matter how well or badly they seem to be trending. The scientists only watch to see whether the outcomes that they predicted for the tribe do, in fact, occur. Then, they can use the findings of their research to advise governments on policy.  

In ex post facto studies, social scientists ask questions like: Does losing a war spur economic growth in a defeated nation? Do levels of interracial strife rise during economic depressions? Can a country learn a market-based system of commerce in a generation or less? Does a tribe’s losing its traditional source of livelihood, and thus many of its traditional values and customs, cause the tribe’s incidence of substance abuse and family violence to go up? Etc.  

Then, the scientists can draw tentative conclusions about how all societies move and evolve over time. These kinds of conclusions are tentative, because the experimental conditions and the ethics of science do not allow the scientists to isolate the test population or the control. The kind of rigor that bacteriologists, for example, can get in studying a drug can’t be matched by anthropologists. We can’t rigorously control the lives of real people, first because it’s wrong, in our view, to do so, and second, because, almost always, they won’t stand for it. Such action, even roughly perceived, causes people to revolt.

But the fascinating thing for social scientists is that conclusions drawn from ex post facto studies can still be tested in the real world. For example, many of the countries of Eastern Europe got free market economies within a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in many of them, levels of prosperity soared in less than twenty years.

Modern history has even provided more dramatic examples of the greater efficiency of free market economies compared to centrally planned ones. In one generation, South Korea, using the free market approach to commerce, left totalitarian North Korea far behind. Germany today is no longer divided into West and East, but for many years, it was. West Germany soared while the East, under Soviet control, withered. Ethnically, historically, the same people. One group under the free market system, the other under the centrally planned one. In the realm of ex post facto study, proof of the superior efficiency of the free market system could not have been more dramatically demonstrated: Communism lost.

Similar studies to that done of East and West Germany and North and South Korea are being done, especially by historians, all the time. More and more, they keep demonstrating the value of freedom over the long haul.

In the meantime, what progress are we making toward articulating a universal moral code? The signs are mixed. Arguably, the field with the scientists who are most intent on finding nomothetic laws that apply to human history is the wing of Anthropology called “Cultural Materialism". A rigorous scientific gaze has been turned onto culture only recently by these few people. What might we achieve if we began to fully fund truly scientific study of ourselves? 

                                          abandoned factory in East Berlin 

                                      (credit: Babewyn, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                           Drawing of how a Paleolithic hand axe was probably held 

                                     (credit: J. B. Alvarez, via Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 3.                                    (continued) 

Next, we come to a theoretical criticism of Moral Realism: it is hard to test any hypothesis about a whole society in ways that are rigorously scientific. An anthropologists who wants to test a hypothesis about human tribal behavior can’t simply apply any treatment s/he pleases to a test population. Physicists, entomologists, even ornithologists and zoologists can apply a treatment to a group of the things they study and then compare those subjects to a control group of untested subjects – atoms, bugs, birds, or whatever – to see what effects the treatment had. Social Scientists don’t have similar scientific license.

A treatment applied to a whole tribe in order to compare the tribe to a control group with similar traits in order to see whether the treatment has a predicted effect would be a major violation of the test group’s rights under the morés that we in the West already live by. Scientists today can’t skate near the rights of other humans – individuals or groups – without risking a host of legal charges and extra-legal recriminations coming down on their heads.

Trying to justify violating another person’s human rights by saying that the violating was done in the name of science is simply unacceptable in our times. Nazi scientists objectified other people in that way. Today, such a view would get the scientists involved hounded from their professions or sentenced to long prison terms or even sentenced to be shot.  

Therefore, testing of the Moral Realist model must be done in respectful ways. The scientists can, for example, divide a group of a hundred randomly selected volunteers into two groups, then subject half – with their informed consent – to a treatment of some kind, then check later to see what effects the treatment had on the consenting volunteers.

For example, the subjects may be asked to read an article on a possible sales tax for their state. Then, both test and control groups may be asked to fill out a questionnaire about sales taxes. If half of the subjects are given the article in a blurred copy while the other half are given a clear, easy-to-read copy, we may use the responses to the questionnaires to determine the effects of print quality on opinion formation. The blurred copy readers likely will show statistically significant levels of greater hostility toward all sales taxes.

The larger point is that we can study whole groups without infringing upon the rights of any of the test subjects.

And there are even larger considerations that should be reiterated here.

We have all been living in evolving cultures since cultural evolution began. Is toolmaking the first sign of truly human culture? Or art? Language? Skeletons of people who obviously survived via the compassion of others? (Mead thought a healed femur was the first sign of compassion and thus, of true culture.)

The first stone tools date to over two million years ago. The first ambiguous signs of compassion, however, date to about fifty thousand years ago. Language likely began about that same time. When our cultures became distinctly human – i.e., whole levels more complex than the herd codes of animals – is a matter of heated debate among anthropologists. I don’t intend to try to settle the debate.

But what matters for my purposes in this essay is that we have been, primarily, creatures of cultural evolution rather than genetic evolution for many, many human lifetimes. Furthermore, almost all of our cultural evolution has been too subtle to be seen by the humans who were undergoing the changes. We evolved very gradually, culturally, by trial and error.  We have had little control over the process, and thus, over our destiny, for nearly all of our history as a species. But social science has given us the beginnings of that control. With effective social science, a degree of control over cultural evolution is within our reach; the belief that cultures are made of mystery could end. We could begin to shape our future.   

                                       Anthropologist working in the field

                                   (credit: Angelxoxoxo, via Wikimedia Commons) 

          

                           Boris Pasternak, dissident Russian writer of Doctor Zhivago 

                                 (credit: Monozigote, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                            (continued) 

Another thoughtful criticism is that Moral Realism as a worldview offers those who believe in it (i.e., believe in democracy) an intimidatingly rough road because the values/morés and customs/behaviors of democracy must contend with many in our world who are hostile to freedom.

There are cultures that simply assume that my life is not mine to squander. My parents did not raise me; my nation did. My homeland was kept peaceful and plentiful by the toil and sacrifice of millions of people, many of them gone now. I owe those people the goods or services that I can produce with my talents. For example, I may play guitar, but only if I practice hard, and once I have achieved a high degree of virtuosity, I provide a minimum number of entertainment units for my fellow citizens weekly, playing state-approved music. I am required to do so. I do not have a right to play when I choose or what I choose. I am a child of my nation. I must learn to be a dutiful one and do the work assigned to me.  

On the other hand, there are also millions in other lands who say my life belongs not to me, but to Oloron or Birgitta or Allah or Brahman or Manitou or whatever they call their supreme deity. I am directed very clearly by scripture or by oral traditions to live a life of hard work and obedience to all the deity’s commands. For such people, the idea that I can do what pleases me is ludicrous and evil.

And let us not mince words here: the model of human life set down by most of the cultures of history, including those of the nations of the West, tended almost always to be of this strict, prescriptive character, whether political or religious.

But Moral Realism can answer these criticisms too. It says clearly that a society will do better over the long haul of generations if it lets people choose their lives as long as they don't directly harm others. Some may live in the bush for decades, but most won’t. Humans are a gregarious species. And if a few live in the bush, they may come out after decades there, playing music that astounds their whole society. They may emerge having solved the hardest problems in Math, Genetics, Sociology, Physics, etc. Geniuses come from diverse and unexpected quarters. 

Freedom. It is powerful in the hearts of its adherents because they were trained to see it as vital, but we should stress again that the freedom moré was acquired most likely by a gradual process of lucky breaks and human imagination too subtle for us to even guess at now. Then, it grew among some of our early ancestors because it shaped tribes in ways that helped them to survive. Freedom works. We may love both freedom and our fellow citizens, even the strangest of them, and then, from hundreds of them, we may get …nothing. But once in a while, one of them makes a bow and arrow or a computer, or grows a new bean variety, or invents a device that we can’t now even imagine. Because he is free.

The innovator, wherever he/she lives, will have learned discipline to face the entropy of reality. He’ll have accrued a lot of wisdom by the time he discovers his innovation. He may even have gone to quality state-funded schools. But what he then owes his state is respect for the law and no more. A wise state funds its schools knowing that they shape a democratic population and, now and then, a genius. Moral Realism tells its adherents to expect adversaries, domestic and foreign, and still revel in their freedom, not because it feels good, but because it works.

This is also a good place to admit that sometimes that genius, for years, is lazy. Or he may set up his own lab at 17 – and make wonders. Moral Realism tells us that a culture that fosters freely chosen human ventures is, in the big picture, worth the losses to society that those ventures sometimes incur because when people choose their lives, they commit their hearts to them. And, of course, when that one-in-a-million genius arrives, she/he changes society profoundly.   

In the moral realist view, even the fact that freedom frightens a lot of people is a good thing. Fear of being alone makes humans form societies; in society, we divide up the labor. And for a few who have only one friend, or none, the loneliness is not loneliness; it is solitude. In it, they can create, unimpeded.

                                author Frank McCourt (published first novel at 66) 

                               (credit: David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                          Morgan la Fay (Druid sorceress of Arthurian legends) 

                           (credit: NeocoreGames, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                                    (continued) 

How free are we? I’m free to shave my whole body every second day. I’m free to dye it purple if I want to. Under the customs of democracy, I’m free to get my food in any way that does not let me steal it, by force or trickery, from someone else who has rights to it. If he/she got the food from the natural environment by hunting or fishing or gathering, if he/she traded something to other persons who did the gathering or hunting, or if he/she grew the food, then in a democracy, I can’t just take it. But I can have it if the person who has the right to it gives it to me willingly or willingly trades something I offer for it.

This is the view of democracy, the Moral Realist view. It may be intimidating to some, but it isn’t banal. And yes, it could, if pursued by enough enlightened people, transform our species into a rational, responsible one without war.

I’m free to stand on the edge of a cliff and flap my arms and fly away. At least, I’m free to try. If I have comrades near, some of them may try to persuade me not to attempt so foolish a stunt. But they can’t be with me every hour of every day. They have their own lives to live. Their needs and wants likely will take them onto paths that do not coincide with mine. Thus, if I am to continue on in this life – day by day – probably, it will be because I choose to do so. Soon, I may be able to get my brain transplanted into the skull of a genetically modified, giant raven. I have, many times, longed to fly. Why? Why not?  

In some more likely real life scenarios, I’m free to study medieval lore to learn the chants of the witches of Wales and to cast spells on people that I don’t like. The spells may not work, but I’m free to cast them.

I’m free to grow coffee in Greenland if I want to. I probably won’t be successful at growing coffee in Greenland, but I’m free to try.

I’m free to devise a way of generating fields in magnetized gyroscopes so that they suspend gravity. Then, I can build a spacecraft capable of light speed and explore our galaxy as a private citizen, secretly, on my own. If I can build it.

More probably, I’m free to sit and play my guitar every waking hour, in spite of my parents’ hatred of guitar music. They may kick me out of their house. Then, I’m free to wander the streets and play outside of stores for whatever the patrons of these establishments toss my way. I may then use my earnings to pay for a meal at a fast food outlet or a room in a men’s hostel downtown. I don’t have to go to school. I don’t have to stay in my parents’ home. I’m 18. The law in Canada says I am responsible for my own life.

I may choose to go back to university at 48 and become a surgeon. Or to study Philosophy in a city 2,000 miles from my home when I turn 60. Why not?

Under Moral Realism, there aren’t many rules I have to obey in order to fill my role as a good citizen. In a democracy, I get to choose how I live, almost entirely.

I may not be much of a father. The law in a democracy has remedies for men who father children and then skip out on the nurturing responsibilities, but that same law is silent on whether a man or a woman should choose to have children at all. If he/she so chooses, a man or a woman may get surgically sterilized at 18 and never run the risk of creating children. A person may feel that being part of the nurture of children is more work that it is worth. No one in a democracy has a right to tell her/him otherwise.

A girl may choose to go out into the wilderness of British Columbia and build a rustic cabin for herself. She may hunt, fish, and garden for her food, thus supplying all her body’s wants. She may choose a solitary life, free from contact with any other humans. In a democracy, her life is her business. No one has a right to drag her back into civilization as long as she keeps to her life and does no harm to others. By this process of unregulated experiment, every so often, democracy gets a telephone, a movie camera, a phonograph, a symphony, etc.

At this point, it is also worthwhile to say the obvious because it may not be obvious to all: other than the very wide guidelines of courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance, for the guiding of human societies, there are no guidelines. No other comprehensive view has science behind it. That is how free we are, and that degree of freedom scares most people.

Most people don’t want to be that free. We have become very smug inside our cultures, each of us assuming that the way of life of his culture is “normal”. Just humans being properly human. Thinking about how free we really are, for many people, threatens their very sanity. But we are that free, nonetheless.

Our balancing force for maintaining sanity in Western cultures is science; it is enough. We humans may soon be dealing with a lot more than Chinese culture expanding into the West. We may soon be dealing with cyborgs of a complexity unimaginable at this time. But if they’re capable of reason, they’ll be deserving of “human” rights. As will genetically modified humans who swim like seals or fly like bats. The future may be awesome.  

I could go on, but the point for those who still feel that Moral Realism as a world view is so vague and lax as to be banal, I reply that they haven’t fully considered the relativist alternatives. Nuclear war. Ecosystem collapse. We must find a way to integrate our cultures. Then, we can tackle our challenges.  

                                     Man on cliff edge (This man is called 'Ab') 
                     (credit: Joe Roberts, iamjoeroberts, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                                    Le Moustier Neanderthals 
                               (credit: Charles R. Knight, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                          (continued) 

The next criticism of moral realism emerges logically from the first, and it says that the precepts of moral realism are cliché, obvious, and banal. There is nothing new in Moral Realism, and if an understanding of this aggregation of ideas, morés, and customs could transform even a portion of humanity into a fully rational and responsible society, it would have done so by now.

The reply is that there is nothing obvious in reality that points people toward the morés of courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance. Recorded experience passed down over generations, with reason working on that store of knowledge, has led us to the partly effective, fragmentary sets of morés and customs that we have now. But however fragmented and incomplete it may sometimes seem, our current world culture is not obvious; it is a huge leap beyond what the small bands of hominids shivering and cringing in the forest had just a few millennia ago.

For the majority of humans, courage, wisdom, pluralism (freedom), human rights (love), and balance do not come naturally. Even a wish to avoid pain is not what makes us work at our chores. The gap between the stimulus of famine and the response of agriculture is just too wide to be explained as a way of stopping pain. What led us to agriculture was cultural programming. We are mostly creatures of our nurture. We just need to keep in mind that those cultures must always enable us to answer to reality. Physical, empirical reality.

When we study our whole species, we see that some groups of people here and there have learned by hard experience over many generations that a few morés, values and customs equip their adherents to survive in greater numbers over the long haul of many generations.  Our cardinal virtues were learned gradually in harsh, multi-generational ways. Then, tribes that used these morés grew and flourished.

In our times, with Moral Realism to guide us, that hard way of learning the deepest truths of existence – by famine, plague, and war – could be eased, shortened, then, more and more, obviated altogether.  

Entropy and quantum uncertainty are so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible. With our cultures, we are like fish who never study water; they take it for granted. The most profound effects of universal traits like entropy and uncertainty are only seen in subtle ways over the long haul of many generations. 

So let us emphasize the key insight here: if courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance are valued in many lands and are embedded in many cultures, that is not because they are obvious; it is because they work; they shape the daily lives of the tribes that survive. In short, our prime values are unique, given the ways by which other living things evolve. Other species evolve mostly by natural selection working on genetic variation. Humans evolve mostly by natural selection working on meme variation. We evolve by culture, not genetics. And the cultural mode has proven amazingly effective, but only over the very long haul of many generations angling to survive in this harsh world.  These are two points that argue against our ever seeing our values obvious or cliche.   

Until now, tribes have had to learn to respond to entropy and uncertainty by whole nations’ going through slow rounds of trial and error lasting generations. In daily life, we are immersed in our own tribe’s familiar morés and customs. In the past, these did change, but by hard trials and errors, such as wars, revolutions, famines, and plagues. And some tribes that hit an overwhelming challenge or got deeply programmed into chauvinism, xenophobia, and reactionary ways simply died out.

Adjusting the balances of courage and wisdom, freedom and love in this slow, painful way gave us the hybrid virtues of perseverance, foresight, and work. Balancing freedom with love gave us democracy and human rights.

Following this model, we can say that the refining by pre-historic tribes of the first effective morés and customs led us - over millennia - to a better way to do all our learning: science. Science is just a systematic way of learning from experience.

When will cultural evolution end? It won’t. Marx was wrong on this point. Human culture will no more be perfected than reality will be perfected. It keeps changing. Since there will be no end to change on our planet or in our universe, there must be no end to cultural evolution. Not if we want to live.

We’re on the brink of moving at least some of the human race into colonies in space stations, on the moon, or on Mars. We’re on the brink of moving human minds, personal awareness and all, into more and more complex cyborgs. Or into genetically modified dolphins, elephants, or ravens. And so on. Progress will end when we end. Who would venture to say he wants that?

So in further response to those who see Moral Realism as banal, we can say that the tribes of humanity have been and are, in their experiments with the human condition, free. What uncertainty gives us. We can play a lot of variations on the human theme and still adhere to our basic values, which is why the array of cultures in our world is, at first glance, so bewildering. But in every human culture, the basic virtues of courage, wisdom, and work, pluralism (freedom) and human rights (love) are discernible because they ease their adherents into and through the future, which always lies open to infinite possibility. 

Folk who deem such morés banal are not getting just how free we really are. If our daily lives have come to seem banal, it’s because we have made them that way because of tribal responses to pain. We work because our ancestors were seeking to avoid famines, plagues, and wars. They found ways that reduced the frequency of those bouts of suffering. As whole tribes, we flinched away from pain. But always, we were free, both then and now. The adjusting goes on. 

Moral Realism exhorts each of us to pursue her/his own interests and passions because that path is the best way for each of us to serve our fellow citizens and the democracy that serves us all. When we follow our hearts, we do our best work. From our living by a balance of courage, wisdom, and freedom, we get a pluralistic nation and a vigorous economy, though it did take us a long time to work out this model.    

But banal? No. Prudent. Sagacious. Prescient, even. But not banal.

Reality is stochastic: it is full of hazards and opportunities. Against that backdrop, we see our banal morés became banal because they work. Could they make us into a rational society? Yes. If enough of us learn the moral realist model, use it to inform our discussion and implement our findings with determination. We aren't floundering anymore. We just have to reach a critical, self-aware social mass. Compared to the alternatives, this choice to be rational would be hard. Lazy and stupid come easily to humans. But yes, it could give us the tools to become fully rational.

                                                                   Cyborg 
                                        (credit: Matankic, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Battle of the Little Big Horn 

(credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                                 (continued) 

A society has to have at least some universal concepts in place, or it deteriorates into dysfunction. Those basic parts of their culture got those people to here and now because some of those parts work. These are also the morés from which a cultural renaissance for those people, any people, can begin. And in the real world, in other words, any people can work out ways to evolve their tribe’s culture toward a way of life that synthesizes the best, most effective morés and customs from both cultures.

Parties on all sides can envision and write a new culture with morés and customs new to everyone at the negotiating table. With intelligence, goodwill, and perseverance on all sides, any culture can be synthesized with any other in a few generations. In plain terms, the kids will adapt and move on if we give them a way.  

In the United Kingdom, Anglo-Saxons hated Normans for years after 1066, but they learned to live together and gradually, they synthesized. Intermarriage rose, and generally, the terms for the distinctions faded. By 1300, the people in the southern half of the U.K. nearly all saw themselves as just English.

The Scots and the Welsh both exist within the U.K. while keeping control of major parts of their culture – language, education, and the media, in particular.

Canada contains millions of francophone citizens as well as millions of anglophone ones. There have been strained times, but no majority on either side has ever voted to let the other half go. Too many of us like those other folk.  

It can be done. In our times, with more mature ideas of pluralism and tolerance in place, I believe we can do the synthesizing of all tribes into a “global village” type of social ecosystem without even one war.   

Change isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it has been well documented that cultures are all changing constantly, sometimes over many generations, sometimes more rapidly. But all cultures change. Useful memes are incorporated into the lore of any tribe if they improve basic aspects of the tribe’s life like farming, fishing, hunting, healing, having babies, nurturing them, creating more efficient commerce, etc.

For example, many tribes of North America made excellent use of both horses and guns – cultural intruders from Europe – when they incorporated those new technologies into their ways of life. And it is important to note here how these tribes came to understand, accept, and use the new technologies: they acquired those technologies and created their own horse cultures not by compulsion, but by choice. Every tribe contains at least a few members who yearn to extend the tribe’s control over its domain. Then, if their experiments work, usually, the tribe as a whole will take up the new morés and customs. Horses were amazing to the first natives in North America who saw them, but in a generation the men who had grown up with horses were among the best riders in the world.   

All of this evidence leads us to the tentative conclusion that it should be possible to navigate any culture enduring culture shock, through the rough times, and on to an even more vigorous way of life on the other side of the change.

In any case, this much is certain: there is no going back. Not for the indigenous tribes, nor for Europeans, nor for any others. We all go on because going on is the choice that enables survival. Environments change. So must we.    

Furthermore, we can remind ourselves that entropy, uncertainty, evolution, and ecosystems are present anywhere there is life. No matter where they live or how complex their culture is, every tribe has to get food, dispose of wastes, build shelters, make clothes, find mates, cure illness, heal injuries, have children, and train them in their tribe’s way of life. Otherwise, their way of life dies out.

Thus, every culture, wherever and whenever it may exist or have existed, has had to deal with reality, totally natural or partially man-made. If it had not done so, it wouldn’t be here. And when a tribe’s reality evolves – when a tribe sees in reality things it had previously been unaware of – its culture must evolve too if it is to live. For example, both Japan and Germany did after 1945. What Moral Realism tells us is these changes do not have to come about by war.   

It is my contention that we can begin to bridge the gaps between cultures by speaking – through translators, if necessary – with other tribes about their ideas of courage, wisdom, freedom, love, balance, etc. Morés for the cardinal virtues will be, in some form, in the culture of any tribe as will words for basic features of reality like hunger, disease, injury, aging, courage, desire, love, and death.

A culture’s ways of viewing the basics of life can seem troubling for visitors. For example, one tribe’s morés and customs may work to guard tribe solidarity at the expense of the freedom of the individual. This social fact might trouble many Westerners who assume individual freedom is “right” and “good”. No tribe lives like a hive of social insects. Some respect for individuals is always there. 

But material for discussion and beginning negotiation will be there. Finding ways to integrate two cultures can always begin with discussions about courage, wisdom, work, perseverance, foresight, freedom, love and so on. There is always a way, and it is made much easier when all admit that they are willing to change. Change was always a reality in any case. Change is the only constant, but it is made much easier when it begins in mutual respect.  

With patience, intelligence, and good will, any culture can be translated into any other. Or, even better, the two can be integrated to yield a hybrid culture. With misunderstandings and friction, yes, but every culture has those already, as does every family and every individual conscience. We can re-emphasize here that leaders on both sides can negotiate ways to create a new, hybrid culture more vigorous than either of its parents. The task of integrating cultures is full of hazards, but also of opportunities. We get stronger by cooperating and competing, and mingling, and these all can be done in mutually respectful ways. With goodwill on all sides, we can always learn from each other.  

What really is immoral in the view of Moral Realism is to do nothing. To watch indigenous peoples deteriorate into dysfunction and refuse to even try to help. To watch the world drift toward war and refuse to even try to solve its woes. No relativist argument can justify such policies.

Thus, in response to critics who resist all attempts to translate cultures into each other, the bottom line is that we have no other choice. The shadow of the mushroom cloud looms over us all. We must evolve and integrate or die.   

                                 Tokyo after fire-bombing (March, 1945) 

                            (credit: Ishikawa Koyo, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                             Tokyo Olympics (main stadium, 1964)

                                    (credit: Arne Museler, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                              Anthropologist Edward Sapir 

                               (credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3                          Reactions and Discussion

It is worth reminding ourselves at the start of this chapter that each of us is mostly programmed by her/his culture to act in certain, fairly specific ways that are considered “normal” in that culture and “natural” for humans generally. None of these sets of morés and customs is somehow “normal” or “natural” for all human beings as is shown by the wide variety of actual cultures that exist in the world now and that have existed in the past.

Furthermore, children from one culture who are adopted and raised in another take on the ideas and ways of their adoptive culture, not the one they are connected to genetically, which proves culture is made of social constructs, not genetic ones. You are mostly what you were programmed to be before you were six. Culture is the main shaper by far of human thinking and behavior.

Cultural programming is hard to alter once a human is past about twelve years of age, but not impossible. There is hope in your culture for people to grow past the limitations of their culture’s programming as is demonstrated by the ways in which children can learn several languages and learn to move between their birth culture and others that are perhaps widely subscribed to in their area. In fact, even many adults learn to do the same. Such adults sometimes move to another culture, work, live, and choose to stay. Our cultures are hard to rise above, but not impossible.

You are a product of the culture that you grew up in, but you can learn to fit into other cultures, and yet remain flexible enough to live in your old one if you choose to do so or move back and forth at will. Facts prove this.

At this point, we can discuss some major criticisms of Moral Realism.

There are people in the Humanities and Social Sciences who argue vehemently that a culture – any culture – can only be truly understood by a person who has lived among the people of that culture. Once you have lived with the Trobriand Islanders, or the Kwakiutl, or whatever culture you care to study, you realize that their way of life can only be truly understood by those inside it.

An ethnographer, after years or decades, may be accepted by the tribe, but he/she will still be learning the finer nuances of the simplest of everyday morés and customs and may only be adept enough at the culture to successfully signal, for example, her willingness to go along with a plan proposed by a friend in the tribe one time in five. Perhaps a rising vocal intonation must be accompanied by an upward glance and an upward movement of the hand or a facial tic of some sort. The point is that the whole signal system that enables daily social life to function in most cultures is much subtler than just a mastery of the language or cookery or kinship system or commerce of that culture.

Thus, these critics say, there can be no translating of any culture into any other. This is the view called “cultural relativism”. And it is partly true. Cultures can be hard to translate. But not impossible. Unfortunately, cultural relativism is often used to justify moral relativism. This step in the argument has no logical foundation. The possibility that there may be universal standards of right and wrong is not negated by any evidence for cultural relativism.   

Edward Sapir and his student/colleague Benjamin Whorf were giant figures in the development of this moral relativist position in Anthropology. They argued that each culture in its verbal language, body language, morés, customs, art, cooking, etc. – in its totality, in other words – is so subtle and complex that there is no way to translate it into the terms, vocal nuances, and gestures of any other culture. To try to do so would be to do violence to both cultures. In his most famous argument, Whorf gave evidence to support this thesis from the terms used by the Hopi tribe (of Arizona) to describe features of their architecture.

Whorf argued that the Hopi descriptions of their pueblos could not be rendered into English. The Hopi use words that name structural parts, rather than rooms or spaces. But in English, buildings are described using terms for rooms and spaces. He further argued that his study of other native American languages had convinced him that the only way one could study a culture meaningfully was by accepting as an axiom of one’s work that no culture can be translated into any other. The result of any translation attempt is always a thing of shreds and patches. Therefore, he claimed, anthropologists must aim to describe other cultures – ways of life – carefully, honestly, but not to attempt to translate them, nor to try to create a model or theory of culture that embraces all cultures. To try to create such a model, given that the maker of the model likely comes from a European heritage, would be the worst form of ideological colonialism.

This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It has been basic to the arguments of most moral relativists in Anthropology for at least three generations.

This position was more than adequately answered by Steven Pinker in the early 2000s. He makes several telling points. For example, he points out that we’ve all had debates the gist of which we could remember afterwards, even though we might not be able to remember the exact words used by the debaters. What this example shows is that thought is not language.

In addition, if language preceded thought, how could new words be coined? But it is well-established that all languages are evolving all the time, adding words, modifying grammar rules, etc. (What is “cyberspace”? How does one “google” a topic? Has “google” been “verbed”? How does one “surf the web”?)  

Furthermore, how could written works in any language be translated into any other language. Yet, such translations are created all the time, with the consent and approval of the original authors.

The independence of language and thought has even been demonstrated in experiments done with infants. (Pinker is a cognitive scientist who has worked on this subject specifically.) Babies can think well before they talk.

And I’d like to add a personal reaction here. When I read Whorf’s explanation of how profoundly “untranslatable” Hopi words for traits of their architecture are, I stopped reading and burst out: “What did you just do?” It seemed clear to me that he had just explained what he had called “unexplainable”.            

One can further ask, how do the relativists know a culture is untranslatable? If they have been to the land where that society – living within its culture – resides, how did they get proficient enough in that culture’s language and customs to live among them and even to write coherently about their ways? Are moral relativists saying they’re smart enough to “get it”, but no one else ever can be? 

It is also worth emphasizing that each culture, though it may be very unique, must have some morés and customs in place that enable it to deal with physical reality. That is a key aspect of the thesis of this essay: there is a material reality, and we all have to deal with it: its entropy, uncertainty, predators, etc.

Finally, we can say there is a harsh, long-term downside to moral relativism.

An individual who has lost her capacity to process and respond to sense data that stream through her consciousness second by second becomes desperately anxious, in extreme cases, catatonic. Sanity means being in touch with physical reality. The other choice – insanity – no one wants to experience.

A tribe that has lost faith in the most basic parts of its culture – its concepts and words for its ways of understanding the real world – goes through an analogous trauma, a kind of tribal nervous breakdown. Sadly, we have seen examples of this phenomenon happen to indigenous peoples all over the world.

The larger point is that a society has to have some basic morés in place just to function. If its culture begins to deteriorate, or the colonizers purposely attempt to destroy that indigenous people’s culture, the target people likely will go through horrific times as they lose faith in their culture’s morés and customs. They will experience increased substance abuse, poverty, and violence. In the wake of European invasions, indigenous peoples all over the earth have endured this same list of woes. And still, moral relativists insist that they must not act, only watch. 

                                            Hopi pueblos (Wolpi, Arizona) 

                     (credit: Terry Eller, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)