Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

389 Pages·2001·1.27 MB·English

by  Robert Wright

NONZERO
T H E L O G I C O F H U M A N D E S T I N Y

R O B E R T W R I G H T

V I N T A G E B O O K S
A D I V I S I O N O F R A N D O M H O U S E , I N C .
N E W Y O R K
Copyright © 2000 by Robert Wright

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the
United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United
States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000 and in trade paperback
by Vintage Books in 2001.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Wright, Robert, 1957–
Nonzero : the logic of human destiny / Robert Wright.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN 0-375-72781-7
v1.0
1. Social evolution. 2. Human evolution. 3. History. I. Title.
GN360.W75 2000
303.4'21—dc21 99-040859

www.vintagebooks.com

This book is also available in a print version:
0-679-75894-1
For Eleanor and Margaret

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the
simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and
sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.
This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies
extending to the men of all nations and races.
—Charles Darwin
CONTENTS

Introduction: The Storm Before the Calm

PART I A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
2. The Way We Were
3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
4. The Invisible Brain
5. War: What Is It Good For?
6. The Inevitability of Agriculture
7. The Age of Chiefdoms
8. The Second Information Revolution
9. Civilization and So On
10. Our Friends the Barbarians
11. Dark Ages
12. The Inscrutable Orient
13. Modern Times
14. And Here We Are
15. New World Order
16. Degrees of Freedom
PART II A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

17. The Cosmic Context
18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness
19. Why Life Is So Complex
20. The Last Adaptation

PART III FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

21. Non-crazy Questions
22. You Call This a God?

Appendix 1: On Non-zero-sumness
Appendix 2: What Is Social Complexity?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
NONZERO

Acclaim for Robert Wright’s
NONZERO:

The Logic of Human Destiny

“An original, accessible and thought-provoking view of history . . . full of rich detail,
ingenious insight and bold argument.” —The Economist

“Wright carries his learning lightly, and his bold attempt to uncover parallels between
organic evolution and the development of human cultures makes for a compelling
synthesis. . . . Wright is right about so many things: evolution is seeded with
inevitabilities, cultures have common trajectories, and human history has seen great
hopes and terrible crimes but is capable of achieving a final destiny.” —Simon Conway
Morris, The New York Times Book Review

“An extraordinarily insightful and thought-provoking book. . . . Wright does an
astonishingly effective job of finding directionality in history, not just over the past few
thousand years but over the almost four billion years since the beginning of life on
earth.” —Francis Fukuyama, The Wilson Quarterly

“A dazzling tour of world history. . . . Although he takes into account the tooth-and-claw
battles of nations, the vanished empires, social violence and chaos, the shocks and
changes of technology, Mr. Wright finds pattern and meaning in history. We are moving
toward connectedness, toward one world. . . . Does that mean we can rest on our laurels
and simply let the game go on? No; Mr. Wright wants us consciously to take
charge.” —The Ottawa Citizen

“A must for history buffs . . . highly readable. . . . Wright’s chatty, informal style makes
all the difference.” —The Singapore Straits Times

At long last, here is a ‘millennium book’ that is definitely worth reading. . . . An
enormously skillful summary of everything you always wanted to know about history and
science but were afraid to ask.” —David Davidar, The Hindu (India)
“A genuine advance in our understanding of how we came to be, and where we are
headed. . . . We—the sorry mass of humanity—have made history, but we have often
proceeded blindly and without the least understanding of the great project in which we
are engaged. Wright should be content that he has described, better than anyone in recent
days, the nature and scope of that endeavor.” —John Judis, The Washington Monthly

“Books that search for grand themes in history are almost impossible to write well, but
when successful, make a lasting impression on thought. Nonzero is such a work. Brilliant,
sweeping, and alive with insight, it is the first really important book of the new
decade.” —Gregg Easterbrook, beliefnet.com

“Generous and urgent scholarship about everything from the function of war among
native North American peoples to the origins of language . . . provided with witty style,
energy, and an attractive sort of bold humility.” —Lionel Tiger, National Review

“Grand and entertaining . . . perceptive and thought-provoking.” —Boston Herald

“Nonzero is a zealous and often thrilling gloss of all of human history—a work of
philosophical derring-do from one of America’s alpha minds.” —Virginia Heffernan,
Talk

“Amusing and bold and at the same time illuminating, contentious and
controversial.” —Toronto Globe & Mail

“I recommend Nonzero to any and all readers as a marvelous ummary and interpretation
of what is now known and surmised about biological and human history on our planet. . . .
Wright knows so much and has thought so clearly; and allows his imagination to range so
freely!” —William H. McNeill, University of Chicago, author of Plagues and People
and The Rise of the West

“Wright’s chapters on the evolution of biological complexity and intelligence—in
addition to being beautifully written and scientifically sound—are a welcome corrective
to current trendy views that understate natural selection’s creative power. There is, indeed,
as Darwin said, a grandeur in this view of life.” —James Gould, Princeton University,
author of Biological Science
Introduction

THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM

A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral and
religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that something
tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it?
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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
overarching 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 a 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 “élan vital,” a vital force. But why posit something so
ethereal when we can explain evolution’s workings in the wholly physical term of natural
selection? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit theologian, saw human history moving
toward “Point Omega.” But how eriously 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 pattern 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 readers not drawn to theological questions will be delighted to hear, such speculation
constitutes a small portion of this book: a few cosmic thoughts toward the end,
necessarily tentative. Mostly this book is about how we got where we are today, and what
this tells us about where we’re heading next.

THE SECRET OF LIFE

On the day James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, Crick, as
Watson later recalled it, walked into their regular lunch place and announced that they
had “found the secret of life.” With all due respect for DNA, I would like to nominate
another candidate for the secret of life. Unlike Francis Crick, I can’t claim to have
discovered the secret I’m touting. It was discovered—or, if you prefer, invented—about
half a century ago by the founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar
Morgenstern.
They 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 member of a legislature, two childhood friends sometimes—but not always—find
their interests overlapping. To the extent that their interests do overlap, their relationship i
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 discussion of the classic non-zero-
sum game “the prisoner’s dilemma,” see appendix 1.)