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)