Please note: This is very much a work in progress! Please read, enjoy, and then write me some feedback to BG2006 @ whiteworld. com. I'm particularly interested in which parts you find interesting and which parts you find confusing. Both are things I want to know to make this better. Thanks --Roger
The difference between a good discussion and a bad argument often hinges on the understanding of the words being used. A good discussion starts and ends with well understood terms... or, it starts with time spent defining the terms that will be used in the body of the discussion.
I'm going to take some time at the beginning of this book to define some of the important terms I will be using. These terms are ones that I have used often with my friends as we have had discussions over the years. In the process of having those discussions, these terms have become well defined to us. I will share with you the definitions that we have come up with, not because they are the universally correct definitions, but because they are correct within the context of this book.
[A Roger Editorial: In this book we will also have Roger's Editorials. In Roger's Editorials I will talk about things I strongly believe, even though I don't have strong evidence or logic to support that belief. The editorials cover subjects that are peripheral to the main arguments about the human condition, and they really shouldn't be in this book, but they are in because they are spectacularly important to my heart.]
The concepts I'm dealing with here are sometimes subtle. To make them easier to "wrap arms around", I often build a stereotype that I can use as a foundation for further discussion. Here are some of the stereotypes that I have developed to help my own thinking on these issues, and I will use these in this discussion.
The purpose of these stereotypes is make discussion of a subtle concept easier, not to literally explain what is happening.
This first one, Prisoner's Dilemma, is a long definition, but the concept is important and at the heart of much I write about. The others are much shorter and easier.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a concept that can explain how a person will act when faced with a choice that has social ramifications -- the choice the person makes will affect how the person is percieved by other community members.
This concept originated in the Game Theory branch of mathematics, and it is a way of evaluating what action to take when a person is given a choice between two actions that involve another person.
The Hollywood Version of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation is as follows:
Suppose we are watching a movie. It's a movie with a crime scene.
As we watch the movie, two characters in it are about to make a drug deal. The characters have previously agreed on a price, and what they are going to do now is exchange drugs for money.
The exchange is going to take place in a park. But... this park has a vigilant policeman patrolling it, so neither character can examine what he is getting at the time of the exchange. They can simply walk in, exchange briefcases, and walk out. Once they are out of the park, they can look at what they got from their business associate, but if that business associate has done something wrong, he will be long gone and hard to catch up with.
Person A has two briefcases: one filled with money and the other filled with yesterday's newspaper. Person B has two briefcases: one filled with the promised drugs and the other with worthless cornstarch.
A and B will both take one of their suitcases to exchange. The Prisoner's Dilemma is about: Which one they will take?
Some definitions:
If A brings the money briefcase and B brings the drugs briefcase, then they are both Cooperating, and you have a Double Cooperator situation.
Most arrangements that humans make with other familiar and friendly humans are Double Cooperator situations, when viewed in the Prisoner's Dilemma context. When life feels good and life is easy, it's because most of the human-human interactions a person is experiencing are of the double cooperator variety.
In the case of our drug deal, if Person A and Person B know each other well, and they have done this deal many times before, and they plan on doing similar deals many more times in the future, it is very likely that both will do as promised, and the result will be a double cooperator transaction.
If Person A brings the money briefcase and Person B brings the cornstarch briefcase, then you have a Cooperator-Defector situation.
Suppose in the case of our drug deal that Person A is a first-time tourist who has come to Times Square, New York City to "score", and Person B is a long-time Times Square con-artist who preys on tourists. The chances that Person A is going to get drugs from Person B are infinitesimal, which means B will Defect
on this transaction.
A Cooperator-Defector transaction is the heart of most chase movie stories in which someone is "on the run": one person in the transaction didn't do as promised, and gained a really big prize for not doing so. The rest of the movie is about Person A trying to get revenge on Person B for his defection, and B trying to avoid the revenge.
A Cooperator-Defector transaction brings up powerful emotions in most human beings -- it is betrayal -- so it's something that usually happens only once in a relation. If there are further transactions after that, they are either "getting even" transactions, or of the following variety...
If Person A brings the newspaper briefcase and Person B brings the cornstarch briefcase, then you have a Double Defector situation.
In the Double Defector relation, little is risked and little is gained, or lost. Double Defector relations are not hopelessly bad, in fact, they are good enough to be very common. Most legal agreements are double defector agreements: both sides agree to do something, but they have a lot of protection built into the transaction, and that protection lowers the profit, flexibility and speed at which the transaction can take place.
That's the Hollywood version of The Prisoner's Dilemma. Now lets look at some other, more real life, transactions from the point of view of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Notice that when these transactions looked at from within The Prisoner's Dilemma perspective, they make a lot of "common sense" for both participants. This is the advantage the Prisoner's Dilemma perspective offers when we view various aspects of The Human Condition -- people seem rational.
A much more every day example of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation is standing in line.
Standing in a basic, unstructured line is a Double Cooperator situation. You stand in line and you trust that when other people come up they will stand in line behind you... but you watch, just to be sure they do... and you worry a little.
If someone does "cut" the line, they are engaging in Defector behavior, and you have a Cooperator-Defector situation. When you see it happen you may first wonder if the line cutter has a good reason for cutting in front of you -- such as he or she is part of a bigger group that got in line before you did. If they have a good reason, they are still cooperating, and Cooperators, and you stop worrying about them. If you decide he or she doesn't have a good reason for cutting, you decide they are Defectors, and you either yell at them to "go to the back", or you fume quietly and wait for someone else to yell at them. The line cutter has betrayed you, and you want appropriate revenge.
If line cutting happens too often at a particular location, and the people who stand in that line regularly get unhappy with it, then the management will put up stands and ropes to make the line more structured. This is an example of reverting to Double Defector behavior. Double Defector behavior is more expensive and less flexible than Double Cooperator behavior, but people worry less about Defection. Standing in a simple line is easier and more flexible, but people worry less about line cutting when there are ropes and stands put up.
In every day life, falling in love and getting married is a good example of transitioning from the double defector relations of strangers to the double cooperator relations of newlywed husband and wife. Divorce is the reverse process, it's going back to double defector transactions. Divorce is a difficult process because it is hard to avoid making transactions that are thought of as the kind of defector-cooperator transactions that signal betrayal.
The more divorce transactions change to revenge transactions instead of double defector transactions, the more "messy" the divorce is percieved as.
"What evil lurks in the hearts of Men? The Shadow knows!"
So went the opening lines of a radio mystery series of the 1930's. The Good/Evil matrix is another way of explaining people's actions. The Good/Evil matrix (concept) has been around a long time. The Bible story of Cain and Able is based on the Good-Evil matrix. So... how does the Good/Evil Matrix compare with the Prisoner's Dilemma as a way of explaining the actions of people?
Both the Prisoner's Dilemma and Good and Evil try to establish a pattern of action that will be taken by a person when they are given a choice. My experience is that the Good/Evil matrix works pretty well in anticipating what literary characters will do in books and movies, and what real world characters will do when you examine their actions in hind-sight. But it is about as good as coin flipping when it is called upon to say what real world characters will do in the future.
The Good/Evil matrix is a comfortable matrix to think about actions in, but it is poor at predicting the future because very few people wake up the morning, yawn and stretch a bit, then think, "What a fine day to do evil!" ie., there are very few people in the world who define their own actions as evil. "Evil" is the label put upon those who lost in some contest with a "good" person, and who scared the good people a lot before he or she lost.
The Cooperator/Defector matrix, on the other hand, is tied to risk and reward: "What is my risk for taking a certain action? What is my reward? What is the other person involved likely to do?" This makes it much more useful for predicting real world behavior.
There is much talk about the differences in values between Eastern cultures and Western cultures. One way of looking at those differences is through the "prism" of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If the difference is looked at that way, it looks like a difference between making Double Cooperator transactions more secure and making Double Defector transactions more rewarding.
The basic premise in Confucian philosophy is that social relations are hierarchical and should be modeled after good family relations: The King is father to his government, the government is father to the people, and men are fathers to their family. Another way of saying this is that the community is well structured and people know their relations to each other. When people know their relations well, they can trust each other, and engage in mostly double cooperator transactions. From the Prisoner's Dilemma perspective, Eastern thinking is about having a community engage in mostly Double Cooperator relations, and researching and practicing better ways to make that happen.
This goal is true in Eastern thinking, and it's also true in some semi-closed communities. Examples of semi-closed communities which are famous for doing double cooperator transactions are the Mormons of Utah and the diamond traders in Amsterdam. If two strangers meet in Utah, one of the early small talk questions asked by Mormons is, "Are you a Mormon?" To a non-Mormon the question gets mildly annoying, especially when the non-Mormon notices that the answer makes a difference in how the Mormon acts. The full implication of what the Mormon is asking is, "Can I start a Double Cooperator relation with you based on your being part of the Mormon religion and community?"
The challenge in Eastern thinking is how to deal with defection. Some kinds of defection are beneficial to the community, for instance, developing a new art form or a new way to apply technology. But how do you weed out bad defection, such as crime, and keep good defection, such as beneficial innovation? This is the big challenge of Eastern thought systems.
The East is famous in The West for having a person need to "save face" when things go wrong -- famous because it's not something Westerners find a high priority to worry about. The Prisoner's Dilemma interpretation of why this is imporant is that the person needing his or her face saved wants to avoid looking like a defector. If a person gets a repuation as a defector in a community doing mostly double cooperator transactions, that person can't transact any more because they can't be trusted.
[quote from a western philosipher about how men can't be trusted.] The basis for how to conduct human transactions in Western thinking is that man is "base" and can't be trusted. This means that the basic transaction of The West is the double defector transaction. What Westerners do is work on making double defector transactions more efficient.
The famous underpinning of Western success as a civilization is Rule of Law, and the concept that everyone is equal under the eyes of the law. In Prisoner Dilemma terminology this means everyone engages in double defector transactions -- there are no favorites, and everyone is protected.
The famous "checks and balances" of the US Constitution are also based on Double Defection. They are there to keep a defector in the government community from becoming a tyrant and abusing power.
[A Roger Editorial: The Bush Administration's decision after the World Trade Center terrorist event (the 9-11 Event) that the standard American legal system was not strong enough to handle terrorists was a big setback to rule of law and making double defector transactions more efficient. That decision to keep terrorists outside of conventional law continues to poison legal efficiency in America and around the world. It was the poorest of the Bush/Cheney choices springing from the 9-11 Crisis, even poorer than starting the Iraq War.]
When a crime is committed in either Eastern or Western culture it does a lot of damage. As a rule of thumb a crime costs the victim about a hundred times what the criminal gets away with (in value to the criminal). I know this from personal experience: I was visiting Istanbul in 2004 when I got attacked by pickpockets. It was a team effort, and as one person distracted me, another fished around in my left pants pocket. The pickpockets got my passport and my glasses out of my pocket, but they did not get my wallet because it was in a different pocket. The passport and glasses were valueless to them, but the cost to me of replacing them was about $400 and three days of running around to embassys and stores. This kind of reward-to-thief/damage-to-victim ratio is typical, and this is part of why people get so angry when they get robbed.
In Western culture, where double defector relations are the norm, people routinely do a lot to protect themselves from crime. (In the case of my pickpocket attack, my wallet was not in my pants pocket because I knew there was a chance I would get pick pocketed.) As a result the damage done by the criminal act is more quickly recovered from. In Eastern culture, where double cooperator relations are the norm, there is less protection in place, so damage done by crime is greater and recovery is slower.
To sum up:
This is the Prisoner's Dilemma Concept.
It can explain a lot of transactions that occur in nature. It can explain transactions between people, groups of people and even between organisms that can't talk to each other. More on this as we go along.
Evolution is the process of adding slight changes to the design of an organism with each generation. Most of these changes don't work out, and the changes are not passed down to future progeny. Some do, and those are passed down. Many of those that do work, work some times, but not all the time. Many that do work out only work well when linked to other changes. What this means is that as each generation of an organism is born, lives and creates a new generation, a whole lot of subtle experimenting is going on.
To deal with this concept of constant experimenting, I imagine that there's a Mother Nature in Heaven who is sitting over a drafting table. With each generation of organism, she tries small changes. If the changes work, the organism has children who have children. If the changes don't work, no successful children. This is the Mother Nature, Design Engineer concept. With each generation Mom is tweaking the DNA (and anything else that is carrying inheritable properties), and in so doing is making small changes to the organism.
What I further imagine is that Mother Nature thinks about specific problems, one at a time. I will get inside Mom's head and imagine what she is thinking about as she tries to solve a specific problem.
For example, Mother Nature might think, "Mankind needs a better way to communicate over long distances."
She considers and thinks, "Hmm... If I give mankind a deeper voice, the lower frequencies will carry further on hot afternoons. That will help solve the problem. Now... men need this ability more than woman because they are more spread out while they are hunting... so lets evolve men with bigger larynxes... yeah... that seems to be working. Oh, and as a side effect, this becomes another way to distinguish men from women. And, as another side effect, men can address big crowds of people more easily than women." (This latter side effect has no significant meaning... until mankind starts to civilize and politicians use oratory to reach their constituencies.)
This is an example of thinking through a problem using the Mother Nature, Design Engineer concept.
(Let me stress that the Mother Nature, Design Engineer concept is different from real world evolution in a couple of ways. First, real world evolution considers thousands of problems simultaneously, not just one at a time (in computer terms, it is a massively parallel process), and second, many of the solutions proposed by evolution start as simple random changes to genes (in layman terms, it is a massively stupid process).)
One other thing to keep in mind about Mother Nature, Design Engineer: she favors quick and dirty solutions. She's not looking for perfect, she's not looking for elegant, she's looking for sufficient. Elegant design comes about because elegant uses less resource than clunky, so in the long run elegant is a better choice. But if clunky can get the job done, Mother Nature will happily take a clunky solution and use it until a more elegant solution is offered her.
This means that many workable solutions have odd "surprises" attached to them. If the "surprises" don't get in the way of solving the basic problem, or cause too much other grief, the solution is considered satisfactory by Mother Nature, and the person who has that solution built into their DNA has many children who have many children. But... the surprises have a lot to do with what makes the human condition an interesting conversation topic.
Here is an example of how a sufficient design works...
There are about six thousand human languages spoken today, and this is down considerably from the number spoken before writing, global trade and TV started shrinking our world. Not only are there many languages, languages change from generation to generation. All human languages change with time -- even those that are written. One of the most famous examples in English is the famous quote from Shakespear's Romeo and Juliet (written around 1600). In "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" the "wherefore" means "why", "art" means "are", and "thou" means "you". In modern English (of 2000) this sentence would be, "Romeo, Romeo, why are you Romeo?"
Human language an example of sufficient engineering. Human language is not permanent, but it changes slowly enough that grandparents can talk to grandchildren without difficulty. Until writing became well established, this slow rate of change was not only sufficient, it was in practice no different from being permanent... except that the world was filled with thousands of languages, not one.
The surprise advantage to this mutability is the ability of language to adapt to changing circumstances. If humans need eight different words for snow, something to describe a wide-screen TV, or a way of talking about a new activity such as spreadsheeting, human language can accomidate quickly and easily. The disadvantage is that a well-educated, well-traveled person must devote lots of learning resource to becoming multi-lingual.
Language's semi-permanentness is an example of sufficient design with a surprise benefit.
When humans are transitioning from children to adults they become sexually mature. This happens during the teenage years. But, while teenagers can have children, they are usually not ready to raise them, being ready to raise children comes a few years later. So, Mother Nature's Challenge is, "How do I find a way to give newly maturing teenagers a full set of sexual desires, but not have them start doing sex?"
One way of doing that is to have those teenagers look seriously diseased. Disease is a strong signal that someone is not desirable. Viola... acne: it solves a vexing social problem by making it easier for teenagers to delay sex for a few years. It is an example of a sufficient solution.
The Generic Mammal does not exist any more than Mother Nature, Design Engineer exists. I use the concept when I want to talk about how mankind is similar to or different from other mammals. Likewise, I use the concept of Generic Primate when I want to talk about how mankind is similar to or different from other primates.
I envision the Generic Mammal as dog-like, deer-like or rat-like -- four footed, with a medium-size mammal brain and average mammal traits. I envision the Generic Primate as a blend of gorilla, chimpanzee and human. Generic Mammals tend to come up when I'm talking about body shape and functions, and Generic Primates tend to come up when I'm talking about thinking and community traits.
In both cases I will discuss more of what I mean by a Generic when I talk about it in specific discussions.
Modern humans appeared about 20,000 years ago as the Earth has entered the warming cycle we now call the [Modern] Interglacial period. At the start of this period and through most of it humans have lived as Stone Age Humans. They have been hunter-gatherers and made tools of stone, wood and bone.
About five thousand years ago the human lifestyle began a dramatic change as writing and agriculture were invented and spread. This is the beginning of the Historic Age (as in... writing down history).
About three hundred years ago the Industrial Revolution began in Western Europe. Once again mankind's environment changed dramatically. And, in roughly 2000, the Information Age began, which began yet another dramatic shift in mankind's environment.
These are the major eras of men I will talk about and contrast. Our genes are currently well adapted to Stone Age conditions, but we have been stressing that gene mix (changing it in specific directions) ever since we started becoming agriculturalized. Industrialization started pushing the gene mix in a new direction, and Information Age living will push in yet another new direction.
Instead of talking about changes over the years, lets talk about these changes using another time scale: the generational time scale. A new generation of humans comes roughly every twenty years. This means that Stone Age Man appeared roughly a thousand generations ago. A thousand generations is plenty of time to bring a genotype (the mix of genes carried by the DNA) into good alignment with a static (unchanging) environment.
Agriculture and Writing first appeared 250 generations ago, and as they became established they changed the optimum genotype. (How they changed it will be talked about a lot in this book) In places such as Nile River, Egypt; Yellow River, China and Euphrates River, Iraq, mankind has had about 250 generations to adapt to an agricultural environment. In places such as central Borneo and the deep Amazon jungle, mankind is still doing pre-agricultural hunting and gathering, so the genotype in these areas has not been stressed by agriculture at all. Instead the genotype has been kept fairly constant by the fairly constant, tropical jungle, hunting-and-gathering environment these people live in.
Likewise, the genotype of Western Europeans started adapting to the Industrial environment only ten generations ago, and the genotypes of newly industrializing India and China are in the first generation of that adaptation. And the world over is at Generation Zero relative to Information Age stress (an example of Information Age stress: driving while listening to a cell phone).
If a scientist wants to breed a version of fruit fly that is better adapted to, say, living in a colder environment, it takes about ten generations for a suite of modifications to emerge and establish in the fruit fly colony. By this measure mankind should be completely adapted to Stone Age conditions, well on his way to adapting to the new stresses of the Agricultural Revolution, just beginning to adapt to the Industrial, and done no adapting to Information Age stresses.
Keep in mind that if those fruit flies are put back in a standard warm environment, they can revert back very quickly. The "warm" genes are not lost, they are saved, but not expressed until they are needed again. This is important because it means that "reversion" if a stress disappears can happen quickly. In humans a gene set that is sensitive to this reversion tendancy is the set used for male cooperation. More on this in the section on The Sacred Masculine.
These are the basic premises of this book:
We have covered some basic definitions and basic concepts, now, lets get on with the story...