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)