Humans construct complicated social situations fraught with social conflict. Status and power hierarchies, reproductive networks, families and households, and many other social arrangements continually push to stabilize the lives of individuals into patterns, while competition, individuation, gender differentiation, and other biological drives, constantly exert energies that destabilize social order. In an article in another blog, The Human Mess, I describe an instance of the intricate family relationships that people put together and must work through in their lives.
What generates this propensity for complex lives? Surely it is natural selection, working on the preconscious emotional brain.
Consider, first, complicatedness must be an evolved propensity that is shared by the higher mammals. If we have the propensity, evolutionary theory says that our mammalian cousins must have it, too.
Second, if the higher mammals have the propensity, then the impulse is not a result of language or of the human higher brain's story-making facility. It must be a product of the emotions operating out of the amygdala and hippocampus. No doubt, the human neo-cortex makes more interesting the relationships and emotions that originate social complicatedness, but the fundamental drive cannot be a product originally in evolution, or a product today, solely of the logic generating brain of language-based consciousness. Complicatedness is not a literary product, but a social-biological process.
Third, a complex situation of inter-woven, multi-threaded, conflicting relationships would provide a higher proving ground for values and emotions that would accumulate social fitness in a Darwinian population.
Fourth, as evidence for the credibility of my hypothesis, I point to scientific studies of the past decade that see moral decision making as hardwired in the human brain and shared with other animals. Moreover, our human emotional-cognitive decision-making apparatus involves precisely the complicated, conflicting social relationships described in my blog article, The Human Mess.
I think that my hypothesis would not be controversial among evolutionary anthropologists or evolutionary psychologists. The question, therefore, of more important interest is, what is the role of values in this arrangement?
I believe that values must provide important features of the social landscape of the human mess. I mean here values in the sense of objective objects in the world, not as preferences of conscience. They must have evolved rapidly among primeval animal and humanoid populations to provide a role for both stabilization and disorganization of social relationships. What implications does this role for values have for my theory?
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