Chapter 18           The Genetic Evolution – Cultural Evolution Analogy

 

 

                      

 

                                      Earth seen from space (Wikimedia Commons)

 

What makes Earth’s biosphere – its living ecosystem – so different from any other entity we have found in the universe (so far) is the way it tends, overall, to keep becoming more – more in mass, in space, and in internal complexity – as it moves forward in time. All other entities we know of shred apart over time. But life on this planet has formed complex entities that keep weaving more matter and energy into themselves. Living things take bits of dead matter, plus (sometimes) already existing living fabric, then, following directions coded into their own parts, they weave these together to make more of themselves. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen woven on sunlight-powered looms, following directions coded into DNA, form one giant garment: earth’s biosphere.  

This weaving metaphor is an inadequate one, but then so are all models of matter. All models used in Science prove limited. Electrons are not tiny balls, even though that’s how they’re portrayed in high school Science texts.

 

All the metaphor is meant to help make clear is that as this entity expands, there are patterns visible in that expanding. Those patterns can be seen repeating and also subtly evolving, ceaselessly. It is just logical for us to assume that they must be guided by some programming embedded somewhere in the fabric.

 

We have shown in the life sciences that all living things in the system embed their programming in microscopic bits of matter we call “DNA” that they carry around inside themselves. The code in these bits regulates how that living thing maintains its body, how it reproduces, and how the species as a whole adapts to changes in its surroundings. But then humans add their own extra codes.

 

Other species teach some of their behaviors to their offspring. But humans get nearly all of the programming they use for their maintenance, reproduction, and adaptation from memes programmed by both behavior and language into the brains of the young by their adult role models.   

 

Living by their cultural codes – that is, mostly by learned behaviors rather than genetically coded ones – humans outmanoeuvre all other species on this planet. But, in the end, societies have to survive in the same universe run by the same laws as all other living things do. Cultural programs must guide us to deal with gravity, light, entropy, uncertainty, pH ranges, moisture levels, and so on, just as genetic programs do. Cultures augment and support genetic codes. They do not replace genetic codes. And both aim to achieve the same end: survival in this harsh, scary universe.

 

Thus, it is logical for us to digress on the analogy that can be drawn between the genetic mode of evolution and the cultural one. This analogy will help to deepen our understanding of cultural codes, and so of moral realism.

 

Parallels between biological evolution and cultural evolution have been noted before, by the Social Darwinists in particular. But most people today find the Social Darwinists’ conclusions unacceptable. And rightly so. Social Darwinism argues that rich people are rich because they deserve to be; they are superior. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society. They have both the intelligence and the discipline to keep society stable and to get work done. In contrast, Social Darwinism claims the workers, who in many places in the world are still indigent and living in squalor, deserve to live in misery because they don’t have the intelligence or discipline to run anything.

 

 

           

                                               "The storming of the Bastille"

                            (credit: Jean-Pierre Houël, via Wikimedia Commons

A few generations ago, some rich Frenchmen lived by this code and found to their sorrow that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade any who still want to live by that oligarchic code, I offer the harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. And the very near miss in the US in the 1930s. This evidence contains a hard lesson for the nineteenth century-style Social Darwinists all over the world: if you want to live, be nice. Share. Workers have to be paid enough to be able to care for their families. Otherwise, they will revolt. Living in misery, with daily starvation for themselves and their kids, they have nothing left to lose. Social Darwinism, left to its own ways, driven only by markets, tends toward this exact picture of the workers’ lives. Richer and richer elites. Poorer and poorer workers. In such societies, bloody, violent revolution becomes more and more likely. And that description is not overly florid or dramatic. It’s just what the evidence shows.

                        

 

                       Victorious North Vietnamese troops capture Saigon, 1975

                                                        (credit: Wikipedia) 

Experience in countries all over the world has shown that societies containing more compassion and social justice – unionization of workers, state-funded education and health care, etc. – can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today know this. They will not accept exploitation, bare subsistence living, and misery as their necessary parts in society anymore.

 

The values code that guides society to its highest levels of efficiency is one that balances courage with wisdom and freedom with compassion. Leaving love out of our picture of human society is not just cruel; it’s stupid. As unrestrained capitalism keeps doing its “thing”, maneuvering only for greater and greater profits, the exploitation gets worse and worse until, eventually, it costs its adherents their heads. Literally. This is becoming clearer and clearer as we have more and more historical records to study and find patterns in.  

                      

         

                         Teamsters’ union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934

                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Now let’s consider an example that shows how values can come to equilibrium in a democracy. This example is relevant and useful here because it can be seen as a paradigm of how sub-cultures of democracies, at their best, are guided by their values as they interact in all areas of their lives, professional and personal. (In Modern English, we say our actions are informed by our values.)

 

Workers and management in Western economies can be thought of as “social species”. A captain of industry in the West today has times when he despises unions, but he accepts that if workers are not paid a fair percentage of the company’s earnings, they will work less and less efficiently. His best workers will leave his firm to find other jobs. Other workers, fed up, will willfully sabotage the company. He may find ways of retaliating, but he knows those will simply cause the cycle to deepen and worsen. If the obstinacy on both sides becomes hardened enough, violence is inevitable. If those who own the means of production – farms, mines, factories, etc. – become more incorrigible in their attitudes, society eventually breaks down into revolution. To prevent such chaos and preserve his way of life, the smart CEO has ambition/drive/diligence (courage), but also wisdom. A smart CEO works with, not against, his workers.

 

Thus, we have learned, by trial and painful error, to aim for balance. For example, workers in democracies have rights to safe working conditions and free collective bargaining via their unions. Smart businesspeople negotiate with unions, and contracts are arrived at by debate and compromise. In fact, some of the smartest businesspersons in the West today are those specifically trained in labor-management negotiations.

 

                          

                                               union leaders with Ford executives

                          (contract signing 2007) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

For their part, most union leaders today know they have to respect a company’s ability to pay. They ask for reasonable wages and benefits for their members, but smart union bosses don’t push the employers to the brink of insolvency. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders need courage and wisdom in balance as well.

 

Furthermore, most business leaders in the West have accepted that as long as prices go up, workers will expect wages to go up accordingly. Ethical business leaders make businesses more efficient by funding research and by efficient management, not by union-busting. Attempts at strike breaking are viewed today as signs of management incompetence. Overall, finding balance between all the parties trying to get the work done is the key to making the whole economic system of the nation vigorous.  

 

And clearly, the system is not random. It does not find a working balance by lucky chance, nor by one individual's choice. Many parties, guided by their concepts and values, interact, give a bit, demand a bit in return, and reach agreements that are viable in the real world. Values drive behavior, and, in turn, behavior must interface with reality. Values that mirror the forces of the physical world are the ones that produce working compromises. Companies whose workers and management strive to balance enthusiasm with judgement (courage and wisdom) and innovation with respect (freedom and love) produce quality, sensibly priced goods and their firms thrive. Those that don't – don't.

 

Thus, in the view of cultural evolution, two social species – management and labor – stay in balance by following their cultural programming.    

 

There are also some even more nuanced ways of seeing balance in this labor-management subsystem within our society. One truth is that while most smart business leaders hope they can achieve a modest settlement with their workers, they also hold values that make them secretly hope the rest of their society’s workers will get generous new contracts. That will mean more disposable income in the economy, money that workers – who, during their time off, are just consumers – can spend on the smarter company’s goods and services.

 

The corollary is that while workers in any company want generous rates of pay in their new contracts, they don’t want to see too generous pay packets being handed out in all the contracts signed in all sectors of their society. If settlements in general are modest, workers know that goods will soon be cheaper relative to their wages than those goods were just a few months ago.

 

If they are honest, most workers will also admit that they want their company to succeed. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding, but smart workers know that managers who scrutinize every line in their books, as long as they also know how to adapt to industry innovations and to market their goods in creative ways, are the ones the company needs if it is to stay in business and keep workers employed.

 

In short, in the modern business world, smart businesspeople don’t live by Social Darwinism and smart workers don’t live by Marxism. Democracy in all its sectors runs by extremely complex interactions, tensions, and balances of all parties with all their concepts and values functioning vigorously. In short, the social ecosystem is closely analogous to the biological one.

 

 

                               A natural balance: wolves closing in to kill bison

                                (credit: Doug Smith, via Wikimedia Commons)

Over time, the wolf pack keeps the bison herd strong. Over time, management and union leaders keep each other and their whole country economically and socially strong. The negotiating costs emotion, but it’s effect over the long term is to prevent violence. The uplifting thing to notice here is that in healthy democracies, we have learned to find balances almost always by non-violent means. Firms go bankrupt sometimes. Unions cease to exist if some kinds of work are made obsolete by new technology. But social species like managers and workers do not have to wipe one another out for cultural evolution to occur.

  

  

                             Chapter 17.                               (conclusion) 

But what about the second big trait of physical reality, quantum uncertainty?

As with courage and wisdom, a balanced pair of values shapes the behavior of citizens as societies strive to deal with uncertainty.

To maximize its chances of handling the uncertainty of the physical reality in which we live – the unexpected events that keep coming at us – a society must contain as wide a variety of possible responses to the challenges of the world as people in the society can learn to master. In a scary world, if you’re smart, you try to learn skills that will make you resourceful and versatile so that you can be ready for almost anything. 

 

             

                        Democratic pluralism: the first cabinet of Barack Obama 

                         (credit: Chuck Kennedy, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Encouraging individuals to be versatile (the Renaissance man concept) helps, but the really important value a wise society instills into all its members is a love of freedom: a desire in every child to develop his/her talents. And it works best if it partners with a generosity that encourages others to do the same. 

To be equipped to meet the widest range of futures possible, a society must contain the widest range of humans possible, with skills and talents of every sort imaginable. If an unforeseeable crisis threatens a freedom-loving society, that society has a higher likelihood of containing a small group of people, or even just one individual, who will be able to react effectively to the situation than a more homogenous society ever can. Then, the effective ones can teach the rest how to survive the current crisis. A free society is resilient because it has many kinds of folks to draw its resources from.

In addition, in more ordinary times, when a society is maintaining a steady state, the people in a diverse society pursue a wide range of activities, research a wide range of topics, and develop a wide range of goods and services any of which may yield benefits for the whole society. Against the uncertainty of the universe, societies that are free and courageous even become proactive.

Which activities will turn out to be more than just hobbies in a decade or two can’t be known in an uncertain universe. Some of these hobby activities will fit into the society’s social ecosystem and, in a decade or so, simply become parts of the division of labor. Others will prove to be silly wastes of time. Still others will lead to innovations that will make that society leap forward.

Therefore, a wise society cultivates diversity and also cultivates its dreamers. Occasionally, an eccentric invents something that is amazingly useful to all. The presence of eccentrics in a society is proof that freedom is part of that society’s moral code. In any society, in the long run, the more uniform its people are, the lower its odds of survival are. On the other hand, pluralistic societies adapt better to challenges, and thus, over generations, they survive and thrive.

Thus, to balance this value called freedom in the way wisdom balances courage, society must teach love. Left unbalanced, freedom leads to fissioning. Factions tend to form, and gradually become mutually hostile. To balance the hazards of freedom, we teach brotherhood, respect, and love. As courage plus wisdom yields work, so freedom plus love yields democracy. Love makes us strong.

A society with a wide range of behaviors and lifestyles practiced among its citizens must also teach these citizens to respect one another. If it does not, that society will be constantly torn by violence between  the varied factions that will inevitably arise in its free ethos. No matter which wins, some of that society’s versatility will be lost, a net loss for all. Thus, in long-enduring societies, some form of love – or at minimum, respect – for one’s fellow citizens has always been taught to each new generation.

When a society becomes highly intolerant of any persons who diverge from what its citizens think of as “normal”, it is ready, in a few generations, to die out, due to its being unable to handle a plague, or a famine, or more likely, an invasion by a more versatile neighbor.

 

 

 

                                          New technology: cannon (ca. 1430)

                                     (Jan Rehschuh, Wikimedia Commons)

 

The most basic form that this love takes is mutual respect, and it is realized, most basically, in the rule of law. In a democracy, laws are drawn up by elected representatives of the people. In an autocracy, the laws are whatever the autocrat says they are, but since he or she is just one person, the laws tend to be arbitrary, inconsistent and inadequate. (This is why most autocracies end up using repression to keep their people in line.) 

Thus, in a democracy, the citizens must cooperate to build and maintain a legal system that will enable them to work, exchange goods, raise families, settle disputes, and through all these activities, live in communities and get along.

But laws can only work if the people living under them respect not just the exact wording of their laws, but the spirit or intent behind them. When large numbers of citizens begin to see their laws as unjust, they start to circumvent those laws. The justice system becomes less and less effective. Then, too many offenses go unpunished, a bad sign for any society. Anarchy is about to ensue.

In our work as students of cultural evolution, one more thing to note is that, in History, causes and their effects can take generations to connect. A decadent society, whose citizens no longer live by their values, deteriorates gradually into corruption, rebellions, and anarchy. For students of History, mounds of irrelevant trivia can obscure their view and keep them from seeing how decay in a society’s belief system produces effects in the daily lives of its people. Why did they win this war or lose that one? Did they fall because of this famine or this plague? The wars, famines, and plagues are usually not the prime causes of any civilization’s fall. The cause of a civilization’s fall is moral decay. When most of a nation’s people are living by their values, it handles challenge. When its people’s values decline below a critical threshold, that society will fall to the next hard challenge it encounters.    

But we should not be surprised at the gradualness of the processes of History. In truth, they only seem gradual in the limited view of the individual. A thousand years is fifty human generations. In terms of biological evolution, fifty generations is trivial. In genetic evolution, hundreds of generations often have to pass before a new anatomical or physiological feature in a species can prove its usefulness.

On the other hand, the evidence of History indicates that a new belief, with its morés attached, even though it looks slow acting in our eyes, often can prove itself much more rapidly than a new anatomical or physiological trait can. We can see the workings of human cultural evolution in action if we know what to look for. For example, Renaissance Science – with its curious spirit, its freeing of minds from the superstitions of the Middle Ages, its belief in the physically-caused nature underlying events, and its rigorous method of theory-forming and testing – created better and better guns. For people in those times, guns changed everything. In one generation, knights were out, musketeers were in.

Note also that even when sometimes it moves more slowly, cultural evolution is much more efficient than genetic evolution: cultural evolution responds to changes in the environment more quickly and effectively than does genetic evolution. Since Enlightenment times, in fact, humans have been getting better at altering Nature herself. We don't wait for Nature to hit us with a challenge anymore; we go over to the offense and dominate Nature faster than we once did. A drug may cure a disease, but a vaccine may prevent that disease.

In any case, the cause-effect connection between a human society’s ideals and customs and its success in the material world is always there for us to see if we look hard enough. We just have to study a lot of societies and a lot of belief systems; then, we begin to see the balances among, and connections between, courage, wisdom, freedom, and love and their consequences in plentiful goods, longevity, lower infant mortality rates, control of disease, military success, etc.

Plagues, famines, wars, etc. are readily dealt with by a society that has the values of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love in place. Natural disasters are just the uncertainty of the universe taking physical form. These too are dealt with by democratic societies. To meet universal uncertainty at its inception – whatever form disaster is about to take – successful societies teach and practice courage, wisdom, freedom, and love. Then, material achievements – greater technical advances, harvests, birthrates, territory, etc. – keep arriving.

It is also worth pointing out here that some societies in the past even worked out sets of beliefs and customs that enabled them to live and multiply so well that for generations, their elites came to believe they had found the answers to life. These citizens created niches that were insulated from contact with the adversity and uncertainty of the material world. Then, their belief in their values deteriorated till they came to regard the values that had first enabled their society’s success as obsolete, old-fashioned notions.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality. It keeps being adverse and unpredictable, demanding courage, wisdom, freedom, and love of all citizens if their society is going to stay strong. What can confuse an analysis of History is that when citizens do begin to get lazy about living their values, the crash of their society may take a while to arrive, and its cause may be hidden by a lot of trivia. But that crash will come.

It is also worth noting again that the numbers of cultures possible that would qualify as brave, smart, free, and kind is near infinite. If we brought together all the records from all the cultures that have ever existed, this would still give us only a tiny fraction of the number of cultures possible. We’ll never observe in History every way by which we might respond to adversity and uncertainty.

Therefore, we must scrutinize the records of all human societies and discern the larger principles and try to accumulate what knowledge we can about them if we are to steer our species as it moves forward through time. This wisdom –  knowledge that gets results – has been long, hard, and slow in coming.

But however hard all that reading, thinking, debating, and writing has been, as much in our own times as in any past era, it has to be continued. From those mounds of historical data, our minds must extract the principles that we need to save ourselves. The alternative is to resign ourselves to disaster.

 

 

          

                                          University of Virginia: Modern scholars

                                      (credit: Mmw3v, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Some people in every era don’t want to study the past. Such studies might lead to change. They resist change as automatically as they breathe. They want to stay with the values and morés they were raised to because that feels secure. But we can’t hide from change. So if we don’t learn from the past, if we don’t constantly strive to get wiser and adapt more rationally to changes in reality, then reality comes for us. The one alternative strategy is to go at life hard. 

Freedom, as a value programmed into children, is vital to society. It drives us to develop our talents and live motivated lives. It pushes us to handle change. But, if it weren’t complemented with love, freedom would beget cliques, gangs, and factions, then prejudice, hostility, violence, and anarchy.

Brotherly love, as a widely held value, solves this dilemma. In ancient times, for example, love seemed so crucial to Jesus that he told his disciples to place love above all other virtues. He said that it was the one thing he’d taught them that they must not forget. Implicitly, he was saying all other values – even courage and wisdom and their benefits – arise from love. Similar messages occur in all religions that endure because they enable those who live by them to endure.

“A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13: 34-35)

Thus, humans sustain and spread their societies by practicing lifestyles that seem paradoxical to any who look for all phenomena to be reduced to simple parts. Freedom must be balanced with love. In balancing these values in our daily lives, we mirror the balance principle of the ecosystems of the earth. Competition and cooperation are always in balance in every creature’s life, even for a shark. She can’t reproduce by killing everything she encounters.

This is basic systems theory. A “system” that deserves the name will – when stressed – adjust balances within itself and adapt to the stressor, whatever that may be, by reaching a new equilibrium. The stressed system adjusts from within itself. We couldn’t survive in this uncertain reality, as individuals or societies, if our lives were otherwise. 

And balances are tricky to find and maintain. But who really expects life to be easy? Freedom is a precious, beautiful thing. If the price of it is maintaining a loving attitude and standard of respectful conduct as we deal with our neighbors, there is a deep sense of symmetry to that picture. A decent way of life for an individual or a society requires constant adjusting and is hard to sustain. But not impossible.

Therefore, we need internal tensions in our communities. Pluralism is a sign of a vigorous society. Monolithic, homogeneous societies lack resourcefulness. A democracy may seem to its critics to be enervated by the energy its people waste in endless arguing. But over time, in a universe in which we can’t know what hazards may be coming in the next day or century, diversity and debate make us strong. Wishing to escape the anxiety of uncertainty leads us away from love for our neighbors, away from pluralism and freedom. And love is not just “nice”: it’s crucial. It has carried us this far; it is all that may save us.

A basic Buddhist truth is that life is hard. Another is that only love can drive out hate. Jesus’s prime command to us all: love one another as I have loved you. These codes have not survived because some old men said they should; they have survived because they enable their carriers to survive. In short, our oldest, most general values have survived in us because they get results. They work.

                                    

 

                 

                                                The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia

                                       (by Monsiau) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Now let us sum up this chapter. Courage is the cultural response to entropy. Wisdom balances courage. Freedom is the cultural response to uncertainty. Love balances freedom. Diligence, humility, and many other values are hybrids of the four prime ones. They are not easy to see in action; they only show their usefulness on a huge scale as we study the daily actions of millions of people over thousands of years to see how values keep evolving and keep getting – for the followers of the best tuned values codes – better and better results. 

But values are not, as moral relativism tells us, trivial or arbitrary preferences like preferences for certain flavors of ice cream or brands of perfume. Values are cultural responses to what is real.

In the next chapter, we shall strengthen the case for belief in the empirical realness of moral values by showing some ways in which the cultural model of evolution closely parallels the biological model of evolution, the one by which we understand life on this planet and how it grows and changes. At that point, the case for moral realism will be proven. Perfectly? No. In quantum reality, we don’t get perfect proof. But more than adequately, by Bayesian standards.

And for theistic readers, I will also say that theism is coming. Hang in there.

 

Notes 

1. Kenelm Henry Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour; or, The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry, Vol. 2 (London: B. Quaritch, 1976).

https://archive.org/details/broadstoneofhono02digbiala.

2. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Chapter 11 (1843; The Literature Network).

http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/34/.

 

 

                               Chapter 17.                           (continued) 

Thus, we are now ready to ask: What are the values that enable humans to respond to entropy – the uphill struggle of life, the adversity that is a given for all things that live.

A whole array of values may be taught to young people to enable them and their culture to deal with adversity over generations and centuries. In order to deal well with adversity, a society needs large numbers of people willing to face exertion, exhaustion, struggle, and pain. In fact, a society proves most effective if its citizens take up the offensive against the relentless decay of the universe. Children taught to seek challenge become adults who bring new territories (one day, planets) under their tribe’s control, devise new ways of growing food and making shelters, devise technologies to do more work with less human exertion, and generally perform the tasks of survival more efficiently.

When we generalize about what these entropy-driven behavior clusters have in common, we derive two large, generic values that are found in all cultures: in English, the terms courage and wisdom roughly name these two ideas.

In different cultures all over the world, various versions of courage are instilled in the young, which is what we’d expect if the idea works. Honor and discipline are also terms that serve well in most contexts for this same cluster of values. Face adversity, kids. In fact, go at life. Tackle it head on.

Japanese samurai lived by bushido, their code. European nations by chivalry, right into modern times. Beyond the difficulties of translation from culture to culture, we see in all these varied values a common motif: they direct disciples to persevere through, even to seek, challenge. In ancient Greek myth, Achilles chose a brief, hard life of honor over a longer, easier one of obscurity. For centuries, the ancient Greeks considered him to be a model of a man, as do some people to this day in nations that admire the values of ancient Greek culture. Many non-Western cultures have similar heroes.

 

 

 

      The Triumph of Achilles (credit: Franz Matsch, via Wikimedia Commons)

                              

 

                        Photo believed to be of Apache leader Crazy Horse, c. 1877

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

                               

                                                   Statue of Zulu leader, Shaka

                        (credit: Jacob Truedson Demitz, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                

                             Martial arts master and Chinese hero, Huo Yuanjia

                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Confucius said the superior man thinks always of virtue, while the inferior man thinks always of comfort. Nineteenth-century English writer K.H. Digby said: “Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic actions and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world”.¹ 

The exhortation to seek adversity, and reject easy lifestyles, echoes through all societies. Young people everywhere are encouraged to tackle hardships, especially for the defense and promotion of their nations. We can sum up the gist of all of these values by saying that they are built around the principle that in English is called courage.

It is familiar and clichéd to push young people to aspire to courage. But clichés get to be clichés because they express something true. In the hard background of the physical universe, life seeks to create pockets of order. In the case of humans, it does so by programming into young people an entire constellation of values around the prime value called “courage”. Behaviors that aim to meet and overcome adversity enable those who practice them to move forward in knowledge and outward in space. Societies that value courage survive and spread better because of that value.

And now we come to a subtler insight. All of nature is pulled into its many shapes by balances of forces. Thus, the value society instills into its young to make them seek out and conquer adversity must be balanced with a second value that will cause the energy put into facing challenges to be focused so the individual will deal with challenges efficiently. Nothing is to be gained by teaching young people blind aggression; it will only run amok in its own society. Eager-but-directionless young people end up hurting themselves in car crashes, daredevil stunts, and street fights, dying young while accomplishing little or nothing in useful terms for their nations.

In English, the courage-tempering value is called wisdom, but knowledge and judgement are also terms in English based around this same value. Wisdom has the effect of focusing human actions to achieve objectives by behavior patterns that use energy efficiently. It is in the medieval knight’s code of chivalry and the samurai warriors’ code of bushido, both of which contain instruction on how a man may be both brave and smart. Warrior and diplomat/poet.

Note that the idea of balance is implied all through my model. Societies, like species, become extremely complex, internally and in their dealings with each other. An individual has to hold his internal traits and forces in balance in order to function. Thus, balance has become an ideal in all cultures.

Aristotle told his followers to seek moderation. For example, in his view, balance between foolhardiness and cowardice yields courage, a trait one must cultivate above all others. Stinginess must be balanced against extravagancy if we are to reach a prudent way of handling wealth; and so on for a list of virtues.

The religions of the East, like Taoism and Buddhism, go so far as to say that even the picture our minds have of reality as being made of opposite traits is illusory. Buddha and Lao Tse say reality is actually a single, seamless thing.

Our minds think they see separate entities like animal and plant, garbage and food, rich and poor, life and death, past and future, but in reality, there are no such things. The words only name illusions. We handle our suffering best, they say, when we let all our categories go and become one with everything. Then, with awareness of the true nature of reality, even the most tedious forms of work can be done with mindfulness and dignity. Scrubbing a pot, weeding a garden, or digging a ditch can all be dignified if they are done mindfully. 

A fascinating insight into how cultures teach this balancing of courage and wisdom lies embedded in myths. Myths were the life-guides for early tribes. The Greek mythic heroes Achilles, Jason, Perseus, Theseus, and Aeneas all needed Chiron, the wise teacher: courage plus wisdom. In myths of the early Britons, Arthur needed Merlin. In modern myths, Luke Skywalker needs Yoda; Dorothy, Glinda; Katniss, Haymitch. Courage tempered by wisdom.

                                                           

 

                                  

                                              Thomas Carlyle (artist, J.E. Millais)

                                                     (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

The familiar value that is a hybrid of courage and wisdom is our belief in hard work. Diligence and conscientiousness are two of its other names, as most of us are wearily aware. But the tedious, clichéd feel of this values cluster should not discourage us. Clichés, as I’ve said, like this one about the nobleness of work, become clichés because they express something that is universally true.

“I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” (Thomas Jefferson)

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” (Edison) 

 

Courage is good. Wisdom is good. We learn as children that if we want to achieve great things, we must learn both courage and wisdom. Be brave, but also smart. In practice, the combination of the two always means hard work.  

Thomas Carlyle distilled the idea well: 

“For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature’s appointments and regulations, which are truth.” ²

This is the moral realist view of how the profound, universal fact of entropy informs the values and behaviors of human societies. A lot of varied societies can emerge in real life, but all that last must teach some mode of hard work as a prime value. The giant picture we’re drawing here leaves plenty of room for variety in human cultures, but this varied picture of cultures is not without any constants, as the moral relativists would have us believe.