|
NONZERO
A:hover {color: #FF0000; font-style: italic}
NONZERO
THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY By
ROBERT WRIGHT
Home
Thumbnail
Summary
Introduction
Table
of Contents and Excerpts
Excerpts
from Reviews
About
the Author
Buy
the Book
Introduction
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 I: On
Non-zero-sumness
Appendix II: What Is
Social Complexity?
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 higher 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 as 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 "elan
vital," a vital force. But why posit something so ethereal when we
can explain evolution's workings in the wholly physical terms of natural
selection? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit theologian, saw human
history moving toward "Point Omega." But how seriously 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 patterns 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
members of a legislature, two childhood friends sometimes—but not
always—find their interests overlapping. To the extent that their
interests do overlap, their relationship is 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 a discussion of the classic
non-zero-sum game "the prisoner's dilemma," see Appendix 1.]
Sometimes political
scientists or economists break human interaction down into zero-sum and
non-zero-sum components. Occasionally, evolutionary biologists do the
same in looking at the way various living systems work. My contention is
that, if we want to see what drives the direction of both human history
and organic evolution, we should apply this perspective more
systematically. Interaction among individual genes, or cells, or
animals, among interest groups, or nations, or corporations, can be
viewed through the lenses of game theory. What follows is a survey of
human history, and of organic history, with those lenses in place. My
hope is to illuminate a kind of force—the non-zero-sum dynamic—that
has crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth so far.
The survey of organic
history is brief, and the survey of human history not so brief. Human
history, after all, is notoriously messy. But I don't think it's nearly
as messy as it's often made out to be. Indeed, even if you start the
survey back when the most complex society on earth was a hunter-gatherer
village, and follow it up to the present, you can capture history's
basic trajectory by reference to a core pattern: New technologies arise
that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction;
then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature)
social structures evolve that realize this rich potential—that convert
non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity
grow in scope and depth.
This isn't to say that
non-zero-sum games always have win-win outcomes rather than lose-lose
outcomes. Nor is it to say that the powerful and the treacherous never
exploit the weak and the naive; parasitic behavior is often possible in
non-zero-sum games, and history offers no shortage of examples. Still,
on balance, over the long run, non-zero-sum situations produce more
positive sums than negative sums, more mutual benefit than parasitism.
As a result, people become embedded in larger and richer webs of
interdependence.
This basic sequence--the
conversion of non-zero-sum situations into mostly positive sums—had
started happening at least as early as 15,000 years ago. Then it
happened again. And again. And again. Until—voila!—here we are,
riding in airplanes, sending e-mail, living in a global village.
I don't mean to minimize
the interesting details that populate most history books: Sumerian
kings, barbarian hordes, medieval knights, the Protestant Reformation,
nascent nationalism, and so on. In fact, I try to give all of these
their due (along with such too-often-neglected exemplars of the human
experience as native American hunter-gatherers, Polynesian chiefdoms,
Islamic commercial innovations, African kingdoms, Aztec justice, and
precocious Chinese technology). But I do intend to show how these
details, though important in their own right, are ultimately part of a
larger story—to show how they fit into a framework that makes thinking
about human history easier.
After surveying human
history, I will briefly apply to organic history the same organizing
principle. Through natural selection, there arise new
"technologies" that permit richer forms of non-zero-sum
interaction among biological entities: among genes, or cells, or
animals, or whatever. And the rest, as they say, is organic history.
In short, both organic and
human history involve the playing of ever-more-numerous, ever-larger,
and ever-more-elaborate non-zero-sum games. It is the accumulation of
these games—game upon game upon game that constitutes the growth in
biological and social complexity that people like Bergson and Teilhard
de Chardin have talked about. I like to refer to this accumulation as an
accumulation of "non-zero-sumness." Non-zero-sumness is a kind
of potential—a potential for overall gain, or for overall loss,
depending on how the game is played. The concept may sound ethereal in
the abstract, but I hope it will feel concrete by the end of this book.
Non-zero-sumness, I'll argue, is something whose ongoing growth and
ongoing fulfillment define the arrow of the history of life, from the
primordial soup to the World Wide Web.
You might even say that
non-zero-sumness is a nuts-and-bolts, materialist version of Bergson's
immaterial elan vital; it gives a certain momentum to the basic
direction of life on this planet. It explains why biological evolution,
given enough time, was very likely to create highly intelligent life--life smart enough to generate technology and other forms of culture. It
also explains why the ensuing evolution of technology, and of culture
more broadly, was very likely to enrich and expand the social structure
of that intelligent species, carrying social organization to planetary
breadth. Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just
since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the
written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. All along,
the relentless logic of non-zero-sumness has been pointing toward this
age in which relations among nations are growing more non-zero-sum year
by year.
YOU CALL
THAT DESTINY?
Any book with a subtitle
as grandiose as "The Logic of Human Destiny" is bound to have
some mealy-mouthed qualification somewhere along the way. We might as
well get it over with.
How literally do I mean
the word "destiny"? Do I mean that the exact state of the
world ten or fifty or one hundred years from now is inevitable, down to
the last detail? No, on two counts.
(1) I'm talking not about
the world's exact, detailed state, but about its broad contours: the
nature of its political and economic structures (Whither, for example,
the nation-state?); the texture of individual experience (Whither
freedom?); the scope of culture (Whither Mickey Mouse?); and so on.
(2) I'm not talking about
something that is literally inevitable. Still, I am talking about
something whose chances of transpiring are very, very high. Moreover,
I'm saying that the only real alternatives to the "destiny"
that I'll outline are extremely unpleasant, best avoided for all our
sakes.
Some people may consider
it cheating to use the word "destiny" when you mean not
"inevitable" but "exceedingly likely." Would you
consider it cheating to say that the destiny of a poppy seed is to
become a poppy? Obviously, a given poppy seed may not become a
poppy. Indeed, the destiny of some poppy seeds seems—in retrospect, at
least—to have been getting baked onto a bagel. And even poppy seeds
that have escaped this fate, and landed on soil, may still get eaten
(though not at brunch) and thus never become flowers.
Still, there are at least
three reasons that it seems defensible to say that the
"destiny" of a poppy seed is to become a poppy. First, this is
very likely to happen under broadly definable circumstances. Second,
from the seed's point of view, the only alternative to this happening is
catastrophe—death, to put a finer point on it. Third, if we inspect
the essence of a poppy seed—the DNA it contains—we find it hard to
escape the conclusion that the poppy seed is programmed to become a
poppy. Indeed, you might say the seed is designed to become a
poppy, even though it was "designed" not by a human designer,
but by natural selection. For anything other than full-fledged poppyhood
to happen to a poppy seed—for it to get baked onto a bagel or eaten by
a bird—is for the seed's true expression to be stifled' its naturally
imbued purpose to go unrealized.
It is for reasons roughly
analogous to these that I will make an argument for human destiny. Of
course, the human-poppy analogy gets most contentious when we ponder the
third reason: Is it fair to say that our species has some larger
"purpose"? Is there some grand goal that life on earth was
"designed" to realize? Here, as I've said, the argument has to
get quite speculative. But I do think the reasons for answering yes are
stronger than many people especially many scientists and social
scientists—realize.
THE CURRENT
CHAOS
Neither biological
evolution nor human history is a smooth, steady process. Both pass
through thresholds; they can leap from one equilibrium to a new,
higher-level equilibrium. To some people, the current era has the aura
of a threshold; it has that unsettling, out-of-control feeling that can
portend a major shift. Technological, geopolitical, and economic change
seem ominously fast, and the fabric of society seems somehow tenuous.
For instance: World
currency markets are rocked by the turbulent force of electronically
lubricated financial speculation. Weapons of mass destruction are
cultivated by rogue regimes and New Age cults. Nations seem less
cohesive than before, afflicted by ethnic or religious or cultural
faction. Health officials seriously discuss the prospect of a worldwide
plague the unspeakably gruesome Ebola virus, perhaps, or some microbe we
don't yet know about, spread around the world by jet-propelled
travelers. Even tropical storms seem to have grown more intense in
recent decades, arguably a result of global warming.
It sounds apocalyptic, and
some religiously minded people think it literally is. They have trouble
imagining that this rash of new threats could be mere coincidence
especially coming, as it has, at the end of a millennium. Some
fundamentalist Christians cite growing global chaos as evidence that
Judgment Day is around the corner. A whole genre of best-selling novels
envisions "the Rapture," the day when true believers, on the
way to heaven, meet Christ in midair, while others, down below, find a
less glamorous fate.
In a sense, these
fundamentalists are right. No, I don't mean about the Rapture. I just
mean that growing turmoil does signify, by my lights, a distinct step in
the unfolding of what you could call the world's destiny. We are indeed
approaching a culmination of sorts; our species seems to face a kind of
test toward which basic forces of history have been moving us for
millennia. It is a test of political imagination—of our ability to
accept basic, necessary changes in structures of governance but also a
test of moral imagination.
So how will we do on this
test? Judging by history, the current turbulence will eventually yield
to an era of relative stability, an era when global political, economic,
and social structures have largely tamed the new forms of chaos. The
world will reach a new equilibrium, at a level of organization higher
than any past equilibrium. And the period we are now entering will, in
retrospect, look like the storm before the calm.
Or, on the other hand, we
could blow up the world. Remember, even poppy seeds don't always manage
to flower.
For that matter, even if
we avoid blowing up the world, elements of uncertainty remain. Though
the natural expression of history's logic has certain firm parameters,
they leave some leeway. One can imagine, within the bounds of
possibility suggested by the trajectory of the past, future political
structures that grant more freedom or less, more privacy or less, that
foster more order or less, more wealth or less.
One purpose of this book
is to aid in exploring this "wiggle room"—in choosing among
such alternative futures and in realizing the choice. But at least as
important as using destiny's leeway wisely is easing destiny's arrival.
History, even if its basic direction is set, can proceed at massive,
wrenching human cost. Or it can proceed more smoothly—with costs, to
be sure, but with more tolerable costs. It is the destiny of our species—and
this time I mean the inescapable destiny, not just the high likelihood—to
choose.
An
excerpt from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert
Wright, published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright.
More excerpts are available at www.nonzero.org
|
|
