Many of the values that you and I have today were devised thousands of years ago in a world of great scarcity. For example, during past centuries it took about twenty farmers to produce enough surplus food to maintain one townsman. To have a deep feeling of worth in such a world, it was usual to have a value structure that generated hardworking and thrifty behavior.
The scarcity conditions of the past have led men to place a high value on owning as many things as possible. The ownership of a set of tools enabled a man to make his living. If someone had stolen these from him, his ability to earn a living would have been threatened. The ownership of material goods became associated with a feeling of self-esteem. In some of our past cultures, the concept of private ownership even extended to include women. Women could be bought and sold in the marketplace. Even in the twentieth century we have conflicts in our value system as the status of women is evolving from being the property of men to the role of free human beings.
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”
If we are to make a reasonable anticipation of the type of world our descendants will have, we must adequately choose the dominant trends in values. So here we go! Although there are many ways to phrase it, we feel that the value wave of the future was expressed well by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence in that historic phrase, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Although we in mid-twentieth-century America have a degree of liberty and freedom, we have only reached the first rung in climbing the ladder toward achieving the highest degree of life and liberty. When men of the future look back and try to understand the relatively primitive conditions of mid-twentieth-century America, they will be most perplexed. They may comment that while Fourth of July speeches in which the blessings of liberty, freedom, and the right of everyone to be an individual were spoken of quite highly, yet every year more and more laws were passed telling people that they couldn’t do this, and they would pay a fine if they did that, and they would go to jail for doing something else. Perhaps further research by future historians might reveal that many of our laws were passed because we felt they were needed to keep men from hurting other men. In other words, the liberty of one person had to be limited so that he could not destroy the freedom and happiness of others. And this will be a curious thing for people in the future to understand about our present civilization. For they will find it unthinkable that conditions existed that permitted conflict between human beings.
The civilization of the future will outgrow the need for laws as we know them. For example, we have a law against murder. In the future there will be no laws dealing with murder. No baby is born a murderer. Immersed in a conflict-culture such as ours, he interacts with the conditions of his environment to develop a pattern of reaction that can, under certain circumstances, lead him to kill another human being. As he grows up, he often sees headlines and pictures in newspapers telling of murder. In literature, movies, and television he witnesses thousands of murders. Our sick society dotes over such legendary murderers as Jesse James, Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde. A young child lives under conditions where he is trained to be jealous and acquisitive. His king-sized ego learns to respond with feelings of deep hurt and rejection. If one day the grown man were to find his wife in bed with another man, he would respond in a way that is dictated by the years of conditioning. It would seem natural for him to seize a gun and murder the man.
Today we are beginning to identify various things which condition us to act as we do. In the future the factors that condition human beings to kill or do other things that harm fellow human beings will be understood and eliminated. The value structure will not permit children to be conditioned in sick, twisted, and insane ways. If it is found that someone might do something that could hurt another human being, the reaction will not be to pass a law against it. People will not use an archaic structure of courts, judges, and laws. They will simply ask themselves, “What is it that permits a person to act in a way that could hurt someone else?” When they find the root of the difficulty, they will modify conditions so that people will not—or can not—act in this way.
What About Human Nature?
When little was known about cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology, it seemed quite valid to resist proposed reforms by saying, “It won’t work. It’s against human nature.” It is difficult for many people to appreciate the fact that what they call “human nature” just doesn’t exist. Scientific research has discovered that it is probably not even “human nature” for a man to be attracted sexually to a woman! The particular object to which one is attracted sexually seems to be determined by experiences that happen early in life. This even applies to some animals. Eckhard Hess kept a young male jungle fowl with him for the first month of its life. It was not permitted to be with any of its own species during this time. Hess noticed:
This animal, even after five years—much of that time in association with his own species—courts human beings with typical behavior, but not females of his own species. This certainly is a far-reaching effect and is similar to the finding of Räber (1948), who reported on a male turkey whose behavior toward human beings was similar.
Eckhard H. Hess, “Imprinting,” Science, (1959), p. 140.
Man is like a mirror—he largely
