Destructive Ideas

Humans are unique among all species on Earth in that we can create and propagate destructive ideas. Richard Dawkins referred to these ideas as memes.

With the advent of intensive agriculture and hierarchical based societies, humans lost one other important social device -- a filter for bad ideas.

In a small tribal society, the group was small enough that everyone knew its members by name. Small groups, by their nature, are not very private places. People tend to know everyone else's business. This meant that bad ideas did not have fertile ground to develop in.

In addition, the tribe had a number of social technologies that reigned in antisocial behavior. These social technologies developed as a method of maintaining social harmony for the benefit of the tribe.

What this meant, in practice, is that new ideas would need to gain the approval of (at least) the majority of the tribe before being adopted. Individuals who persisted in acting on their bad ideas without tribal approval would risk approbation, censure, or expulsion.

Perhaps an example will better illustrate this idea.

(Note: This is a metaphor based on a bad stereotype, but I'm at a loss as to how and explain the concept better. I apologize in advance!)

Let's say that Chuck believes that a spirit spoke to him, and told Chuck that the lands East of the stream belonged to him. The tribe discusses this idea. Although many tribal members have areas that are sacred to them, no one has ever been granted ownership before. They talk it over, laugh a bit amongst themselves, and tell Chuck "Sorry, the land belongs to the spirits of the earth, we merely borrow parts of it from time to time."

Chuck considers this, but insists that the hunting blind behind the old Willow is very sacred to him. He asks that this parcel, at least, be granted to him. He promises to provide the tribe with the boon of his exclusivity -- more meat, furs, and fall blueberries.

The tribe reconsiders, and once again declines to grant this property to Chuck. The goal of the tribe is not to maximize production, but to maintain social harmony. The precedent of setting aside pieces of land for members of the tribe would be inharmonious.

When humans adopted hierarchical decisionmaking, the criteria for making these sorts of decisions changed. The guy in charge (it was usually a man) was interested in maintaining social harmony, but in a civilization social harmony could also be maintained with physical technologies. In other words -- while wise Solomon-like decisions could maintain social cohesion, an extra loaf of bread per week could also suffice to keep people happy. This, increasing production had the added benefit of expanding his power, More food = more soldiers = more land = a larger pyramid for him to control.

If Chuck came to such a leader and asked for the same privilege, it may well have been granted.

(This scenario I've just described, where land once held in the common is turned over to an individual in exchange for a promise for increased production -- this is the foundational basis of our private property system.

Much of the land in the Western United States was taken from the native population and given away to anyone who could stake a claim, work it for seven years, and 'improve' the property. To this day, private land is held in stewardship by the individual but ultimately belongs to the state. An individual who fails to pays property taxes will have their land taken back by the government, as the individual is no longer fulfilling their tacit promise to increase the productivity of their land. The same thing may happen if a wealthy developer wants to turn your home into a shopping mall, and increase the productivity of the land. Your land can be taken away if you don't develop it to the satisfaction of the government).

Today, our civilization is rife with bad and inharmonious ideas. We have developed a series of complex laws to reign them in. These laws have met with only moderate success, controlling the worst excesses of modern hyperindividualism.

We are left with an vexing problem, then. If bad ideas can be developed in the dark and are not properly filtered before they cause disharmony, then how can we trust which ideas are sound?

Human civilizations have developed a number of ways to separate fact from fiction, and valid ideas from invalid ones. We call these tools 'philosophy', 'religion' and 'science'. These tools all provide a paradigm which can be used to filter out information and ideas. These tools, however, are contradictory and disharmonious.

This is a massive understatement!

The creation of new paradigms, which filter incoming information and largely define a person's view of the world, is subject to few restrictions. Paradigms are often mutually incompatible and impossible to reconcile.

How do Christians and Muslims resolve who the true prophet is, Jesus or Mohammed?

How does a community create harmony between a logging company and environmentalists, who each have very different definitions of property and the common good?

Fully describing the this issue is beyond the scope of this post. However, the validity of these kinds of moral decisions is relevant to the topics being explored on this blog.

We face an ecological crisis of staggering scale and import. Simply asking people nicely to stop breeding, stripping the tops off of mountains and dumping toxins into the groundwater is not effective. Since we lack a time-tested method of determining whether an action is necessary to maintain social and ecological harmony, we run the risk of introducing another bad idea and making things worse.

Since providing an example worked so spectacularly the first time (*cough*), let me try it again.

A new group of people, let's call them 'pale men who smell like cheese', show up one day and begin killing tribal members who come anywhere near the old Willow tree. They are very well-armed and pose a significant challenge to the tribe. The tribe discusses this, then decides to move along to their winter camp early. The pale men may be gone by next spring.

When they move to the winter camp, the smelly men follow and make it clear through their actions that they are not going to settle for anything less than all of the tribe's land. The tribe discusses this at great length, with loud raucous debates. They decide to fight and attempt to kill as many smelly cheese men as they can to drive them off. The tribe's decision to go to war was based on a system of decisionmaking that was developed over several generations, and was debated among equal members of a fully egalitarian society.

By contrast, modern people lack many of these social technologies. Decisions are made in small groups with little history together (certainly not several generations worth), by people who are used to acceding to authority, and who have been raised by a culture populated with inharmonious moral values.

When the question arises, "What actions are legitimate to stop a spectacularly bad idea from damaging our tribe?", we do not have adequate tools to make these decisions with much confidence or certainty. We are further limited by the disturbing truth that some of the most vile periods in human history have come about because a small group of people decided that they knew the right way to live better than anyone else.

We no longer have the long tail of several generations of ancestors speaking to us and guiding us. They were a barrier to progress and were removed from the conversation.