Speculating
on how early tribes and societies produced rule systems could
probably be better described by historians. But for the purposes
of establishing a first approximation of how ethics has evolved
from the dawn of civilization until the present, a very general
overview will suffice.
Human
beings express a wide range of timeless emotions: passion,
rage, grief, love, and compassion, to name a few. To this day,
people are born immature, uneducated, and inexperienced. Some
are intelligent, others slow to learn, some emotionally stable,
and some prone to rage. Some individuals mature faster than
others, some can understand complex relationships, others have
great difficulty understanding the simplest of things. Given
the wide diversity of individual talent and emotional sensitivities,
conflicts are inevitable. If conflicts dominate societal attention,
vital energies are drained from the creative growth of a society.
Constant conflict impoverishes any society.
At
some point, incessant conflict within a species will threaten
its survival. Thus, some regulating systems will arise. Actions
inspire reactions that in a primitive environment may be overreactions.
Thus, certain delaying mechanisms must buffer emotions and
the effects of their excesses. Manners, customs, protocol,
and decorum help regulate relationships among people and curb
impulsive behavior.
The
anarchy that would arise from the chemistry of a group of primitive
intellects and emotions in the first moments of building a
society would produce certain results. The emotional excesses
and predatory habits of people who were not fully reasoning
individuals would predictably start conflicts. After repeated
conflicts of a similar kind, the nature of conflict might suddenly
shift. In some instances, more organization might emerge.
As
more people began to move into closer proximity to one another,
their untempered emotions would create excesses and overreactions.
As the number of overreactions increased, and tempers began
to elevate, stress would begin to affect everyone. Given enough
stress, some individuals would imagine hostilities where none
existed. Mistakes of judgment would proliferate and afflict
the society with an exponentially increasing number of reasons
to engage in conflict. With an increase in conflict people
would begin to yearn for a resolution and for a return to a
state of equilibrium. There would be no way to stop the conflicts
from intensifying until some benchmark catalysis occurred,
since in earliest times no prehistory would have been known
that could guide society's actions. Conflict in society would
heat up like a nuclear chain reaction. A catalysis would illuminate
the source of the conflict and would produce a new rule or
attitude to prevent a similar conflict from recurring. Social
fission, like nuclear fission, can be initiated under certain
conditions. Honest misunderstandings are one condition that
can lead to tragic conflict. Systems of etiquette are an example
of how rules help minimize misunderstandings by regulating
social intercourse through prescriptions of decorum and protocol.
Social
fission could be defined in the following way: as the number
of people increases in a given area, there is a tendency for
those people to establish strong and meaningful relationships
that draw individuals residing on the periphery into the midst
of a society formulating itself. As the depth and richness
of life's experience unfolds in the socializing process, a
fascinating tapestry of civilization begins to weave itself.
This tapestry becomes the nectar of civilization subtly moving
men and women to become dynamically involved. However, a countervailing
force, slowing the socializing process, simultaneously evolves
from the clashes of human emotions, immaturity, and misunderstanding
of a society that does not yet know how to be social. On one
hand, people would begin to savor the benefits of being together;
on the other hand, they would not know exactly how to be together
without getting into conflicts.
Social
fission spontaneously follows from the nature of emotions.
When resources are scarce, and the closer that primitive emotions
come to other primitive emotions, the greater the number of
conflicts there will be. Each conflict will inspire more conflicts.
Overreactions would create an atmosphere of chaos. For instance,
suppose a person's dog bites another person. The second person
kicks the dog. The owner of the dog has noticed the kicking
but not the biting. The owner hits the bitten person, whose
kin happen to be watching. Consequently, tensions rise to the
point that several people are killed. It is doubtful that a
sensible person observing this would believe that kicking a
dog in defense of one's life warrants the tit-for-tat killing
of several people. Senseless killing such as this sometimes
inspires a grief that raises the consciousness of people, making
them aware of the harmful actions they propose to undertake.
It could be said, then, that a catalysis of events in a major
conflict gives rise to new quanta of social organization.
Conflict
catalyses repeatedly occur as the society defines finer and
finer details of organization. Social, legal, and moral contracts
evolve out of these catalyses. There is something threatening
to the whole society, and its ultimate survival, if it finds
itself being killed off for little or no reason at all. Grief
intensifies the perception of insensibility loose in the world.
It is a primitive emotion, yet it can move people toward a
better way of organizing their world.
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