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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny PDF

389 Pages·2001·1.27 MB·English
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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.)

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In his bestselling The Moral Animal , Robert Wright applied the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind. Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history–and discerning where history will lead us next. In Nonzero:
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