The core of the problem for the moral relativists of the West is that, while they may see morals as being relative, other nations’ cultures may be programming their citizens to believe they must spread their culture until it encompasses all of humanity, and to believe that democracy is a dangerous delusion. Their belief system tells them that they conquer or eliminate altogether the other cultures of the world. And aggressive, 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. In coming chapters, I will discuss more fully why pluralistic democracy really is, for humans, a more rational, strategic, long-term social design than aggressive, xenophobic totalitarianism. 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 today’s science-driven world if it integrates and harmonizes our world view—that is, our best models of reality—with the code itself until they are one cognitive entity. Even under this constraint, many different morés are possible, and many of those could be used to equip human society to flourish. Integrating and harmonizing them all—peacefully—is what will be required of us if we are going to keep our democracies. It’s up to us.

However, some values clearly don’t work. In today’s world, values that teach citizens the virtues of war or, alternatively, of moral inertia are among the least survival oriented. Thus, 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. Reason is our one way out of this dilemma.

A universal moral code would not end the diversity of cultures on this planet; it would simply provide a means by which people could settle disputes between their cultures without having to go to war. Through art, sport, commerce, intermarriage, and other nonviolent means, in a few generations the integration of adversarial cultures could take place. The theory is sound. It is possible for us to 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 have arrived at the step in our reasoning showing that all of a society’s morés and 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 world view, 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 that it deserves to be adopted by the entire human race as a beginning point for a new moral system.

 Notes

1. Layne Cameron, Nora Lewin, “Social Status Has Impact on Overall Health of Mammals,” Michigan State University Today, March 12, 2015. http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2015/social-status-has-impact-on-overall-health-of-mammals/?utm_source=weekly-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=standard-promo&utm_content=image.

2. Dr. Stephen J. Cimbala, “War-Fighting Deterrence: Forces and Doctrines in U.S. Policy,” Air & Space Power Journal (May–June, 1983). http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/may-jun/cimbala.htm.

3. “Benito Mussolini,” Wikiquote, the Free Quote Compendium. Accessed April 21, 2015. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini.

Another bit of evidence to note is the vigour evident in pluralistic societies, those that have succeeded in synthesizing (which, you may recall, is different from compromising) several cultures. A community formed by merging many ways of life can work. Britain is an excellent example. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Danes, and more recently people from the countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. Most who call themselves Brits these days may show genetic and cultural features from any of these tribes and/or nations.

Furthermore, we can see that after a war, living patterns and values change in major, radical ways not only for the vanquished, 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 I was a young man, German delicatessens and karate dojos could be found all over my town, one whose men had just won a war against Germany and Japan a few years before.

  

                                             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. In retrospect, it seems so stupid that fifty-five million people had to die so 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 in the West 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 intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. This will be hard but not impossible. In this age of the Internet and the global village, it is getting easier by the day.

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 fitter for long-term survival than are the warmongers. 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.

However, further discussion of whether war can be avoided or at least reduced in destructiveness and duration is 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. 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—that is, 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 too crucial for those values to be described by a term as casual-sounding as arbitrary. The whole point of formulating a universal moral code would be to guide us all so we can clearly see the changes in the patterns of energy flow  emerging in our environment and devise new ways of living that will give our species the best chances of surviving over the long term.

Clever strategies for survival pay attention to the energy patterns of the earth. Are the algae in the Indian Ocean multiplying, trapping sun energy? Are the forests doing particularly well this year in Central America? Is the soil left by the volcanic eruption two years ago in Indonesia particularly fertile? Are the crops all dying in the East African drought? Is the soil eroding in North America even faster this year than it was last? Is North Sea oil running out? Can we tap into the tidal power in the Bay of Fundy? If we’re rational, we note and exploit energy supply opportunities and remedy energy supply problems out of choice, not by luck. We have to learn to live consciously and by reason, which also implies that we have to work out a moral code that is rational. If we don’t devise a code of values that is rational and easy to keep in mind, the lessons of history and the trends of technology combined show that we are likely doomed to scorch or poison our planet—or both.

As stated above, the wide variety of morés and value systems of our societies has led some social scientists and philosophers to suggest that 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. However, 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 the traditional moral codes.

Humans need strong, affirmative guidelines to live by. What the moral relativists seem to be aiming to produce is a cynical, judgmental outlook that is above critique because in the realm of morals it affirms nothing and therefore cannot be critiqued. But real humans have to make decisions in real life. We need a global model of what is right, one that has a sense of direction and purpose. In the analogous situation for scientists themselves, they couldn’t undertake research without models and theories that guide them to plan their experiments and studies. Without models to guide his research, a scientist would be a buffoon wandering among rooms full of gauges, beakers, and computers, with no clue as to his purpose there.

Moral relativism leads to a practical consequence of resigning 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” (Nietzsche’s term) will sway the masses and get their way—by trickery, promises, threats, or blood. The Western Allies in the 1930s 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 that might have stopped Hitler and Mussolini had no stomach for such action. In fact, many prominent citizens in the West admired the fascist states and leaders and said so openly. Franklin Roosevelt said he was deeply impressed by what Mussolini was accomplishing 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

---

So, is war inevitable? Again, 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 worldview is extended to an analysis of cultural groupings of humans (e.g., tribes and nations) and the conflicts that arise among them, it becomes more disturbing.

  

                                                Ruins of Nuremberg, Germany, 1945

The ancient Greeks had two words for humans: Hellenes (themselves) and barbarians (everyone else). Similar in view and vocabulary are the Chinese. To many Chinese in China, I would 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 hundreds of years, Europeans divided the members of the species homo sapiens into Christians and heathens. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. In Japan, for centuries, all humans were either Japanese or gaijin. Jews were not Gentiles. Tutsis were not Hutus. In other words, people in all these cultures and most 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 has always occurred with alarming frequency.

The evidence mounts on all sides against the hopes of those who love peace. People find it easy, even moral, to attack, subdue, assimilate, and sometimes even exterminate other humans whom they regard as members of an inferior subspecies. 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-behaviours pool (its meme pool, rather than its gene pool) by war. Wars primarily kill the young and fit, the prime breeding stock. 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—that is, the US Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die and prime breeding stock is 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 shake us. Paradoxically, we save individuals born with genetically transmitted defects that in any other species’ 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 in a cultural-behavioural way.

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, for example, in the way that 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 those it conquered—a vigorous, efficient, aggressive culture that swallowed up its neighbours, their territories, peoples, and ways of life. Parallel cases abound in the history books. For centuries, war worked.

 

                                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, burned almost bare and covered 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 deer that have no predators because they’re isolated on an island? Experts have flat-out said so. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They’re ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it.²

However, there is evidence that supports the belief that humans may learn to live, multiply, and spread—that is, to remain vigorous—without constantly fighting one another. The strongest evidence may lie in how, in every society, there are some people who show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiation rather than by violence. They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe that any single worldview or set of values (even the ones they learned as children) necessarily leads to the only appropriate, viable, “right” way of life. From a social sciences viewpoint, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members a society assign a higher priority to the lives of other humans than to reducing the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that are alien to them.

 

                                                      Modern British school children

Chapter 10 – World Views and the War Digression

Protoplasm moves forward through time only in certain limited ways. If a branch of the living community of the earth strays outside those shifting boundaries, it is cut off from the energy-flow patterns of the planet’s ecosystem and it shrivels and dies. From the earth’s perspective, the extinction of a species, a culture, or an individual is neither sad nor ironic nor comic: it is simply over. Even in complex, nation-sized groups, humans cannot ignore this truth for long.

  

                                                           Ruins of ancient Beersheba

Recognizing that survival, if it is to happen at all, must happen in material reality, not the dimension of Plato’s forms or the soul or cyberspace, all societies including prehistoric ones, historical ones, and contemporary ones have always tried to integrate their value systems—the codes by which their citizens choose and carry out their actions in all phases of living—with their society’s worldview. Thus, a society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favourable part of the streams of the energy flowing around that society. A society’s worldview, its way of picturing reality, gives rise directly to its value system, then to its morés and behaviour patterns, and finally, to its survival.

A worldview is a way of understanding or organizing our sensory perceptions, memories of sensory perceptions, and categories of perceptions of the material universe. Every society that survives arrives, by the consensus of generations of its people, at a system for organizing people’s perceptions of their universe (and the roles of humans in that universe). The people perceive their society’s method as being correct, appropriate, and natural.

Whether a worldview precedes, parallels, or follows a set of values favoured by that worldview is difficult to say. Worldviews and the value systems and morés that go with them are subtly intertwined. A change in a society’s worldview, the value shifts that change leads to, and the behaviours the new values foster, probably all arise sporadically as one large complex in a nation’s ways of thinking, talking, and living—its culture, in other words.

                

                                          Aztec calendar (a neatly condensed world view)

In any case, a society’s world view, if it is analyzed closely, can be thought of as a condensed version of and guide to that society’s values. In conjunction with their basic view of what the universe is, a society’s people design systems of values and attached behaviours that they teach to their children as being good and right. The word right has two meanings here: right in the sense of accurately describing things in the material world (“Is that thermometer right?”) and right in the sense of being moral (“Do the right thing”). Upon close analysis, this ambiguity is not ambiguous at all. We want deeply to believe that our idea of moral rightness is consistent with the way the universe really works.

Another digression is in order here. It is an important digression that has been lingering at the edge of this topic for several chapters already, so I will indulge in it for a few pages here.

If we strive to be rigorously logical and objective at this point, we can also become very discouraged. Every society has its own world view, its own values, and its own morés (accepted patterns of behaviour). The natural trend for human societies seems to be for each of them to keep moving ahead with its own way of life while simultaneously diverging from, and becoming increasingly alien to, all other societies and their ways of life.

Does an analysis of human value systems involve the corollary that we can never arrive at a set of values that would be good and right for all sentient beings? Will people in the world’s many different human societies continue to be loyal to incompatible sets of values? Even worse, will citizens of the world’s societies continue to follow their own codes of values so rigidly that they will tolerate no other way and will feel motivated to kill other folk whose values and behaviours clearly differ from their own? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be yes.

Analyzing the background physical situation in which societies evolve adds to our sense of hopelessness at this point. The environment around us is always changing, so our value systems and morés must too. When new conditions arise, several different societies’ responses to them may all prove effective, as happened with lions and hyenas.

  

                                                            Hyenas attacking a lioness

Lions and hyenas occupy the same habitat and hunt the same prey. Their relative competitive advantages and disadvantages interact in complex ways, but they each flourish at the same time in the same habitat.¹ In this, they are akin to human societies, whose bases are sociocultural rather than genetic, but whose competitive situations are analogous to those of lions and hyenas. Lions and hyenas coexist in the same habitats and remain extremely mutually hostile. They exist as hostile neighbours, drive one another away from kills, and fight to the death regularly. Examples of human societies in similar circumstances don’t just riddle history; they are what history is about (e.g., the Apache and Pueblo, Huron and Iroquois, Ghiljais and Durranis, Croats and Serbs, Poles and Ukrainians, Gauls and Germans, Catholics and Protestants, Sunnis and Shia, etc.).

 

  

                                         Police confronting Catholic rioters in Belfast

  

                                                 Police confronting Protestant rioters in Belfast

In other words, estrangement between societies comes about by a natural process. Widely different, often neighbouring societies, each with its own values and customs, arise and make war, inevitably as the real world simply rolls along. Such has been the case for all of human history so far.

Now let’s return to our main argument, in spite of digressions that beckon.

It is clear that individual human behaviors and the internal running of the more complex but vital principles and values programs (which are mental meta-behaviors) almost all originate in the programming that the individual is given by his or her society. Furthermore, values become established in a society when they direct its citizens toward patterns of behaviour that enable the citizens to survive, reproduce, and territorialize with ever-growing success.

By now some readers are probably inferring a profound insight about the higher-order mental constructs that we call values. Clearly, the deepest principles that must underlie and guide our value systems—in big choices for the tribe and small ones for the individual—must be designed in such a way as to enable us to respond effectively to the largest general principles of the physical universe itself. That universe is the one in which survival happens or does not happen. 

                                 

Value systems must have designs underlying them that complement and respond to the designs inherent in matter, space, and time.

What are these principles? For impatient readers, I can only say that I am coming to them—by small steps and gradual degrees. But we have to discuss the network of ideas at the base of the new moral system thoroughly before we try to build the middle and upper levels. Proceeding with precision and care will maximize the chances of seeing that a universal moral code is possible for us to devise—in theory—and that such a code, if we can implement it, will offer the only path into the future that allows our the survival of our species—in practice.

Notes

1. “Feral Children,” Learn Stuff website, December 5, 2012. http://www.learnstuff.com/feral-children/.

2. “Enculturation,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enculturation.

3. “Sociocultural evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution#Contemporary_discourse_about_sociocultural_evolution.

4. Pearson Higher Education, “Anthropology and the Study of Culture,” My Anthro Lab, Chapter 1, p. 17. http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205949509.pdf.

5. Alice Dreger, “When Taking Multiple Husbands Makes Sense,” The Atlantic, February 1, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/when-taking-multiple-husbands-makes-sense/272726/.

6. “Piaget’s theory of cognitive development,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget’s_theory_of_cognitive_development.

7. Plato, Crito, Perseus Digital Library. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DCrito%3Apage%3D50

8. Mark J. Perry, “U.S. Male-Female SAT Math Scores: What Accounts for the Gap?” Encyclopedia Britannica blog, July 1, 2009. http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/07/more-on-the-male-female-sat-math-test-gap/

9. Jenny Hope, “Women Doctors Will Soon Outnumber Men after Numbers in Medical School Go up Tenfold,” Daily Mail online, November 30, 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2067887/Women-doctors-soon-outnumber-men-numbers-medical-school-fold.html.

Further examples of morés that illustrate this generalization are easy to find. The fact that so many of the world’s cultures are patriarchal in design, for instance, is worth pondering.

Female humans appear, in general, to be slightly less capable than males in some areas such as large muscle strength and coordination, and in spatial and numerical reasoning ability.⁸ 

However, these differences are slight compared with the differences among members of the same gender, and compared with the differences between males and females in other species. In addition, they are differences that exist between mythical beings called the “average man” and the “average woman.” Real individuals, male and female, vary considerably from the mean. 

Some women are bodybuilders and some are mathematical geniuses, while some men are weak and moronic.

                                U. of Georgia (steroid-free) cheerleader Anna Watson

Furthermore, objective, scientific analysis reveals that, on average, females are superior to males in other ways, such as in coordination of the muscles of the hands and in verbal communication skills. That they have not become the majority of doctors, lawyers, and political leaders in most of the world’s societies, jobs for which they seem better suited, is puzzling to say the least. (Women are finally beginning to achieve parity in medicine, for example, which has been long overdue.⁹)

Why have females been relegated to positions of lower status and pay in nearly all the world’s societies? This seems not only unfair but illogical and inefficient. Aren’t such tribes wasting human resources? Unfortunately, logic and fairness have not been the determining factors. Cultural efficiency, it turns out, is subtler.

Actually, logic and fairness are just values themselves. In other words, like all values, they’re tentative. They must serve a society’s survival in order to become entrenched in the value code of that society. If they work counter to the needs of a society’s survival in certain areas, they will be superseded by what the society will come to call a “higher” value. In the case of women, motherhood was a higher value.

Women bear the young, and a society’s children are its future in the starkest, most final sense. Women become pregnant due to anatomy and hormones. We are programmed by our genetics to find sex pleasurable. We seek it without needing instruction. The biological drive toward sex is often harnessed and redirected by society’s programming to serve several of society’s needs at the same time, but these do not have to concern us for now. Our line of reasoning has to continue to follow the developing child—society’s future—now in the female’s womb.

Human females, like almost all mammalian females, are not as capable of running, hiding, gathering, and fighting when in advanced pregnancy as when they are not pregnant. After delivery, the child, to whom the mother usually bonds deeply, requires years of care and nurturing before maturing, becoming able to fend for itself, and making adult contributions to society. In short, for thousands of years, if a society was to survive, its males had to protect its females and to assist, at least indirectly, with the work required in nurturing children. A male was simply more likely to provide assistance and protection when he believed that the children were his. Individual males who loved all children were not numerous enough to make a difference to the long-term odds. Those odds were improved significantly when most of the men knew, or thought they knew, which kids were theirs.

Note also that male arousal and orgasm are necessary to procreation; female orgasm is not. Therefore, societies teaching males to be dominant and females to be submissive thrived, while competing societies that didn’t teach such values did not. The logical upshot was that nearly all societies that reproduced at a rate that enabled them to grow taught their girls to be sexually faithful and generally submissive to their husbands. Hunting, agricultural, and industrial societies all grew steadily stronger under patriarchies.

In addition, these societies evolved toward augmenting their belief in female submissiveness with supporting values and morés that, in most matters, gave the community’s approval to male dominance. Other less patriarchal societies stagnated or were assimilated by expanding, land-seizing, patriarchal ones. Whatever increased male commitment to child nurture raised the tribe’s odds of going on. Again note that little of the history of these societies was shaped by a gender-neutral concept of justice.

 

In today’s post-industrial societies with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), women can now simultaneously contribute children and work other than child nurturing to most areas of their culture’s ongoing development and life. The imperatives of the past that dictated girls had to adopt submissive roles to ensure the survival of their tribe and its culture are evolutionarily obsolete. Advances in birth control technologies (e.g. the oral contraceptive) and in child-rearing and nurturing technologies (e.g., artificial insemination, infant-feeding mixtures) have made the chores and joys of child rearing possible for men, and even for single women, who in earlier eras had little choice but to forego the joys and trials of parenting or else condemn themselves and their children to society’s stigmatization.

In post-industrial societies, there is no survival-oriented reason for women not to be afforded as large and varied a range of career and lifestyle choices as those previously open almost exclusively to men. There is no compelling, survival-oriented reason for any person’s not receiving pay and status commensurate with the value of his or her contribution to the nation’s ongoing life and development.

In fact, what appears to be true is that any limitations placed unduly or unequally on the opportunities of any citizens in the community on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, or race is only reducing the community’s capacity to grow and flourish. Computer technology and the oral contraceptive have made a higher degree of gender-neutral justice possible. If we wish to maximize our human resources, become as dynamic a society as possible, and compete ever more successfully in the environments of our planet and perhaps beyond, we must make education and careers of the highest quality open to all capable citizens. If we are to maximize our human resources, then access to education and careers should be based on merit alone. At least, such is the conclusion we must draw from all the reasoning and evidence we have before us today.

Furthermore, the authorities of society, if only for efficiency’s sake, will probably have to find ways of ensuring that quality nurturing of children receives pay and benefits matching the pay and benefits given to all other kinds of jobs in a society traditionally driven by these incentives. Having kids will have to be a reasonable option if we are to maintain a stable base population for our society in this new century.

Driving women back into a domestic zone would be retrograde and counterproductive, like locking our bulldozers in sheds and digging ditches by hand in order to provide more jobs. For women and men who choose it, the nurturing of children must be given real respect and pay if we are to continue on the path of knowledge-driven and technology-based evolution that we have chosen. Logic says so.

It remains unclear whether future societies will see a profound and enduring redesigning of gender roles and child-rearing practices and a concomitant redesigning of the roles of worker-citizens that will make women equal partners with men. Moves toward gender equity, in work and citizenship, and real change in the everyday life experiences of women and men have been suggested and tried (to varying degrees) before and have faded away before. But the trends in the West, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, look widespread and strong. The question will be whether societies that contain a high degree of gender equity will outperform those that do not. That question will be answered, but the answer will only emerge gradually over the next hundred years or so.

To sum up this digression, let me reiterate that the point of illustrating the sociocultural model of human evolution with some example morés that we are familiar with and that we can imagine being revised is to emphasize the fact that our morés and values are programmable. At least in theory, we can rewrite them for the betterment of the whole of society by processes of rational discussion and debate, processes that are based on reasoning, evidence, and compromise. Difficult, yes, but preferable to the blind, trudging, painful methods of social change that we have been using for centuries.

It is time for reason to take over. The hazards of continuing the old ways of prejudice, revolution, and war are too large. We have to find another way, one that rights gender injustices and so many others without resorting to the horror of war. And if we can find a way to base our values on our best models of physical reality, ones we can all see the sense of, it can be done. Rational thinking and evidence-gathering can tame our atavistic urges. Difficult, but not impossible.