Copyright @ 2009
Simple things are easy, unlike life which tends to be complicated and difficult, far too complicated even for easy description. There are some general rules though. One is that simple rules often just don't apply and simple descriptions just aren't going to work. In terms of morality, many things must be described as balances to be looked at with human judgment. I cannot tell you what will work, but I can tell you what will not work and not keeping things in balance will not work. Certainly many of the most important aspects of morality must be addressed as balances. This is to describe some factors from that perspective.
This list is not meant to be complete. It is meant to show patterns and to cover some topics that seem particularly important in terms of survival, but I see that these pretty much all fall into categories of human knowledge that have been well examined. The point here is to consider them in the context that humans may well have to be making choices about artificially selecting genes in their children that will help maintain these critical balances for both the individual and society.
As I said, this is not a complete list. If you want a more complete list is suggest examining the Seven Deadly Sins, The Twenty Virtues, The Ten Commandments, The Five Benedictions, The Three Unforgivable Spells and quite a number of other bodies of topical wisdom. I did like the wisdom in Gracian’s Manual and the Buddhists seem to have accumulated a large number of great ideas for balanced living. Without these balances, there can be no wisdom. I note that pride in particular shows up in lists of sins as well as lists of virtues. All items in lists should be considered from both views.
Courage. Courage is a good example to start with. Courage is necessary to survival for humans, but there is a time to stand one's ground and a time to run. There is a large genetic foundation to this behavior. If there is not a balance, enough courage, enough timidity, then the behavior becomes contra survival. In history, the behavior was a primary strategy of the military caste and extreme courage was basic to the strategy. That kind of courage is now referred to as suicidal. In an technological environment with current weapons, too much courage can just get you killed, as can lack of courage. Not enough courage can cripple a person socially. Not enough courage can cause a person to be exploited. There must be a balance.
Self. Human psychology includes an essential balance related to how a person perceives self. Recent reports say that it is controlled by the parietal node of the brain. It has a strong genetic basis. Think of a priest. Ideally they would need a consciousness that is very sensitive and empathic. A warrior could be in trouble if they had too much empathy. This is a balance that will need to be carefully maintained at a level appropriate to the nature of the society. This is going to be a subtle and important issue.
Development. Often in nature there is a trade off between the speed of development and the reach of development. Chimpanzees develop far quicker than humans, but humans develop farther. Some humans may develop slower, but they may develop farther. We have to be careful looking at what we value or we may select for less development by selecting for it to be more rapid or orderly.
Aggressive. Aggressive behavior is another good example, but is a little more complicated both because the emotional connotations of social aggressiveness and also because a secondary meaning of aggressive is active.
Social dominance is the commonest form of aggression. In its instinctive form, it is part of mammalian reproductive strategy to use violence or threat of violence to dominate reproductive resource. That may be as the females themselves such as a harem or an essential reproductive resource such as a beach.
Between societies, historically (the civil ecology) in humans it has been brought to extremes because of the nature of society. The first Western civilization in Sumeria was run by priests. The grain farmers would have had no reason to be aggressive. Their challenge was the land. Herders were naturally more aggressive because a strategy of raiding other's herds was useful. Their society could aggressively dominate the farming society and exploit their resources (and to a certain extent, their females). It was like a predator and prey relationship almost, but with parasitic characteristics. The aggressive societies could take the resources of the less aggressive societies. As society became more complex, the herders became the military castes and they dominated the other castes of the society.
Within society aggressiveness would be used more for competition for mates and as part of the status of the individual in their society. You would particularly see it in the young as they jostle for social position and before they learn more developed social interactions.
Humans often regulate competition. Aggressive competition and particularly war can be extremely destructive and damaging to the society, so it tends to be regulated. Most law is about resolving differences without using violence. This is a difficult one, because a balance is needed where a person is aggressive enough for it to be an advantage to their personal survival, but not so aggressive that they endanger their society. Because of the huge negatives that have resulted from aggressive strategies and the fact that the benefit is always to a minority, aggression is widely considered immoral. There must be a balance though for a number of reasons, but primarily for self defense. If a society were to use artificial selection and training to remove aggressiveness, the society and the individuals of the society could be dominated by societies and individuals that were aggressive. You might say that there is a better way or another way to deal with aggression, but I haven't found it and I am rather uniquely qualified for the search. It is appropriate to mention here that I am physically massive and powerful, but even with my strength, if I use a less than aggressive strategy I am subject to aggression. Maybe law will one day be able to prevent that, but I am dubious. I do have aggressive instincts though and when they are combined with my physical ability, I can resist most aggression. Aggression must be resisted or accommodated. It cannot be ignored or wished away.
Another issue is that active seems to be associated with aggressive. It can be active in the pursuit of success or a mate, but if humans were to use artificial selection and training to remove aggressive potentials, I think there would be a large risk of losing active potentials that are essential to survival and creativity.
The solution must be three parts. The society must use law to regulate the use of aggression for competition. In genetic and socialization terms, aggression must be kept at a balance. Not too much and not too little, though circumstances might make that level higher than expected. Also, in terms of genetics, the best strategy is rather than removing a trait that might be problematic, add a control to it, perhaps intelligence and moral training. At the same time, social aggressiveness might well be less useful as its purpose is to acquire the most fit mate. It is natural selection in action, but the point is to introduce a new form of genetic selection so the importance of aggressiveness used for competition for superior genes would be less important. After a few generations, beauty would be common enough that it would be far less important as a focal point of competition than it is now. Also, as far as that goes, the process of artificial selection would be far more effective for producing superior genetic offspring than would aggressive competition. For that matter, genetic analysis would be a far superior method for producing genetically complementary mating pools for natural instincts to operate in when selecting a mate.
So it might well end up that aggressiveness as a reproductive trait would become useless. Then again, it might not. This makes some assumptions. The first is that the family will continue be the best way to raise children. This seems likely to be true for a number of important reasons. The next assumption though is that due to the resource requirements of raising children in a technological society, humans will use some form of marriage such that the father is an important part of raising the children. This may not be strictly a monogamy in terms of one man and woman. In many places the custom is for one man to have multiple wives, based on status or economic success. Then perhaps competition for economic resources would translate into reproductive success. This kind of speculation can go on and on to many variations and many extremes, but an overall assumption indicated by trends and supported by logic is that the equality of men and women will increase, which would lead to monogamy of a man and a woman. You can describe where this is not true, including current trends mentioned below where the man is getting disenfranchised, but then you can see how balancing forces will tend to pull it back to a balance where both the man and woman are partners contributing to raising the children.
Perhaps the other side of aggressive is passive. Passive has its place and can even be a useful response to aggression for an individual or society at any particular time, but it cannot be a primary strategy of survival or the passive get replaced by the active.
Masculine and Feminine.
Human nature has been explored and described using both reason and emotion far as long as there has been self awareness. When a woman first thought introspectively, her next though was to ask why men are different. It's not even about sexual orientation. There are very feminine men who are extremely heterosexual and very masculine men that are strongly homosexual. Women are similar. The problem to usefully understanding this is to describe the things that differ between what we label as masculine and feminine. In terms of sex, it's fairly easy, men are attracted to women and women are attracted to men. In terms of mammalian biology, it's also fairly straight forward. Beyond that, good luck. It is important though. Characteristic reproductive strategies are changing due to technology. The usefulness of physical competition is changing for the same reason. Masculine behavior is associated with war and other destructive dominance behaviors. Also and perhaps most importantly, we are seeing males not fitting well into the modern society. The modern world is demanding and rewarding cooperative (feminine) behaviors more than competitive (masculine) behaviors. The reality is that too often the men are found in their coffee houses, hookah bars or pubs complaining about the world and wishing that they had a relevant part in it. This examination of masculine and feminine is oriented around them. There are many aspects to masculine behavior. It must be figured out which connotations are going to help or hinder survival.
Connotations of masculine behavior are said to include honor, risk, respect, lack of compromise and others, but the connotation that will need to be focused on for survival and for masculine principles to integrate into the developing ecology is doing what must be done. That is stoicism in the face of difficulty. That is the best moral strategy that men can use as a philosophical foundation for survival in the future. It is a natural aspect of masculine behavior that must be cultivated genetically, morally and in lore.
Another interesting point is that as men come under similar reproductive constraints as women, their strategies will include more feminine methods. Men would be expected to become more beautiful. Currently (to the best of my knowledge and according to theory) there are proportionally more beautiful women than there are men. It can be hard to say as there seems to be conflicting evidence about how men and women perceive beauty. Both have far more magazines about feminine beauty. No doubt some women value masculine beauty and no doubt some men are beautiful, but are we talking about masculine beauty or feminine beauty? It may be that masculine beauty (whatever that is) becomes largely replaced by feminine beauty or it may be that women will take on some aspects of masculine beauty. It is just something I will try to describe, not solve.
Honesty. Honesty is commonly seen as more than a survival issue because dishonesty is mentioned as a sin in many religions. It seems so simple to say that one must be truthful, always. It doesn't even make sense socially. Yes, a person's social position and reputation will be based on their honesty, but there is obviously more to it than that. Totally honesty is just going to conflict with manners and cause social friction. There are people that will say that they are so honest that they are going to tell the truth no matter how much it might hurt, insult or anger another person, but they are just being mean and rude. A person with a reputation for dishonesty though will not be trusted and can put their society at risk. There is a difference between the two and knowing that balance is part of the complicated education that is called socialization. There are also going to be genetic foundations to it that will need to be kept in a range of balance. The word honesty here could almost certainly be replaced with the word honor, respect, loyalty, pride or a number of other words that name virtues or vices. From weakness can come strength, from strength can come weakness. They are not static and must exist in a balance appropriate to the circumstance.
Newness. Humans love things that are new. That is part of what drives progress, but all newness comes with an energetic cost and a survival risk. Humans love things that are familiar, but this can lead to many forms of stagnation. There is individual variation related to this based on genetics. It needs to be balanced and will become more important as new potentials are developed. Survival is the ultimate form of conservatism, but survival is accomplished by the newness of birth.
Faith. Faith is another good example of balance. Faith seems to be an expression of the most basic survival instinct. When combined with a meme that describes a God, it can become overwhelmingly powerful, powerful enough to conflict with the individual's survival. (Maybe powerful enough to allow for group selection...). A balance is required between faith (a reason not based on reason or fact) and intellect that operates upon facts and reason. Faith is needed, because facts and reason do not make an evolutionary survival instinct. Faith makes a person value moral systems that provide a measure of right and wrong in terms of survival. Without that instinctive value, survival is going to be pretty dicey. Too much of it and it is a problem as well.
Work.
There has been a lot of warfare in history for many reasons, but one of the longest ongoing conflicts has been between farmers and herders. A farmer's life was a hard one of constant labor. While a herder's life was one resembling a predator where they relaxed and conserved energy, while staying alert to the dangers of the natural terrain their animals wandered. Farmers considered them lazy. As the farmer's tools, crops and methods improved, they have been able to farm areas that were formerly only exploitable by tribes that herded sheep, goats, cattle, horses or other domesticated animals that would graze the natural growth of an area and then move on. In ways, this was a foundation of the American Civil War. It is still happening today as new farming techniques and new crops are developed.
This difference in work ethic has become a moral issue in many ways. Sloth or laziness is considered to be one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but there must be a balance and it might not be what is expected. It has been shown that there is a genetic basis to this. Monkeys could be made to be procrastinators or workaholics based on genes controlling dopamine. If we control our genes, how do we achieve a balance conducive to survival. As my brother so delicately puts it, those made chronically unemployed by automation become surely drunks. Humans like all species have always existed in a context of a struggle to survive. What if that struggle is removed by technology and automation? It may be that procrastination and passiveness could be survival traits.
A theme that has been repeatedly visited by speculative fiction writers is the effect of robots and automation on humanity. Possibilities are described ranging from the mundane to the bizarre. In any case, it is most likely that their effect will be very profound. This seems important in a number of cases. The first case to mention would seem to be about the risk of human sloth and subsequent weakness brought on by robotic pampering. Note that two of the most visionary SciFi series, Frank Herbert's Dune and Isaac Asimov's Foundation, were based on that premise. This will eventually become a moral issue. If it does, it will have to be solved by moral knowledge. For many years I wondered how that moral knowledge could be taught without endangering the person's life. Self awareness is created by many things, but requires a behavioral release. In humans that is usually a challenge to survival. I wondered how you could cause this release without overly endangering the person's life. Eventually I figured out that the solution that it might be something that could safely be provided by virtual reality.
Then the question becomes what should humans be doing? This is the old question of why are we here? That question will be considered more at the end of this book.
Humans like newness and entertainment. If we are not occupied by the demands of survival, perhaps we will be distracted by virtual reality. With children making up less of the population, the newness of children could become more widely recognized for its real value.
Life for humans in an artificial habitat could be so labor demanding that it will only be accomplished by workaholics with the help of highly developed mechanisms to make and maintain the habitats.
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