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I have covered this before but with many people wondering why civilization seems to be unraveling It may be worth considering.

There are many criticisms that can be thrown at Richard Dawkins but his popularity as a science writer is useful. Perhaps Dawkins most well known book was the "selfish gene". Although he backed off of the importance of genetics and behavior the book is witness, as was Pinker 's "Blank Slate", to a shift away from the hopeful liberal rhetoric that humans are infinitely malleable.

Science being reductionistic it isn't unreasonable to say the purpose of life is more life. Think what you will of Sigmund Freud, that his methods lacked scientific rigor for example, what he was really doing was pointing out the obvious. What he was saying was that all animals including humans are basically reproductive "machines". For sexually reproducing species that means a lot of what goes on in the brain has it's roots in sex.

If you think that this may only be true at the individual level consider a line from a 16th century poem by Christopher Marlowe, itself taken from one of the oldest written plays "The face that launched a thousand ships". Whatever the real story behind Helen of Troy may be it illustrates how culture and the primitive instincts surrounding sexuality are intertwined.

The question then is what are the primitive instincts that drive human behavior.

First it is important to understand that evolution is conservative. By that I mean that genetic information is largely conserved but expression is altered in speciation. For example you can induce embryonic chicks to grow teeth. The genes responsible are simply altered in their expression from the ancestors of chickens. It would be unreasonable to expect that human instincts or emotions are not similarly conserved.

If our emotions or instincts are conserved it is worth asking for what type of environment are they evolved for.

For most of evolutionary history we existed in an easy but unstable environment. Easy in the sense that our primitive abilities were limited by a lack of culture to environments that "naturally" produced everything we needed. Unstable in the sense that the environment was only modestly altered or controlled. Agriculture changed that dramatically.

In the same way that we don't have culture because we have big brains but rather we have big brains because culture provided the stone tools necessary to sustain a large brain agriculture had a similar effect. We don't have agriculture so much because we have culture but we have culture or civilization because it was necessary to sustain agriculture.

Agriculture imposed civilization.

Civilization can be thought of as nothing more than a harsh but stable environment. By harsh We mean the abandonment of our emotions or instincts that were well suited for easy but unstable environment. Essentially the abandonment of what could be thought of as a fast lifestyle. By stable we mean the imposition on the natural environment of rigid control. As Hunter and gathers we had little to defend a particular spot but crops have to be unerringly defended. That calls a for rigid "military" hierarchy. Additionally because everyone was dependent on competent management of crops there also developed a hierarchy of competence that lead to rigid ownership principles. What civilization requires is the abandonment of instincts in favor of a slow lifestyle.

What a slow lifestyle means can best be illustrated by a single institution, marriage and monogamy. There is no point in denying that not all civilizations have had or have the institution of marriage and monogamy. Even then they have rigid rules concerning sexual behavior that defy emotion. Either way the purpose of rigid rules are to maximize cooperation. Cooperation that is constant and unwavering.

I picked marriage as the institution to illustrate a slow lifestyle because it is perhaps the most violated of institutions. Even the highly religious seem to have trouble not violating their vows. Within the secular community there is no longer any pretense of obligation to marry and young people are not expect to remain virgins until marriage. Even when the institution had wide spread support there was only superficial adherence to the rules with a multitude of private violations.

Like so many other institutions the institution of marriage has ostensibly been promoted as a set of practices that were designed to maximize the happiness of the individual. Very little if any indoctrination was in the form of it's role in social cohesion even amongst the religious. It's cultural evolution is so ancient that it is lost to history. There is little doubt however that it evolved out of necessity being so at odds with instinct. What we do know is that 80 percent of males that ever lived are not represented in the gene pool. That is despite intense instinctual motivation for males to copulate. We also know that females are highly hypergamous. Male competition and female hypergamy probably account for the low genetic representation of males. Patterns in keeping with our closest relatives the chimpanzees and reflect behavior in humans that isn't regulated by social censure.

If marriage is not based on emotions or instincts for permanent pair bonding then it must be an artificial cultural construct. Even if there are pair bonding instincts which support serial monogamy they don't appear to be permanent and seem to need constant conscious updating. Also if they were similar to say birds that do mate for life extra pair copulation would still be common. Marriage by definition is unnaturally strict in regulating sexual behavior. Evidence that it is not instinctually evolved but culturally evolved.

Why marriage would evolve culturally can be partially explained by artificial group selection. Societies that had the institution simply out competed one's that did not. A fast lifestyle that is well suited for natural environments is less suited for complex societies. Some may argue that stone age societies have the institution of marriage proving the theory is in question but it is supported by dimorphism and studies of Amazon stone age tribes. Studies of those tribes show polyamorous sexual activity by women hypothesized to be advantageous since males cannot be certain of paternity and will provide what little material wealth is available more evenly. You also have to keep in mind that those tribes are primitively agricultural. For other historical stone age people you have the question of primitive pastorialism that adds a complication beyond our immediate scope.

What has to be understood is that the level of cooperation that a complex society requires goes beyond what can be achieved by sharing and requires rigid hierarchies of competence, what has come to be known as a meritocracy. Marriage facilitates
this level of cooperation by reducing constant male competition and insuring paternity. It lowers the pain of the hierarchy as well as every male is more or less granted sexual access. Females benefit by being relieved from constant male badgering for sexual access and the protection of their children from higher ranking males and females. It is in biological terms the highest form of K selected behavior.

The decline of the institution of marriage reflects the general trend n society to become more emotionally or instinctually oriented. The assumption being that the satisfaction of instincts will lead to a happier life. That may be true if we lived in the environment we are evolved for but we live in a civilized environment. The fast lifestyle for which we are evolved will general not produce happy outcomes, especially for offspring. While delayed gratification may be pointless in a easy but unstable environment it is essential in a harsh but stable environment.

What the world needs now is not "love" but discipline. The discipline to create an environment in which love is not transitory. The discipline to not focus on the trappings of civilization but the core from which it evolved, agriculture and water management, organized security, excess that allows for specialization, organized transport of products, organized property rights, so on and so forth. Lastly a recognition that labor is not the fountain of wealth. No one works harder than a subsistence farmer but the wealth never accumulates. Wealth comes from intelligent management and innovation.

wolfhnd 8 June 20
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The next thing to understand is the relationship of youth culture to social instability.

As the baby boom generation came of age in the 60s by shear demographics they altered the culture.

As youth have always been canon fodder before the 60s it was assumed that young people would serve their nation in combat. That is not to say that previous wars had been popular. There had been considerable resistance to service in the civil war. Riots in the North and semi autonomous areas set up by draft dodgers in the south attest to how unpopular the war was. There were anti war marches and draft protests leading up to U.S. involvement in WWI. Popular opinion accounts for the late entry of the U.S. into WWII. What made the 60s anti war movement different was it's ethos. The protests were not just against the war in Vietnam but authority itself. In many ways not that different from the current wave of unrest over policing. They are and were in a sense protesting nature.

Biologically speaking young males are expendable. While every female is a valuable reproductive resource a single male can fertilize hundreds of females. The problem of inbreeding is handled by dispersion. Either the young males or females are driven out of the group. In humans I hypothesize that teenage rebellion aids in dispersion. Low social status and sexual over stimulation makes young males unpleasant to be around. Moodiness and self absorption make young females unpleasant to be around. No amount of socialization seems able to completely suppress these predispositions.

While the above patterns are common to our closest relatives in humans the social adjustment of youth is compounded by the unnatural nature of civilization. Socialization smooths the edges of conflict in our closest relatives as they mature but the natural environment still preferences a fast lifestyle. In the harsh but stable environment of civilization youthful exuberance and passion has few outlets. For males in particular low social status means acquiring sexual access is going to be difficult. We can see in the phenomenon known as involuntary celibacy that as youth culture has over taken society that female hypergamy has compounded the problem for young males. Statistics show that an unusually promiscuous young female population is having sex with only 20 percent of the male population. Those instincts that once prevented inbreeding have morphed into a life long behavioral pattern. Hypergamy has reached it's ultimate end in which mating is recreational and pair bounding is with the state as a surrogate for relationships. In other words because youth culture is rebellious full socialization never takes place. In the wild a faster lifestyle for youth is a coping mechanism for low status but in a civilization it is a disaster.

You can extend the above discussion of sexuality to all aspects of life. Lack of socialization doesn't just encourage females to bound with the state but it encourages dependency in other areas. Our natural environment being easy but unstable the preference of a youth culture, already inclined towards a fast lifestyle, is to recreate that environment in the civilization. The inclination is for everything to be free as it is in the natural state. Stability be damned.

Here again male and female instincts play a role. Females being more concerned with distribution to their offspring than production will view every problem as a distribution problem. Males isolated by lack of hope of gaining social status and thus mates will lose interest in production. If every problem was an infant that needed protecting the system we have created to restore the natural easy but unstable environment may make sense. Unfortunately many of the "infants" are predators. Even if that were not the case the lack of excess production is a destabilizing force. Civilization requires an excess of necessity to produce the luxury of complex culture.

I'm going to leave it here for now but there are many nuances that need to be considered. The one thing that the post modernists got right is that grand narratives are necessarily misleading.

wolfhnd Level 8 June 22, 2020
0

Very good presentation of the ideas you're exploring.

govols Level 8 June 21, 2020
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I don't quite buy the idea that Egypt was quite "civilization" as leftist professors want us to believe. IT was the cradle of slavery though.

0

A very wise (my opinion) dissertation. The concluding paragraph is unassailable.

0

I read all of that and it is one of the coldest most dispassionate things I’ve read. That’s a hell of an essay and if it wasn’t copy pasted then I agree that marriage is necessary and what we need is to focus on what makes luxuries possible in the first place. Also, I think staying with one partner might have also served the purpose of helping a new mother care for the baby.

The hypothesis of serial monogamy seems plausible but in small groups as I mentioned parental uncertainty may actually be beneficial.

4

Selection of the fittest? Our society seems to be more of an "artificial selection" at best. Selecting not necessarily the fittest of the human species, but artificially selecting those that would otherwise cease to exist if left alone, without government subsidies. It's more akin to that, or adaptation to an "altered environment" which has not necessarily selected for the 'fittest' of the gene pool.

We are not talking about individual selection but a new kind of mammalian way of life that favors group selection. It is about specialization, defense, environmental alteration, hierarchies of competence, and elaborate cultural transmission.

For sure there are serious draw backs one of which is dysgenics. An artificial environment interferes with individual selection. Medical advances may be able to keep pace. With AI looming the question is how to keep everyone not only physically healthy but employed in ways that makes them feel like an important part of the community.

1

This has been understood for a long time.
However people don’t want to understand it.
This implies personal responsibility and acceptance of how things are.

Hanno Level 8 June 20, 2020

It was "understood" until the middle of the 19th century by almost everyone if not consciously then collectively. By the middle of the 20th century two world wars had pretty much convinced everyone that group selection was a bad idea. I actually agree to some extent but civilization is fundamentally abstract and war could be as well. By that I mean civilization is based on cooperation but cooperative competition in which there are rules and referees makes life not only more interesting but advances civilization.

2

CIVILIZATION is unraveling because we are told and taught not to mention the superior nature of civilization as we might then be supremacist. That is really the distinction between Western culture and many others is that they do not have the fruits of a thousand years of civilization. We cannot mention this as the leftist communist will scream racist to the 7th heaven.
Western culture invented almost all of the technology in this world. But whoa to anyone that states that. Snow people are the inventors of almost everything as they had to struggle against a harsh environment to survive. Sun people had it made with all the fish and fruit they could consume which left plenty of time to sing, dance, loot from neighbor tribes and scream about Westerners coming to their lands to supplement party time for religion to their overall good to live in the coming modern world, which many still seem Incapable of handling.

I wish we would have just let them have their party time and approached the continent of Africa and North America with a Star Trek like prime directive. We should have taken one good look through the spy glass and never touched Africa. Instead, we should have beefed up the European naval military to ensure that they could never enter “our lands”. Instead, we wasted all that energy being busy bodies. At this rate, we will never be space faring, because we care so much about being “virtuous”.

Civilization started in Sumer most likely by people had been pushed there by stronger tribes. The harsh but stable condition between the Tigris and Euphrates essentially created civilization. From there it either through convergent evolution independently or by spread developed in Egypt. All the original civilizations are in sunny areas calling into doubt the winter hypothesis.

Northern Europe is harsh but not particularly stable in terms of weather so I prefer to think that once agriculture was established it creates the harsh but stable environment that requires civilization.

There is a book by Ian Morris "Why the West Rules—For Now" you may find interesting.

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