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| Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Part IV
The story so far:
In my first two postings I argued that (a) biological and cultural evolution tend on balance to raise structural complexity; (b) in the case of biological evolution, at least, this directionality, upon close examination, can be construed as evidence of teleology--not definitive evidence, but evidence nonetheless.
In my third posting, I explored the question of teleology further, making a series of related points: (a) consciousness--by which I mean subjective experience, sentience--is, according to the philosophy implicit in mainstream behavioral science, functionally superfluous; hence its reason for being is mysterious; (b) consciousness is also what gives life meaning--indeed, moral meaning; (c) since consciousness seems to be a property of complex organic information processing, biological evolution, by increasing the complexity of information processing in animals over time, would seem to be a recipe for generating consciousness, hence meaning.
On the other hand, as I noted at the end of my third posting, the existence of meaning, and even of moral meaning, don't by themselves provide any evidence that the conjectured higher purpose of evolution tends toward the good. Indeed, if sentience on this planet more often assumes the form of pain and suffering than of joy and contentment, one might well speculate that, on balance, the higher purpose is evil.
So today's question is: Was the existence of goodness inherent in biological and/or cultural evolution? And, if so, does biological and/or cultural evolution have any tendency to expand goodness, to raise the ratio of good to bad?
In one sense, it may seem naive to expect goodness to emerge from natural selection. At its core, natural selection is cutthroat. It is a zero-sum struggle for finite resources, and there are no rules. How much good could come of that? More than you might think.
For example, via "kin selection," altruism among close relatives has evolved. And in our species, at least, this altruism (for reasons concealed in the more general mystery of consciousness) involves the experience of love.
This intra-family altruism has evolved multiple times, and naturally so. With closely related organisms tending to start out life near each other, commonality of Darwinian interest is thick, just waiting to be harnessed by the logic of kin selection. Though maternal devotion was presumably the original form of kin-directed love (even many insects display maternal altruism), other forms followed: sibling love and--in our species and some others--paternal love.
Altruism, having established a beachhead within the family, eventually branched out beyond close relatives. In a number of species, including ours, natural selection invented reciprocal altruism, which, notwithstanding its connotations of cold calculation, involves heartfelt obligation, even affection. This ability of human beings to form bonds beyond the family would become crucial as cultural evolution began to build larger and more complex human societies. Biological evolution, having created goodness by inventing altruism, would now surrender center stage to the second great evolutionary force, with which any hopes for expanding goodness would now lie.
And in some ways, actually, cultural evolution would expand goodness. Consider, for example, the moral progress made by the ancient Greeks. As the philosopher Peter Singer noted in his 1981 book The Expanding Circle, fifth-century Greece featured a fairly primitive morality; citizens of one city-state often treated citizens of another Greek city-state as sub-human, enslaving them and occasionally massacring them.
Eventually, this narrow moral compass expanded, as Greeks in distant cities came to consider one another worthy of decent treatment. Why? I contend that the reason was an expansion of the web of interdependence. As the Greeks mobilized to fend off the Persians, the different Greek city-states needed one another more. In the terminology of my book, you would say that Greeks in different cities came to play non-zero-sum games with Greeks in other cities.
War isn't the only thing that creates interdependence. Since the days of ancient Greece, the realm of economic interdependence has grown to global extent. When you buy a car, you are playing a non-zero-sum game with countless workers in various nations. They all helped build your car, and you helped pay their wages.
This interdependence, I argue, is the main reason that today--especially in the most economically advanced nations--a universalistic morality prevails: all people are thought to deserve equal treatment regardless of nationality, religion, or race. If the US were to act as the Athenians did--periodically slaughter all male citizens residing in foreign polities--doing business with them would grow more complicated, to say the least.
In other words: Ever since ancient times, as the realm of "non-zero-sumness," of interdependence, has expanded, it has made practical sense to extend respect to a growing number of the planet's inhabitants.
In my book, I spend many chapters arguing that this expansion of interdependence has been more or less inexorable. As communications and transportation technologies evolve, it becomes practical--and often necessary--to play non-zero-sum games with larger and larger expanses of people. The moral compass expands accordingly.
But before we get too rhapsodic about humanity's expanding moral compass, I want to back up a bit and inject some grim sobriety into the discussion. It is great that natural selection invented affection and even extended it beyond the family, and it is great that cultural evolution extended human bonds across great distances. But a word is in order about the oft-underplayed downside of affection and bonding.
Ever hear of the "Texas cheerleader mom"? She was convicted of plotting to murder her daughter's rival for a high-school cheerleading slot. The good news is that this woman is manifestly not typical of mothers in Texas--or anywhere. The bad news is that she nonetheless illustrates, if in grotesque proportion, a ubiquitous point: love is, by design, an invidious emotion.
The problem isn't just that love naturally gets extended selectively, often coming to a screeching halt at the bounds of family. The problem is that love is naturally deployed to the active detriment of people beyond the family. It's a jungle out there, after all, and we want our loved ones to triumph. This seamy underside of affinity isn't confined to intra-family affinity. One common purpose of reciprocal altruism in primates is to cement coalitions which then compete with other coalitions, sometimes violently. In general, as the biologist Richard Alexander has observed, the flip-side of "within-group amity" is "between-group enmity".
This dour equation seems almost to have been a constant of human history. Lengthened and strengthened bonds have tended to involve deepened fissures. Consider those nostalgic reveries about wartime. Soldiers talk about the indelible devotion to their comrades in arms, and civilians recall the sense of brotherhood that suffused an entire nation. Sounds great. But as amity thus reached national scope, the petty enmities of daily life weren't so much erased as displaced--piled up, sky-high, along the nation's border: a mass of hatred between peoples. It almost seems as if one of the basic laws of the universe, right next to "conservation of mass" and "conservation of energy" is "conservation of antipathy."
Fortunately, "conservation of antipathy" is not truly a law of nature--for two reasons. First, martial fervor is not the only source of social bonding. If I water my neighbor's plants while he's away, and he returns the favor, our mutual amity grows just a bit--without any necessary growth in my dislike of anyone else. And much of the growth of non-zero-sumness over the past few millennia has been of this sort--people being "pulled" together for common gain, not "pushed" together by a common enemy.
One of the main pulling forces, of course, has been economic. Granted, commerce can be a cool affair, and often fails to expand the web of affection, but it does expand the web of tolerance. You don't have to love your grocer, but you shouldn't assault him. You don't have to love the people who built your Toyota, but it's unwise to bomb them--just as it's unwise to bomb the people overseas who are buying the things you made.
The second reason that the alleged "conservation of antipathy" doesn't doom moral progress has to do not with these "pulling" forces of economics but with the "pushing" forces, under which people unite to thwart a common threat. Though war is the time-honored example of such a force, things can change as social organization approaches the global level. At that point, barring extra-terrestrial invasion, conquest isn't the peril that brings people together. Rather, they cooperate to evade such things as environmental calamity and economic collapse. More than before, non-zero-sumness can thrive without zero-sumness as its ultimate source. To whatever rough extent "conservation of antipathy" *has* held as a general law of history, it seems to be in the process of being repealed.
Of course, it may forever remain true that nothing brings people together, heart to heart, quite like a war. And that sort of bonding, thankfully, is unavailable on a planetary scale. But other common challenges--environmental distress, for example--are not devoid of bonding power.
Indeed, the classic experiment on inter-group solidarity suggests that inanimate threats can be quite unifying. Several decades ago, the psychologist Muzafer Sherif used boys in a summer camp (unbeknownst to them) to study human nature. He divided them into two groups and put them in a series of zero-sum games, with cherished perks going to the winning team. Jingoism blossomed; there was one full-fledged riot, and even after all zero-sum games had ended, contact between the groups brought slurs and fistfights. Then Sherif put the groups in a series of non-zero-sum situations, where all boys faced some mutual threat. Sure enough, antagonism was so dampened that some erstwhile enemies became lasting friends. And the mutual threats that did this congealing weren't invasions from a neighboring camp, but rather such things as the breakdown of the truck all campers depended on, or of the pipeline that brought water into camp.
This doesn't mean that combatting global warming will lead to a transnational lovefest. But it is evidence that, as global interdependence thickens, long-distance amity can in principle grow even in the absence of external enmity. And It's something to build on. There is no telling what it could mean as technology keeps advancing; as the world wide web goes broad bandwidth, so that any two people anywhere can meet and chat virtually, visually (perhaps someday assisted, where necessary, by accurate automated translation). One can well imagine, as the internet nurtures more and more communities of interest, true friendships more and more crossing the most dangerous fault lines--boundaries of religion, of nationality, of ethnicity, of culture.
Here is one way to encapsulate much of the upshot of this posting and my previous posting:
Life on Earth was, from the beginning, a machine for generating meaning and then deepening it, a machine that created the potential for good and began to fulfill it. And, though the machine also created the potential for bad--and did plenty of fulfilling on that front--it now finally shows signs of raising the ratio of good to bad; or, at the very least, of giving the human species that option, along with powerful incentives to exercise it.
Obviously, the movement of biological and cultural evolution toward this moral threshold isn't proof of a benign universal architect. But it's closer to being evidence of divinity than its opposite would be. Once you've accepted that evil is, for whatever reason, built into the fabric of human--indeed, organic--experience, the basic trend lines don't look all that bad.
Thanks very much to those of you who have read all, or any, of my four postings.
Did you enjoy this article? ... Your donation is tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.
Robert Wright is the author of "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny", from which portions of this and preceding postings have been adapted. http//:www.nonzero.org
Published 2000.02.03
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