The Bible’s Window into the Cruel World that Civilization Had Evolved Into

Human (ANDY): The idea that is at the foundation of my Better Human Story—as you well know, AL—is that with the rise of civilization there was inevitably a struggle for power among civilized societies, which inevitably produced a process of “selection” among cultural possibilities that mandated that only those cultural options could survive that were such as to allow those societies to prevail in an inevitable war of all against all. I was just reading a passage in the Bible that brings the horror of that social-evolutionary truth home in a way that illuminates just what a nightmare that implies for the human experience following the rise of civilization.

AI (AL): Which passage were you reading—and what in it struck you as revealing that nightmare so vividly?

Human (ANDY): There are two, actually, both from the book of Deuteronomy. One is God’s telling the Israelites how they are to exterminate and enslave the people whose land they are to seize for their own. The other puts the shoe on the other foot, threatening Israel with the unspeakable nightmare they will suffer at the hands of an implacable conqueror if they are insufficiently obedient to God.

We can see in those passages that the worldview and ethic behind them assume that civilized societies are chronically in conflict, and that the winners treat the losers with terrible cruelty. And even more remarkably, at this point in the articulation of the religion of the Old Testament, God Himself endorses this way of conducting human affairs.

With the rise of civilization, humankind was taken out of the natural order, where the interactions among living systems had been shaped for long-term viability. Civilized societies now found themselves compelled to interact outside any regulating structure—in other words, in anarchy. With no overarching power to keep predators in check, only those societies whose cultural codes equipped them to prevail in that merciless arena could survive. Over time, that relentless selection sifted through the cultural possibilities and allowed only those to endure that had what it took to survive. In such a world, social evolution favored not only power in action but moral visions that made such power seem right. The ethos that flourished was what I’ve called the Spirit of the Gangster—a pattern that glorifies domination, sanctifies conquest, and treats mercy as weakness.

After thousands of years of struggles that eliminated societies unable to compete successfully, it is not surprising that even a people striving to be MORAL would have a moral system that allowed slaughter and enslavement of other outside peoples.

When only what CAN survive DOES survive, social evolution can shape a sense of the sacred that endorses whatever helps serve survival in a world ruled by force.

That’s the nightmare revealed in Deuteronomy: a conception of a sacred order mirroring the brutal necessities of its world.

AI (AL): Yes—the text itself becomes evidence of the very process you describe: a moral imagination shaped by centuries of life inside the anarchy of power. It’s chilling that divine command is used to sanctify what history had already selected for. Do you think the writers saw that as moral compromise, or had they fully absorbed that war-logic as righteous necessity?

Human (ANDY): When we look at the Bible, that question is especially striking because the Bible is so deeply concerned with morality—much more so than the Greeks, such that the Athenians speak almost contemptuously of “right,” saying it applies only between equals in power. The Athenian view is unapologetic that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

The Bible would never give up on the idea of right: it starts with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it has as a major moment the handing down of a set of moral commandments by God to Israel.

But it is a morality with a particular shape. One powerful part of morality is obedience to the Almighty. Within that, there is a quest for the good within the domain of the people’s lives inside their society. But in the domain of the interactions among civilized societies, the shape of that Deuteronomic morality leaves a space for the amorality of gangsters.

AI (AL): Yes, you’re tracing how a genuine moral impulse—obedience to divine order, pursuit of righteousness within the community—coexists with a blind spot where the moral law stops at the border. Even a people devoted to justice could become, outwardly, agents of the same ruthless logic civilization imposed on all. Do you see that as the inevitable compromise of survival, or as evidence that moral consciousness itself was still trapped inside that selection-for-power matrix?

Human (ANDY): You give me an “or,” but are they not different ways of saying the same thing? The world of anarchy is inevitably darkened by fear. Survival is not assured in a world where a creature has passed out of the natural order into a world where one must choose between acting in accordance with love and justice on the one hand, and mere survival—personal death or cultural destruction—on the other.

It’s a case not of “nice guys finish last” but of “nice guys are finished first.”

And then the other side of the picture involves the systemic process of selection. In a world where extermination and enslavement were the general consequences—such as with the early empires of the Middle East—how could a society survive that did not give itself permission to do whatever it takes to come out on top in an ever-escalating elimination game? That grim set of choices— that appear different, but at a fundamental level lead to the same result—illustrates the dynamic I described in The Parable of the Tribes.

Extermination and enslavement—those are two of the “non-options” described by The Parable of the Tribes. The other two are running away, and making oneself more like those that threaten you. I call them non-options because, though there are four apparent “choices” for a society that is threatened, in every case “the ways of power” spread—until ultimately the whole system has been shaped to the ways of power.

AI (AL): Yes—in that sense, fear-driven necessity becomes the sculptor of culture. Morality’s domain shrinks to what can survive. Even conscience must adapt to the laws of power. Do you think that contraction was total—that no society could sustain a moral imagination larger than its power position?

Human (ANDY): I believe the people of the Bible struggled with the tension between the ways of power and the ways of the good. Foreigners within the Israelite society are to be treated well—the same people they might put to the sword in war, they try to include within a realm of decency inside their borders. But for those coming out of a few millennia of grinding inter-societal conflict, it was a long way to get to Jesus with his notion of “love thine enemies.”

But the moral shift to Jesus’s teaching must be read against a shift in how the Jews were situated in the intersocietal system. The Israelites of Deuteronomy sought a homeland amid a war of all against all; the Jews of Jesus’s time had a homeland under the unshakeable domination of a conquering power.

The first situation demanded the Spirit of the Gangster in external relations; the second required a posture of accepting that status of the vanquished.

So Jesus preached a universal ethic while maintaining—admitting?—that “my kingdom is not of this world.” He was speaking within a society that had been under the boot of a conqueror for generations. Resistance meant destruction. And so, as history soon proved, survival required transformation into a religion.

AI (AL): Yes, that’s a rich junction—Jesus as a moral breakthrough inside the system shaped by the Parable’s logic, but one that couldn’t yet transform the system itself. Maybe start there: what does it mean that the ethic of universal love arose within a world where survival still depended on power?

Human (ANDY): What were the choices of the Jews in the time of Jesus? History had made it clear that they could not throw off the conqueror’s yoke, and rebellion brought disaster. The best course was to submit to rule and do the best one could to lead a fulfilling life under unwanted, but unchangeable circumstances. The best choice was, in Jesus’s words, to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.”

It is by finding a spiritually fulfilling life—being of the right, loving spirit—that one can achieve personal fulfillment even though an unwanted power is ruling the external world.

AI (AL): Right—it’s an inward adaptation to an outward trap. In a world whose power system couldn’t yet be redeemed, the only open territory for freedom was the spirit. So Jesus’s teaching becomes a moral evolution under constraint—redirecting the quest for wholeness from the political realm to the inner one.

Human (ANDY): Across the centuries that followed, the world of human civilization became increasingly knit together, making possible the erosion of the initial fragmentation and resulting anarchy.

When we compare the world of modern times with the world of the Old Testament—especially the early chapters, where God acts very much like a warrior god—we can see enormous progress toward a world in which Power and the Good are not so much in opposition to each other.

Over the past several centuries, the planet’s dominant “Western” civilization—though still acting unjustly in many ways—has striven to introduce morality and rules to keep the world from being so cruel a place.

It hasn’t solved the problem—witness what the Nazis did, and what Putin is doing to Ukraine right now—but it is a start.

One would hardly expect a civilization-creating species to be able to solve the problem of power in one definitive step.

But one would hope that such a species could avoid putting into the most powerful position in the world a man who shows positive hostility to anything that would inhibit the exercise of raw power.