racially diverse elementary school class 

                                (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Bruce Cummins)

                                     

20. Recommendations

At this point in our argument, we can skip to the end. It should be clear that if we are to survive our current perilous times, reverse the damage we’ve done to our ecosystems, disarm our nuclear weapons, etc., we must instill these values – balance, courage, wisdom, freedom, and love – deeply into the next human generation. Teach the kids the logic of living by principles, not profits. 

Balance, courage, wisdom, freedom, and love. These abstractions, in their net effect, are strategies for species survival. The kids need to learn this by reason, supported with evidence. Learn the Moral Realist model. Then, we must teach by example, by embodying these principles in our daily behavior. Model decency and sense for the kids to see and learn. 

Be scholars, athletes, entrepreneurs, tradespeople, teachers, etc., guided by ethical ideals. Be the honest businessperson. The dedicated teacher. The loyal soldier. The conscientious tradesman. The kids see it all. We must never forget that.

The moral code this essay arrives at is mostly our familiar one. What this essay seeks to do is not to promulgate a revolution but to strengthen the resolve of decent folk everywhere. Our moral code is basically right. And we’re updating it all the time. Postmodernism is a lie, but now we know why it is. As a consequence of our understanding Moral Relativism, we can behave in ways that are more targeted and strategic so that we build a form of democratic pluralism that endures.

And if this Moral Realism model still sounds vague or unsatisfying to you, then ask yourself: How much did Newton’s model or Darwin’s change human lives? 

Could the social sciences, especially Economics, Sociology, Political Science, and History be made as exact as Physics or even Biology? I don’t think so. But they could use hard measures like gross domestic product, literacy rate, volunteering rates, business starts, and statistical methods that aim to connect these concepts with courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance in ways similar to the ways in which the evolutionary theory has shaped agriculture. We’ll get there.

As Newton’s model advanced Engineering and Darwin’s advanced Agriculture, Moral Realism will advance Social Science. Profound social change in as little as two generations. Conscious social evolution. Understand the theory, use it to guide the practical. Then, we have a reasonable chance to survive. 

Otherwise, we’ll do what we’ve always done. War. With today’s technologies, a final one.

 

21. The Bottom Line for Us Now

Education systems should be retooling now to build curricula informed by courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance. Before 2040, all the nations of the world should be offering in their public schools courses on Universal Values - Global Citizenship that are required study for secondary school graduation.

This is the only practical means by which the goal of human survival might still be accomplished. Not a World Workers’ State; it always turns into one more form of tyranny. But not robber baron capitalism either. It becomes oligarchy.

Balance. Democratic pluralism. It is built to survive – long term – in reality.

And let the kids see us striving to be moral. Physically fit. Venturesome. Scholarly. Courteous and patient every day. Let the kids see us striving to be these things. Difficult. Not impossible. Then they may evolve to go on to a higher destiny.

They may spread life to the stars.

                                     Buzz Aldrin during the first moon landing (July, 1969)                                                                             (photo by Neil Armstrong, public domain)

 

(credit: Freepik.com) 

19. Concluding Notes

As a final note, let us emphasize that this is a model of cultural evolution that works. It pictures human reality in a way that empowers us humans. What we see is that our moral codes were written by trial and error over eons to maximize survival probabilities. With this model clearly understood, we can effectively counter the postmodernists who say our values are mere arbitrary cultural constructs. They are wrong. Our values are as real as entropy and quantum uncertainty.

We can start to write a plan for our own future. Instill the Moral Realist model in our kids that will guide them past climate collapse and World War III. Can we set them on a path to complete security? Not possible. Can we toughen them to keep forming and enacting action plans with better and better survival odds? Absolutely. 

Moral Realism recommends to us a society that is free to a scary level. We fear being that free. But we are that free. On the other hand, Moral Realism sees life as exciting challenge. What shall we do today?

There is currently no other model or theory being offered that contains that hope. We may be able to save ourselves if we work at transforming ourselves as whole tribes into one tribe. Work on survival in an informed and resolute way, using strategies that are contained and explained in Moral Realism. Or we can drift deeper and deeper into materialism, militarism, cynicism, and despair.

Moral Realism is not unrestrained capitalism, nor is it Marxism. Market driven economies make wealth, but capitalists are not equipped to run a nation. Politics are complicated in ways business is not, as many industrialists in Nazi times learned to their sorrow. The centrally planned economies of Marxism also tend to wither and die. Moral Realism is the model that supports democratic pluralism as a way of life for whole societies. And it works. The evidence lies in the nations of the world now. Mixed economies balanced with government institutions. Populations varied in ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. The whole system updating regularly, growing more and more sociodiverse and dynamic.  

The role in which we humans strive to understand ourselves and to exercise proactive control over our lives has always seemed nobler to me than its cynical alternatives. I choose that role. And for the honest entrepreneurs, trades people, soldiers, teachers, etc. …yes, your life is hard. So was your Grandpa's, so was your Grandma's, and you see now, they were not fools. They were doing the best they could with what they knew at the time. But your life does have higher purpose: you are what makes democracy work, and democracy is what makes humanity work. A cliché, but a true one. Never doubt it again.

               U.N. General Assembly in session 

               (credit: Wikimedia) 

 

      

                                                                 Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down)                                                                       (credit: Jean-Leon Gerome, via Wikimedia)

18. The Long Haul of Centuries

Note again that balance, courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, and the beliefs and customs they lead us to, may seem vague and slow acting, but these beliefs are the drivers of cultural evolution. These beliefs are enough to give tribes that adhere to them for generations a survival advantage. They just take time to get results.

In the contexts of daily life, general values like wisdom and love take a long time to work. They do not lead to growth as dramatic as agriculture, metals, or germ theory do. Or knowing the elk path. But they work with an irresistible, long-term force very like that of the forces they have been designed to respond to, namely entropy and uncertainty, the forces of nature herself. Tribes who believe in these values and use them to guide their actions in daily life eventually win the long battles, small and historic. Belief in loving one’s neighbors leads, in time, via more nuanced action and communication, to agriculture, cars, vaccines, etc. Love practiced well makes a pluralistic tribe. Then, as a consequence, the pluralistic tribe finds more good ideas, and in the end, it outperforms its competition.  

History shows that, in the end, the ways of truth and love win (Gandhi). They sometimes take a thousand years of very gradual subtle influencing and tilting of the odds for the tribe that lives faithfully by them. But then they win. The evidence of history says so. (By our standards, Romans were brutes who paid to see men kill each other. We don’t. That's progress. With recursions. But progress.)

The ways of truth (courage and wisdom) and love (freedom, love, and balance) keep granting those who faithfully practice them effective technologies and a more united citizenry. They gradually –  or sometimes dramatically – keep dominating and absorbing more monoethnic, xenophobic, jingoistic tribes that they compete with. (Hitler lost because his strategy was glaringly monoethnic.)

Our species is healthier, smarter, more civil, and more numerous than we were six thousand years ago. It just took a few thousand years for a couple of tilts to the odds of the cosmos to get us here. 

Now, note how the theory of Moral Realism being taught well to most of the kids in a nation could raise its group consciousness and reduce the time needed for it to evolve into a unified, self-directing tribe. Then, imagine what the effects of teaching Moral Realism might do if it were taught to all the children of homo sapiens. A new dynamic equilibrium in two generations by our learning and practicing core values.

What Gandhi called the “ways of truth and love” grant their adherents an edge in the survival struggle because they tilt the odds in their followers’ favor. Over generations, these values have brought us to our present world with all of its varied, vigorous, interdependent cultures. And they are as yet only poorly understood and taught. What might be possible for us? 

Balance. Courage. Wisdom. Freedom. Love.  And that’s it. They’re provisional, but they’re enough to guide our lives. They are what brought us to this day.   

How many different cultures and their tribes could be designed using these few design principles? The total we have tried so far isn’t one percent of that list. They even enable us – if we’re brave – to keep updating the culture we have all the time.  

Otherwise …we’re free to try almost anything.

We can’t find security in this universe; but by loving, wise, courageous action, we can find equilibrium and raise our odds of surviving to over 90%. Thus, if we grasp Moral Realism, that is more than enough to give us a sense of  purpose.

Most people don’t want to be nearly as free as we really are. Existentialists like Sartre emphasize this point. Real freedom is frightening. It’s a scary world. We long for security and an end to anxiety. But there isn’t one.  

Many even seek security in what they think was our past. But the past is not coming back, and the truth is that it wasn’t very nice anyway. In fact, in many details, if we remember honestly, we see it was often horrible. In addition, the scary future isn’t going to go away. So? If we’re realistic …we face forward.

Balance. Courage. Wisdom. Freedom. Love. That’s the list of efficacious design principles theoretically available. The rest is up to us.  Our human world may yet unfold into a civilized balance of those survival components. It’s up to us.

Herodotus, quoting the poet Pindar, said, “Custom is king.” He meant we’re all tribally programmed in how we think. But no culture is perfect for guiding our actions to survive all possible futures because such a complete culture, a set of apps that covers all possible future challenges, can’t be formulated. Quantum Theory tells us the future isn’t just unknown; it’s unknowable. It will unfold in ways we can’t ever perfectly anticipate. However, we can keep learning more about how to present events in our environments, then weigh our action options, then update.

The downside of Herodotus’ view is that we’re still programmed to aim, much of the time, for tribe solidarity. Every tribe thinks its culture is ‘normal’. We react to folk from other cultures with suspicion that can easily turn hostile. This all but universal human tendency had its uses thousands of years ago. It created tribe rivalries that led us to become our own cultural predators. For millennia, we haven’t eaten those we killed in wars, but winner cultures do "eat" loser cultures. Winners adopt and use the effective beliefs and practices of the vanquished, but they erase the rest of the conquered culture out of the consciousness of the human species. Thus, by the harsh route of self cultural predation, humanity became fitter. 

The upside now is that people in almost all cultures are also told by at least some of their wiser gurus to study strangers – and their own tribe’s eccentrics – to find ways in which they can interact with them, respect them, work with them, and learn from them. For eons, we tended toward tribal hostility, but in recent centuries, we have also begun to learn to love each other.

The Torah/Old Testament tells its adherents – Jews, Christians, and Muslims:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.    

                                                                                                  (Leviticus 19:34)  

                

                                                                 The Good Samaritan                                                                                                       (credit: Aime Morot, via Wikipedia) 

          

                                                              John Calvin, determinist Christian leader                                                                                                                           (credit:  via Wikimedia) 

                                                           

So, on this crucial issue of human freedom, let’s digress for a minute.

Quantum Theory says determinism is false. Free will is real for all living things, especially humans. Living things flow back against the current of entropy and the winds of uncertainty. For example, chlorophyl can absorb a single photon. This means that it can alter probabilities at the quantum level. All life more complex than plants takes advantage of the odds driving events from that point up the complexity levels to us. Living things are smart gamblers, from amoeba on up to fish, birds, and humans as individuals and even whole tribes. Our actions have been designed by evolution over eons of time to maximize the odds embedded in the events of the real, physical world. Humans are the smartest of the gamblers that live in the real world. And smart gamblers survive.

The evidence that shows the free will claim to be true is in the fact that there is life at all. The universe, working in its normal way, works to destroy complex bundles of matter like us. But life fights off that destruction or slips past it and goes on to make more of itself. (For us, the “more” is our kids.) Even algae are – to a degree – free. An algae uses chlorophyl to trap photons of light as chemical energy, then uses the chemical energy to perform tasks like make cell walls and organelles and so to become an entity with identity: a creature: a thing that is identifiably not part of the undifferentiated primordial soup around it. A living being that can alter odds.  

Events occur in sequences that can’t be exactly predicted even if we understood all the laws of science and knew the positions of all the particles in the cosmos. But the ways in which events unfold do contain trends. Living things recognize and use the trends to respond effectively to events in reality. Over generations, species adapt and as the more up-to-date among them reproduce, the less fit die off. Thus, living things constantly update their reproductive codes, i.e. their survival odds. Once the first chlorophyl molecule absorbed a photon of light and saved its energy in ATP chemical storage, the rest of evolution was just a matter of many collisions over eons of time. In a universe as big as ours, with googols of collisions happening, life was bound to arise somewhere. Earth got lucky.

Quantum theory supports the view that the outcome of the events leading up to this moment is a matter of probabilities, not certainties. The future is not set. However, this fact of the physical world also means we can influence how events occur. Discover and perform acts that tilt the odds of future events in our favor.

In this universe, we humans can learn which events contain higher survival odds for us and also learn how to intervene in event sequences to enhance the odds of upcoming ones that will benefit us and lower the odds of ones that might harm us. Often, we can even make events we want into near certainties. The garden will almost certainly yield food if we plant in rich soil, weed every week, and hill the potatoes, or even move the operation inside a controlled-atmosphere greenhouse. Agriculture advances. Similarly, so do our other technologies.

Then, in a powerful way, we humans pass our knowledge on to our kids. Knowledge accumulates over generations in cultures just as it does in genes: by trial and error. It’s there, in tribes passing culture across time, that our human survival edge lies.  

Note as an aside that determinists may say there’s no free will, but they live by free will guidelines that have been passed down to us by our forebears. Those guidelines have evolved to improve our odds of surviving possible harsh future scenarios. We plant and irrigate crops so we’ll have food next year. Not famine. We avoid known paths of avalanches because we’ve learned from harsh experience where the avalanches in our area hit most often. We do these acts and many others like them to improve our odds of surviving in this harsh reality.

So do determinists. In short, they don’t live by determinism. They live as if they have free will. What they say about freedom isn’t consistent with what they do.

Consider an example. Determinists in most parts of the world today live where there are cars and cell phones. If Deter is driving in traffic on a four lane road, and the driver beside him, Stupe, is not attending to his driving very well, but is instead looking at his cell phone, and if even worse, Stupe’s car begins to drift into Deter’s lane, forcing Deter to steer further toward the center line and thus toward oncoming traffic, Deter is going to get angry with Stupe -- not Stupe’s car or cell phone, even if in casual conversation, Deter claims he’s a determinist.

Believing in free will is what enables us to assign responsibility to one another, and to function in daily community life. Deter may say he’s a determinist, but in the real world where he lives, he isn’t one. On the other hand, he may come to regret some of the horn-beeping, fist-shaking, and swearing that he directed at Stupe. Stupe has just been hired as Deter’s new department head.

Finally, seeing how scientists do science is the decisive argument. They design experiments that isolate events so that the trends underlying those events can be exposed, understood, and even quantified. They make events go in ways that almost never occur in nature, and they make these events occur when and where they choose. An experiment is a contrived event, as is an H-bomb. If the control that scientists doing science exert over reality doesn’t evidence freedom, what could?

 

                            Scientist at work in a lab, imposes his will on events in reality

                             (credit: Mark Shwartz, Stanford ENERGY, via Wikimedia)  

 

 

                              

                                                            Chicxulub asteroid impact (65 mya)                                             (uncertainty in the real world, sometimes impossible to anticipate) 

                             (credit: Wikimedia, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/98/yucatan.html) 

17. A Third Universal Trait and its Attached Beliefs/Values

A third basic trait of reality is uncertainty. It is a trait of reality because of the quantum nature of matter.  

Quantum Theory is very difficult to understand for most folk, but its presence in our lives is not. The quantum uncertainty in matter simply means in ordinary lives that life is not only hard (entropy), but also is run by probabilities, never certainties. We must face a life that is uphill, but harder yet, it always contains shocks. The past is fixed, but the future is not. 

But the future is also not made of chaos. It is filled with possible events that are degrees of likely, unlikely, and remotely possible. The remotely possible ones are things we didn’t plan for because we couldn’t plan for them. We ignore some possibilities because they seem very unlikely to occur or sometimes because they are literally inconceivable for us. Who could prepare for an airborne form of ebola?  

Quantum Theory tells us that the events of the next century and the next minute aren’t fixed in unalterable sequences. They are always governed by probability. The crucial insight comes at this point: in this picture, humans act to intervene in the sequences of events around them; we act to alter the odds of the events that are likely to happen  in the next minute or century. We try constantly to make events around us come out in ways that will be advantageous for us.

I can’t guarantee that my hunt or my crop will be successful, but I can do things to improve the probability that my efforts will lead to success. Sometimes we have very little capacity to affect the odds of what is going to happen next. But at our level of resolution, i.e. the level of “medium-sized dry goods” (A. J. Ayer), we often do have at least some ability to influence upcoming events.

Know the tracks of the deer from those of the elk. Know their droppings. Know the area. Then, your hunt will succeed more often because you’ll choose to act in ways that improve the odds of your hunt’s being a success. Odds are you can kill, gut, and drag a deer alone today. But elk? Much harder. If you kill one, then have to leave it overnight, scavengers will likely get it. Track the deer.

Or if wireworms get into your yam field, learn how to trap them in pieces of potato, then the next day, throw the potato bits in the fire. With this trick in your tool kit, odds are that you’ll bring in good crops on a reliable basis.

Understanding uncertainty gives us more than wisdom and courage can. It tells us that we can act in ways that use the odds, anticipate what’s likely to happen in a minute or a year, and often influence what’s going to happen. Uncertainty is scary, but on the positive side, understanding uncertainty tells us we are – to a very useful degree – free. At our level in reality, we can influence how our future is going to turn out. 

Understanding uncertainty also tells us that what’s going to happen next can, occasionally, be an event that we’re unprepared for. Our total bank of wisdom, individual and tribal, may not have prepared us for even the possibility of a huge asteroid hitting the earth. Or a patch of ice causing us to skid over a cliff face. Life brings rude shocks. But the balancing side of this truth is that extreme catastrophes are rare, and even when one hits, we’re still partly free. We may improvise in a few hours. Use our machines to dig deep bunkers, stock them, then live in them till our climate recovers. We put snow tires on for sound reasons.  

We are not bound into sequences of events beyond all human control, and there is not just one single possible future for all parts of our universe. We do have a degree of freedom, especially at our level of resolution. Not the atomic level, nor the cosmic, but our level of medium-sized, dry goods. And deer and dry wood.

In response to the basic uncertainty/probability of events in reality, all vigorous tribes have learned, over time, to live by values that enable a tribe to adjust its way of life to handle shocks. The profoundest uncertainty-driven values are freedom and love. Love balances freedom. Charity balances entrepreneurship.

Why do these values, in dynamic equilibrium, help us to survive? Because in a probabilistic world, a tribe survives better if it contains lots of different kinds of humans with diverse kinds of skills and ways of thinking. That’s freedom in the real world of whole tribes. But freedom without a balancing value too often leads tribes that live by unrestrained freedom to break up into hostile factions and scatter.

Love as a value lived daily, builds a tribe that is pluralistic and resourceful. It contains lots of diverse kinds of people. A tribe with strong love-your-neighbor values is more resourceful than any lacking those values. Worse yet, a tribe that aims to build a monoethnic population of “our kind ” will always be poorer in ideas than a more pluralistic tribe. Nations running under hard tribalism lose.

However, courage, wisdom, and freedom, with economies that are market-driven and full of complex, labor-intensive, cleverly designed goods and services, are still not enough. Successful tribes/nations also need the balancing value called ‘love’.

Smart ideas, once in a while, can be “game-changing”. In a generation, a good idea can totally alter life for a tribe that finds it. A tribe raises its odds of finding powerful ideas when it contains many really diverse kinds of people. In fact, some of our most powerful ideas have come from minorities and eccentrics. For example, Newton and Einstein were likely both autistic. Einstein was also a Jew. Alan Turing was a homosexual, as were Newton, Tchaikovsky, and many others. The society that embraces those who are "different" gets the products of the labors of these men. 

It is important to note here that no individual leader, no matter how versatile, can ever be nearly as resourceful as a whole tribe can; thus, the most resourceful tribes run by the value called love. We survive better as whole tribes, long term, when we respect others: treat them with dignity. Engage our lives with theirs. Then, our tribe gets more good ideas. Many different types of people, who treat each other with respect, form a more resourceful tribe. (Centuries had to pass before the West came to value its scientists and merchants. But then it did.)

So? Love your neighbor. Not in spite of his strange ways, but because of them. One day in an unexpected crisis, those ways may save your life. And at a minimum, if you find their ways unnerving, respect their right to live in the way they want, as long as it shows you the same.   

It is useful to note as an aside here, that in modern Science, many who pose as ‘gurus’ disagree with even the basic idea of freedom. They claim humans are not free even to a small degree. (Laplace thought this way. Likely Newton also. Many more in science in these times are also determinists.)

These ‘determinists’, as they’re called, believe all events are shaped by earlier events in ways that are very complex, but that nevertheless are set. They believe even the changes in brain chemistry that humans go through as they observe events around them cause humans to respond to those events in fixed sequences that guarantee that what is going to happen next is inevitable.

In short, determinists believe there is no free will.

Modern quantum theory breaks the back of that determinist view. Events right down to the atomic level leap to their next state according to laws of probability, not by equations of certainty. Living things alter real world probabilities by intervening physically in the flows of events around them. Both instinctively and consciously, humans especially can tilt the odds of what’s going to happen next. 

Pluralism 

                Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Mentoring, 2011         

              (credit: National Science Foundation, via Wikimedia) 

 

                         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)