Chapter 15.                  (conclusion) 

                              Conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity 

                                     (artist: Rubens) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

The next phase in the history of the West comes with the rise of Christianity. Did Christianity get strong because it offered Romans a way out of sensuality and materialism, i.e. inspired them and, thus, enabled them to live by a system of values again? Or did it just happen to coincide with the end of the Empire?   

The position of Moral Realism is that the simultaneous appearance of these two social phenomena is no coincidence. Changes in values coincide with changes in ways of life because values changes lead to new patterns of behavior, ones that either help or hinder a society in its struggle to survive. Neither can accurately be said to cause the other. Both are signs of a nation’s experimenting with even deeper changes in its thinking. Nations always have at least some experimenting going on in the thinking of the citizens. Mixing or creating new memes. Once in a while, an experiment works. The old values of Rome decayed. The Christian ones were there to offer a way out, a life raft when the old ship sank.

The downside of Christianity was that it told people that the highest state for a human to aspire to is not citizenship. It is a state of grace, i.e. peace with God. Renounce the world in all its tempting forms; focus on eternity. In the last years of the Roman Empire, balance between Christian values and Roman ones was nigh on to impossible to find. When the Visigoths’ challenge came, too many Romans had let their ideals decay, in the cases of the old style, pagan Romans, or else to stray too far from the practical/material, in the cases of the Christians. People who had integrated the two value sets were too few to stop the barbarian tide. Melding the two was still too complex.

Rome fell, in an agony that we today cannot imagine. But the catastrophe had been coming for a century, at least. The time from the Romans’ accepting Christianity as the state religion to the Empire’s fall is six generations – almost nothing in biological evolution’s terms. It took another thousand years, fifty generations, for Europe to find a way to synthesize the Roman ideals and those of Christianity into one coherent, practicable way of thinking and living.

Again, Hegel’s model, does seem to fit. Roughly. But the model I offer in this book goes beyond Hegel. We must leave his model because it portrays our species’ cultural evolution as being mysterious, involuntary, and even fated. We have to wrench the wheel that steers this ship away from instincts and luck and put it into the hands of Reason and Choice. Minds and Freedom. We have to get control over our own cultural evolution. Hegel doesn’t give us that option.

Under the Christian worldview, the earth had been specially created by God to house man, his most beloved creation. But man’s role was not to enjoy life when he could (as the ancients had). Instead, humans were here to praise God and gratefully accept all God sent their way, all joy and all suffering. Getting ready for the next life after death was what mattered. “Memento Mori” (Remember Death) was carved into a plaster base holding a human skull on every scholar’s desk. Remember death. Let go of this brief life of temporal, secular, painful illusions and think instead about the eternal, spiritual life beyond this life. This way of thinking sounds like a backward step, and in many ways, it was. It did not foster the constant improving of practical skills for the whole, larger society. It focused the attention of many smart people away from matters in this material world.

 

 

                  

               The Good Samaritan (credit: Aimé Morot, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

But Christianity added some useful ideas of its own. Christians were taught to act kindly toward all other people, not just other Romans; to behave honestly and compassionately in their dealings with others; and to commit in a personal way to Christ’s kind of faith and his simple, honest, compassionate way of life. Christians were programmed to live as if being kind to all was the moral way, even if kind actions might not get any rewards for their doer in this lifetime. 

This was a big change from the ways of the slave-owning, sensual, late Empire Romans. It is worth noting here, however, that gladiatorial games were banned around 400 A.D. A change toward a more moral society. The Romans were changing. They were just too slow about it and the melding of the two sets of values into a synthesis was still too hard for people to imagine.

Why the Church later became so cynical as to own property and engage in wars, while individual serfs were not to even contemplate such acts (unless the pope told them to make war on the heathens) was kept vague. But the emotional grip and social solidarity produced by Christianity were so strong that hypocritical Church authorities easily steered followers’ past the Church’s hypocrisies.

For centuries in Europe, the Church’s explanations of the universe and the human place in it were enough to attract, build, and retain a large following for the Church and the values it endorsed. The values, in turn, gradually fostered more honest, diligent communities, ones that eventually began to re-establish order. That was all that mattered as far as cultural evolution was concerned. 

Christian communities began to enjoy periods of increasing prosperity as their values created stability, diligence, and productivity. Even though they were not very progressive by modern standards, or by the standards of the glory days of Rome, the later Middle Ages were a big improvement on the violence and chaos that had come for centuries right after the values of the Romans unraveled.

The synthesis of Roman practicality and Christian compassion, and some experimental new ideas, got more and more viable as the contradictions were worked out in the minds and daily lives of ordinary folk. Gradually, Europe began to climb back toward prosperity and the rule of law. But it did so under a moral system very different from that of the Roman Empire. 

At first, the behaviors Christianity recommended had seemed effete to Romans of the mid-Empire. Compassion for the poor was stupid. They bred like flies. A good horse was worth a thousand of them. Who was this Chrestus? What system had he offered that was luring Roman youth into its cult? The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers!

But that system, which gave moral status to all humans (unlike slaves, even serfs had rights), mutual support through all tribulations (caring for each other in plague, famine, and war), and honesty in all dealings (God watches all) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. Dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life – a life filled with pleasures, but also cynicism – more and more people became converts. When Theodosius made Christianity the official faith in 380 CE, he was only acknowledging reality. Christianity’s values enabled its adherents to build prosperous communities and keep order in them. It impressed, then persuaded people. In short, it got popular.

 

 

        

      gladiators in ancient Rome (credit: J. L. Gerome, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Christianity offered something new – a worldview that felt personal, a way of life that made moral sense. Over the long term, it created efficient communities.

 

As contemptible as Christianity seemed to mid-Empire Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as gladiators killed each other, it gradually assimilated the old Roman system. The large point to grasp here is that even though individuals might not be aware of any long-term trends, Christianity didn’t just sound nice. Over millions of people and hundreds of years, it worked. It got results.

Christianity’s otherworldly worldview, for a while, caused a decline in Roman practical skills. This loss kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until comparatively recent times. But finally, subtler, more worldly Renaissance values fostered exploration and invention. They melded with Christian beliefs of duty, self-denial, and compassion, and some new ideas. Then, visible changes, like the Europeans’ “discovery” of the New World and the rise of Science, gave proof that the new way worked.

In our view in this book, the view that looks for causes and effects, the Christian way of life, that required every citizen to respect every other citizen, enabled Western society’s efficiency level to rise past a critical threshold. A flowering of Western civilization became, not just likely, but inevitable. The new hybrid values system worked: Greek abstract ideas, Roman practical skills, and some new, Renaissance ideas. The offspring ideas interbred with Christian values. In 1000 years, fifty generations, a functioning whole emerged (visible, for example, in the Hanseatic League).

   

        

                     Map showing cities in the Hanseatic League (credit: Wikipedia)

 

It took over a thousand years for people whose lives focused on worldly matters, instead of on seeking salvation in a life after death, to be seen as good Christians. But then architects, artists, merchants, explorers, even conquistadores, could do what they had always done, but now as ways of glorifying God. From the perspective of the life of a single human being, this transition seems so slow, but in evolutionary terms, a thousand years is short. Fifty generations. Some insects do that in a summer. Some bacteria do it in a week. Under the model of cultural evolution, humans can’t evolve as fast as insects, but much faster than they ever could in the days before cultural evolution kicked in. 

It’s interesting here to note the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies that seem to have reached equilibrium always hold a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted world view, values, and morés. These people's followers are often the young, which suggests that adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society. Teenagers make us look at our values and, once in a long while, they even make us realize that one of our familiar values is due for overhaul. Even a value retirement. Surprise! Teenage revolt serves a crucial purpose in the process of cultural evolution.

However, it’s more important to understand that many people in the rest of society see the new thinkers and their followers as delinquents. Only rarely are they seen as valuable by a majority. It’s even more important to see that the numbers involved on each side don’t matter as much as whether, first, the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers, second, they are allowed to practice their ways in a relatively free society, and third ...the ideas work, i.e. the followers then live more vigorous lives than the rest of the society.

A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many citizens in its establishment may resent the means by which it does so and may do everything in their power to quell the process. Most often, they can. But not always. For Western society, until the practical features of its ancient beliefs were integrated with its more humane Christian ones, Medieval Europeans did not support those in their midst whose ideas and morés focused on life in this material world.

Artists, scientists, inventors, explorers, and entrepreneurs are eccentric. They don’t support the status quo, they threaten it. But they move the rest forward. They flourish only in a society that tolerates eccentrics. Renaissance culture did.

   

 

           Gutenberg inspecting a proof (circa 1440) (engraving created in 1800’s)  

      (credit: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Gutenberg)

 

                          

 

         The Glasses Apostle (credit: Conrad von Soest, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

To flourish, a society must use resources and grow when it has opportunities to do so, or it will lose out later when events in the environment grow harsher, competition gets fiercer, and it has few or no resources banked. How do new, improved ways of doing things become established ways of doing things? One means is by war, as has been mentioned. But the peaceful mechanism can also work, and it is seen in tolerant societies when the people who devise and use new ways are allowed to do so undisturbed. If they then live better, the majority begins to pay attention and take up these ways. ("Wow! Eyeglasses work!") 

This market-driven way, if practiced honestly, is the way of peaceful cultural evolution, the alternative to the war-driven one. Humans have taken a long time to even begin to grasp and follow the peaceful path, but as a species, we are almost there, almost to the point of being able to evolve culturally without war.

Now we can return to our main argument. We have already shown that humans must have a general code, usually called their moral code, to live by, just so they can organize their communities into teams that can efficiently get food, build shelters, care for the sick and injured, raise kids, etc. Furthermore, the code that the West has lived by is due for some major updating. It has not worked very well over the last century and if it is not updated, it will end in disaster for the human race. We have to have a code in place just to live, but the old one will not do. The problem for this twenty-first century is to figure out a new code for our society. Our discussion is getting us closer to building that code.

What has been discussed in this chapter is a quick and simplified summary of what Western societies did in terms of writing and re-writing their code for a few of their early recorded centuries. And it’s worth inserting that the summary presented here is admittedly very quick and simplified. There is a strong case to be made for the claim that the Renaissance began much earlier than the mid-1400s. More like the mid-1000s.^4. But most historians agree that the West for several centuries after the fall of Rome in the West was weak, and life was miserable for nearly all the people. Then, as the breakthroughs of science began to happen, the West began to surge ahead of the rest of the cultures of those times in economic and military power. It has continued to do so right into our times. A lead which all the signs indicate is now, in the 2020s, coming to an end.

What has also been shown along the way is that values endure over generations if and only if they work, i.e. they create nations that function efficiently in physical reality over the long haul.

The nations of the West took a thousand years to integrate Christian tolerance with Greek abstract thought and Roman practicality, but once Western nations learned to see commerce, Science, and exploration as ways of serving God, during the Renaissance, material progress came. Renaissance values worked. ("Do practical things that glorify God. Then, He loves you.") Western culture surged, in commerce, technology, and conquest, ahead of all other cultures.

But the hybrid moral code that led to the success of the West, fell out of touch with the wealth and power it had enabled the people of the West to acquire. The ways in which the West’s material progress outstripped its moral progress will be dealt with later in this book. For now, let’s just follow the evidence – what has happened in the West since the Renaissance. Once we have described what happened and why, i.e. once we have a model of cultural evolution in our minds, then we can go on to design a better code to teach to our children in these times.

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1999), pp. 16–19.

2. Matthew Fox, The Accessible Hegel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005).

3. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776; Project Gutenberg).

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.html.

4. Dana B. Durand, Nicole Oresme and the Mediaeval Origins of Modern Science, article (journals.uchicago.edu)

 

                                         Chapter 15.                   (continued) 

Thus, in Western history, the next important worldview is the Roman one. Operating under it, Romans became much less cerebral than the Athenians, more practical, focused on physical effectiveness and power, and less interested in ideas for their own sake. Among many of the early Romans, this feeling often expressed itself in a hatred of all things Greek. The truth was that though they didn’t like to admit it, the Romans borrowed a lot from the Greeks, especially in art and in scientific knowledge. Greek science and geometry enabled the building of the engineering marvels the Romans constructed. But the Romans didn’t discuss whether there were pure forms beyond this world (as Plato did).

In their heyday, the Romans no longer feared the gods in the way the ancient Greeks or the Romans’ own ancestors once had. As the Republic faded and the Empire took over, the Romans turned so far from Greek-style abstract thinking that they lost much of the Athenian capacity for abstract things – philosophical speculation, pure geometry, and flights of imagination. 

The Romans built their state on abstract political principles, values, and behaviors, similar to the Athenians, but like the Spartans, they loved far more the real-world results and the physical power some ideas could lead them to. They cared little for speculation about “the one and the many” or where parallel lines meet. Those were Athenian mind games that, to the Romans, were silly. It is also worth mentioning that the early Romans’ ideals being political, rather than philosophical, meant that they dearly loved their city, and its mode of governance. They believed Rome had been picked by the gods for a special destiny. (Their ideas about their country and themselves were similar to what some Americans today call “American exceptionalism”.)

         

       Pont du Gard in France (Roman aqueduct built in the first century A.D.)                       

                     (credit: Benh LIEU SONG, via Wikimedia Commons)                     

   

                             

It’s tempting to see Roman culture as a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and the Spartans. This would be an example of Hegel’s “dialectic”: one way of thinking – thesis – along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows, and then an opposite way of thinking – antithesis – rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way. The two interact, struggle, then meld into a synthesis, which is not a compromise because it is a new, coherent way with a character of its own. Thesis, anti-thesis, then synthesis. That’s Hegel. ²

The people born into the new way are not aware they are using some elements from one worldview and some from another. The new way is simply their way, and they add ideas to it till it is a seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, over and over, with the system spiralling ever upward toward greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human cultural evolution.

It is tempting. It is a fairly simple model, and with a little stretching it can be made to seem to fit in era after era and country after country in History. But it is too simple. The Roman way of thinking did contain some ideals similar to those of both the Athenians and the Spartans, but we know today that there was much else going on in the thinking and lifestyles of the Romans. Constant experimenting in construction, agriculture, war, medicine, etc.  

The Romans came into power in the ancient world by a culture that was their own, evolved over generations of farmers who had banded together to protect their food, farms, and families. They built a city as a fortress that would enable this goal. The Romans weren’t Atheno-Spartans. They were alien to all Greeks. Like foxes introduced into the Australian environment by Europeans. They were, more accurately, a society that contained some traits like the Athenians, some like the Spartans, and more that were their own. But they were a new experiment coming from outside of the Greek system, one capable of beating every Greek army that came against them. In short, real cultures in History are more complex than Hegel's model. But let’s digress on Hegel for a moment.

What makes more sense is to examine each society’s worldview, values, morés, and behavior patterns and observe how they coordinate to produce a culture and way of life that meets the citizens’ survival needs at the time. To see human cultures like we do species in the natural world with their infinite numbers of variations and ways of surviving, and unpredictable arrivals and departures. In order to survive, species change their anatomies, physiologies, programmed behavior, etc. Cultural evolution uses analogous devices. Under this view, we can learn much more about how human societies really work. Then, maybe, in modern times, we can finally get control of the process. This is our one hope.  

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as neat as Hegel’s model because cultural evolution is more complex than that. Cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution in the biological world, which proceeds by genetic variation and natural selection. The key difference in cultural evolution is that genetic variations have been replaced with memetic variations. Both kinds of variations emerge in ways that aren’t syntheses. Like species changes, cultural changes have emerged in a wide range of ways. They have so far proved more unpredictable than Hegel’s model can account for. But our aim here is to understand cultural evolution in depth, as it works in reality, and to use that knowledge, finally, to prevent war.

Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the dialectal mode that Hegel describes. In the past, events like floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down, or opened up, reams of opportunities. Life forms move into new habitats opportunistically. Life spreads across time and space not in a single path like a chain, but like a bush branching and bifurcating from that primal trunk of a few cells that came alive eons ago. Most branches, by far, get cut off.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But both real animal life and human cultural life are not that neat. Our models of culture, in the meantime, must be grounded in reality, where new challenges and new memes both arise in ways that can’t be foreseen. Surprising variations occur that are radical departures from our past experience.

In every species, genetic evolution has also, over millennia, put in many genes that are dominant, some that are recessive, some genetically inert, and some that are lethal. Memetic/cultural evolution contains analogues for all of these, plus others that are presently beyond all our terms, models, analogies, and metaphors. These we are, nevertheless, going to have to analyze and try to understand. Sociology is a young science.

Examples of lethal genes are ones that used to guarantee at conception that a human born with that gene in his genotype was likely going to die young (e.g. sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis). My position in this book is that there are memes in cultural codes that are lethal memes, analogous to lethal genes. Or, more accurately, they have become lethal as our social environments and meme codes have evolved. For example, patriarchy is, in my view, such a meme. It produces sexism and homophobia. The meme that makes us practice and pass on tribalism is today also such a meme. It makes us act out patterns of behavior called “racism” and “war”. Either we end the tribalism meme, or it will end us. 

But the model explored here can do what we need it to do. It can give us insights into how human cultures and values work. It can enable us to build a rational moral code, one that retains our vigor, but also improves our odds of avoiding disaster, and so, of survival.

In order to do that, i.e. improve our odds, we must learn to do what a Bayesian view of society suggests. Enable (i.e. educate citizens for) decency and sense;  neutralize ignorance and cruelty. Now let’s return to analyzing the Romans.

The Romans had a system that contained more practicality, discipline, and efficiency than the Athenian one. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great engineering sophistication and size by employing some of the knowledge they had learned from the Athenians, some they got from their neighbours, the Tuscans, and some useful ideas that were the Romans’ own. Similarly, in other areas such as agriculture, medicine, law, and war, by memetic experimenting and compromise, the Romans got practical results unmatched in their times.

 

            

                           Etruscan scenes; tomb painting in Tarquinia, Italy

                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

In addition, it is worth repeating that the Roman Republic, cruel as it could be to its enemies, was dearly loved by Romans. They were citizens of a democracy. They were a family. They truly thought that they deserved to rule the world because there had never been any state like Rome. It was specially gifted and destined, chosen by the gods. State religion said so. The Aeneid, their national epic, said so. Thus, the Romans’ worldview assigned to them the most important role in the history of the world. For generations, the Romans knew by their foundational worldview that the gods loved Rome.

 

 

                                          Glory days of ancient Rome

             (“Consummation” by Thomas Cole) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

This worldview produced an idealistic patriotism because it produced a state that gave democratic rights to all Roman citizens, or at first all “true” citizens, which meant adult Roman males who owned property. There were aristocratic families, as had been the case in almost all previous states, and these were accustomed to the idea of privilege. But there were also plebeians, and they too were full citizens with rights to vote, run for office, have a fair trial if charged with a crime, etc. These were ideals that existed above any human individuals. How could one not love such a country? What would one not endure for her? Thus, the Romans were capable of Athenian types of political ideals, but largely forgot Plato’s “forms”. Instead of loving “forms”, Romans loved Rome.   

The slave portion of the Roman population gradually grew till it became half of the people of southern Italy, but the Romans viewed this situation as the natural order. This view that superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals and activities, did not originate with the Romans. It had been common centuries before. Even Aristotle defended it at length for reasons similar to those that the Romans subscribed to. They accepted, unconsciously, that their culture was superior. They deserved to be masters of all others.

Then, sadly, later generations of Romans got spoiled. They grew to love luxuries far more than abstract principles and to want more and more of the luxuries. They overtaxed people - by the late Roman Empire, literally to death. “Provincials” and citizens got fed up and began to cheat on their taxes because “everyone did”. The ubiquity of bribed officials made it all worse. 

As the generations passed, Rome declined by degrees into a society built on slaves and worldly pleasures, restrained only by a warrior’s code of loyalty. Patriotic ideals faded. Rome’s collapse also became more probable when its armies ran out of lands to conquer. To the North lay frozen wastes, to the South, deserts, to the East, mountains or more deserts, to the West, endless ocean. They had conquered all that was worth having. The warrior code became superfluous and the citizens sank into cynicism, bribery, envy, and assassinations. 

In short, the cultural code of Rome started to decay. Its remnants, still followed doggedly by fewer and fewer, grew dangerously out of touch with larger forces in their times, many of which had been produced by the Romans’ earlier success. For example, by the late 300’s, nowhere near enough Romans were volunteering for the army. Military service had come to seem naïve. And for the growing numbers of Christians of that era, military service was too worldly, rather than spiritual. So the army had to be filled with foreign mercenaries. As a result, rival tribes learned better ways of making war from the Romans themselves. At the same time, government officials became ever more corrupt. All the while, fewer and fewer in Rome cared. For most of them, their minds were elsewhere, on worldly pleasures or else (for Christians) on heaven.

As the values of the old Roman practicality and love for their country declined, they were replaced not by newer, more practical values, but by Christian belief in the value of the life after death and the trivialness of this earthly one.

Like a computer operating system, a cultural code needs regular updating in order to stay effective in the natural and social environments it must interface with every day. Computer code that doesn’t get updated becomes obsolete as better apps are devised by competing firms. But the consequences for a society whose code falls out of touch with reality are more drastic than those felt by a company when its software no longer competes well in the software market.

By the time the Romans realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late. The Roman Empire got torn apart, especially in the West. The Eastern Empire held together for, arguably, another 800 years. But in the West, the Dark Ages came. Small fiefdoms, constantly at war with their neighbors. Roaming gangs of bandits plundering the areas away from the cities almost at will.

 

 

               

     Late Roman decadence (credit: Thomas Couture, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Note how the decline of the later Romans’ values and their laziness regarding ideals of citizenship and honesty presaged that fall. Note also how we today grasp intuitively the crucial roles ideals play in shaping citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of their state. Ideals shape behavior and behavior determines whether a society rises or falls. We know this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. We grasp implicitly that when the Romans became procrastinating, hypocritical, and corrupt, the collapse of their state became inevitable. (The view originates, mainly, with Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still, arguably, the most respected of all time.³)

But we are not good at articulating our deep understanding of how values/ideals work. The relationship between a society’s ideas/values and its ways of surviving in its physical environment has eluded us for too long. In this era, we must do better if we are to understand ourselves and end war before it ends us.

 

            Chapter 15            Western Worldviews till The Renaissance

 

Every society must work out and articulate a view of the physical universe, a way of seeing the world, a way that then becomes a key part of the system on which the society’s values and culture will be built. This is no minor issue; philosophers may dally over the matter in a theoretical way; real folk have to deal with life. They have to have some code in place that helps them decide, individually and collectively, how to live. Worldview, values, and behaviors form a single system under which each individual is able to make decisions and act so that the whole society can operate, cooperate, and survive in its always-changing environment. Software directs how hardware runs. In real life, the hardware (humans) must run if the society is to deal with reality – to get food, raise kids, avoid lions, heal the sick, etc.  

All societies, in deep ways, know this. Societies have always worked to integrate their worldviews, values, and morés because people everywhere knew implicitly that their worldview was their guide when they were trying to decide whether an act that felt morally right was practicable. Can the act that I believe I should do actually be done? My worldview gives me my answer. No one aims to achieve what she truly believes cannot exist.

This is hard thinking we’re embarking on. We need to get into our best analytic mindset in order to consider the major peaks in the histories of some societies of the past, to see how their worldviews, values, and morés worked: how ideas shape behavior. In short, we now need to get used to thinking in the terms, axioms, premises, and methods of our theory of cultural evolution.

In the scientific study of Moral Philosophy, History is our data bank. From studying History, we get insights into how societies work, and from the insights, we can form models/theories. Then, we also can find in History the evidence against which we may test our theories. Always, it is observable evidence that confirms or disconfirms any theory, including our grand theory of cultural evolution.

It is the history of the Western nations that I know a little about and so it is that I ask: How have some Western societies of the past formed, evolved, and in some cases died out? Let’s take a look at a few.

 

     

                       

   “Saturn devouring one of his children” (Goya) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

For instance, let’s consider the ancient Greeks, the ones who came long before Socrates’ time. They portrayed the universe as an irrational, dangerous place. To them, the gods who ran the universe were capricious, violent, and cruel, a phrase which also described the Greeks’ worldview. Under this view, humans could only cringe fearfully when facing the gods’ testy humors. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, Hades, Athena, Apollo, and the rest were lustful, cruel, and unpredictable. Zeus punished with thunderbolts, Apollo, plagues, Poseidon, earthquakes. The ancient Greeks knew how terribly the gods could punish.

But as individuals experimented with new ways, Greek culture evolved. A few individuals attracted groups of followers who multiplied when their set of new beliefs and ways worked. By the Periclean Age, a few daring Greek plays were showing people how to defy the gods. After all, under their evolving worldview, they had been given the powerful gift of fire by their patron, Prometheus.

As the Greek worldview – with its attached system of values – evolved, it guided them toward a smarter, braver lifestyle. They began trying to explain reality in ways that let people believe they could take effective action, and understand and control at least some events in the world, not always cringe before them. Once their worldview included such possibilities, they began to create action plans that enabled them to cause, hasten, or forestall more and more events in the world. They tried out the action plans. Early forms of maps, mining, cranes, gears, underground water pipes, and roof trusses all came in these times. When some daring ideas worked, more followed. ¹

It is important to also note here, however, that human individuals and groups normally will not attempt any action they think of as “taboo”. The majority of the ancients who happened upon an action that seemed contrary to, or outside of, what in their worldview was appropriate for humans only grew upset and fearful. Whether the action got results or not, the thing the less-daring people wanted to learn was how to avoid putting themselves into that situation again. They sought to avoid it for fear of bringing the gods’ wrath down on them. But taboos got tested now and then when a genius questioned society’s worldview, or even described an alternative. Sadly, he often paid dearly for his audacity by being ostracized or killed. Like Socrates.

Taboos are usually few in number, but they are not things to be toyed with. For example, in Ancient Egypt, if you questioned the custom of burying a dead man with food, sandals, jewels, and gold, or worse yet, if you robbed a tomb of such contents, you could be put to death by any of several means: decapitation, drowning, burning, etc. Every society has at least a few taboos. The existence of taboos only shows how subtle cultural evolution is. Like biological evolution, it contains myriads of nuances and sub-routines. But in spite of all the nuances, the overarching principle is that cultures must evolve or die. Like living species.

                                                                    

                                                              

             

                                                 Euripides, Greek tragic playwright

                                (credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Most changes in a society’s worldview and then in its values and morés happen because of genius individuals. But some evolve more gradually, helped by many lesser geniuses. The Greeks had both kinds of geniuses. By the Golden Age of Athens, these people were offering works that a few centuries earlier would have been unthinkable. Their worldview had evolved to allow for more human freedom. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Euripides, and Pythagoras were produced under a worldview in which humans could conceive of actions that challenged the old beliefs and even the gods. They made later, brilliant men like Archimedes, possible.

The challenge might only rarely succeed, but if it worked, it drew followers. Some of the new beliefs and ways just made life safer and healthier. Better. 

 

 

                                                       

                

                                     Spartan woman giving a shield to her son  

                                  (credit: Le Barbier, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

In the Athenians’ golden era, their neighbors, the Spartans, were evolving a very different society, a perfect military state. The Peloponnesian War (Athens vs. Sparta) became inevitable; Athens lost. A few years later, the Macedonians out-did the Spartans. Then, the Romans, with even better military technologies and more numerous armies, ended the matter by conquering them all.  

In each case, one culture’s worldview, values, and set of behavior patterns – all integrated into a system, was tried against one of that culture's neighbors and proved more vigorous. This cultural evolution kept bringing new human social systems to the top. This whole picture of History is harsh, but real.

Note also how cultural evolution works by variation and selection of memes rather than genes. Roman society got stronger than its adversaries because it was more efficient. This mode of evolution appears tenuous, even shaky, but it is much faster and more responsive to change than is evolution by the genetic mode. We can adapt culturally to changes in climate and grow a new kind of crop to eat because we can watch the change, form concepts, build new mental models of reality, then new action plans, and then implement them. Or new weapons and tactics. Or new ways of curing diseases. We can update our culture rather than our genes. And humans do these things in a generation or two, which does not seem really fast, but it is much faster than evolution by the genetic mode. The memetic mode of evolution is our way, the human way. 

In short, we have been constantly adjusting our cultures – the concepts with which we think, the customs we practice, the values we believe in, and the way we view the world – in order to adapt to our ever-changing environment. We evolve by adjusting the ideas we pass down to our young. Little to none of our evolving and adapting happens via changes to our genes.