>> [We must use] ...an artificial state of nature. [One that] places
>> everyone in the original position. The original position is a
>> hypothetical state of nature used as a thought experiment: People in
>> the original position have no society and are under a veil of
>> ignorance that prevents them from knowing how they may benefit from
>> society. They do not know if they will be smart or dumb, rich or poor,
>> or anything else about their fortunes and abilities. ...people in the
>> original position would want a society where they had their basic
>> liberties protected and where they had some economic guarantees as
>> well. If society were to be constructed from scratch through a social
>> agreement between individuals, these principles would be the expected
>> basis of such an agreement. Thus, these principles should form the
>> basis of real, modern societies since everyone should consent to them
>> if society were organized from scratch in fair agreements.
...if people were somehow raised from birth in an environment devoid
of most cultural influence, they would construct basic elements of
human social life ab initio. In short time new elements of language
would be invented and their culture enriched. Robin Fox, an
anthropologist and pioneer in human sociobiology, has expressed this
hypothesis in its strongest possible terms. Suppose, he conjectured,
that we performed the cruel experiment linked in legend to the Pharaoh
Psammetichus and King James IV of Scotland, who were said to have
reared children by remote control, in total social isolation from
their elders. Would the children learn to speak to one another?
I do not doubt that they could speak and that, theoretically, given
time, they or their offspring would invent and develop a language
despite their never having been taught one. Furthermore, this
language, although totally different from any known to us, would be
analyzable to linguists on the same basis as other languages and
translatable into all known languages. But I would push this further.
If our new Adam and Eve could survive and breed — still in total
isolation from any cultural influences — then eventually they would
produce a society which would have laws about property, rules about
incest and marriage, customs of taboo and avoidance, methods of
settling disputes with a minimum of bloodshed, beliefs about the
supernatural and practices relating to it, a system of social status
and methods of indicating it, initiation ceremonies for young men,
courtship practices including the adornment of females, systems of
symbolic body adornment generally, certain activities and associations
set aside for men from which women were excluded, gambling of some
kind, a tool- and weapon-making industry, myths and legends, dancing,
adultery, and various doses of homicide, suicide, homosexuality,
schizophrenia, psychosis and neuroses, and various practitioners to
take advantage of or cure these, depending on how they are viewed.
In 1945 the American anthropologist George P. Murdock listed the
following characteristics that have been recorded in every culture
known to history and ethnography:
Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness
training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor,
cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of
labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics,
ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making,
folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving,
government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene,
incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship
nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage,
mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names,
population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights,
propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious
ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status
differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and
weather control.
Few of these unifying properties can be interpreted as the inevitable
outcome of either advanced social life or high intelligence. It is
easy to imagine nonhuman societies whose members are even more
intelligent and complexly organized than ourselves, yet lack a
majority of the qualities just listed. Consider the possibilities
inherent in the insect societies. The sterile workers are already more
cooperative and altruistic than people and they have a more pronounced
tendency toward caste systems and division of labor. If ants were to
be endowed in addition with rationalizing brains equal to our own,
they could be our peers. Their societies would display the following
peculiarities:
Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, cannibalism,
caste determination, caste laws, colony-foundation rules, colony
organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative
labor, cosmology, courtship, division of labor, drone control,
education, eschatology, ethics, etiquette, euthanasia, fire making,
food taboos, gift giving, government, greetings, grooming rituals,
hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, language, larval care,
law, medicine, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing
castes, nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen
obeisance, residence rules, sex determination, soldier castes,
sisterhoods, status differentiation, sterile workers, surgery,
symbiont care, tool making, trade, visiting, weather control, and
still other activities so alien as to make mere description by our
language difficult. If in addition they were programmed to eliminate
strife between colonies and to conserve the natural environment they
would have greater staying power than people, and in a broad sense
theirs would be the higher morality.
From On Human Nature by Edward O Wilson
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/
