Even If the Pessimists Are Right About Human Nature

(This essay follows up on the discussion that arose from my recent piece, “The Bible’s Window into the Cruel World That Civilization Had Evolved Into,” in which several readers questioned the validity of my indictment of civilization as creating the circumstances in which God would be reported to command His Chosen People to exterminate the people from whose land He commanded them to steal.)

The foundation of my life’s work for more than half a century — which claims to explain why human history has been as destructive and tormented as it has been — has been the idea that the emergence of civilization made it inevitable that there would be a “war of all against all” among civilized societies, and that the consequences of that would inevitably be that civilization would develop in ways people would never have chosen but could not avoid.

Recently, I published on Daily Kos a piece talking about how the biblical book Deuteronomy provides a disturbing snapshot that supports that idea — showing how the evolution of civilization was dictated to a large extent by “the Spirit of the Gangster.” For the rise of civilization inevitably plunged humankind into an anarchic intersocietal system, and it is the Gangster that generally comes to dominate in circumstances of anarchy.

Among the comments my Deuteronomy piece evoked were some providing what the commenters believed was contrary evidence: wasn’t there lots of war before civilization emerged? didn’t Jane Goodall discover that bands of chimpanzees make war on other bands of their own species?

Those challenges require a more elaborate response than I thought it appropriate to venture on that comment thread. But here’s the response I’d like to offer:

In terms of the scientifically (historical, archaeological, primatological) established facts, the picture has seemed to grow darker than when I first studied the relative fields in the 1970s, when I developed my idea to get my Ph.D. and to get my book The Parable of the Tribes published (University of California Press, 1984; still in print from SUNY Press):

• Our relatives the chimpanzees do seem less peaceful than the literature used to say (though the bonobos are also our close cousins, and they make love, not war).
• And some evidence suggests more violence among hunting-gathering societies than I’d previously thought, but to the best of my ability to discern, the archaeological record doesn’t show Homo sapiens to have been particularly warlike. (And it doesn’t seem to be the current thought that our species eliminated our neighboring species, the Neanderthals, who likely died out on their own.)

But regardless, even if the pessimists about our inherent nature are right, the core of my argument remains intact.

Even if it were true that the rise of civilization didn’t greatly intensify the conflict among human groups — and I still believe that it did lead to a great escalation of the place of war among human societies — the social-evolutionary consequences of a “war of all against all” under conditions of civilization would be much greater than had been the case in the hunter-gatherer era.

To show why the rise of civilization was such a significant point of discontinuity, I should begin by making clear what I mean by “civilization.” I do not draw the line at the rise of cities and empires, as one commenter imagined. Such “full-blown” civilization emerged some five millennia after the crucial breakthrough that marks the beginning of “the rise of civilization” as I mean it.

By “civilization,” I mean those societies created by a species that has extricated itself from the biological niche in which it evolved, by inventing its own way of life — thereby bringing into existence not just a new kind of society, but indeed a wholly new kind of life-form, one shaped not by natural selection but by the creature’s own creative intelligence.

“Civilization” may not be entirely apt to describe human societies from the very beginnings of horticulture and herding through the millennia-long build-up to empires, but our language doesn’t present a better word to differentiate the breakthrough into a wholly new kind of life-form — one that was the product not of “natural selection” but of the creature’s own creative intelligence.

That’s the crucial dividing line — in the niche or out of the niche, not whether there’s an empire ruled from a city with a tyrant in charge.

In the niche: eating what nature spontaneously provides, or growing the plants the species formerly gathered and herding the animals they used to hunt. Not the power systems that emerged millennia later.

Because that initial breakout made the subsequent emergence of those vast power systems inevitable.

That’s what my Big Idea — my Parable of the Tribes — claims to show.

Here’s how that works:

So long as humankind remained in the hunting-gathering mode, there were stringent limits on what kind of variety there might be among societies. The size, structure, and means of subsistence were givens — and culture could create variations only within those limits. Human societies, though cultural, remained in those essential respects continuous with our primate ancestors.

Once humans broke out of that niche, by virtue of their inventive breakthroughs, they opened the door to an unlimited number of subsequent possible cultural innovations.

So even if we imagine that there was some sort of “war of all against all” among those societies, the “elimination tournament” that would result when the winners survived and the losers did not could have had only very limited social-evolutionary consequences.

But when some human societies broke out of that original evolutionary niche by inventing new ways of producing food — allowing populations to grow and social structures to become more complex — the range of possibilities expanded enormously. If there were then to arise such a “war of all against all,” its consequences for the development of civilization would be of an entirely different magnitude.

For when a species breaks out of the biologically evolved order, it breaks into Disorder, for there is no other order yet in place to regulate the interactions among societies of this unprecedented kind.

Under those inevitably anarchic circumstances, their interactions take place with nothing to assure that their relations are compatible with the long-term viability of the system as a whole. Indeed, such conditions of Anarchy ensure that the overall system will be plagued by a “war of all against all.”

In such a world, it is evident that only those societies that can prevail in that struggle will survive and spread. And whether a society prevails or perishes depends on what it brings to the contest — its organization, its cohesion, its capacity for power.

Another consequence of the breakthrough to civilization was that it opened the door to profound cultural variation. With the emerging diversity — different food-producing technologies, different ways of organizing power and belief — the possibilities multiplied.

When we combine the inevitability of that “war of all against all” with this vastly expanded range of cultural possibilities, the transformative implications for human history come into view. A whole new drama has begun — one in which civilization’s boundless creativity unfolds amid ungoverned struggle, and the fate of each society depends on how it meets that challenge.

Even among hunting-gathering peoples, there may have been an elimination tournament, but the winners and losers differed only within narrow bounds. Once the genie was out of the bottle, the range widened from perhaps A to Z.

And the criteria for survival — who can prevail in a war of all against all — differ profoundly from the criteria a creature would choose if it could.

So it is that our species’ great breakthrough — starting with new methods of food production — inevitably began a selective process that mandates that only those cultural forms that can prevail in an inevitable intersocietal struggle will survive and spread, while all those cultural options that fail to equip a society to win such conflicts will disappear from possible human futures. What inevitably emerges is an empire animated by the kind of spirit that does well in anarchic circumstances.

So, whether our inborn, biologically-evolved nature is more peaceful or more warlike, the selective process after the beginnings of civilization will inevitably give “the Spirit of the Gangster” a quite disproportionate say in how human civilization will operate and evolve.

Which leads to the important conclusion: We are better creatures than what we’ve shown in the past ten thousand years, and than we have traditionally believed.