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This book is about changes in human ecology and in particular survival strategies
or moralities. The changes are happening over time. Some have occured and some changes
are still to come. The first thing that must be described is the moralities
used before the changes started. In ways that is problematic, because the main start of
the recent changes was near 10,000 years ago when agriculture and cities started, but the
most noticable changes such as antibiotics, communication and computers have just occured recently. The biggest change is still to come, but has already started and that is humans
begin more conciously and effectively controlling their own genetic destiny. Different
moral topics must be considered in a number of different ecologies. What hasn't changed much must be looked at closest of all.
This is a list of moral issues that is formed to illustrate a number of issues. It is to
list what are important moral issues and why they are important. It is to examine each
issue in the past, present and future, in terms of changing ecology. This is descriptive, but ends up being informative.
Humans are a social animal that survives based on cooperation.
All the stuff below is nice, but can be checked for presence at the end.
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Morality of the Tribes
The moralities of the tribes were the survival strategies needed for small
isolated groups of families that were part of larger tribes that inhabited regions.
Before agriculture, the basis of human surivival was largely a matter of having
children young while supporting the larger community and competing for status within the
community or tribe. Status gives access to resources, especially reproductive resources.
Having children young was the best way to avoid the largest hazards of primitive life,
disease, accident or starvation. The main problem was raising and socializing children
until they were mature. Stll, life was simpler in the past and there was less knowledge needed for survival.
Reproduction was regulated in a number of ways including what we would call marriage. The father helped in the raising of the young. The family was part of the community and the extended family was the community.
Aggressive competition was regulated. Tribal law generally bans murder and regulates social violence.
The moralities of the tribes were the survival strategies needed for small isolated
groups of families that were part of larger tribes that inhabited regions. Mostly the
strategies they used were fairly simple. Life was simpler, children matured young
and people had children while fairly young.
The first lessons would have been sanitation. After that there was a lot to learn,
but the most complex parts would have been socialization including language. A child
learns the lessons of socialization from birth, how to manipulate their parents and
peers. The basic definition of intelligence is to remember, understand and influence
the other members of one's social group. It is what the human mind is most developed
for. It starts as how one can get their way and how to avoid various attacks that can
come from other memebers of their social group. Another important lesson is the
communication skills necessary for hunting. All the social skills eventually serve
to bring status to the individual. Status is what gets the individual access to
physical and reproductive resources. Those with highest status get the best mates.
That is an example of natural selective breeding practiced by social animals. Status
is why skills like tool making, cooking, individual hunting skills, healing,
gathering, story telling and other skills have value as social skills that enhance
reproductive success.
There would have been some laws. Stealing and fighting would have lowered a persons
status in an environment where cooperation was critical to survival.
Tribes tend to have sexual laws to prevent inbreeding. Inbreeding could have been
quite dangerous in small isolated groups. Often a tribe divides itself into
reproductive moities. One is allowed to mate between moities, but not within them.
This is also critical to the cooperation within the tribe. Relationships within
the tribe would have been based on kinship and would have been responsibel for much
of the social cooperation of the tribe. In many animals, it would not be unusual for
the father to impregnate a daughter. In humans, it would endanger the society by
limiting the potentials for kinship ties.
Now if you hadn't noticed, this topic is anthropology. I hate to talk about anthropology
because it is so contentious. Major new discoveries and views are developed yearly.
As such, I stick to general principles to make some points. This is more about principles of the ecology than it is about facts about anthropology. The following points are more
argueable, but are meant to relate more to the present than the past. The factors examined are resources, disease and child birth
In terms of ecology, some tribes needed to travel a good deal to not use up local
resources, some wouldn't. It was small bands that traveled and colonized the Americas.
Travelling is important. In central Europe, the habitat would have been plentiful
enough that it would be better to try to stay in a limited area. If current evidence is
indicitive, there would likely have been a lot of tribal warfare over resources.
Humans were in different ecologies with different needs.
In terms of disease, since many of the populations were isolated, disease transmission
would have been less of a problem. Still, when diseases did hit, they probably would
have been devestating.
Since it is considered that there is a high mortality rate at birth due to the
increased brain size, in the time before history it would seem likely that there
were tribal rules to prevent impregnation fo females at too young an age. It is hard
to say what rules and rituals were developed for that reason.
Overall, it must be assumed that moral systems were limited both by knowledge and
transmission of knowledge, still there would have been rules. Presumably they would
be similar to what we see in tribes that have been studied. Really the point is
that there were survival strategies, some of which would have been universal and
some of which would have been specific to local environmental factors.
Moralities of the Stratified Civil Society
Just the title of this shows the problem. Stratified indicates that the society was
composed of different groups living together, often with different moral rules.
Calling it a civil society just describes what was developing. Until the 20th century,
most humans lived in rural areas. It is almost impossible to describe all the
strategies used by all the many different peoples to survive in so many different
places. By looking at what was common though, should show what was most important.
It would be expected that the survival strategies of people in the time of the civil,
stratified society would be very similar to the strategies of the tribes, but with
specific changes and additions, particularly adaptations to there being multiple tribes
living together.
Morality in the Future
Child raising is what we were designed for. There is
potentially lots more to life, but it is surprising how much
children can offer. As already said, if it does not include
happiness, it is not worth it.
Having children is the only chance for physical immortality
that we have.
We are designed to be creative. There is no creativity
greater than children. We like challenges and stimulation, there
are few greater than educating and socializing a child.
Humans survive and operate out of love. Love is a facet of
the family. The greatest real happiness comes from love.
If a person grows old without having children, unfulfilled
instincts will make them regret it. Though families do not insure
against it, lack of family almost guarantees loneliness.
We have the potential to become something great.
Take care of oneself. Take care of ones family. To take care
of others and ones society, is to take care of oneself.
This is the core of morality, the lessons of family.
We need more than that. So
starting with sanitation, what are the beliefs, values,
techniques and understandings that will help us survive our
transition to a more mature specie and then continued survival?
The discussion is in the context of existent moral systems
embodied by religions, law, humanistic beliefs and whatever can
be dug up. Elements of the ecological system will include clean
resource characteristics, artificial selection, computers,
techniques, wisdom and hopefully, some love, hope and happiness.
As said before, the potential for humans is amazing.
Future moral systems, as opposed to older systems and
reflecting a more complex world, will have to teach increased
understanding of the requirements of survival, rather than just a
time tested formula. Fundamentalist moral systems do not respond
adequately to diverse and changing circumstances. A tribal moral
system will include moral laws such as rituals for washing and
prescriptions for how often. Future moral systems will have to
describe what the objective of sanitation is as well as possible
techniques or standards.
The body of any moral system is the family, marriage and
childraising. For any moral system, the first rule must be to
carefully raise and teach the children. Moral law comes from
that. The moral laws of religions were never meant to benefit
gods, they are for the preservation of peoples.
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In the past it was a function of religion to regulate the
genetics of the population, primarily by promoting breeding out
of the family, but within the group. It seems unlikely that
religion will act the same way, because we are genetically
different from what we were and also we are much less isolated.
Humans will develop a knowledge and a conciosness of their
genetic nature and its consequences. Artificial selection
would replace this function of religion.
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We are going to have to learn and teach the importance of
children. Our instincts prompt us to sex, the consequence of
which is families. Birth control has removed that consequence.
Our instinct fails at that point. It does not seem likely or
desirable to fore go the benefits of birth control, so moral
lessons must be learned that will compensate for this changed
factor. Now it becomes necessary to teach having children as a
moral lesson. We must teach the choice to have families.
Pregnancy stimulates development of parental behaviors,
especially in women. Men tend to develop parental behavior for
other reasons corresponding to the reasons for monogamy. It is
one of the functions of religion to teach family values, but it
is the primary function of the family. Some cultures already do,
but many groups and families do not strongly teach this. It used
to take care of itself. It is surprising, because it is new, but
now a child must be taught that there is a reason to have
children.
Childraising is a much more complex and involved project
than it used to be. Good child raising techniques are not widely
known, taught or even agreed upon, but they are certainly widely
neglected. It must be taught to children that raising a family is
difficult, demanding and partly technical. It is also simple.
Often, it takes maturity for an individual to understand the
value of family, especially when the living is easy. The
importance of family must be taught early.
Since childraising is almost as difficult as it is
valuable, both education and policy must be formed as an aid. To
call a society wealthy is to describe something of the values of
the society. In a diverse, stimulating, high energy society,
there are many values to compete with the family values that are
the basis of all societies. We will learn more about child
development and requirement. Machines will be able to greatly aid
the teacher by providing individually paced, diverse and patient
instruction. At the core of what morality is about, we will have
to learn more about what is necessary for any family form to
survive, prosper, improve and continue. We will have to learn and
develop useful forms of communities.
Humans survive based on the use of learned survival strategies as opposed to instincts. That is the mark of a human. These learned survival strategies are called moralities.
Morality is like food in many ways. How it is done may change, but the result never does. How one gets food may change, but the need and use never does. There are many moral systems, but their result is the same. There are many ways to do it, but the result of a moral system is a method to survive and raise children that can survive. So what is variable about moral systems and what is not? A moral system is the method and will to survive. How to survive changes, characteristics of survival do not. A moral system must allow for the raising of children such that they will be able to raise their own children in turn.
This book started out as an examination of changing human ecologies. Human ecology has been undergoing rapid changes since the advent of big game hunting. This examination has always been stated in the context of what it would take for humans to create another relatively stable ecology. If we cannot find a long term niche, we will not survive. This book is written to produce a way of examining and evaulating factors of human existence as elements that can be evaluated by the methods of science. In general, the science used was ecology. Because of the importance of survival strategies to human surival though, the primary goal of this book becomes an examination of human survival strategies. A method and will to survive is a morality. So this is to examine moralities as part of the science of ecology. The characteristics of human survival strategies are qualitatively different than the strategies of other organisms examined by biology. Humans have diverged and will continue to diverge from the characteristic patterns of the rest of the animal kingdom, just as plants and animals diverge. As suggested, these changes largely relate to intelligence and tool use. Call this study what you like, perhaps moralology. The difficulty of creating a study of morality is the complexity of the study that includes energetics, genetics, behaviors, beliefs, technology, disease and a good dollop of other factors, all observed in an unavoidably subjective context.
The main vehicle of morality in the past has been religion. Moralities have generally been husbanded and taught by religions. Though religions vary in their moral systems, the utilization of religion has almost been universal to human groups. Morality is another function of religion that may or may not be changed to a science. Rarely can religion look forward, a science can. Religion is not very analytic, but it is conservative and has other advantages in the context of an institution that manages morality.
Life appeared on earth shortly after it started to solidify. The appearence of organismal life took another 500 million years. The creation of cooperation is difficult. Much of the basis of human survival strategy is based on cooperation. Any human moral system considers how individuals interact. All human tribes conciously promote regulated levels and systems of cooperation and competition. The more advanced the moral system, the more the individual is aware of the effects of their actions, on their various different social groups.
A moral system refers to a learned survival strategy. Some
other species of animals used learned behaviors, but they are
qualitatively different from those used by humans.
An animals survival strategy does not usually consider the
effect of its actions in relation to other individuals. When it
does, we call that social behavior. Much of the basis of human
survival strategy is based on cooperation. Any human moral system
considers how individuals interact. All human tribes conciously
promote regulated levels and systems of cooperation and
competition. The more advanced the moral system, the more the
individual is aware of the effects of their actions, on their
various different social groups.
Life appeared on earth shortly after it started to solidify.
The appearence of organismal life took another 500 million years.
The creation of cooperation is difficult. compare to bees
Plato's model of society
could disease force us into small populations?
First lesson is sanitation
Institutions - summery
Institutions are created for a purpose. That purose should be
kept in a charter of some kind, because the tendency of all
institutions is for their purpose to become their self
perpetuation. That is natural and it is fine, but it is even a
bit more important that they never forget their purpose.
The functions of the occupational (caste) and industrial
parts of the society must be understood. Their importance to the
society must be also understood.
The importance and function of the family must not be forgotten.
Contracts are important by how they aid cooperation.
Oragnization -
Morality -
The primary occupation of any society must be child raising.
Morality refers to the individual, family and community.
The individual must develop their potentials and understand
their place in the world.
The family must raise children oand provide the physical and
emotional needs of the family.
Global Village concept
In the computer industry is a concept called the Global
Village. It is the idea that eventually computer connectivity
could become so effective and common, that the world would be
like one village - when it comes to communication. To convert
this to a social concept, it could be referred to as a global
community. Villages have communities.
An examination of moralities as collections of memes, should allow for the other primary objective of this book, which is to describe any morality well enough to show what parts are based on reason and logic and what parts are based on authority and precedence. This could do a lot towards allowing the intentional development of new memes that an individual could add to their own morality. This is the primary way by which humans adapt to their environment. It would also allow a person to examine their morality and know better what it means and how it could be improved. It would help any individual that has trouble using a morality without completely understanding it. The reasons of authority and precidence are not enough for them to embrace and use a morality. They must also have an understanding of the reason and logic of the morality. This view of a new moral system should look quite similar to the moral systems husbanded by religions at present. This is for a few reasons. The first is that present moral systems work pretty darn good at present. The second and third reasons are related. The second reason is that we do not yet have much to work with in developing new moral survival strategies. The third reason is that there is inherently extreme risk to humans modifying our moral system. The risk verses gain equation is just way to high to promote a lot of change without compelling reasons. Just because something appears like a good idea, it will still have to be judged conservatively, over time, to avoid the potential for dire consequences. On the other hand, change is occurring at an accelerating rate. That, population growth, communication, medicine and other factors are going to promote changes that are going to encroach on the effectiveness and practicality of our current moral systems. A moral view based on reason and biology has an ability to use the various tools of science to analyze different models of morality and to look forward for new models. The current precedence based moral systems must be analyzed in terms that can be compared to a biological analysis of morality. This must be the starting point of creating a biological model of morality. Any future models of morality must be based on past models. This is a feature of the conservatism of biology. Survival is the ultimate expression of conservatism.
What would one call an inheritable behavior to use a learned survival strategy or moral system? This behavior is what is called faith. It is usually associated with religion, because religion is what has perpetuated the moral systems. Yet many people have faith without religion and many that have religion have no faith. As a survival instinct, faith is hope and the belief in the value of self, family, community and the continuity that is represented by survival. Why do we struggle to grow, survive and raise children. It is faith. Many people have difficulty dealing with religion, but they do not ignore it. Even though religion is unusable to them and seems corrupted, their faith is what makes it an issue that is not to be ignored.
Enough said, here is a view of what a stable ecology might look like, that is understood to be so rudimentry as to only qualify as a model. This is a model that took a lot of thought.