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)