A global human society that would be both peaceful and prosperous is not that hard imagine. We have real life instances of codes that many people in many lands can understand, and by and large follow, in many sectors of our lives already. Think of how universal the sign that forbids smoking is.  

Think of how universal the mores of automobile driving have become. Yes, there are cities in which I would be afraid to drive, but even then, there would only be some parts of those cities that would be too hectic for me and only at times of heavy traffic congestion. Yes, there are some major driving laws and mores followed in one group of cultures that are not followed in others. But the differences are only a few, and customs like, for example, driving on the left-hand side of the road are not that hard to get used to. A few hours to get accustomed to the change, and then the odd mistake that you quickly catch yourself making. I've experienced this exact adjustment when I went to New Zealand. 

And there are so many driving mores that coincide. Don't cut other people off when changing lanes. Follow at a safe distance. Don't pass over a solid center line. And so on. Even many road signs are universal. 

For the most part, people drive cars to get from one location to another more quickly than they could if they were walking. A few of the drivers on the road are simply driving around to fill up their idle time, but such a practice, in the first place, costs too much (gas is fairly expensive everywhere) and in the second place, puts pollutants into the atmosphere for no good reason whatsoever. But, in short, we're there because of practical, widely-shared reasons.  

My point is that when people all must share a resource, in the driving case, the highways system of that country, they can readily work out a set of regulations that everyone is expected to obey when using that shared resource because it is in the interest of all of them to do so. Sometimes, you're in a hurry. But you don't drive through crowded streets like a maniac because it is contrary to your own interests over the long haul to do so. You'll very like get a ticket or get in an accident, and then whatever you were rushing to will really have to wait. And you might even get killed. Definitely, not a desirable outcome. 

Emergency vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances can race through city streets when going to a fire or other emergency, but they must turn on their sirens when doing so. The system, most of the time, works, and even the exceptions to the normal driving customs can be accommodated. 

This metaphor is telling us in unequivocal terms that if we could come up with a basic set of values and mores on which the large majority of people on earth could agree, we really could live together in prosperity and peace, and even preserve the ecosystems of our planet while doing so. The earth is our most precious common resource. We can learn to live together on it. And the kids who grew up after the mores fell into place would occasionally wonder, "What was so hard about just simply making sense." Cultural codes, once they are in place, seem as automatic as breathing.  

One day, a teacher in a school somewhere in the world will be working on a history project with a class made up of all kinds of students. The students will be looking at old forms that students back in the twentieth century had to fill out at school. They will find a space on one form which reads: "Racial/Ethnic Origin". A child will say to the teacher, "What was this for?" and the teacher will say, "I don't know." 

We just have to believe.  

                                                                      wind farm in China 

Values and virtues can reach into the highest levels of real modern societies. Here is an example of an effective international project which is doing practical things to reduce green house gas emissions. Wisdom, in the form of engineering know-how, and love, in the form of good will, have combined to create an inspiring string of wind power plants all over the world. Wisdom and love in balance have led to the creation, manufacture, and distribution of a technology that has gone from improbable pipe dream to thriving reality. The parent company is a Chinese company called "Goldwind", and it makes wind turbines which use a technology called "permanent magnetic direct drive" (PMDD). (There's a link to the website below.) 

I am no engineer, but I am deeply impressed with the simplicity and elegance of this company's innovative wind turbine design. Even I get it. A brilliant breakthrough in design and an inspiring example of international cooperation in production and marketing. 

This could be a game changer in the sense that it may cause electric power generated from wind to become our main cure for fossil fuel addiction. But even more importantly, the cooperation of Chinese, developing world, and Western companies on the production and marketing of these dynamos may serve as a model for all kinds of future projects. 

The creative and cooperative forces that make, sell, and install Goldwind turbines give me reason to hope that, as big as our environmental problems may be, we also have some big resources locked up in the human community with which to fight them. 

We're not whipped yet. 

http://www.goldwindamerica.com/project_profiles/uilk-wind-farm/

                             

I am deeply committed to the idea of free will. Unlike many people in science and many more in ordinary walks of life, I really do think we are free. 

We are not free in the sense that we can jump from a cliff and fly away, or do anything similar that is beyond the limits of the human body. I also don't believe that we can, as some wide-eyed optimists say, be anything we want to be. That is absurd. But we are free in the sense that we can alter the courses of events at our level of resolution in the universe, the level of what J.L. Austin, the philosopher, called "medium-sized, dry goods". We can't influence the movements of the sun and the stars, and we can have only very limited, tiny effects on things at the atomic level. But we can do actions that increase or decrease the odds of events happening at our level of resolution. Almost always, each of us tries to influence those events so that they lead on to paths that result in more health and happiness and less illness and misery, for us and our loved ones. Our ability to do that kind of influencing has been rising since we set out on the path that can properly be called "human" more that a million years ago. 

In the philosophical view of the universe, it is quantum theory that opens up the door to freedom. The old view of science, from Newton and Laplace till the twentieth century, was that human beings were stuck in fixed sequences of events that had been preordained by the positions and speeds of particles going back to the start of the universe. If we could somehow know the positions and speeds of all of the particles in the universe, and also know all of the scientific laws by which these particles interact, then we would be able to predict all of the future and retrodict all of the past for every entity that the universe contains. In the Newtonian view, this makes perfect sense. No human brain could hold that many bits of data, but at least in principle, the future in this model is fixed.  

But quantum theory breaks the back of classical determinism. Under quantum theory's model of reality, events at the sub-atomic level, the tiny events that determine all events at higher levels, happen in probabilistic ways, not single chain, cause-effect ones. In that view of reality, there is room for humans not to make any future they can imagine, but to conceive and do actions that alter the probabilities of at least some of the various futures that might unfold so that the ones that contain a little more health for us become more likely and the ones that contain pain for us become a little less likely. And it is worth noting here that building our knowledge of the laws of the universe enables us to get better and better at spotting the opportunities for effective action on our part. In short, we pursue science because the better we get at it, the freer we become.

What does this mean for everyday life? We have every right to expect responsible action from our fellow human beings in most of the areas of living. The way a car maneuvers through traffic is the fault of the driver, not the car. If you insist on smoking tobacco, I will argue to you strongly that you are increasing your risk of one day getting cancer or having an early heart attack and draining our public health care system of resources that could have been spent on a person who got sick or hurt through no fault of her own. You are responsible, to a high degree, for your own health. 

But far more importantly, human freedom means that in most situations I respect your right to be yourself, to choose whatever paths in life you wish, as long as your choices do not directly infringe on the freedom of someone else. And you have a right to say with absolute moral conviction, "Leave me alone. When I want your help, I'll ask for it. I am a free citizen, just like you are. If my wearing my clothes backwards, or keeping my hair long, or whistling while I walk, or eating raw fish on my porch is bothering you, too bad."

The kinds of behavior that actually pose a health hazard to the community as a whole can rightfully be regulated by the community as a whole. But it is immoral for any laws to persecute an individual for living in some way that the rest of the community feels uncomfortable about if that way of living is not demonstrably harming anyone else. Muslim women who want to wear a head scarf in the West are not harming anyone when they do, and therefore, their dress code is no one else's business. The facial veil is another matter because it might enable thieves to evade being identified, but that can probably be handled too if women who want to wear a veil agree to have iris scans so they can be positively identified when they go to a government office, an airport, or a bank. 

Conversely, women in Muslim countries who go about unscarfed and unveiled are not harming anyone. They have a moral right to say, "Hands off my life. I'm not hurting you and therefore, I have a right to go my own way. If you don't like it, close your door, and let me get back to my day." 

Men and women both have a right to go and live in the wilderness if they want to. Or make their living selling old bottle caps, or live on the beach and eat kelp and clams for the rest of their lives. Or keep searching for a perpetual motion machine that they plan to then take out patents for and sell to buyers everywhere. Scientists will tell them that the idea of a perpetual motion machine is absurd by the laws of physics, but they have a right to search for one if they want to. 

What society gains by extending to its citizens as much freedom as it possibly can, within the dictates of physical safety for the community as a whole, is creativity. Invention. While most of the dreamers who chase wild ideas do wind up broke. a few come up with some invention that changes life for all of us. A wise nation loves its eccentrics, even though they do make some people nervous. We have ancient instincts that push us toward fear of the different. Xenophobia. But the whole march toward democracy has been toward a more and more diverse population. And the pluralistic societies around the world work. They are dynamic and productive. In fact, some of their most creative people flew in the face of conventional wisdom and struck out very young on their own paths in life. 

Steve Jobs, Brad Pitt, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey all quit college to strike out on their own. Jim Carrey, Al Pacino, and Walt Disney quit in high school, while in earlier times, Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln had almost no formal schooling. 

The point is that being different than the conventional is not necessarily an indicator of very much of anything. Every individual human being has a right to go his or her own way. And society gains by being tolerant. Talent and merit are more and more the qualifications which must drive a society's system when irrelevant qualities, like class, race, sex, ethnic origin, and so on are thrown out. 

It is also worth stating here that a free society is not somehow automatically a weak society. A free society can contain large numbers of citizens who really love their homeland, even though it contains lots of people that they don't understand. It is not only uniform societies in which citizens are pushed or even forced to conform that can fight. If the twentieth century, with all of its horrors, taught us anything, it taught us that. Democracies take a while to reach consensus, and longer yet to get mad. But when they do, look out.  

Let me live where I have every right to say to anyone, "I'm not hurting you so leave me alone. This is a free country. Go your own way and I will go mine." That isn't just pleasant-sounding idealism. It is a way of relating to others and to the world that makes a whole society that works. Better than any of the competing ways human beings have ever found. 

Be yourself. To the limits of your energy. Pursue your dreams, however ridiculous they may seem to everyone else around you. You are doing your fellow human beings the biggest favor when that is exactly how you live. Vaccines for smallpox and polio weren't found by charity workers looking to ease human suffering. They were found by curious, free human minds, just being themselves. 

        

Morgayne

High in the mountains far, far from my home,

I stood upon a barren peak alone,

The dawning of the twenty-first of June,

And as foretold by lore in ancient runes,

A ray fell on the valley floor and showed the outline of a door,

Etched faintly in the surface of the stone.

The amulet I'd carried through the wars

Hung round my neck, upon a leather cord,

And yes, it fit the niche cut in the stone,

And yes, the door swung open on its own,

And then, within, by torchlight glare, I read the scrolls enclosèd there,

The key to all the myths we've ever known.

You ask of Truth to ask no change of you,

The one thing that the Truth can never do,

And so we now must go our separate ways,

There's nothing more that I'm allowed say.

But this one meme I can explain:  Your kind must always learn by pain.

Some kinds die out so others can renew.

So many signs you still ignore; she's crying from her very core.

The sweetest flower the cosmos ever grew. 

Today feels like a good day on which to speak of balance. I've been leading up to it for weeks. 

If there is a virtue that informs all of the others, it must be balance. A balance of courage and wisdom motivates us toward hard work. The athlete that loves to compete and really wants to win studies his sport, his competition, and his own body, and then forms a well-designed training schedule which is filled mostly with hard work. So also the armies that want to win, and the entrepreneurs. In the end, it is the work that they remember the most vividly, and with a quiet sense of satisfaction, no matter how many times they won or lost or how many people knew their names. 

Love in balance with wisdom produces honesty. If we love people, we treat them as we would like to be treated ourselves. And which of us wants to be lied to? I recognize in no one a moral right to guide my life. And that's what lying amounts to. If my butt looks grotesque in these gym shorts, then tell me so. If I can't take what you deem to be the truth, then it is time I grew up and did learn to hear it. I can disagree with you. I can wear them anyway because they're comfortable, and the hell with the way they look to other people. But I value that you tell me what you really think. I can't learn and grow by our relationship as two independent human beings if we have any other policy between us.

And the balance of love and freedom is respect. The respectful balance produces a pluralistic society, one in which different kinds of people all live together and get along. The balance of courage and freedom is self-esteem. Not vanity, but true pride. Knowing you're worthy as an individual and believing that you can do things, set goals and realize them, and live day by day decently. 

In short, even at the highest levels of organization, the whole of society, the whole picture of the human race, the whole living community of the earth, and the particles of the universe, balance is the virtue that rules all of the others. The tao, if you like, which is the idea of balance that made sense to millions in the East for thousands of years, and informed all that they did, from peasants to emperors.   

The scary thing for us in this twenty first century is that we can look back and see that for centuries, balance has been achieved in the human community of the earth by war. We have been our own predators for a long time. We don't eat corpses. Cannibalism has been considered taboo in almost all societies for a long time. But we do cut out the obsolete parts of our total cultural pool by war, and we have done so for a long time. Note also that no conqueror justifies his conquests by saying to his followers, "Those other people are weak. They deserve to be wiped out because they're weak." The rationale is always that the others are evil, savage, sub-human, and that we must get them before they get us because it's obvious that our two societies cannot coexist. So we fight, one side defeats the other, and the losers are re-programmed by the winners to a different culture and a different way of life. The contest is cultural, not racial, and the outcome leads to one culture taking in more territory and members as the other shrinks. 

Now the full picture is more nuanced than the above description captures. Vanquished cultures only rarely disappear altogether, and even when their adherents bow to another culture, the people hardly ever lose their cultural identity - language, artistic traditions, education system, laws, and so on - entirely. But the picture given above of balance in the human community is good enough for the purposes of this post. The ways of extending the idea of balance in real life can be worked out by each reader for him or herself. 

What scares us today is that on the global scale we can't afford to use war as the means of finding balance and determining which cultures should rise and which should fade anymore. Our weapons have gotten too big. The logical question that comes next is, "How do we replace war?" War kept humanity strong for eons. It was ugly, but it served a larger purpose. If we try to eliminate war, will we simply get weaker and sicker, generation after generation, until our cultural vigor fizzles out and we become like the deer on the island where there are no predators? Such cases have occurred in our records of natural history. Populations that have no survival pressures applied to them at all do keep getting weaker. Then when a challenge like a new microbe comes into the population, they die out in one generation to the last individual. 

But I maintain on this page that we can use our intelligence and do better. We can replace war and still remain vigorous and even become more so. And we can learn to live in harmony with nature.  

Sport is a simple, clear example of an activity that aims to do exactly that - replace war in a socially manageable way. There are rules. There is a referee. Sportsmanship as a value to be aimed at guides the players to strive to win not just within the letter of the laws of the game, but the spirit of those laws. Fair play for the love of the game. Yes, rules differ from sport to sport as mores differ from society to society. But excellent wrestlers in another context can be excellent rugby players, or basketball players, or chess players or actors or public speakers, for that matter. 

The managing of the human competitive instincts that we have had programmed into us by nature for centuries will be complex, but that managing is not impossible. The moral crisis that we now face because we have used our brains to make such terrible weapons is demanding of us that we learn to not use those weapons. 

We are going to have to learn to intelligently redirect our darkest instincts into useful and productive activities. Sport, business, the arts, science. And the danger that some frustrated maniac will push that nuclear weapons button is always there. But who ever told you life could be made completely safe? Find that fool and kick his ass. 

What we can do is work very hard for whole lifetimes to get people to think about morals, to take responsibility for their actions and words and strive every day to make a better world. A respectful, wise, courageous one. And most of all, to teach the kids that there is inherent worth in every other human being, no matter that person's race, religion, gender, or abilities. 

Tough, smart, motivated, decent kids. Ones who will look back at us and smile, thinking that we were well-intentioned, but so feeble and naive. Of course, life can be managed and enjoyed. Why did our grandparents find that so difficult? 

Mutualistic relationships exist in nature by the millions, just as much as predator-prey ones do. The crucial difference between us and the rest of the animal world is that we can manage our relationships intelligently. We can learn to employ more and more nuance in our dealings with nature and with each other. If we have the smarts to make terrible weapons, we also have the smarts not to use them. 

A better world. Hard. Not impossible. And with the internet working for us, getting a little more believable every day.      

                                          Mutualism: plover cleaning teeth of Nile crocodile 

                                                       fish cleaning sea turtle's shell of parasites 

This is probably as good a time as any to extend my theory of cultural evolution into areas that are really controversial. So let's consider why belief in a moral code is practical and, in fact, is vital if a nation is going to get strong and stay strong. Keep in mind all through this discussion that the kind of moral code that I am speaking of is composed of values that inform and guide the big majority of the actions of every individual citizen, even when no one is watching and there is no direct reward in it for the individual living by the code. 

Virtues like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are not just vague, nice-sounding terms. Living by a balance of courage and wisdom, for example, drives the believer to the same old tedious pattern that we are all wearily aware of, namely hard work. But people who generally accept that life is built around toil make a strong, vigorous, dynamic society. Thus, those people survive, and their way of life goes on and spreads. There have been societies of people who by luck have found their way into environments where the living was easy and who then chose to live pretty much that way. But sooner or later they always came into contact with people from more driven cultures, and the easy going then became easy prey. 

Not a nice picture, but in this blog I have to put truth before political correctness. Colonialism was mostly pretty ugly for those who were not the colonizers, but it worked in the sense that it gave powerful nations, mostly European in the last few centuries. huge new areas of land with resources to exploit, making those nations even more powerful. This was not justice, but it was reality. The Europeans now are trying to right the injustices in most parts of their former empires, but it's taking a lot of time and money. Shocking whole peoples - militarily, politically, economically, and culturally - takes a long time to repair. But we are getting there. Justice is a higher value for most people in most societies than are power or profit. 

It is also worth noting here that corruption has pretty much nothing to do with race. Some of the worst and best of government officials are white, or black, or Asian, or aboriginal. The countries of the former Soviet Union, whose populations are almost entirely white, currently have worse cultures of bribery and corruption than the better ones in Asia and Africa. 

And we can examine some other values as well. For example, love combined with wisdom yields honesty. If you really love people, you don't lie to them. When you can see the old way of life of a whole people is obsolete, that it doesn't work anymore, and that it probably never will again, you have to tell them what you really think. For example, the buffalo are gone. They aren't coming back, therefore, the way of life built around the buffalo is over. Someone needs to say that bluntly for all to hear before we can make any progress toward righting the wrongs done to the plains tribes of North America. 

In fairness, the same teller should be part of the program which helps those tribes to write a new cultural code for their people, one that will enable them to keep the parts of their old culture that are still viable (e.g. sports, public speaking, dance, the fine arts, and especially their spiritual belief system) while also writing new roles for themselves in the larger society and then educating their kids to fill those roles. 

But now, let's look at an even larger view of human culture in order to see how values yield survival. For example, consider the role that honesty has in history's strongest societies. 

The single biggest hurdle that countries and tribes all over the world have to overcome as they try to build what is called an "economy of scale" is corruption. Bribes and kickbacks paid to government officers and in the private sector drain the economy like parasites. The monies involved in the shady, corrupt exchanges do not represent any real "wealth" in the economy. No goods or services are being produced, or bought, or sold in such exchanges. As a result, the corrupt country's currency keeps sinking in value. The country's economy has fewer and fewer real goods or services present in it. 

Aid monies sent into the country dwindle away and fizzle out. Few to no new facilities, goods, or jobs come out of the aid monies. They mostly end up being spent by crooked government officials to buy foreign goods. Thus, those aid monies exit the needy country's economy having done little to no good. Or they end up in foreign bank accounts, secreted away by corrupt ministers and their families and friends with an eye to the day when they will leave public service and retire rich. Buildings, roads, and bridges collapse because they are built by engineers who bought their degrees and in reality can't do long division. Doctors trained in little more than skipping class ease no pain and cure no disease. And the list of ills goes on.

The people in these poorer, developing world countries often had ways of life in which the family and the tribe were the limits of one's culture. Inside these smaller populations, most people were hard workers and honest citizens. It was only when nation states with huge territories and populations began to emerge in these areas of the world that temptation grew too strong and disconnection between one's crimes and their consequences became too easy to slip into. Which is all only to say that the larger a political entity becomes, the more its officials must be programmed to live by moral values. And even then, the efficiency of the system can decay if it is not constantly policed. China had an excellent, merit-driven civil service for centuries, but it fell into decay when the nation had things too easy for too long.   

I offer all of this explication simply to show that values or virtues, if you prefer that term, really do cause more idealistic and disciplined cultures to grow and ones that are less so to shrink. Note again that it is not enough for values to be recited by the general run of the population. The values must be lived if they are to make an economy of scale possible. 

Whether people have to believe in a deity of some sort to be really virtuous or whether, alternatively, they can acquire the habits of honesty, hard work, etc. without having to believe that God is watching is a subject worthy of another discussion on another day. But this much is clear: economies of scale are impossible in countries where hard work is thought of as what you do when you have no other choice and honesty is for chumps. A country where such is the general attitude will stay poor. An economy of scale is not possible in a country until its people have a realistic moral code programmed into them, and those morals are believed and lived.   

For patient readers, two posts in one day. Why not? 

We need to touch on one more religious tradition in this set of essays on world religions and their import for the realist model of human cultural evolution. 

China is the world's most populous nation, and has been for a long time. At least in part, Chinese values have enabled the people to build a huge nation. Geography, accidents of history, and resources figure in the calculation too. But cultural programming is the big determiner of a nation's success. 

"China has a massive population but lacks in technological sophistication and standard of living," you might reply. These claims are misleading and only partly true. The average person in China had a better standard of living than the average person in Europe right into the late nineteenth century. Our much vaunted Western technology did not begin to trickle its benefits down to the masses until nearly 1900. In Victorian times, the squalor in Britain's slums was of a kind that would sicken us. And we must not forget that this technology, childishly handled, made possible the horrors of the twentieth century, beginning with World War I in 1914. 

So what worked in China? In large measure, the values of Confucianism. Confucius and his later interpreters instructed people to care deeply about their character, to set virtues before themselves as standards to be lived up to in every action and word every day. The most prominent of these were what we would call "compassion" and "self-discipline". The result of these virtues being practiced by millions was a hard-working, law-abiding population, which made a productive, stable community, province, and state. 

Let us also not forget that though many Chinese for centuries lived poor, uncreative, unimaginative lives, China also had some amazing innovations. Paper, gunpowder, the compass, silk, tea, porcelain -- all of these, the West was a long time in matching. Or stealing. On the other hand, some of the Chinese, when they first fought Western troops in the 1800's, withdrew into bases that were well-fortified on two sides. Combat had become ritualistic. The enemy was supposed to attack the side that could be defended. In that way, there would be a fair, sporting contest. To attack on the unfortified side was considered in bad taste. Western troops, of course, found such ideas silly. China had been cut off from the rest of the world for too long, I think. 

In addition, women were almost entirely subjugated to men, in Confucian thought, and in the real China, for centuries. The most desirable even had their feet crushed and deformed so that they would walk at a teetering gait that was considered modest and attractive. Poorer women, unfortunately for them in this system, were stuck with "big feet". Ugly. In China, then.   

But in total, I can't help but think, as I watch documentaries on China now, first, of how hard the people can work and, second, how angry they are with the West. Still? Oh, yes. The friendliness, I fear, is, in most of them, about one millimeter thick. And they have reason to be angry. Westerners, especially the British, funded and armed Chinese organized crime leaders, and through the Chinese mafia, pumped opium into the Chinese nation, as they pumped silver and gold out. When the Chinese governments of the times tried to fight back, the were beaten pretty harshly in the Opium Wars and subsequent conflicts. The anger has been passed down through the generations. Yes, they're mad. So would you be if it had been your people. (Think of how many Irish are still mad about the Potato Famine.) And the Chinese are coming on now, my friends. Buying up and exploiting the resources of all other nations -- Africa, South East Asia, Australia, Europe, even the Americas. 1.3 billion. That's a lot of heads to be awakened and fitted with a terrible purpose. 

How many aircraft carriers are they building? How long have they had nuclear weapons? You look it up. But otherwise, have a nice day.