Chapter 11.                            Part C            

           But let’s return to our main line of thought.

           The Romans put more practicality, discipline and efficiency into the Athenian ideas and values that they borrowed. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great size and engineering sophistication, by employing knowledge that they had learned from the Greeks, mainly the Athenians, and the Romans' own neighbors, the Etruscans (or Tuscans). Similarly, in other areas, such as war, law, medicine, and agriculture, the Romans achieved practical successes unmatched in their own times, and also, for centuries after the Empire fell.

 

                           Etruscan banquet scene, from a painting in a tomb in Tarquinia, Italy  

           

            In addition, it is important to note that the Roman republic, as cruel as it could be to outsiders, was dearly loved by Romans. They were citizens of a democracy. They were like family. They knew that they deserved to rule because there had never been any state like Rome. It had been chosen by the gods to be specially gifted and destined. The state religion said so. The Aeneid said so. Thus, the Roman worldview, by a direct chain of logic, assigned to the Romans the most important role that had ever existed in the history of the world. Their gods did not rule them and their universe with cruelty and capriciousness. Instead, the Romans, for generations, were very sure of where they stood: the gods (later, God) loved Rome.

                    glory days of Ancient Rome (as depicted by Thomas Cole, American artist) 

This worldview produced a patriotism that had an Athenian kind of character to it because it was built around a model that gave democratic rights and duties to all Roman citizens, or at least all “true” citizens, namely adult Roman males who owned property. There were aristocratic families, as had been the case in almost all previous states, and these folk were used to the idea of privilege. But there were also plebeians, and they too were full citizens with rights to vote, run for office, have a fair trial if they were charged with a crime, and so on. How could you not love such a country? What would you not endure for her? 

The slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, but the Romans thought that this situation was just part of the natural order.  This view, by the way, that the superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals and activities, did not originate with the Romans. It had been Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons similar to the reasons that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people just knew without thinking about it that their country’s system and the patriotism that it fostered - patriotism that had been displayed over and over by them, their fellow citizens, and their ancestors - made them superior. The Romans knew that they deserved to be the masters of inferior cultures.

            A society built on slaves and materialism, and restrained only by a warrior’s code of discipline and loyalty, had to collapse when the warriors ran out of territories to conquer and sank into boredom, sloth, envy, and internal strife. In short, the cultural-code account was drawn on until it was bankrupt. Overdrawn. By the time that they realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late. 

 

                           late Roman decadence (as conceived by French artist, Couture) 

                        Chapter 11.                                    Part B 

         Therefore, in Western history, the next important world view is the Roman one. Operating under it, people in general became even more practical, more focused on physical effectiveness and power, and less interested in, or even aware of, ideas considered for their own sake. This feeling expressed itself among many of the early Romans simply and directly in an out-and-out hatred for all things Greek; the truth was that the Romans borrowed much from the Greeks, especially in theoretical knowledge, but many Romans loathed having to admit it. 

           The Romans in their heyday no longer feared the gods in the way that the ancient Greeks and the Romans’ own ancestors once had. As the Roman Republic faded and the Roman Empire took over, the Romans went so far from that way of thinking that they lost much of the Greek, especially the Athenian, capacity for the things called “abstract” – wonder, idealism, pure geometry, philosophical speculation, and flights of imagination. The Romans built their state on Athenian-style, democratic principles, values, and behaviors, but they also, more like the Spartans, loved practical results and power, not abstract speculation.

                     

                                      Pont du Gard: Roman aqueduct (in present day France) 

            It is tempting here to see in Roman culture a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and those of the Spartans/Macedonians. This would be an example of Hegel’s famous dialectic. One way of thinking, along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows, and then an opposite way of thinking rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way.  The two struggle, interact, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not like a compromise because it is a new way with a life and identity of its own. 

            The people who are born into the new way are not aware of using some elements from one philosophy and some from the other. The new way is simply their way, and the supporting ideas that are added to the new system make it seem like a neat, smooth, seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system always spiraling up toward greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

               

            It is tempting. It’s a fairly simple model and with a little stretching it can be made to at least seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is simply too simple. The Roman way of thinking and way of life did contain some ideals similar to those of the Athenians and some like those of the Spartan ones, but there was too much else going on in the thinking and living styles of the Romans for us to be satisfied with Hegel’s model. Human societies are subtler than that. What makes more sense is to look at each society and see what its world view, values, morés, and behavior patterns were like and how they coordinated in the lives of the people who operated under them to produce a whole culture and way of life that met the survival demands of the time. Using that humbler, but subtler and more nuanced, model, we can learn about how human societies really work.

               

            The point is that the model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as all-encompassing as Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model because the real process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit that model. Rather, the real process of human cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution in the rest of nature, by genetic variation and natural selection and accident and disaster.

             Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the mechanism that Hegel describes. In the past, conditions in the non-living world like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down, or opened up, reams of opportunities in the living world. Then, usually, life forms moved in opportunistically. Life spreads across time and space not like a chain or a road or a ladder, but like a stream branching and bifurcating over and over onward from that primal source started from a few cells long ago. And it is also important to emphasize that the direction of growth, in the living world, is against the flow of entropy. Life flows "uphill". The direction of living flow is from the source into the branches, not the other way round. 

             The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for cognitive attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But life isn’t that neat, and it is in the realm of the living that our models of human culture must be placed. The model that we are going to explore here can do what we need it to do. It can give us enough insights into how human cultures work, and what right and wrong are, both apparently and really, for us to then be able to build a rational moral code. And that is all we need.

Chapter  11                            World Views, Old                          Part A

               

            Every society must work out and articulate a view of the physical universe, a way of seeing the world, a way which then becomes the base on which the society's values system is to be built. This is no minor matter; while philosophers may dally over the questions in a theoretical way, real folk have to deal with life. They have to have some code in place that tells them how to act. Worldview, values, and behaviors must form a coherent thinking and doing system under which each individual is empowered to make decisions and take action, and the whole society can efficiently operate and survive in its always-changing, always-demanding environment.

All societies in some deep way know this. Even though societies up until our time have worked out their worldviews, values, mores, etc. and lived their lives almost entirely in unselfconscious ways, people everywhere have always placed great stock in their society’s model of how the material universe is constructed, how it operates, and where it is going. They know implicitly that their worldview must be used as their guide when they are trying to decide whether an act that feels "right" (i.e. moral) is "right" (i.e. practicable).

            So let's keep moving forward in this task of building a new, universal moral code, but let us also move with all the prudence we possess. What is at stake is everything. Before we begin building a new universal moral system, we need to get our thinking into the necessary mindset by considering at least the most salient peaks in the histories of some of the societies of the past, in order to see how systems made of worldviews, values, and behaviors coordinate and evolve.

               

                                                                            G.W.F. Hegel 

            In this chapter, Philosophy students will notice similarities between some aspects of what I have to say and the philosophy of Hegel, and I admit freely that there are similarities. But I have some major points of disagreement with Hegel which I will explain along the way in this chapter. For those readers who are not Philosophy students, I also should say here that, even when I bring him up, I am going to give only a very quick version of my understanding Hegel. If you find the ideas presented here at all interesting, you really should give Hegel a try. His writing is difficult, but not impossible, and he also has been interpreted by some disciples who write more accessibly.(1.) But in this book, let’s now get back to our analysis of the worldviews, values, morés, and behavior patterns that are discernible in the history of some of the societies of the West. 

                 

                                      artist's conception of Trojans dragging wooden horse into Troy

            For an instance, let's consider the very ancient Greeks, the ones who came long before Socrates’ time. They portrayed the universe as an irrational, dangerous place. For them, the gods who ran the universe were capricious, violent, and cruel, which is a quick way of describing these people's worldview. Under their worldview, human beings could only cringe fearfully under the gods' testy humors. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, Hades, Athena, Apollo, et al were all lustful, jealous, cruel, and unpredictable. Zeus, especially, had thunderbolts. Poseidon inflicted earthquakes. Apollo, plagues.

            

            But as Greek culture advanced, this worldview evolved. By the Periclean Age, many Greek stories and plays portrayed humans challenging the gods. At the same time, the Greeks evolved their system of values towards a braver, smarter lifestyle. They began to try to explain the world in ways that left room for the possibility of people understanding and manipulating at least some of the events in the world around them. Once their worldview included that possibility, they did begin to create action plans that enabled humans to cause, hasten, or forestall events in the world. They tried out the daring action plans and some worked. More daring plans followed. (Edith Hamilton articulates these ideas well.) (2.)

                                                   

                                                         Aristophanes, Greek comic playwright 

            It is important to see that human individuals and groups will normally not attempt any action that they see as being taboo. Ancient tribes who happened upon an action which seemed contrary to, or outside of, what was appropriate for humans in their worldview only grew upset and fearful. Whether the action got promising results or not, the only thing most of these people wanted to learn in such situations was how to avoid putting themselves in the situation again. They sought to avoid it for fear of bringing the gods' wrath down on them. Once in a long while, a genius might question his society’s worldview and even describe an alternative one, but s/he often paid dearly for such audacity – by being ostracized or put to death.

                         

                                      

                                                           Euripides, Greek tragic playwright 

            However, changes in a society’s worldview and then in the society’s values and morés can also evolve more gradually, helped on by whole bunches of lesser geniuses. By the Golden Age of Athens, writers, artists, and philosophers were attempting all kinds of things that only a few centuries earlier would have been literally unthinkable. Their worldview had evolved to allow for at least some degree of human free will. The works of Euclid, Plato, Euripedes, Archimedes, and Aristotle could only have been produced under a world view in which a person could conceive of actions challenging the orthodox beliefs of the tribe and even the forces of the universe, even though the challenge might succeed only once in a hundred tries. Sadly, also, of course, at the same time, their neighbors, the Spartans, were evolving their society, the perfect military state. The clash called the Peloponnesian War was inevitable and Athens lost. A few years later, the Macedonians out-Spartanned the Spartans, and then in a few generations, of course, the Romans ended the matter by conquering them all.

                       

                                                         artist's conception of Spartan warriors 

              Chapter 10.                    Part F 

         A universal moral code would not end the diversity of cultures on this planet; it would simply give people in those different cultures a means by which they could settle disputes between cultures without them having to go to war. Then, by art, sport, commerce, intermarriage, etc., in two or three generations, the integration of adversarial cultures could and would take place. The theory is sound: we could build one world, beautiful, vigorous, evolving, and peaceful.  

 

                                                               artist's conception of a utopian future 

               

            For now, however, we must return to our main line of thought. 

            We had arrived at the step in our reasoning which states that all of a society’s morés/approved behaviors are implicit in its world view. Now we can move on – still by small steps and gradual degrees – to examine the question of whether any worldview, along with its concomitant sets of values, morés, and behaviors, can be shown by logic and evidence to be so directly derived from the deep principles of material reality itself that it deserves to be adopted by the whole human race as a beginning point for a new moral system.  

Notes 

1.http://hyenas.zoology.msu.edu/ 

2.http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/may-jun/cimbala.htm

3. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini

                          Chapter 10.                                Part E 

                                                          Vinton Cerf                                                               Robert Kahn       

                                    

                                    (main creators of the internet, one of the big changes of our time) 

         One way or another, changes keep happening in every human culture, whether the changes originate from within or without. But changes in ways of living aren't always accompanied by people hurting and killing each other. And given that, in the end, we all must answer with our cultural codes and morés to the same material reality, there may even be reason to hope that peace-loving people, if they can become clever and motivated enough, may prove more fit for long term survival than are the war-mongers. From these and many other observations of the open-mindedness, adaptability, and improvisational capacities found in major segments of all societies, we can draw hope for peace.

               

            Further discussion of whether war can be avoided or at least reduced in destructiveness and duration is, however, premature at this point. Even this most pressing and distressing of issues must be subsumed under our discussion of world views, a discussion which is yet to come in my argument. But a few words on the larger picture are appropriate here.

               

            In an objective analysis, even though all values are tentative for humans, no values should be called "arbitrary". Yes, our world, including the parts of it that we make, is always changing, so our values must also. But new, different values and morés are not arbitrary, i.e. they are not all of equal merit, because they do not all lead to the same survival odds for a nation or the human species. Some new values, and the morés they foster, work well, some badly. Some are moving society in an unhealthy direction entirely.

            Values have consequences that are too crucial for us ever to describe those values by a term as casual-sounding as the word "arbitrary". The whole point of formulating a universal moral code would be to guide us all so that we can clearly see the new patterns of energy flow emerging in our environment and then devise new ways of living that will give our species the best chances of surviving over the long haul. We have to learn to live consciously and by reason. If we don't find a code of values that is reasonable and easy to keep in mind, the lessons of History and the trends of technology combine to say that we are doomed to scorch or poison our planet – or both. 

            As I have said above, the wide variety of the morés and values systems of the societies of this planet has led some social scientists and philosophers to say every system of values is "correct" in its own cultural context, and none is "correct" in any ultimate, objective sense. But this is a dangerous and false conclusion to draw. These people have the best of intentions: they want to encourage us all to feel tolerant toward one another's cultures and to get along. But as noted above, their moral code is not assertive enough. It aims to fill the gap left after they have deconstructed - with a kind of cerebral, detached amorality - all of the traditional moral codes.

               

         However, humans need strong, affirmative guidelines to live by. What the moral relativists seem to be aiming to produce is a cynical, judgmental outlook that aims to be above critique because in the realm of morals it affirms nothing. But real humans have to make decisions in real life. We need a global model of what is right that has a sense of direction and purpose to it. In the analogous situation for scientists themselves, real scientists couldn't do science, i.e. could not do research, without models and theories which guide them to plan their experiments and studies. Without a model of the phenomena being studied, a model that can be used to guide his research, a scientist would be a mere buffoon wandering among rooms full of gauges, beakers, and computers, with no clue as to what he was doing there.    

               

            The practical consequence that moral relativism leads to is a resigning of this planet to the bullies. When the tolerant citizens can say only what they are against and never what they are for, the bullies with their “will to power” will sway the masses and get their way, by trickery, promises, threats, or blood. The Western Allies in the 1930's did not call themselves "moral relativists", but the moral relativist way of thinking was already loose in the universities of Europe, and the consequence was that most of the leaders of the nations who might have stopped Hitler and Mussolini had no stomach for such action. In fact, many prominent citizens in the West quite admired the fascist states and leaders and said so openly. FDR himself said he was deeply impressed by what Mussolini accomplished in Italy.(3.) The consequences of this indecision were WWII and the deaths of fifty-five million people. Parallel situations abound in the History texts right into our own time.

 

                                                                       Benito Mussolini 

               

            The core of the problem for the moral relativists of the West is that other nations' cultures may very well be telling their citizens that they must spread their culture until it encompasses all of humanity and that democracy is a dangerous delusion. Their belief system requires that they conquer, subdue, or eliminate altogether, the other cultures of the world. And aggressive, confidently self-righteous cultures have always existed. Democracies have to be motivated to face them, if we are to have a world in which we can discuss any options at all. I will discuss more fully why pluralistic democracy really is, for humans, a more rational, strategic, long-term social design than xenophobic totalitarianism in coming chapters. For now, let's return to developing the main argument.   

               

            We have to build a far more assertive code than moral relativism offers. Furthermore, such a code will only be acceptable to most people in the science-driven world of today if it integrates and harmonizes our world view - i.e. our best models of  reality - with the code itself till they are one cognitive entity. Even under this constraint, many different morés are possible, and many of those that are possible could be used to equip human society to flourish. Integrating and harmonizing them all is the challenge of democracy. It's up to us.    

            However, some values clearly don’t work. In today's world, values which teach citizens the virtues of war or, alternatively, of moral inertia are among the least survival-oriented. Again, then, I must reaffirm: we have to find that third way. Not a return to one of the traditional moral codes, but not moral relativism either. 

                      Chapter 10.                                   Part D

                                             artist's conception of post nuclear war Moscow 

Today, however, war has made itself obsolete. Our species very likely would not survive another world war. Combining what we know of human history and of our war habit with what we know of our present levels of technology leads us to envision a worldwide bloom of huge mushroom clouds, followed within a decade by an image of our once beautiful, blue-green planet, burnt almost bare and covered over with drifting clouds of ash.

On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we give up war, will we grow weak and sickly, then die out, like the deer on the island that has no predators? There have been experts who said so, flat out. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They're ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it. (2.)       

 

However, there are some pieces of evidence which support the belief that humans may learn, by rational persuasion, to live, multiply, and spread, i.e. to remain vigorous without constantly fighting one another. One of the best lies in how, in every society, there are some people that show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiation rather than by violence. They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe any one world view or set of values (even the ones that they learned as children) necessarily leads to the only appropriate, viable, “right” way of life. From the view of the social sciences, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members that can be found in all societies assign a higher priority to the lives of other humans than to the reducing of the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that feel alien to them.

                                                                    modern British school-children 

Another bit of evidence to note is the vigor that is evident in pluralistic societies, ones that have succeeded in synthesizing (which is different than compromising, remember) several cultures. A community formed by merging many ways of life can work. Britain is an excellent example here. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Danes, and lately people from all of the countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. Who calls him or herself a “Brit” these days may show genetic, ethnic, and cultural features from any of these tribes/nations.

               

            Furthermore, we can see that after a war, people's living patterns and values change in major, radical ways, for the vanquished, of course, but often for the victors as well, ways not anticipated by the planners on either side.

       When I was a boy in the 1950's in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my town, and "sushi" and "dojo" were just words in a novel. By the time that I was a young man, these things could be found all over my town, one whose older men had won a war against Germany and Japan a few years before I was born. 

                                                modern public school students in the U.S.  

                                                       modern public school students in Canada 

            

         Today, Germany and Japan are two of the strongest economies in the world and Edmonton schools contain students from almost every culture on earth. It seems so stupid now that fifty-five million people had to die so that the Japanese could learn to open up to the ways of the gaijin, and I could learn to love and trust people named "Kobayashi". 

            We were the victors in that war yet today we have embraced many of the technologies and morés of the vanquished. Which proves that we can integrate. The trick in the future will be to bring about these changes on both sides by planned interactions in commerce, sport, science, art, and finally intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. Hard but not impossible. In this age of the internet and the global village, getting easier by the day.

                    Chapter 10.               Part C 

        

         So, is war inevitable? The evidence of history seems to answer with a firm "Yes". Wars are fought over these very differences. Following this line of argument, we see what Hitler thought of as his great insight: he accepted that war was an inevitable, periodic test of the cultural and (he said) “racial” vitality of a people. He held to, and ranted over, his worldview to his last hour. To geneticists, his racial theories are meaningless silliness. Humans are all one species. But when his world view is extended to an analysis of cultural groupings of humans(tribes/nations) and the conflicts which arise among them, it becomes more disturbing.

                                 bodies awaiting cremation (Dresden, Germany, 1945)

         The ancient Greeks had two words for humans: “Hellenes” (themselves) and “barbarians” (everyone else). Similar in view and vocabulary were, and are, the Chinese. To many Chinese in China, I would still be "gwai lo", an "evil alien”. The word “Masai” – a famous African tribe’s name for themselves – means “people”, as do the words “Innu”, in Innu, and “Cheyenne”, in Cheyenne. For Europeans, for hundreds of years, the members of the species homo sapiens were divided most basically into Christians and heathens. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. In Japanese, for centuries, all humans were either Japanese or gaijin. Jews are not Gentiles. Tutsis are not Hutus. In other words, people in all of these cultures and nearly all others that have ever existed have believed that they are - or were, in the cases of those now vanished into History - the only fully human humans. Thus war.

                  

 The evidence mounts on all sides against the hopes of those who love peace. People find it easy, even “moral”, to attack, subdue, assimilate, sometimes even exterminate, other humans whom they regard as members of an inferior sub-species. By this reasoning, Hitler was only exhorting the Germans to accept the inevitability of war and get to work at being winners. 

 Under this reasoning, war is the way by which we have, through the sociocultural mode of evolution, become our own predators. We cut out the ineffective parts of our species' total concepts-values-behaviors pool (its meme pool, rather than its gene pool) by war. Wars kill mainly the young and fit, the prime breeding stock, first. And modern wars kill much of the healthiest, smartest, best breeding stock on both sides. Wars don't serve a genetic mode of evolution anymore, if they ever did. They haven't, arguably, since the first technological war, i.e. the U.S. Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die. Prime breeding stock lost. But wars do still serve a cultural mode of evolution.

  For thousands of years, we have evolved – culturally – by this ugly means. For centuries, no other species and no change in our environment has been able to seriously shake us. We even save individuals who are born with genetically transmitted defects that in any other species in any raw natural environment would be fatal every time, and these individuals go on to reproduce. We aren't evolving genetically anymore; if anything, we’re likely devolving. But we are evolving culturally-behaviorally.

 We prey on ourselves, not eating corpses, but killing followers of other cultures in order to cut out parts of our species' total values/memes pool whose usefulness is fading. This system has worked brutally, but efficiently, for a long time. Evidence that it works lies in the way that, for example, within a generation of being conquered, most of the people subjugated under the Romans were effectively "Romanized". Rome was a more vigorous and efficient culture than were any of the cultures that it conquered. A vigorous, efficient, aggressive culture swallowed up its neighbors, their territories, peoples, and ways of life. Parallel cases abound in the history books. For centuries, war worked.