Sunset on Mars: entropy: our sun is burning out

                                                                          (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

16. A Second Universal Trait and its Attached Beliefs/Values

The next basic trait of reality is entropy. In human lives, this fact of reality means life is hard. It is always uphill. Adversity permeates our lives, and our balances are, therefore, always being eroded away by our environments.

All things in the universe are gradually cooling and breaking up. Suns burn out, woods rot, metals rust, plants and animals die. Bundles of matter called “living things” in an area can seem to be holding more and more matter and energy together.  They seem to cheat the entropy of the universe by reproduction. They make more of themselves. But they only do this by stealing even more energy from things in their surroundings. In our planet’s case, all living things ultimately get the energy they need to run their bodies from the sun. Plants capture it directly from sunshine, then animals like us steal from the plants by eating them or by eating other animals that eat plants.

In Physics, entropy is a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What it means for us as living things is that like all other living things, we must face adversity, not just in getting food, but in every way every day. The physical universe works in ways that tend to wreck everything we need to survive. Life is always hard because the universe is built to erode us and all that we build.

What we perceive as adversity is just the inescapable entropy of reality. We live in a world where we must ‘swim against the current’. Life can seem easy for a while, but that only means adversity will soon be back, often in new forms with even more power. Thus, in our cultures, we have learned to expect adversity. 

All tribes have done this by teaching to their kids values that motivate and guide them to stand up to the harshness of life. Values that enable a tribe to cope with the entropy harshness of the universe are found in all cultures. In English, these two giant values are called courage and wisdom. Note here that most primitive tribes in the forest a million years ago didn’t have these values driving them. We do because these values enabled a few of our boldest forebears to survive in greater numbers than did timider tribes who lived in the same forests.

The beginnings of courage can be seen in the behavior patterns of living things that move toward adversity rather than away from it. For example, some living things like beetles retreat from extremes of heat and cold. But we use the term courage to describe the behavior of any creature that consciously knows from stored up memories of past experience that it’s likely about to encounter danger and pain, but that then keeps moving in the potentially dangerous direction anyway. Courage works around pain. (Humans learned by pain to handle fire.)  

Note also that what we think deserves to be called courage is a matter of degree. Our ideas on whether a living thing is being courageous lie along a continuum from low level instinct to higher level, conscious decisions to take an action in spite of its known hazards.

A doe shows courage when she faces a wolf she would normally run from, but she faces and kicks at him because her fawn is lying helpless on the ground. This ingredient of recognizing danger but behaving abnormally to confront it and to handle it is the defining feature of courage.

We see actions by living things as more courageous the more we know that the living thing is knowingly behaving in a way that’s risking its own well-being. In those facts, we see the abstract (courage) in the concrete (facing a predator).  

Facing entropy – i.e. purposely acting in ways that make one’s own wellbeing harder – takes courage for any living thing. However, courage is only rarely seen in an unequivocal, primal form. Usually, it is balanced with another ideal that in English is called wisdom. The doe acts like she knows about wolves. She stands facing him and tries to kick him, and she aims for vulnerable spots. She doesn’t run, but she also doesn’t just stand between him and her fawn and get eaten first. She fights back with both courage and targeted strategy.

Humans show courage in both short term and long term threat situations with entropy-handling behavior. In the short term, a human can sometimes show the same kind of courage that a doe does. (Humans instinctively defend their kids).

In the long term, humans endure exhaustion and tedium to hunt big game while game is plentiful, drying and preserving the meat, even when the tribe currently has lots of meat. They gather berries when the tribe is already well fed, and its folk would rather lie in the shade or go swimming. It may be a hot day, with a risk of sunstroke or dehydration, but tribe members keep gathering, pounding, and drying berries still. Why? Because their courage is balanced with wisdom. They know they’ll need preserved food in winter just a few weeks from now when food will be scarce.

Probably, at one time, there was a tribe in this valley that didn’t work on saving food for the winter, but most of that tribe died out long ago. The few survivors were absorbed by the berry pounders. Saving food is an odds-raising practice.

In short, courage is almost always encountered in humans in behavior patterns that also contain knowledge, judgement, or, simply, wisdom. Efforts expended are expended strategically. Targeted. Over generations, the behavior set that formed in surviving tribes out of their balancing courage and wisdom became the virtue we call work. It is a key basic value; all tribes eventually come to it. We do what’s hard and tedious – but informed and targeted – to provide for our tribe’s folk, long term. Courage balanced with wisdom leads us to work.

                                                                    Work: harvesting yams in Africa                                                                           (credit: Bediong, via Wikimedia)

Work as a value tells its adherents to spend long hours of hunting and failing, and long tedious hours practicing with spear and bow. Hours gathering herbs or chewing hides. Or, in other tribes, long, tedious hours hoeing yams till they’re ready to harvest. The bottom line is that all tribes that survive live by cultures sculpted by evolution to handle this harsh universe. That survival requires a balance of courage and wisdom. In all environments, balancing courage and wisdom leads us to work.

Wisdom about hunting, for example, tells hunters where the heart of an animal is, and simultaneously tells them that they are going to need to learn to fire their arrows with fine accuracy. So, they practice. It’s tiring and boring, but it’s wise.

Farmers learn how they can stop wireworms in their yam fields. Put little pieces of potato into the soil for a few days, then dig them out, full of wireworms, and throw them in the fire. This adds more toil to the tedious job of growing yams, but it’s worth the effort in the long haul; it saves almost all the crop. It’s wise.  In short, courage alone is not enough. Over time, courage in all its forms gets balanced with wisdom in all its forms in all tribes that survive. We expect work.  

These two very general values – courage and wisdom – occur in cultures all over the earth in ways that go beyond any one tribe’s current situation. Gatherers, if they are forced to move to the coast, soon learn to dig for shellfish because they have come to expect that life is hard everywhere. It always demands work.

Work is to be expected in any environment. Tribes keep striving to find food if they move into a new environment until a way is discovered, often by one wise tribe member. Then, they use it. All environments similarly require some form of work from all tribes who choose to live in them. Entropy permeates all.   

One particular set of values and the behaviors that these values foster is seen in all tribes that have been invaded by other tribes: warrior values. Virtually all tribes that have experience of war learn and practice war skills.

The skills of war are most effectively passed to the next generation when we put exciting tales of warriors into the lore of the tribe. Kids love stories of heroes. In listening to these stories, kids absorb ideas of what makes a man or woman heroic. Then, motivated by stories of heroes, young people design and practice behaviors that raise the tribe’s survival odds. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by trial and error, sometimes both. As a result, the tribe is more likely to survive.

In short, virtually all tribes have at least some knowledge of how to fight off invaders. They may use spears, swords, rifles, or planes, but they must have – first – a willingness, even eagerness, to fight to preserve their way of life.  

It helps our understanding here to note that in hero myths everywhere, the hero has a mentor. Gilgamesh has Utnapishtim. Achilles, Chiron. Arthur, Merlin. Hiawatha, Deganawida. Shaka, Dingiswayo. Luke, Yoda. Katniss, Haymitch. Thus, by myths, kids in all lands learn courage must be balanced with wisdom. Warrior-hero myths are cultural responses to the hardest challenge: invasion by another tribe. Effective warrior myths enable tribes to fight hard because their armies are full of ‘heroes’ who fight with courage and wisdom.

Note that war is just one more form of entropy to any tribe that must fight one. However, it isn’t like famine or plague: humans choose to war on each other; they could choose not to. 

Terms for courage and wisdom, and heroes who represent them, are found in all languages because courage and wisdom are entropy-driven values that shape tribe members’ behavior patterns long term to create a durable tribe. One that faces and handles entropy in all real life situations, day by tedious day.  

Note also here that exactly how courage and wisdom will inform and guide a tribe’s morés can’t be set down in detail for all tribes everywhere. Knowing how to kill polar bears isn’t useful in Kenya. How to kill lions isn’t useful in Nunavut. However, both Masai and Innu teach courage and wisdom to their young.

                                                                                                                    

                

                                                               Modern myth hero warrior Luke Skywalker                                                                                     (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                                                                 Cutthroat Trout                                                                                                                          (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

15. The First Universal Trait and its attached Beliefs/Values

So, what might some of these universal, values-shaping traits of reality be?

It is important for us at this point to insert a caveat for readers to keep in mind. The listing and explaining of the major values-shaping traits of reality and of the values that humans have evolved to deal with these basic traits that I go into below is a simplification of the real processes that are occurring in human social evolution all the time. An analogy between the species in an ecosystem and the many societies of the Earth will help to clarify here.

In a living ecosystem, like a patch of forest in a valley in the Rocky Mountains or in an isolated lake, we can study the system in detail. For example, wolf and elk populations in Yellowstone National Park may vary from year to year with the severity of the winter, pressures by humans, and hosts of other factors like disease, parasites, etc.. But they tend toward a median point for both species. Trout and freshwater shrimp populations in a lake vary in analogous ways.

For us to speak of these relationships as if they are the only variables affecting each other’s populations would be totally misleading. A small hayfield near the lake being sprayed with a new pesticide may hugely affect the populations of all of the species in the lake, perhaps even causing some species to die out entirely. Global warming bringing steadily milder winters might cause elk populations in a park to soar to levels wolves can no longer control.

The point is that simplifications of these relationships can be misleading. So we keep these caveats in mind. Scientists who study wildlife know that a new invasive species or dry summer or mosquito control spray mandated by a nearby city – any of these may radically change the big picture. Sociologists keep analogous factors in mind as they study human tribes. 

However, the simplifications are also useful, as long as other factors stay fairly constant. The wolf population is a good – not perfect – indicator of the overall health of the park. The trout population is a good indicator of the health of the lake. Even the population of probiotic bacteria in my intestines is an indicator of my health. So, in the discussion below of the values our societies have arrived at as cultural programming, please keep in mind that these values must be seen as usually reliable indicators of a society’s health. But they’re simplifications. When we view them with caution, they are useful for clarifying how a society’s values affect its long term survival. Thus, we could ask what volunteering levels in a society tell us? Or the numbers of new business starts? Or fentanyl deaths?    

All concepts, terms, and models in all sciences are provisional. Even the concept of “life” in Biology turns out to be fuzzy at the edges (dormant viruses) as do “real numbers” in Math and “time” in Physics. The key question is whether the concept leads us to useful, testable results. Moral Realism, as a model in Philosophy and Sociology, leads us in that useful way.

                  

                                                            Wolf in Yellowstone Park                                                                                                               (credit: NPS, via Wikimedia Commons)

The first principle is balance. Even more valuable than cleanliness, balance is the profound general principle that shapes atoms, molecules, and solar systems in the non-living world, and cells, organs, creatures, ecosystems, and tribes in the living world. At all levels, a balance of forces pulls the universe into existence out of nothing. Thus, respect for balance has become a value in cultures all over.

In all tribes, adults teach kids to look for a range of effects for every decision and action. Advantages and disadvantages. This is what it means to ‘grow up’. To ‘cut your wisdom teeth’ people used to say in English.

Most crucially, this means that human tribes all over – each in its own way – recognize that balance means existing in ecosystems. Human tribes and other living species interact to find, and stay in, balance. Systems theory tells us that systems are dynamic: they work to maintain equilibrium, internal and external. Tribes that survive over centuries come to recognize the balance principle of reality and use it to guide their choices as they live in the world. Some of their other values may change over time, but balance does not.  

Aristotle emphasized to his followers that they must do all things in moderation, nothing to excess. He said the best life is a life of balance between extremes. The Tao of Taoism is, essentially, balance. Buddhism is called ‘the middle way’.

For centuries, Chinese culture has taught its young about yin and yang: balance as a deep universal principle. For centuries, Christianity has taught children of God’s wrath, God’s mercy, and the human need to achieve grace (balance).

For many native tribes of the Americas, this reverence for balance was even more profound. Europeans took a while to grasp that if they wiped out a species in an area, that action would likely precipitate changes in the ecosystem that would be bad for humans. They lacked a profound understanding of balance as it worked in the wilder ecosystems of the new continents they had come to.  

The first European farmers who came to the Americas learned the hard way that they couldn’t simply shoot hawks and owls to protect their chickens and not suffer consequences. If they killed off the hawks, the rodents, in many areas, multiplied grossly in a few years.

But indigenous people knew why this was so. They also knew that the wolves keep the moose strong by culling the less fit from the moose herd’s gene pool. Less fit moose are easy prey. Over generations, the fit ones then survive, breed, and toughen the gene pool. Native people used these concepts to guide their own actions, and they too stayed strong.

Other tribes elsewhere in the world have similar ideas about balance and the guidelines for achieving it. Most strive to restore their nation’s balances even during crises (“peace, order, good government”: the Canadian constitution).

As a value, balance has endured because it has guided its adherents, ancient and modern, to study tasks to find ways to make their responses to them more nuanced and effective with less labor to yield more good results for more folk more of the time. And thus, to raise the tribe's survival odds over the long haul.

Respecting balance begets tribal efficiency and durability. It teaches humans to scrutinize real world situations carefully and invest their energies wisely. If a reward for a task looks too good to be true, it probably is. A balancing downside will be found in the bigger picture somewhere.                      

Balance as a guide permeates successful cultures. As an idea, it goes on because it enables people who grasp it, live by it, and pass it on to make smart decisions and thus, they go on. They act to maintain balanced systems around them. The tribe then survives well and carries that value forward over generations.  

Furthermore, we should emphasize here that the first human tribes likely did not understand ecosystems. If they had a chance to pick every fireweed root in a patch or kill all the deer in a valley, they probably did. A respect for balance is still in our values programming probably because it gave a survival edge to the earliest tribes that did learn it. They were our forebears.  

                                                        Neanderthal Flintworkers                                                                                                                   (painting by Charles Robert Knight, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                            Native American dancer (2010)                                                                                                           (a ritual linking a people to a way of thinking about reality)

                         (credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alaina_marie/4550730637/ )

14. Note a subtler insight here also: most of the time, changes to our ways of life occur in response to changes in our environments. We learn to gather a new plant or hunt a new species when we must do so or die out. 

But the connection between our cultural codes -- i.e. our ideas of ‘right’ behavior -- and facts in reality sometimes can flow the other way, from ideas to reality. In other words, we can change how we live and even the physical facts of where we live, by creating and using new, man-made processes or tools to change our behavior and then, as a consequence, profoundly change the physical reality around us.

It is worth emphasizing this point: the interaction between the concrete realm of a tribe’s environment and the abstract ideas of a tribe isn’t, as cultural materialists and Marxists portray it, a one way path from the concrete to the abstract. There is interplay in both directions. Most often, the causal arrow points from concrete facts to abstract ideas; a change in reality forces a tribe in that area to change its ways of living and then of thinking (adapt or die out). But now and then a tribe living in a stable environment finds a new idea that enables the tribe to change its physical environment, altering the tribe’s way of life dramatically.  

A new way of thinking – a new “app” – comes to a tribe by pure luck, slow trial and error, an individual genius, or diffusion through a visitor from another tribe. Then, this new way of thinking enables a new way of behaving in the tribe, and the new mode of behaving enables the tribe to change its environment in ways that improve their survival odds in the new homeland they have made.  

In other words, the interaction between ways of thinking and the physical world is a dynamic one. Physical facts, technologies, behavior patterns, ideas for responding to all of these modify each other, back and forth, from environmental change to modifications in behavior to new ideas/models about reality and back again. 

Usually, the cause-effect arrow points from reality to ideas. For example, when a new species of herbivore comes into an area, tribes there respond with new ways of hunting that species, then new weapons that improve the hunt, then beliefs that support the new ways of hunting, toolmaking, and thinking the tribe has acquired.

But this flow from reality to beliefs and ideas once in a while can point back the other way. A clever app sometimes can guide a tribe to act in ways that change physical reality profoundly: now and then, an idea enables the people who learn it to change their world. Or to put this point in Anthropology’s terms, a change in a tribe’s superstructure (ideas and values) can, now and then, alter its structure (technologies and morés) so profoundly that the tribe is then able to transform its infrastructure (its physical environment – forest, prairie, coast, or desert, etc.) in ways that favor that tribe’s more vigorous survival.   

Agriculture was a breakthrough of this sort. Farmland is not bush or prairie. It is profoundly different from either. When humans realized that plants grow from seeds, and that they could plant those seeds where and when they chose to, they learned to farm. Then, by thoughtfully guided labor, they changed their environments. They made bush into fields covered with wheat, barley, rice, etc.

It’s also worth noting here that agriculture didn’t make farming tribes happier in their daily lives than competing nearby hunter-gatherers were. Research has indicated that much of the time, hunter-gatherers probably led easier lives than farmers did then or have since. But farming tribes had higher long-term survival rates. Agriculture makes population, not joy. Then, population makes power. Joy was never the point.

 

                                                 

                                                   Image of early Egyptian farmer                                                                    

                            (credit: Maher der Grabkammer des Sennudem, via Wikimedia)  

 

Guns, metals, steam engines, germ theory, etc. were similar (Jared Diamond): understanding new, human-devised ideas about how reality could be manipulated enabled tribes who learned them to make new tools, alter their worlds, and then, as a long term consequence, make more of their tribe.

On a side note, it is worth saying here that Einstein believed our harnessing the power of the atom – which began from an idea that came first from him – is the most dangerous change so far in all the sets of ideas that have occurred to humans.

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”    

                                                           (Einstein) 

Which is only to say what was said at the beginning of this essay: we can’t keep building more nuclear weapons indefinitely. That process has only one ending.

Now let us return to our main task by reiterating that the most general beliefs and values that are present in all tribes’ cultures are in all those cultures because they enabled all those tribes in all their varied environments to survive, even as those environments kept changing. They improve survival odds in all lands and climates because over the long haul, they work in all lands and climates. 

Wildlife conservation values and behaviors arise in areas where there are animals that humans can hunt and eat. Water conservation values develop in lands with low rainfall. But the largest point is that our core values rose out of our interactions with the even more basic forces of the universe, the ones that are ubiquitous. 

The set of core values that work for us all exists because those values fit all realities. No other explanation for our ‘common humanity’ makes sense. Our problem now is to articulate those core values, then live by them and teach them to our kids.

A moral code is analogous to what in Computing Science is called a kernel, the core of an operating system (culture) that enables a human tribe to survive in this harsh world. Our cultures are software built up from memes that have been arrived at by eons of trial and error.

Every sane human has in their brain a moral/behavior code mostly like the one that is in their fellow tribe members. It’s what gives the tribe its daily routines, and, to a profound degree, it makes each tribe member who he or she is.

Even seen as an individual, each of us is mostly what his culture programmed him or her to be. As Herodotus said three thousand years ago, “Custom is king."

                                           Balut (fetal duck), a delicacy eaten in Vietnam                                                                            (credit:   Marshall Astor, via Wikimedia)                                  

 

Schematic of Moral Realist model

 

Physics         ßà    |       Biology                |          ßà            Social Science

Matter, energy      ßà       |     Protoplasm, DNA              |               <- ->                   Human Nations

Laws of Physics   ßà       |     Laws of Biology                |                ßà                  Social Science           

                                  (code: DNA)                           (code: Culture)                          

 

 

Cosmos Evolution       Biological Evolution                   Social/Cultural Evolution

Physical universe             Living universe                               Human universe 

 

__________________________________________________________________

 

This graphic is intended to show how life, and especially human life, works. By Physics alone, life should not exist. Entropy and uncertainty should destroy any entity that is maintaining itself as discrete. Entropy normally chills and scatters everything into smaller and smaller, cold, dead bits. But life forms maintain. Life is the most indisputable reality our minds are aware of, and it defies Physics.  

So how does life sustain? There is code written physically into each living thing, gene code that guides that entity to elude physical forces, even exploit them.  

In short, a living thing’s interfacing with the universe is run by its gene code.

In analogous ways, the interface between a tribe and its environment is further enhanced by code we call culture, a set of apps encoded into the memes of a tribe, which enables that tribe to practice its own communal way of functioning.

All living things have code in their genes that guides them to handle the forces of the world, both physical and biological. Humans have a genome like all other species, and over generations, it is being constantly updated. (Human genome evolution is why our responses to malaria and tuberculosis are more nuanced and more effective now than in 4 B.C.)

But in addition, humans also have a culture-driven mode of living that enables them to adapt as whole tribes to changing hazards and opportunities. We update our cultures so that we survive. We do the updating mostly by processes we aren’t aware of, but, more and more frequently in recent centuries, we have been learning to shape and implement effective, culturally-guided behaviors for surviving.

By Physics alone, life should not exist. But it does because of the code written into genes. And genes are programmable. 

By Biology alone, humans are weak and slow. We should not dominate the living world. But we do because of the code written into our cultures. And cultures are programmable. We could and should be updating our cultural code in ways that enable us to take control of our survival and our destiny as a whole species now, while we still can.

 

 

                                         Aspasia Conversing With Socrates and Alcibiades                                                                   (credit: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 

13. The Major Conclusions of the Argument So Far

So, what are the major conclusions of this argument so far? Most crucially, we need to see that a few very general concepts, values, and customs are present in the cultures of almost all human tribes in all lands and eras. But it is also true that all of our concepts, beliefs, values, etc. affect how we act toward the things around us – other people, animals, plants, and non-living entities. Before they do an act, humans must conceive of it. Software -- i.e. thinking that is shaped by our cultures -- directs the actions of the hardware, the 'meat robots', namely each one of us.

It is further true that ideas and values can shape reality because they enable us to shape reality: to think of ways to respond to events and objects, then to act in the ways we’ve thought up, sometimes making clever new tools and ways of using them. The inference we can draw from these facts is that the few general principles that we call ‘moral  values’ must be connected, ultimately, to a few very general traits of the physical universe itself, traits so pervasive in the world that the values we’ve found to respond to those traits work in reality in all lands and eras.

A few very general ideas about how humans should behave massively improve the survival odds of any humans who live by them. These general ideas about how humans should behave are called ‘values’, and the best of them work for human tribes in all kinds of environments. Forests, coasts, grasslands, etc.

Thus, we can infer that our values must be shaped to fit traits of reality. No other explanation exists for the way that a few core values are found in cultures all over the world.

Now, let’s re-word this major conclusion in different terms and emphasize it again.

     (a) Every part of a culture – every belief, value, custom, etc. – has an effect of some kind on the behavior patterns of the tribe programmed with that culture. Cultural software shapes human behavior in the physical world.

     (b) All behaviors have a survival index. This is true even for behaviors that, at first glance, seem like silly, but harmless, wastes time that tribe members could have spent could on other, more obviously productive activities. All values, beliefs, and customs in a culture are relevant to tribe survival because they shape behavior, and it’s through our behavior that we interface with the world. Cultural programming is, therefore, the key factor that determines survival odds for humans.                                  

     (c) Virtually all human cultures share a few, recognizable core beliefs and values that guide and inform the whole tribe’s patterns of behavior.

     (d) Thus, the few values common in all human cultures must arise from common traits in the physical reality that all humans live and survive in.

For example, recall the fact that bathing customs are found in many cultures. This is because bathing is useful all over. Everywhere humans are, germs are. Habits of cleanliness kill germs and so improve a tribe’s odds of growing its population over generations. Then, tribes with more workers, hunters, soldiers, etc. get more done and survive wars, famines, and epidemics better than less sanitary rival tribes. Successful tribes value cleanliness because it works. It enhances survival odds. It makes ‘our folk’ multiply.  

In this model, over the long haul, physical reality is the base on which human beliefs, values, and morés must operate. It is reality that shapes our cultures.

Our ideas of right and wrong do not exist in a non-material, ideal dimension.

Our ideas of right and wrong are also not arbitrary cultural constructs.

The most important thing this essay offers is a third alternative: effective ideas of right and wrong are grounded in the most ubiquitous traits of physical reality itself.

In the real world, human cultures must interface with, and respond to, the living world, which runs by the laws of Biology, and the living world must interface with, and respond to, the non-living world, which runs by the laws of Physics. 

Our ideas about right are core concepts of our cultures; they became our most trusted values because they work. They enabled their followers to multiply. 

Furthermore, all tribes have a few core values in common. This ‘common humanity’ leads us to the conclusion that we have these values in common because they enable us to respond effectively to our common reality - the things about the world that are true everywhere.

This insight is essential if we are to survive: our values are not arbitrary; over generations of us experimenting, they have been shaped by the physical world. 

Note that these survival-boosting values and the customs/morés they lead their followers into aren’t usually worked out consciously in advance of any tribe’s adopting them. The process has usually been slower and harsher than that for most of human history. We do get wiser, but it sometimes takes centuries, and it has almost always, up to this point, been by pain: war, famine, and plague.  

Tribes that follow up-to-date values live practicing behavior patterns informed by those values. Thus, if the members of a tribe adopt new ideas that respond to reality well, the tribe flourishes and then absorbs less vigorous, rival tribes. The survival edge lies with the tribe that sees the advantages of effective ‘new ways’ and adopts them in timely fashion. Vigorous tribes embrace changes that they think make sense because that flexible attitude works. A tribe that can recognize new ideas, values, and morés that get results, and readily integrate them into its culture, is going to win in that area’s tribal competitions, like wars and markets.

Values are called ‘values’, not ‘customary ways of thinking’, because they are valuable. They are precious to know and follow over generations. They are far more valuable than any material things. We value our values because over the long haul, they have guided us to patterns of behavior that kept us alive.

Note again also how important the concept of increasing generalizability is. It’s good to know the path to the water hole that all large animals in your area have to use to get water daily. But it’s better to know where to aim spears at an animal in order to kill it. It’s even more generally true, therefore, to understand, that a heart shot will kill any vertebrates: elk, pigs, fish, mammoths, crocodiles, etc. all have hearts. It is still more valuable to believe you raise your survival odds most when you do not kill fifty animals and use only the tasty cuts, but instead kill only ten and use every bit of every kill.

Wildlife conservation values favor a tribe’s long term survival. Once you begin to live by a belief that requires you to kill only as many animals as you need to feed your folk – and you formulate a myth to justify that belief for your tribe – you will outlast rival tribes that don’t conserve the game. Then, to instill the value of conservation into your  kids, you teach them to see game conservation as being the way of the Great Spirit and the time-honored way of your people.

Note also how mythmaking has kept on into modern times even in the West. Two very general ideas that we in the West value are the ideas of brotherly love and democracy. Thus, we speak respectfully of Jesus and of Ancient Athens.  

The truth is that Ancient Athens was not a model democracy. She bullied other, less powerful cities in the Delian League, pressuring and threatening those other cities into paying taxes to be used to build the Acropolis and other works. Those works likely weren’t praised by most of the visitors from smaller cities in the Delian League. They knew whose money had built those magnificent structures.

And to be a citizen in Ancient Athens one had to be male, Athens-born of two Athens-born parents, past 18, and to have served in the military. Most of those who walked around Athens in 400 B.C. weren’t citizens and never would be.  

Aristotle thought women were too flighty to be citizens. Socrates thought an election win proved nothing and qualified the winners for nothing. These men weren’t believers in, or supporters of, democracy as we think of it today.

Jesus was very kind to many in his times, but he showed questionable judgment sometimes. The buyers and sellers that he took a whip to in the temple were only doing what had been done there for decades and accepted by the majority of the Jews. And some of the miracles attributed to him later by his followers sound very much like many earlier myths of other tribes. (e.g. Zoroaster)

But many in the West today need myths as much as any of the tribes of the past. We cling to our ideas of Socrates and Jesus. We aren’t interested in hearing why our ideas about them might be mainly wishful thinking, and we generally don’t listen when someone tries to tell us his reasons for why he says they are. And our idea sets about both Ancient Greece and Ancient Christianity, I repeat, are at least half myth. The real people in their time were not as smart, strong, kind, or dedicated as we like to think they were.

In the meantime, what about the large general ideas of kindness and democracy?They have endured. Why? Because, I say again, over the long haul, they work. 

 

To sum up then, our most treasured values are very general beliefs which:

(a) guide most of our actions daily

(b) lead us to act in ways that enhance our tribe’s long term survival odds

(c) respond to the deepest traits of both physical and biological reality

(d) are difficult to explain in everyday, common sense terms

(e) often get turned into myths that are surrounded by emotion and superstition

(f)  are extremely resistant to amendment or replacement

                                            Sermon on the Mountain (artist: Arsene Robert)                                                      (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

            

                                                    Buddha image, Sri Lanka   (credit: Wikipedia)                                                             

12. Reiteration of the Argument So Far

To reiterate: in the first place, we do have principles that we rely on in practice to guide our behavior in the world. In the second place, these beliefs got deeply ingrained in the lore and behavior of a few tribes because they work: they enabled those who lived by them to survive in greater numbers over the long haul than was the case for competing tribes who didn’t have these beliefs .

In the third place, these beliefs were kept not because they guaranteed hunters or farmers success in every project, but because they improved their adherents’ long-term survival odds, as experience showed. Tribes who lived by them grew.

Fourth, tribes come, by trial and error, to imprint a few very general values, customs, etc. very deeply into their young by transforming those values into myths/religion. This very human trait of making myths is due to two facts: first, these very general ideas, values, etc. kept working, gradually, for centuries, enabling more members of tribes who believed in them to survive and flourish; second, the tribe’s lore as told by its shaman couldn’t explain in everyday terms why these values/principles worked. They needed myths to justify their culture.

Tribes that survived did so because, by trial and error, they made a few useful generalizations into tenets of the tribe’s religion. Useful generalizations then became surrounded by ritual, mystery, and emotion. Then, they would not be lost by the tribe, even if, for a while, the evidence happening around the tribe didn’t seem to support those generalizations. Over decades, sound values work.

“We find dry wood for the fire because wet wood will not burn. You can’t burn wet stuff, son. But we don’t worship dry wood like we do the elk. We conserve and respect the elk because they were given to our people by the Great Spirit.”

“The buffalo may be almost gone now, son, but the Great Spirit’s ways still rule. One day, white people will pay for how they treat His world.”

                                       All Saints Catholic Church (San Francisco, US)                                                                              Christian Religious Symbolism

                                                (credit: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons )