perceptions, prose, programming, poetry, pictures
I’m going to update this post throughout the next ten weeks with new information about moral luck.
It will consist primarily of summarization, although if I find something exceptionally problematic and decide to grapple with it immediately… then I will post a link to my further analysis. (more…)
For what reason is the ideal social unit a group of two? For every man desires a woman, and every woman a man… or, more broadly, every body generally desires a partner. Of course, there are exceptions, but one cannot doubt the “couple” is a prevailing trend. It is so pervasive that many feel it is the goal of life, necessary for”completion” – they seek their “other half” so that they may grow old together. Why so?
Certainly there are no shortage of biological possibilities for explanation (at least while assuming the more popular man-woman coupling). Biology equips us with a desire, so the story goes, to spread our genetic material. So, we desire a mate. Fair enough, seems sensible – most have felt biological effects that can reasonable be attributed to this assumed desire. But, why then does it stop at one partner? Perhaps it makes more sense in the short-term, human children are frail, and it does no good to spread your genetic material if you’ll not bother to ensure it survives. The couple endures to rear their young. But, could there not be one man and two women? Would it be much more difficult for the man to protect/provide for two children from different women than two children from a single woman (twins)? Why not diversify your portfolio of genetic successors? Which leads to the next wonder… why does the ideal biological union linger for a lifetime?
The answers may very well not lead us out of the biological woods just yet. Blame it on biologically-inspired jealousy. You’re not simply equipped with the desire to spread your genetic material, but to do so more successfully than your peers. It is easier for me to justify jealousy on behalf of a woman than a man. The woman is vulnerable during her pregnancy, she needs her partner’s undivided attention to ensure he provides optimally for her needs – thus ensuring a healthy child. If the man won’t commit – well, he just wont be spreading his genetic material. He commits, because he must. Of course, we now jealousy isn’t a one-sided ordeal. Many men are jealous. It could be that this jealousy is simple a restrained version of – kill your opposition. I suppose it is not too far-fetched.
However, I’m still not convinced this accounts for long term unions. It seems to me that these explanations of jealousy would mostly dissolve after the short-term child rearing. Based purely on biological motivations – the couple should separate and try numerous other genetic combinations.
And, well, we can’t pretend biology answers most of the aspects of this couple setup. What about the couples that don’t ever have (or want) children, and the same-sex partnerships, or the kids that talk about getting married long before they ever hit puberty? What can biology say of these? What advantage here does the two-person organization provide?
Financial stability would likely be better ensured by much larger groups, so too would entertainment value. Intimacy might suffer with groups that get too large, but not in smaller three or four person configurations. Are there social constraints? Sure – four people can’t get legally married – but marriage rates in many countries are slumping, and social constraints were not strong enough to suppress same-sex unions. I doubt they could overcome a strong desire for alternative social units.
What can we make of it? Simply some desire to emulate our parents, or the parents of pop-culture? Might society one day fill itself with groups of four or five partners – or will couples linger? And if they do, to what can we owe their success?
I’ve a few more thoughts on this subject… but they’ll have to wait. Until next time…
After my last post about the apparent appeal of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle… and a lively debate with my uncle, who claims the Obama administration is setting the USA up for socialism… I feel compelled to write more explicitly about my thoughts on the capitalistic system that exists today. For whatever reason, changing that system seems unfathomable to many people. That bothers me.
As long as I have been alive, and for as long as my uncle before me, the United States has been infatuated with capitalism – and Americans have benefited from it. We have been the winners, and the people making our cheap products have been the losers (at least arguably, and for a time). After being thoroughly exploited, most of these countries have gone on to have their own economic expansions, and so, perhaps capitalism actually helped them along. At any rate, capitalism is all about this cheap “stuff” we seem to so enjoy. It has always required human labor, and in many cases that labor has been cheaper outside the USA.
That’s all well and good, and most of that last paragraph isn’t too debatable. Capitalism, in pioneering new stuff (new technologies, too) has made the world a much less “boring” place. In the hunter-gatherer society I discussed in a previous post, you’d likely have a lot more time on your hands… but you would have far fewer ways to spend that free time. Maybe this is why capitalism and industrialization have made hunter-gathering an obsolete way of life. Maybe, among other things, people were just too bored.
All I really want to say about the relationship between hunter-gathering and capitalism is that the transformation from the former to the latter has been evolutionary. At some point in history, hunter-gathering seemed like a stellar social system, and out of it led agricultural systems… and eventually we had capitalism. (More free time breeds less free time, go figure… although it seems the trend hat been reversing in the past few centuries.) Now, few people would consider (or do consider) non-industrialized ways of life preffered ways of life.
Ok, so here is the issue a I have with capitalism. It has invented technologies that are on the verge of reinventing themselves. Artificial intelligence, robotics, computing in general – these areas emerged from a capitalistic system. (For which we should all be very grateful to capitalism.) However, once these technologies become relatively self-evolving, capitalism has a real issue on its hands. Namely, there will be very few jobs. Almost everything will be benefit from new technologies that can work faster and smarter than humans. Massive unemployment… not simply single digit, but high double digits. Then what?
Capitalism is very poor, in my opinion, at dealing with unemployment. Which is perhaps why socialistic legislation gets passed when unemployment gets too high. At any rate, capitalism’s success is going to cause real issues. Not just for the worker, but for the capitalist. The technology will be so cheap that it would make little sense for anyone NOT to have their own machines working for them. Every man a capitalists, every machine a laborer – errr, capital.
Some new system will have to emerge to deal with this. The system will have to deal with the sky-high unemployment, the serious possibility of resource depletion caused by an exponential increase in output, the social issues that will emerge (after all, this setup looks a bit like a new form of slavery). I posit that system is going is going to look a little more egalitarian than capitalism – dare I say, a bit more communistic or socialistic.
Machines will be exploited rather than people, and what’s so wrong with that? It is hard to comprehend now (for some people), but so too was our capitalistic system to the hunter-gatherers that necessarily came before us.
Some day, capitalism may look as disagreeable as picking berries six hours a day – but it will be remembered as a stepping stone. A system that bred technologies capable of furthering social evolution. Bravo!
On the verge of such a change we need not hold on so tightly to the system in which most of us are comfortable. Thank capitalism, and lets move on.