Tuesday, March 29, 2022

The Moral Directives Derivable from the Beyondist Goal: 1. Among Individuals in a Community - - Beyondism Summary Chapter 4

 (1) The aim of the present chapter has been to explore the derivation of within-group moral values - the values necessary to group maintenance and progress - within the framework of the evolutionary position stated in the previous chapter. Any group will have certain values that are shared with all groups - called common maintenance values - and others which may be called unique community values - peculiar to itself. The former are concerned simply with keeping any group functional as a group. They are the non-relativistic moral values deducible from the fixed goal of group survival. The latter are concerned with advancing the group in the special experimental direction it is choosing to explore. One should guard, however, against the mistake of conceiving the latter as "relativistic ethics" in the currently used sense of subjective values, culturally local and unrelated to general principles. For the unique parts of the within-group values are still deducible from an attachment to the goal of human evolution. They vary only as the bearings of different ships headed for the same port vary. The human need for ultimate constancy is not denied by a scientific ethics.

(2) Since the desired laws of inter-individual behavior are those which insure greatest group viability, the necessary first step, before social scientists can set out empirically to discover the laws which maximize this criterion, is to define and illuminate the criterion. Some five largely independently determinable criterion measures are suggested (page 115) for evaluating groups on a continuum between moribund, unlikely-to-survive, and highly viable cultures.

(3) The present level of technical development of the social sciences is pathetically inadequate for understanding far-reaching cause and effect relations between individual behavior and group survival. They are thus at present incapable of determining in anything but a most approximate manner the requisite laws of individual moral behavior for ensuring high viability. Nevertheless, there would probably be a reasonable adequate consensus from experts in the existing, non-quantitative social sciences, notably history, that already natural selection among groups, i.e., a prolonged practical application of this criterion of group viability, has been the means of generating and maintaining of tolerably effective interindividual moral rules [15]. Even at the animal level (see Lorenz, 1966; Tinbergen, 1959; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970) the behavior in humans that is in our sense ethical is paralleled at an instinctual level. In man, prior to the present Beyondist plan to recognize and derive by research ethical laws from group functioning, moral values came by "divine" revelation bequeathed to inspired religious leaders, such as Moses, Buddha, Mohammed and Christ. A very large number of such inspirations must have occurred, and those that have survived have been shaped by further trial and error, followed by natural selection maintaining the groups with more felicitously adaptive belief systems. Both by study of these animal and early historical adjustments and by simple inference along Beyondist lines it is obvious that the central teaching on within-group, inter-individual relations is the importance of love and treating one's neighbor as oneself. The innate loneliness of the individual is bequeathed him as a guarantee that he will seek the oceanic experience of love for all his fellows - the subjective experience of the objective truth that only the group can be immortal. The fact that science seeks ethical "rules" need not and must not blind it to the fact that these are only a guiding framework and that the breeding and teaching of spontaneous and positive love, sensitivity and altruistic enterprise is also a defined requirement of the group criterion.

(4) The insightful and precise relating of the behavior of individuals to the performance of the group belongs to the future, and depends on genius in the development of experimental and quantitative social psychology. Two basic existing approaches-one with small and one with large groups - are briefly set out here which aim at (a) a precise and structurally meaningful quantification of a group or its culture pattern, and (b) an attempt to relate the patterns to the characteristics of population behavior and role structure. In small group dynamics experiments dimensions called morale of leadership and morale of congeniality appear in the area of interest here. In large, national cultural groups, out of a dozen descriptive factorially independent dimensions, three seem particularly relevant here: cultural pressure, affluence-education, and group morality level. Each is expressed in diverse measurable group behaviors and the measures permit drawing a syntality profile by which a culture's pattern affiliation can be calculated. The synergy of a group is defined as the dynamic part of this syntality.

(5) Although our concern cannot extend here to the technicalities of social psychology a gross statement of the core model is relevant to other arguments. We operate with a two-stage model in which, first, the syntality dimension vector, S, is considered derivable from population characteristics, P, and the group structure and resources, R, thus:




(4.1 above)


and the viability (survival potential) of the group is in turn estimated from the syntality, S, and the environmental conditions (implicit in b values) expressed in the simplest linear, additive model thus:


(4.3)

(See specification equation on page 135.)
In as much as the k factors in syntality, S, include also such endowments as natural resources and factors influencing survival which are not morality factors, survival is not wholly determined by internal morality (measured in population behavior, P) and cannot be taken as an estimate of survival without partialling out statistically the scores on the other factors, such as ability traits in the population, generous natural resources (in R), etc.


(6) A requirement which Beyondism brings out clearly, and which is neglected by existing within-group ethical systems, is that behavior affecting the genetic make-up of the group comes quite as much under moral law as behavior affecting the culture. Genetic make-up can be changed in a culturo-genetic positive system simply by letting the culture select for closer genetic adaptation to itself. But it seems desirable also, in the interests of avoiding stagnant equilibrium of encapsulation in the "cultural cocoon," not merely to let culture lead genetics, but to adventure directly in genetic engineering. In most contexts the use of the term race here does not refer to existing races, mainly products of geographical isolation and selection (Coon, 1962a), but to groups carrying new divergent patterns of gene distributions produced by either cultural selection or deliberate genetic creation.

(7) Cultural and genetic inter-group natural selection, as will be more clearly evident in the next chapter, is inherently likely to be more prolonged, vacillating and inefficient than selection among individuals (in a steady environment). If a million years has been necessary to bring some finish to physical man, perhaps three million years of group natural selection will be necessary to develop social man. One of the chief reasons for this is the possibility of within-group, inter-individual parasitism, which is a special form of negative morality, in the parasite, and reduces the
efficiency of inter-group selection. Although a reliable definition of parasitism is subtle, it can be made. An important aim of deriving an objective assessment of the morality of within-group, inter-individual behavior is the efficient elimination of parasitic and criminal behavior. Without this the tragedy of the worst pulling the best down to destruction with it becomes a wasteful, endemic cause of breakdowns in culturoracial experiments.

(8) Both in cultural and genetic advance, the means are (a) production of variability, ie., the trying of new mutations or borrowings, (b) hybridization, i.e., the trying of new combinations, followed by (c) withdrawal for consolidation, and (d) the elimination of faulty varieties that do not aid group survival. The rationalist reformer is quite apt to shut his eyes to the last requirement. But by the fact that more innovations, genetic or cultural, are bad than good, this elimination has to be severe. Science is likely to provide means, for those countries that avail themselves thereof, whereby individual genetic mutations can be more rapidly tried without costly increases in birth and death rates. There is also the possibility of reducing loss by trying out culturo-genetic mutations in small experimental groups. Incidentally, equal importance is given throughout these considerations of evolutionary inferences to cultural and racial effects, but because the latter have been grossly overlooked in'many sociological texts it has been necessary to give somewhat more detailed explanation to them here. In their reciprocal relationship the fact that cultural mutation and selection takes place at an altogether faster tempo points to consequences, not yet closely worked out, in the form of the culture tending to adjust more thoroughly to the genetic possibilities.

(9) Regardless of the means of evaluation of inter-individual, within-group, common and unique, cultural and genetic values, it is, in the light of  Beyondist ethics, the right and duty of each group dedicatedly to pursue its own variant. A rhythm of "hybridization" (cultural and genetic)
and withdrawal-with-consolidation in regard to the new pattern has been and needs to be characteristic of the evolutionary process for groups. However, this is a necessarily slower rhythm for genetic than cultural experiment. Societies are justified, despite supposed "'liberal" arguments, in screening at their borders, in order to maintain the integrity of their own culturo-racial experiment except for deliberately planned hybridizations and borrowings. For this purpose, and to get skilled guidance on both moral and unique cultural values, it is likely that social science research centers for moral cybernetics will be set up in each group, additional to international comparative research centers. But discussion of their relation to existing scientific and government organization is deferred to
Chapter 9.

(10) The explicit and constant reference to group survival as the criterion of morality of individual behavior must not be misunderstood as making the group more "important" than the individual. Individual and group are links in an endless causally interacting chain, each indispensable to the other [16]. It is from the mind of the creative individual, reacting to the situations created by the group, that the group alone draws its capacity
to live and grow.



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