Robert Wright’s Idea
On Robert Wright’s: Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny
Robert Wright has an idea. It is that evolution manifests a “logic”. Specifically, that evolution pursues non-zero, win/win solutions, as opposed to zero sum win/lose enactments. Further, pursuit of this logic evidences a clear pattern in its results: increasing complexity, expanding cooperativity. The putative pinnacle of complexity/cooperativity would be sentient life, in which a complex biological organism, emerging from non-zero resolutions to purely chance mutations, develops the capacity to make conscious, intentional choices. The result of these choices becomes culture. Cultures evolve, again with demonstrably increasing complexity, into civilizations.
Mr. Wright elaborates these ideas in his book: Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny. On the whole, I find the thinking to be both persuasive and splendidly thought provoking. In two areas, however, I find its exposition to be unsatisfactory - less than it could be. The first involves his traversal of the matter of human cultural evolution. It is irritatingly facile and unconvincing. The second is his reluctance to engage in any serious speculation as to where the thinking may lead. One of our most persistent, indeed characteristic, traits is the attempt to extrapolate from new understandings, to reflect on just what they imply, and to discover where they may lead. I wish to reflect on Mr. Wright’s thinking with these matters in mind. But first, I wish to address certain issues before launching the effort proper.
Thinking about evolution comes with some seemingly inalienable biases. They have to do with perspective. Enormous vistas of time are so much a part of the thinking that they become part of the conceptualism itself. The classical formulation of evolutionary thought holds that chance mutations are acted upon by the environment. A variation on the lines of man proposes (the mutation occurs), and God disposes (the environment selects). Simple, direct, and in general sympathy with the grimmer connotations of “the survival of the fittest”. Only a little reflection would suggest it is also a deceptive simplification, certainly not least to some mutated entity - the “selection” becomes personal – very personal. In reality a dialog between the mutation and the environment ensues. Indeed, the mutation may change the environment, reset the very terms of the dialog. What ultimately emerges is the outcome of a negotiation. Non-zero thinking explicitly focuses on the process as dialog. Dialog is the very nature of a search for win/win outcomes.
Having just made the point that biological evolution (a function of random mutations - and random changes in the environment) is conventionally viewed over such great distances in time that distinguishing the dialog from the “normal” proposes/disposes conceptualism becomes difficult, if not impossible; what happens, then, when we begin to consider culture, our human cultures, as part of the process? Conscious, sentient choice, not random mutation, is involved. And selection is experienced, with steadily increasing frequency, in the highly personal sense referred to above.
This engages a second question of perspective. What would any given sentient individual be likely to consider a determinative change in lifestyle – for that is what a cultural change betokens. Let me get a bit abstract for a moment. Your own life would be a “monad”, meaningful, of course, to you. But we readily extend our concerns to our parents and children: a “triad” of lifetimes”. When lives grow longer, as they have steadily over time, our area of concern extends to grandparents and grandchildren: a “pentad”. A change in lifestyles seen likely to affect monads/triads/pentads is most probably one which will get the attention of peoples and engage their energies, i.e. result in an active participation in selection. Outside of that, “things” will most often be seen as beyond “normal” human concerns. Even though our lives may be structured by those same “things”, having occurred at some (relatively) distant time in the past. Affecting them will only infrequently animate large bodies of people in a process of active selection.
With the two considerations of perspective above in mind.
If you were born into the world of a tribal society 20 or 30 thousand years ago (then the only kind of society), the culture you would know would be that of your people. The principle cultural selections you would experience would involve intratribal innovation and intertribal conflict. From all we know, the former, in any truly important sense, would be slow, and the latter constant. The overriding reality was that, in any given lifetime, real selection, i.e. an enduring change in the human cultural landscape, was rare, and, of course, rare even from the perspective of our triads. Constant, almost reflexive, intertribal conflict, was the rule, but truly decisive outcomes were equally rare. One tribe might drive off another, but cultures do not tend to disappear. One might thrive in one generation, wane in another, and revive again in a third. Local, short term factors most likely determined the ebb and flow, rather than any clean cut selection of a more successful culture over a less successful one. Increasing diversity (granted a form of increasing complexity), rather than selection might be seen to be the rule. Not surprising when one considers that people fight with determination to preserve their way of life. They don’t give up on the negotiation easily.
This begs a question. How did we get from there to here? We certainly live in a cultural landscape far different from that of tribal societies.
Here is where my first caveat with Mr. Wright develops. In his book, Wright provides the following exposition on the transition. Tribal societies are characterized as chiefdoms. Gradually these chiefdoms developed specializations (e.g. skilled craftsmen), discover domesticated agriculture, and develop trade with other chiefdoms. In time these expanded areas of cooperativity evolve into super chiefdoms, and then (Voila!) into civilizations: the spontaneous aggregation of skilled craftsmen, industrious traders and yeoman farmers. Does this correspond to history as we know it? There is little if any evidence to support it, at least as a widespread model. The earliest history of the first civilizational societies is indeed lost in the mists of time. But what we do know, with considerable evidence in support, is the form those societies took. And it is not what one would expect of a felicitous and spontaneous aggregation of skilled craftsmen, industrious traders and yeoman farmers. Civilizational societies, rather, were rigidly organized division of labor constructs, with power concentrated at the top in governmental, military, and religious elites, and with the vast majority of the people consigned to the simple, repetitive physical tasks of large scale domesticated agriculture – assigned in perpetuity: monads, tri ads, pentads. What is wanted here is some persuasive account of the transition from tribal societies to civilizational ones, and by persuasive, I mean one from which the top-down authoritarian nature of nearly all early civilizations we are aware of flows naturally.
So, why top down, repressive authoritarianism? The first answer I will propose possesses considerable mischief potential, which I will try to corral. And that answer is (meant in a peculiar and very particular sense): It was “natural”.
Human beings are social creatures. We live in mutually interdependent and mutually supportive societies, and tribal societies were our first model for this. From an evolutionary perspective, it would be difficult to understand them in any way other than as a part our survival strategy as a species. Indeed, recent studies of primate societies suggest that, in all likelihood, we dropped out of the trees onto the savannah as a society. Think of it. Disparate collections of (now sentient) individuals are together in ways which explicitly curtail the freedom of individuals to the benefit of a larger community. How? Sentient intelligence is the defining fact of our evolution, yet, as a new development, it will, of necessity, be operative as an overlay upon all which proceeded it. And the only plausible way evolution can affect pre-sentient behavior is as behavioral influences: genetically derived psychological/emotional reinforcement of behavioral inclinations. One kind of behavior just “feels right” while another just “feels wrong”. These genetically reinforced behavioral inclinations constitute something like evolutionary “good advice”. It does not invariably represent wisdom, is not universally applicable, and does not merit any apriori recognition as morally “right”.
So how might a group of distinct, separate, sentient individuals secure the benefits of living in societies. Two complementary strategies emerged. One, which I will touch upon lightly, was dominance by an alpha individual, (usually male). Somebody enforces their will as boss. In some form or other, to one extent or other, it has been a constant throughout human history. It is at once the most obvious solution to the problem posed, and, clearly, only a partial answer. Something less transient, more embracing and more enduing is needed. Proto human societies would have to arrive at some conscious rationalization of necessary and useful intercooperation, and achieve acceptance of the consequent suborning of individual freedom in the process. And they did! As the Wisdom of the Ancestors, the Customs of the Tribe. Largely unquestioned and unquestionable, coming from “beyond”, the wisdom of the ancestors serves the purpose of reconciling free individuals to the demands of community, to securing the benefits of living in mutually interdependent, mutually supportive societies. It both reflects and satisfies the evolutionary “good advice” urging cooperation, and becomes, arguably, our first conscious invention.
In that sense, and by that rationale, a source of critical binding authority as “properly” something which comes from beyond, essentially unquestioned and unquestionable, might be considered “natural” to human societies. AGAIN:
It does not invariably represent wisdom, and does not merit any apriori recognition as morally “right”.
I hope the corral is secure.
Tribal societies, then, come to the processes of cultural evolution with a certain bias in favor of “unquestionable authority”.
But what occasioned the actual selection.
The great cultural transformation came, of course, with the Agricultural Revolution, when human societies reconfigured to take advantage of the potentials harbored within large scale domesticated agriculture. What resulted, as noted above, were extended, far more rigorously organized, division of labor constructs. In a relatively brief period of time these new societies enfolded most of humanity, and claimed most of the world’s desirable habitats as their province.
And this provides the second, decisive, rationale for the top-down, repressive nature of emerging civilizational societies.
The initial emergence was almost surely the work of visionary leaders, first of all in war, who saw a novel potential in large scale domesticated agriculture: an assured resource base. Who saw, among other things, that certain land, in the alluvial plains of the Fertile Crescent, India, or China could become a basis for this different kind of agriculture. That what one needed to exploit it was absolute, assured control over the land, and a large supply of labor, committed permanently to the cultivation of that land. Who (ultimately) saw that the old result of tribal conflicts, driving off of the loser, had a newer more useful resolution – slavery. Those leaders systematically conquered and enslaved. They developed a professional military to accomplish and enforce it. A top-down, repressive, authoritarian structure proceeds quite naturally from such a process.
An important point, however: Authority took on some new and critical aspects. These extensively organized and intricately connected societies required a far more flexible administrative structure. The customs and practices that served in the past to unify tribes tended, of their very nature, to be stiff and unmalleable. And so they mutated into codified bodies of law. As law, they could be adjusted at need by the leaders of those societies. New laws, as opposed to new customs, let alone some mysterious, newly arrived (scrupulously detailed?) instructions from the ancestors, are far easier to arrive at, and, above all, easier to “sell”. As bodies of law, these codes frequently were accorded great reverence, even a sacredness. (Breathing, be it noted, a certain deep sympathy with the “Wisdom of the Ancestors.”)
And what of the conqueror’s own tribe? They had triumphed! They would staff the military, become the priests, and serve as administrators in the bureaucracy needed to organize and render these new societal constructs effective. The charisma of visionary, highly successful leaders, the benefits which flowed to the tribe – and, yes, abetted by the “authoritarian bias” suggested above - became powerful inducements to accept and support a new societal paradigm. One which tended towards God-Kings, monumental architecture, overwhelming pomp and physical display. And which also tended towards an increasing remoteness, and separation of the ruling elites from the society being governed, moving, not infrequently, beyond the control of “ordinary mortals”.
That, I submit, and not the spontaneous coming together of skilled craftsmen, industrious traders, and yeoman farmers, is what happened, and why it took the form it did. That is recognizable history.
To return to the matter of cultural selection.
Suppose you were born into one of the societies which formed over the last five to ten thousand years in the aftermath of the Agricultural Revolution. What of selection might you experience?
You would be embedded in the first great cultural evolution. You would be part of a civilization. Civilization itself, in all its range of (often) dazzling accomplishments, emerges essentially as an unintended consequence of the societal reorganization which will define your life. We’ll be generous and posit your birth into the Roman Empire at its height, or Confucian China during one of its stable and long-lived dynasties. Imperia were the ultimate evolution of those cultures - their acme - providing, as Wright would point out, the benefits of a vastly increased cooperatively - of an assured supply of food, of peace over time, and of a wide and diverse division of labor. But your good fortune probably will end there. The vast majority of the people in those societies found themselves “division of labored” into some variation of peasantry, peonage, serfdom or slavery. The fundamental organizational accomplishment, on which success rested, was the efficient organization over time of the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs. This could be, and most often was, obtained by main force - the military/police coercive powers of society. Again the processes of cultural selection would not likely affect you (or your “triad”). Imperiums did realize more rapid innovation than tribal societies, and spread it more rapidly, but they were hardly overwhelming in that regard. Consider the succession: Copper Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age. Hundreds, if not thousands, of years were involved – many, many triads, pentads etc. Imperia did not often come into any proper competitive conflict, and when they did, either a standoff or a conquest would result. But a “triumphant” result is best described, certainly in regard to the broad cultural construct, as the substitution of one variation of the same thing for another. Another scenario would have one Imperium succeed another through time, i.e. an old empire would wither and decay, to be succeeded in time by a new one, without any direct conflict, or any obvious compelling advantage of the newer over the older. Finally, and not infrequently, a weakening imperium would be overwhelmed by the onslaught of “barbarian hoards” – i.e. tribal society taking a brief revenge. The almost universal history of such events, curiously enough, was that within a couple of generations, the conquering tribes were conquered by the very cultures they had assaulted. They replaced the leadership at the top, undoubtedly introduced some new cultural blood, but ended, far more so than not, by becoming “more Catholic than the Pope”. They won the war, but lost the negotiation. Again the argument can be made that a growing diversity in civilizations, an enriched matrix, rather than any consistent and meaningful winnowing of superior versus inferior was the rule.
But it is clear that today’s societies are not appropriately described by a top down authoritarian model. Democracies are becoming the rule, and are clearly the most successful societies. What has occasioned this new cultural selection. Again it was the appearance of something which opened vast new potentials to the human race.
It begins only three hundred years ago, with Issac Newton.
It is plausible to maintain, even absent any evidence in support, that he was not the first with the idea, but it was his formulation of it, in the Principia (1687), that led to the idea taking root. Its subsequent exfoliation, first, through the fertile soil of post Renaissance Europe, and then throughout the whole world, ushers in the modern era, and the second great cultural selection. The Principia propounds the idea that the Natural World is encompassed by a regime of mathematical rigor. That material reality can be described by universal, discoverable, mathematically exact expressions of causality. Natural Philosophy becomes Natural Law. It is one thing to observe that there is a force of gravitational attraction acting between bodies; it is quite another to state that it is directly proportional to the product of the masses of those bodies, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. From that idea flows all of modernity. The understanding initiated what is most appropriately understood as the Scientific Revolution, although that understanding has been displaced from our thinking through the impact of its first great result, the Industrial Revolution. But it remains The Scientific Revolution, and it continues to vigorously reshape our world to this day.
Note ( echo?): The Scientific Revolution does not constitute wisdom, spiritual elevation or moral accomplishment. It is a tool. It remains for us to inform its use with those factors.
To return to the broad historical narrative, paused above with the advent of the Scientific Revolution, and consider processes of cultural selection attendant upon it.
It was argued, with respect to the first great cultural selection, that a creative innovation – large scale domesticated agriculture - led to a thoroughgoing reconfiguration of human societies. Those Civilizational societies were largely authoritarian in structure, a form woven from three factors. 1 - They required an enduring control of land, and the massive, systematic application of human labor in the form of simple, repetitive, physical skills. 2 - Both the land and the labor could be, and far more often than not were, obtained through the use of coercive force. 3 - And least important, authoritarian power possessed a crude, but real, resonance in sympathy with our oldest and most deeply held basis for social order: the wisdom of the ancestors.
Can a similar arc be traced through the modern era? Clearly innovation, now become endemic as the Scientific Revolution, becomes a powerful player. Indeed, it is woven into the very structure of our world. The modern world is born of the nexus between human creativity and the understandings of material reality which have been developed through modern science, which is itself, of course, a primary product of that same creative force. If individual creative energy becomes vital, the conditions conducive to its emergence become critical. Consider: as the advances of science and technology have made their way through the history of the last three hundred years or so, a need for an increasingly educated, genuinely committed work force has slowly emerged (evolved?). Today it is commonplace to assert that all our children need to be educated. Three hundred years ago, that idea would have been greeted with incredulity – most likely a laughing, dismissive incredulity. In short, as with the simple physical skills of the post agricultural revolution world, the nature of the work by which the modern world prospers (educated, creative, committed) has generated a new societal paradigm.
(1) Modern Liberal Democracy. (2) A free and open structure in which rapidly mutating innovation can manifest itself and be implemented. (3) A society in which the benefits of creative efforts are widely realized in a manner roughly proportionate to the source, breadth, and depth of those efforts. Together they constitute a structure appropriate to developing and extending the advantages of material well being that modernity opens to us. It is of some passing interest, in this regard, that one of the most consistent elements in these new social structures is a continued reverence for law. But now for law understood as the “rule of laws and not of men”; law which emanates from, and is legitimized through governance in consultation with and by consent of the governed. [Our capacity for recasting matters of deep and continuing appeal in terms appropriate to changed circumstances is really rather marvelous.]
Future Cultural Selection.
It is at end of his book, in regard to some future cultural selection, that I find Wright’s thinking to become vague and hesitant. Much of what he says evaporates towards the empyrean. Essentially, he declines to speculate. At best he makes a reference to the inevitability of a single world government – an extrapolation of the post Agricultural Revolution world’s tendency toward Imperia - Imperia in their guise as spheres of maximum cooperativity. (Wright appears consistently in the Web magazine Slate as The Earthling.) The notion of world governance, in some form or other, is most likely correct, but only in the long run. In the short run, it tends to send some shivers down the spines of most of us, and to inspire a fierce, truculent resistance in a minority (recall Yeat’s: “worst . . . filled with a passionate intensity”). As such it is not constructive. I believe a more fruitful conceptualism is possible.
Change now clearly has become rapid enough to engage monads/triads/pentads etc. We all understand an interest in the negotiation, in finding non-zero-sum outcomes. Cultural evolution is now palpably a dialog. And therein lies the clue to directions Wright’s thinking might take us. Participants in a dialog must be respected, if that dialog is to have constructive, mutually beneficial, outcomes. What happens will be, can only effectively be, over time, the result of a voluntary, negotiated process between people. Eliminating a rival culture eliminates a potential source of innovation, suborning a rival’s allegiance alienates - it turns off the flow of creative energy, and leads towards the stagnation of any culture brought unwillingly under the thumb of another. Alone, careful, often painstaking and difficult negotiation, leading to mutually accepted resolutions, opens the path to win/win, non-zero sum solutions.
This, I submit, is where Wright’s thinking leads. To a selective process: a dialog of mutual respect, seeking the benefits of cooperation. The winnowing has become active, the result of conscious determination by monads, triads, pentads, etc. (It may indeed eventually lead to a single world government – but that will be a voluntary outcome). It is in a wise engagement with this process that “Human Destiny” lies.
9:27:42 PM 
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