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| Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Part I
First of all, let me say how happy I am to be able to discuss my book in this setting. I know I'll profit from what Metanexus subscribers have to say in response. (No doubt I will wind up wishing I'd gotten the benefit of this feedback before the book was published).
One way to describe my book is as an exercise in natural theology. I examine the whole history of our species--from the primordial ooze to the world wide web--and then ask whether that history shows any evidence of higher purpose. The first four paragraphs of the book's introduction set out my agenda pretty straightforwardly. Here they are:
The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once ended a book on this note: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." Far be it from me to argue with a great physicist about how depressing physics is. For all I know, Weinberg's realm of expertise, the realm of inanimate matter, really does offer no evidence of higher purpose. But when we move into the realm of animate matter--bacteria, cellular slime molds, and, most notably, human beings--the situation strikes me as different. The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. Because in neither case is "drift" really the right word. Both of these processes have a direction, an arrow. At least, that is the thesis of this book.
People who see a direction in human history, or in biological evolution, or both, have often been dismissed as mystics or flakes. In some ways, it's hard to argue that they deserve better treatment. The philosopher Henri Bergson believed that organic evolution is driven forward by a mysterious "elan vital," a vital force. But why posit something so ethereal when we can explain evolution's workings in the wholly physical terms of natural selection? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit theologian, saw human history moving toward "Point Omega." But how seriously could he expect historians to take him, given that Point Omega is "outside Time and Space"?
On the other hand, you have to give Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin some credit. Both saw that organic evolution has a tendency to create forms of life featuring greater and greater complexity. And Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, stressed a comparable tendency in human history: the evolution, over the millennia, of ever more vast and complex social structures. His extrapolations from this trend were prescient. Writing at the middle of this century, he dwelt on telecommunications, and the globalization it abets, before these subjects were all the rage. (Marshall McLuhan, coiner of "global village," had read Teilhard.) With his concept of the "noosphere," the "thinking envelope of the Earth," Teilhard even anticipated in a vague way the Internet--more than a decade before the invention of the microchip.
Can the trends rightly noted by Bergson and Teilhard--basic tendencies in biological evolution and in the technological and social evolution of the human species--be explained in scientific, physical terms? I think so; that is largely what this book is about. But the concreteness of the explanation needn't, I believe, wholly drain these patterns of the spiritual content that Bergson and Teilhard imputed to them. If directionality is built into life--if life naturally moves toward a particular end--then this movement legitimately invites speculation about what did the building. And the invitation is especially strong, I'll argue, in light of the phase of human history that seems to lie immediately ahead--a social, political, and even moral culmination of sorts.
As you can see from these four paragraphs, I take pains to stress that my standpoint is fundamentally materialist. I'm not arguing that biological evolution needs a higher power to guide it along, or anything like that. On the contrary, I'm arguing that natural selection is such a powerful creative engine as to make us wonder whether it is itself a product of design. Only after spending 22 chapters making a materialist argument for directionality in biological and social (or cultural) evolution do I spend a couple of chapters addressing the issue of higher purpose raised by that directionality.
In other words, you could summarize my argument as consisting of three separate but related sub-arguments: (1) It was almost inevitable that natural selection, given long enough, would produce a species about as complex and intelligent as ours--a species capable of, among other things, generating culture (where culture is defined broadly to include technology, politics, and for that matter all forms of non-genetic information that are passed down through the generations). (2) Once cultural evolution in our species had acquired much momentum--by, say, the Upper Paleolithic, when the evolution of hunter-gatherer technology started to accelerate--it was almost inevitable that social complexity would grow in scope and depth until social organization finally reached planetary breadth, as it has now done with globalization. (3) The directionality in these two evolutionary processes suggests that maybe the processes are themselves subordinate to a larger purpose.
What exactly is it about the direction of biological and cultural evolution that I find suggestive of higher purpose? I'll save that argument for a later posting. But one key to the argument lies in the analytical framework I use to account for the directionality, and I'll go ahead and say a little about that framework right now. In the book, I make extensive use of the logic of game theory--in particular, the distinction between zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. (Hence the book's title, Nonzero.) Here again, there are a few paragraphs in the introduction that make the point about as well as I know how to make it:
[The founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern,] made a basic distinction between "zero-sum" games and "non-zero-sum" games. In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant's gain is the other's loss. In non-zero-sum games, one player's gain needn't be bad news for the other(s). Indeed, in highly non-zero-sum games the players' interests overlap entirely. In 1970, when the three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to figure out how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth, they were playing an utterly non-zero-sum game, because the outcome would be either equally good for all of them or equally bad. (It was equally good.)
Back in the real world, things are usually not so clear-cut. A merchant and a customer, two members of a legislature, two childhood friends sometimes--but not always--find their interests overlapping. To the extent that their interests do overlap, their relationship is non-zero-sum; the outcome can be win-win or lose-lose, depending on how they play the game.
[For elaboration on non-zero-sum logic, and a discussion of the classic non-zero-sum game "the prisoner's dilemma," see http://www.nonzero.org/app1.htm.]
Sometimes political scientists or economists break human interaction down into zero-sum and non-zero-sum components. Occasionally, evolutionary biologists do the same in looking at the way various living systems work. My contention is that, if we want to see what drives the direction of both human history and organic evolution, we should apply this perspective more systematically. Interaction among individual genes, or cells, or animals, among interest groups, or nations, or corporations, can be viewed through the lenses of game theory. What follows is a survey of human history, and of organic history, with those lenses in place. My hope is to illuminate a kind of force--the non-zero-sum dynamic--that has crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth so far.
The survey of organic history is brief, and the survey of human history not so brief. Human history, after all, is notoriously messy. But I don't think it's nearly as messy as it's often made out to be. Indeed, even if you start the survey back when the most complex society on earth was a hunter-gatherer village, and follow it up to the present, you can capture history's basic trajectory by reference to a core pattern: New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential--that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and depth.
This isn't to say that non-zero-sum games always have win-win outcomes rather than lose-lose outcomes. Nor is it to say that the powerful and the treacherous never exploit the weak and the naive; parasitic behavior is often possible in non-zero-sum games, and history offers no shortage of examples. Still, on balance, over the long run, non-zero-sum situations produce more positive sums than negative sums, more mutual benefit than parasitism. As a result, people become embedded in larger and richer webs of interdependence.
I don't mean to minimize the interesting details that populate most history books: Sumerian kings, barbarian hordes, medieval knights, the Protestant Reformation, nascent nationalism, and so on. In fact, I try to give all of these their due (along with such too-often-neglected exemplars of the human experience as native American hunter-gatherers, Polynesian chiefdoms, Islamic commercial innovations, African kingdoms, Aztec justice, and precocious Chinese technology). But I do intend to show how these details, though important in their own right, are ultimately part of a larger story.
OK--I guess that's enough to try to get people to swallow in one posting. But, in closing, let me just (at the risk of repeating myself) try to crystallize my argument by putting it in a contemporary context.
We've all heard that the global age is an age of growing interdependence. An economic downturn in one part of the world can prove contagious; one nation's fossil-fuel emissions can be bad for a nation half-way around the world; a nuclear war anywhere is bad for everyone--and so on. In other words, relations among nations are more and more non-zero-sum. By the same token, relations among individual citizens of different nations are more and more non-zero-sum. (When I bought my Honda mini-van, I was in effect playing a non-zero-sum game with thousands of people, in various countries, involved in building the car. I paid part of their salary, and they built my car--a win-win outcome.)
My argument depicts this state of globalized interdependence as the natural, and virtually inevitable, outcome of cultural evolution. I'm saying that, ever since the late stone age, social evolution has amounted to an expansion and elaboration of interdependence, as non-zero-sum games have been played over greater and greater distances, among more and more people.
Furthermore, that direction--toward more and more "non-zero-sumness"--is the basic direction of the biological evolution that had created a culture-generating species in the first place. For to say that animals have gotten more complex over evolutionary time is to say that more and more genes have come to play larger and more elaborate non-zero-sum games among themselves. (Of course, the genes don't think about these games, or about anything else. But because the survival of genes on a genome typically depends on the smooth functioning of their common vehicle--rather like the survival of those Apollo 13 astronauts--natural selection favors genes that cooperate with one another in maintaining the vehicle.)
There are obvious objections to the argument that human history over the last few millennia exhibits a generally growing web of non-zero-sumness. What about the collapse of the Roman Empire? The Dark Ages? China's seeming stagnation for much of the past millennium? Similarly, when I assert a comparable trend toward greater non-zero-sumness--i.e., organic complexity--in biological evolution, various objections ensue: What about the many species that go for a long time without getting more complex? What about the occasional species that evolves toward less complexity?
I try to deal with all of these objections in the book. For now, I just want to make clear that this is the essence of the direction I'm positing in both biological and cultural evolution--larger and more elaborate non-zero-sum games, manifested in greater and greater structural complexity. In future postings, I get into the question of why this particular sort of directionality might be particularly suggestive of higher purpose.
Thanks for reading this far.
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Published 2000.02.07
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