COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	human[s84,jmc]		Humanity and society
C00009 ENDMK
C⊗;
human[s84,jmc]		Humanity and society

	Much of the disorder attributed to various social problems
is actually a consequence of the fact that humanity never evolved
to live peacefully, productively and happily in modern society.
Indeed there is no reason to believe that humanity evolved to
live happily at all.  No-one, to my knowledge, has ever attributed
a positive selective value to happiness or even contentment.  Perhaps
a study of the problem would turn up some evolutionary advantage in
people being happy some of the time.

	Not that primitive society was any better; presumably it was usually
a lot worse.  There was more fighting, more disease, more hunger, more
oppression, more social exclusion and probably more pointless cruelty.
Like many animals, perhaps most social animals, primitive humanity evolved
a social life based on tyrannical little groups, quite likely polygamous
with the losing males excluded.  This view is supported by history, by
the primitive societies that have survived to the present and by
comparison with the behavior of the higher primates.

	Indeed it is remarkable how well modern middle class society works.
There is almost no fighting.  Most men and almost all women are involved
in no fights, except possibly wars, after teen age.  Murder is rare
among the middle classes.  If we could bring the lower classes, especially
blacks and the Spanish speaking up to the level of the white middle
class, all forms of violence would be satisfactorily rare except
for war.

	This should not be considered a vain hope.  Until after World
War II middle class prosperity depended on exploiting a poor working
class.  Now technology has generated sufficient prosperity so that
everyone who works steadily can live an essentially middle class
life and lives almost as long on the average as the rich.  While
there is a positive effect of income on longevity, this is partly
due to the fact that health increases earning power, and in any
case the distributions overlap enormously.

	There are poor, but while the poor formerly were mainly
exploited workers essential to the prosperity of the rich, now
the poor are mainly people who do not have steady work for reasons
of
malfunction of the economic system,
reluctance of the system to adapt to changes in the economy,
 social upbringing,
personal psychology,
very low ability,
 health,
 or discrimination.  The
order of listing is my guess as to their relative importance.

	If technology is allowed to improve wealth further, then
then poverty can probably be eliminated.

	However, this doesn't mean that people will be uniformly
happy or that there won't be social conflict.  The Scandinavian
countries have achieved a more uniform prosperity than the U.S.,
but they aren't happy.

	Unhappiness leads to social instability, because some people
are led to believe that they are somehow entitled to happiness
and that they would be happy if only society were re-arranged
somehow.  However, random re-arrangement is much more likely to make matters
worse than to make society better.

	The beginning of wisdom in this matter is to realize that
there is no reason to believe that human happiness can be achieved
by adjusting social institutions.  Various sources of complaint
such as illness, poverty and tyranny can be alleviated, but happiness
can only be pursued by the individual or the family.

	It may be that psychology and human biology can discover
the basis for happiness.  It is more likely to be a matter of
chemistry than society.  However, there is scarcely a clue at
present, and if there were a way, it would be a gift horse that individuals
should look in the mouth of very carefully.

	As a species we also have a collection of tendencies that
old-fashioned moralists used to call original sin.  People can be readily
roused into a state in which they are motivated by hatred.  Let a Hitler,
Stalin, Pol Pot or a Khomeini get to the top, and millions will march
willingly to their deaths to kill the enemy.  Middle class society has
evolved reasonably effective ways of blunting these tendencies, but a
minority of people from all classes will be hostile enough to require
suppression.