Directionality: The Road to Somewhere
The drama of life is a cumulatively transformative process in which something of the utmost importance is taking place, even if analytical science cannot see it.
—John Haught, Making Sense of Evolution
So, is evolution going somewhere?” I asked the man across the restaurant table from me on a balmy spring night in Tucson, Arizona. The sun had just gone down, ending the last day of the “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. I had spent several days in Tucson as a journalist and researcher, curious as to the latest theories and activity in this relatively new field. The term “consciousness studies” may seem like something one is more likely to encounter at an Indian ashram than a major university, but increasingly science is turning its attention to perhaps the greatest mystery of evolution—consciousness itself.
Every couple of years, hundreds of pioneering academics, maverick researchers, and even a few conventional types, make the pilgrimage to Tucson to speak their minds and hear the latest about such unusual topics as “Use of Mathematical Physics to Model Neural Correlates of Brain Activity in Perception and Consciousness” or “Games Brains Play: Neurological Disturbances of Self and Identity” or “Retroactive Modulation of Subjective Intentions: Philosophy, Science and Cyborgs.” One of those who had made the journey was a familiar face—John Stewart, an Australian evolutionary theorist and author of the book Evolution’s Arrow: The Direction of Evolution and the Future of Humanity. I had attended his panel in the afternoon and listened to his interesting talk on “The Potential Future Development of Consciousness.”
Stewart and I had first met at a conference years earlier and kept up a correspondence since. With a soft-spoken, easygoing Australian personality that meshes surprisingly well with a brilliant intellect, Stewart is the kind of person who can turn an impromptu dinner at a local restaurant into a long memorable evening of intellectual insight and stimulating conversation. And if that dinner just happens to take place on an outdoor patio in the unnaturally perfect Tucson spring weather, and is accompanied by a particularly nice Australian cabernet sauvignon—well, who am I to complain?
The topic of our conversation was directionality, or to use a more philosophical term, “teleology.” For those not familiar with that term, it is an important and controversial one in the study of evolution. Telos, in Greek, means “end” or “purpose.” So a teleological view, in relationship to evolution, is one that sees the process as having a particular purpose or direction—sees it as going somewhere, as opposed to just randomly unfolding. For some, the idea of teleology implies not only a direction but a specific, predictable end; for others, it means that the process has a clear directionality. It is this latter sense of the term that I use in this chapter.
The issue is critical as we outline the framework for a new worldview. The prevailing currents of evolutionary science have long been suspicious of the idea that one can glean any significance at all from the trajectory of cosmic history, and certainly not from the long march of life from simple bacteria to walking, talking, thinking mammals. The concern is that any sort of identifiable, recognizable directional trajectory in evolution inevitably smacks of purpose, purpose smacks of intelligence, and legitimizing ideas like purpose and intelligence will open the doors of science to all manner of unwelcome nonscientific speculations. This suspicion on the part of science dovetails nicely with the parallel conclusion in the humanities that the notion of progressive evolution in human cultural history is also a dangerous and unsound idea, one that should be, and largely has been, banished from the world of academia.
The concern, of course, with either of these positions is: are they true? Are they the best interpretation of the facts as we find them today? After all, if we’re interested in the deeper dimensions of evolution, then directionality, purpose, intelligence, progress, and all the potential meaning that accompanies these terms are at the very core of our concern.
“Much of the hostility to the idea that evolution has a progressive trajectory goes back to the mid-[twentieth] century, when what’s called the neo-Darwinian synthesis was just being formed,” Stewart explained to me as we waited for dinner, already deep in conversation. “Beginning in the 1940s, major figures in evolutionary theory, including Julian Huxley and Theodore Dobhzansky, decided that evolution needed to be respectable, and therefore science-based evolution had better not dabble in speculative big-picture stuff. Even though many of these founders actually had progressionist perspectives themselves, they suppressed these approaches in order to build the professional standing of evolutionary biology within mainstream, reductionist science.”
It is perhaps hard to fully appreciate from today’s perspective just how much cultural pressure there was in the middle of the last century to rid evolutionary theory of its tendency to attract a teleological aura. Indeed, ever since Darwin (and in truth, even before him), evolution was being embraced by those who wanted to find much more than blind selection in the workings of nature’s laws. By the 1940s, Darwin’s breakthrough had already been used by people as diverse as American philosopher John Dewey, French philosopher Henri Bergson, and German theorist Rudolf Steiner as a means to not only reenvision biology but to rethink cultural history, sociology, philosophy, spirituality, education, and even theology. Some of this theorizing was intriguing, some of it profound, and some of it questionable at best, but all of it was stirring emotions, excitement, and controversy like few subjects can.
These speculations began to directly clash with the larger tides of twentieth-century culture. Two world wars had considerably dampened enthusiasm for any kind of teleological view of history. For many, directionality smacked of Marxism, and the West was at war with the dark results of that cultural experiment. Moreover, Hitler’s fascism had been built upon the idea that one race of human beings had a special destiny, that they were intellectually and culturally superior to the rest of us and represented a higher step on the evolutionary ladder. Perhaps, many suggested, we should throw out big, speculative, meaning-laden ideas of history altogether. They were dangerous. Forget about historical trends, patterns, stages, or directionality. Embracing such ideas became seen as risky and morally hazardous, too closely associated with many of these darker forces in human history. And this was understandable. As British paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris writes, “That biology can be co-opted for agendas, if not ideologies, that promise an ever-more-perfect future, albeit across piles of corpses, is evident from the lunacies adopted by totalitarian states.”
Evolutionary theory, its proponents felt, needed to free itself from such associations, and the best way to do so was to stick to the narrow confines of careful and concrete science. “The prestige of evolutionary research,” wrote the famous biologist Ernst Mayr in 1948, “has suffered in the past because of too much philosophy and speculation.” To the increasingly skeptical modern mind, confronted with an ever-more-fragmented world, the idealistic narratives of the evolutionist philosophers seemed to lack a sufficient empirical basis. The editors and peer reviewers of the important journal Evolution took care to eliminate any such language from its pages as evolutionary science embarked upon a period of consolidating its academic legitimacy.
Ironically, as Stewart explained to me, many of the great leaders in the field continued to publish on ideas of directionality and progress, still captivated (as Evolutionaries tend to be) by the teleological implications of evolutionary science. But in a strange sort of double life, they confined their speculations to popular books and eliminated such “philosophizing” from their professional endeavors. Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane wryly remarked that “teleology is a mistress without whom no biologist can live, but with whom none wishes to be seen in public.”
So despite brief bursts of infidelity on the part of the biologists, the overall trend of the last half-century was established, and those with a bias toward seeing direction, purpose, and progression in evolution seemed fewer and fewer, and their voices in the culture at large grew softer and softer. And that wasn’t just true in the world of biology. Across the spectrum of the humanities, the postwar intellectual climate saw a retreat from reading directionality and its close cousins, purpose and progress, into the tea leaves of cultural history.
It’s striking how many of the great champions of evolutionary progress came of age before World War I. This only underscores the change in western society that occurred between 1914 and 1945. Prior to Europe’s twin conflagrations there had been a general belief in the forward movement of human culture. Those were the days of globalization’s first incarnation, and while concerns about industrialization and modernity were also active, it was still possible to unabashedly believe in the future, to embrace the word “progress” without irony or without immediately qualifying it with a string of caveats and justifications. But all that had changed by 1945. The unguarded optimism that once flowed freely from modernity had finally run dry. Enthusiasm for progress in history seemed as dead as the millions laid to waste on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, and our cultural thought leaders took a collective step back to assess the validity of such notions in a world of atomic weaponry, genocide, totalitarianism, and environmental destruction.
Historian Massimo Salvadori writes in Progress: Can We Do Without It?, “The twentieth century was a great burial ground for ideas and bodies. . . . In this vast cemetery, the idea of Progress . . . was laid to rest both by those who had consciously rejected it and by those who had first undergone its moulding influence and then gravely deformed it.” Directionality and determinism were rejected, uncertainty embraced. Belief in modernity’s promise was replaced with a marked lack of belief, not just in the traditional gods of myth and magic but in the modern deities of technology and progress. We were slowly becoming postmodern. And for postmoderns then and now, directionality and progress are dangerous ideas, potential gateways to illusions of cultural superiority, environmental disaster, and economic domination. They are best relegated to the ideological dustbin of history.
Biologist David Sloan Wilson captures this concern in his Evolution for Everyone, in which he describes how a young graduate attempting to apply the insights of evolutionary theory to other fields ran into a wall of opposition based on many of these negative presumptions when he tried to discuss his newfound interest with his professors and peers:
[He] quickly learned that when [he] spoke of human behavior, psychology and culture in evolutionary terms, their minds churned through an instant and unconscious process of translation, and they heard “Hitler”, “Galton,” “Spencer,” “IQ differences,” “holocaust,” “racial phrenology,” “forced sterilization,” “genetic determinism,” “Darwinian fundamentalism,” and “disciplinary imperialism.”
Wilson is not exaggerating. In the humanities, evolution is mistrusted as the facilitator of so much that was wrong with modernity—unchecked industrialization, cultural superiority, historical determinism, and the kind of reductionism that interprets all human motivation through the lens of Darwinian mechanisms. In academia, evolution is a science, nothing more, and any talk of philosophy, spirit, directionality, purpose, meaning, or grand overarching theories of life and history is heavily discouraged. At the furthest end of this spectrum, scientists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould saw progress as “a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history.”
One may be forgiven for thinking this to be the last word on the subject, that directionality might end up being a casualty of the evolution wars. Some have wished it so. From every corner, it seems, evolution as a larger progressive event, grand idea, or a great organizing narrative for life was rejected, ignored, or hemmed in to narrow boundaries, even as evolution as a narrow and specific science continued to flower and develop.
Today, we live in the world molded by this cultural legacy. But at the edges, much is shifting, churning, and changing. Stewart, my dinner companion that spring evening in Tucson, is one of a new generation of theorists who have thrown off the fears of the twentieth century and taken a fresh look at evolution with new eyes and new appreciation for its powerful teleological characteristics. Does evolution have a direction? Was human-level intelligence the inevitable, or at least a likely, result of the evolutionary process? And, most interestingly, if evolution has a direction, where is it headed? These questions are alive again in the intellectual currents of culture. Simon Conway Morris, a celebrated scientist who made his career studying the Burgess shale fossils, published Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe in 2005, arguing that biological evolution has a direction, and that humans, or something essentially like them, were indeed a likely result of the process.
Morris suggests that life’s tendency is to find the same evolutionary solutions despite disparate circumstances. “Rerun the tape of life as often as you like, and the end result will be much the same,” he writes. For example, the eye was independently created many times, suggesting that even given varying natural conditions, eyes are ultimately a good solution to evolution’s needs. Add up all such “convergent” solutions and it’s fair to propose, according to Morris, that something looking and acting like a human was going to be the inevitable result. He even suggests that evolution on other planets might reasonably be expected to produce intelligent creatures not entirely alien to the two-legged walking, talking apes that are found here on planet Earth.
Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God, has taken up a similar banner, arguing to some acclaim that not just biological but also social evolution has a direction. Despite the twists and turns of cultural development, he argues, a clear path can be seen in the history of both life and culture. These are just two of many theorists who, along with Stewart, are making the case for a much more interesting vision of evolution. It is a vision that has strong roots in science—all three of these theorists hew closely to conventional scientific mechanisms in their theories—but it touches upon all kinds of cultural and even spiritual concerns. Directionality is making a comeback, it seems, and progress is never far behind. For hard-core evolutionary biologists who brook no talk of such matters when it comes to their chosen profession, separating teleology from evolution must be a little like trying to play Whac-A-Mole at the local amusement park. No matter how many times it is beaten back by the powerful hammers of conventionality, it just keeps rearing its head again and again. Perhaps the naysayers are just fighting on the wrong side of history. As Stewart made clear to me that day in Arizona, progress and evolution belong together.
EVOLUTION OF A DIRECTIONALIST
Stewart, like all baby boomers, came of age in the aftermath of the two world wars. His father dabbled in theosophy and other spiritual trends of the day, a “dreamer” who invested in his son all of his own unfulfilled hopes. He gave him books to read, but not the usual teenage fare. Stewart’s young mind was filled with significant twentieth-century figures like philosopher Karl Popper, spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, and also an individual who seems to inevitably surface as a formative influence in the lives of so many Evolutionaries—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard’s assertion that evolution follows a clear trajectory toward higher and higher levels of unity and organization planted an important seed, which made intuitive sense to Stewart even at that young age. “It seemed obvious,” he told me. “It’s the story of atom to molecules to replicating molecular processes to simple cells to complex cells and eventually to organisms.”
In an alternate life, Stewart might have gone on to be an accomplished scientist. He certainly had the aptitude for it—as a teenager he excelled in both math and science. But his real talent was not science per se but what he calls “modeling,” or discovering the underlying processes that make up any system. He discovered this skill at school, using a “classic mental-rational approach” to uncover the problem-solving techniques used by his classmates who did well on tests, and then intentionally working to enhance those skills in himself.
Later in his life, Stewart would use this same passion for modeling to theorize about the patterns and processes underlying not physics exams but evolutionary dynamics, in both nature and culture. But for the time being his teenage thought processes were turning toward another early talent—fishing. At age seventeen, he discovered the Great Barrier Reef, a fisherman’s paradise, and he quit his studies and headed north to the Australian coastal city of Cairns. A fishing boat might not seem like the ideal training ground for a budding intellectual, but Stewart still had that scientific seed planted deep within. When the southeast trade winds blew and the fishing came to a halt, he would pass the idle days not at a pub or nightclub but at a local library. In the midst of those seemingly endless stacks of books, he was faced with a conundrum. How does one find the right books to read? True to his rational mentality, Stewart’s answer was simple. He started at the number 0 in the Dewey decimal system, and began reading.
As fate would have it, philosophy comes quite early in the Dewey decimal system. And so this young Evolutionary-to-be found himself exploring the world’s many systems of knowledge, enthralled by what he found. Around that time, he remembers reading an early book examining human culture in light of evolution, one that presaged later trends in evolutionary psychology. Despite its rather simplistic approach, the book opened Stewart’s eyes “to the fact that evolution had the potential to provide a comprehensive framework that could essentially explain all the aspects of humanity.”
That fundamental intuition drove him forward, and he read and read as the winds blew and blew outside, and when the winds died down, he would board his boat and chase Spanish mackerel up and down the Great Barrier Reef, a hundred miles out to sea. Perhaps it was the constant unpredictability of the elements, or his growing fascination with what was happening inside the Cairns library, or maybe it was simply that the romantic ideal of a fisherman’s life began to lose some of its luster. But one day, sitting among the book stacks, Stewart realized that he didn’t actually want to be a fisherman. He wanted to be a philosopher.
While Stewart never became a philosopher in the strict professional sense, he is very much a philosopher of evolution in a larger sense, someone who is taking data from science and trying to rethink how we interpret that data, philosophically and theoretically. He has steered clear of traditional academic pursuits but has recently become affiliated with the Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition Group (ECCO), a transdisciplinary research institute at the Free University of Brussels.1
As Stewart’s intellectual life developed through his twenties and thirties, so did his career, eventually landing him in the Australian government, where he fortuitously worked his way back to his early passion—fishing. Only this time he wasn’t in the boat, he was at a desk, as manager of the Australian deepwater fisheries. In an era of rapidly declining fish stocks, it was an important, if difficult and thankless, job, but one that Stewart had a particular aptitude for. Indeed, it was during this time that his evolutionary thinking underwent a critical shift. As he observed the decline of the fish stocks and the struggles of the government to adequately respond, he was able to employ his natural capacity for modeling—diagnosing the underlying systemic behavior that was informing the dynamics he was observing in this consequential Australian industry.
How do you get fishermen to cooperate? If they work together and don’t overfish, everyone wins, and the fish levels stay healthy and sustainable over the long term. But if one person overfishes, he or she spoils the party for everyone else. This is what scientists call the “free-rider problem.” These fishermen become free riders, enjoying the benefit of everyone else’s goodwill without incurring the same cost.
The same thing happens in evolution. Competition for scarce resources is critical to evolution’s advance, but as we discussed in the previous chapter, nature doesn’t favor just heroic individuals. Like Sahtouris, Margulis, and others, Stewart points out that other key trend in evolution—the increasing capacity of the living process to cooperate. This evolutionary trend is unmistakably present in the history of human societies as well. If we step back far enough from the details to see it, Stewart explains, the trajectory is clear: family groups cooperate to form small bands, which team up to form tribes, which coalesce to form agricultural communities, and on and on until we get to the extraordinary complexity of human societies today. Cooperation, cooperation, cooperation—all the way up and all the way down. It’s the key ingredient that greases the wheels of evolution’s advance. As he reflected on the powerful role of cooperation in the evolutionary process, Stewart believed he was beginning to understand the science behind Teilhard’s description of the evolutionary trajectory. Cooperators naturally outcompete “go-it-aloners” in most systems, thereby providing a powerful evolutionary impetus for higher and more complex forms of organization to emerge.
So how do you get fishermen to cooperate? Certainly not by explaining evolutionary theory to them. No, they have to believe it is in their own self-interest to work together. In fact, for Stewart, the same fundamental principle is involved whether we are talking about bats, bees, bacteria, or basketball players. As he writes, “Cooperation emerges only when evolution discovers a form of organization in which it pays to cooperate.”
But there was one more problem. In the case of bacteria, that process may take millions of years of trial and error before a form of organization is eventually discovered that rewards reciprocity and win-win arrangements. That’s all fine if we’re on biological time and have eons to burn. But that’s not the case with human culture, when the seas are fast emptying, the biosphere is imperiled, and political conflicts threaten to erupt into nuclear warfare. What will enable a higher, more evolved form of organization to emerge when “free riders” are overindulging to the detriment of us all? How can we help further the cooperative process so vital to growth and development in any system?
It was this compelling combination of real world conundrums, evolutionary knowledge, and burning theoretical questions that was tumbling around in Stewart’s mind one day in the early ’90s at his home in Canberra. Suddenly things began to come into focus:
These different issues were coming together as my mind started to move across levels. How do you organize a bureaucracy effectively so that people cooperate? How do you organize simple cells so that they cooperate together? How do you organize complex cells so they cooperate together? How do you organize multicellular organisms so they cooperate together?
Like new crystalline structures forming deep in his consciousness, a realization took hold, and all the problems and confusions and complexities began to resolve themselves. What was the key to this newfound clarity? In a word: governance. In the case of the nucleated cell (or eukaryote), for example, he realized that the reason it was so successful, from an evolutionary standpoint, was because its structure allowed for the emergence of a new governance function in the form of DNA, which managed the cooperative dynamics within the cell walls. It was this innovation that changed the playing field and made cooperators king in the palace intrigue of cellular politics. In the case of something as complex as international fisheries, the same function is needed, but at a global scale. Stewart explains:
A general theory of organization started to emerge. It wasn’t a logical progression; it all happened in a flash. I saw that the role of DNA in a cell was the same as the role of global governance yet to come for the planet as a whole. I had these models to show why it was very difficult for cooperation to emerge and why self-interest generally trumped/precluded cooperation. But I realized that if you have a powerful entity that can control the activities of the smaller interacting entities, this powerful entity can appropriate some of the benefits of cooperation and feed them back to those who have contributed to that cooperation, thereby ensuring that they don’t get outcompeted.
In this epiphany was the missing piece in his understanding of what makes cooperative evolution a success: governance and hierarchy. Stewart began to recognize the vital role of hierarchical governance as a spur to evolutionary advance. It allows us to do quickly with good policy what evolution once did slowly by trial and error—coordinate self-interest with the interest of the whole. This insight answered his biggest question: Why does evolution so clearly follow the Teilhardian trajectory? Cooperation organized by effective governance systems provides unmatched advantage over non-cooperators, and encourages the rise of higher forms of organization, all the way from the structure of cells to tribal councils to contemporary megacities to nascent planetary governance and beyond.
We may indeed live in a sociable cosmos, as we learned in the previous chapter, but it is also a cosmos that is going somewhere. And one way to track the trajectory of evolution is to track the trajectory of organized cooperation among evolution’s constituent parts—in this case, us. The idea is exciting, but the practical implications even more so. In a world where so many major issues—global warming, drugs, corporate malfeasance, economic interdependence, financial regulation, nuclear nonproliferation, terrorism—involve some sort of failure to cooperate among constituent nations, the dramatic need for effective new forms of governance goes way beyond fisheries. The challenge of effective governance is not just another hot-button political issue. The need to help organize, incentivize, and otherwise oversee the many national and transnational entities and processes that now exist on this rapidly complexifying pale blue dot out on the spiral arm of the Milky Way is in fact an evolutionary imperative, a developmental challenge for the species itself.
Indeed, recognizing the trajectory of evolution is much more than an exciting epiphany. It’s a tremendous responsibility. To begin to see the outlines of the path ahead means that we are responsible for walking down that path. We are beginning to take on our own shoulders the burden of our future, and to appreciate that a richer understanding of evolution provides real clues as to the direction of human culture—not as some straightjacketed, predetermined pathway but as a compelling trend of history, providing essential context for our global challenges that we would not do well to ignore. To see the directional nature of evolution is to make a critical link between the deep past and the possible future, and to connect the cultural drama of our human concerns to the far more vast drama of biological and ultimately cosmological progress. It is to place the choices we make at this moment in history in that spectrum of critical transitions that have punctuated the evolutionary trajectory for billions of years and made it such a dramatic, remarkable, unpredictable affair.
In “The Evolutionary Manifesto: Our Role in the Future Evolution of Life,” a paper he published in 2008, Stewart calls on “intentional evolutionaries” to “recognize that they have a critical role to play in driving the evolutionary transition and the future evolution of life,” and to “use the trajectory of evolution to identify what they need to do to advance evolution.” In part, this means that we have to find ways to facilitate global organization and cooperation on levels never tried before. We have to find a way to coordinate our self-interest—individually, tribally, nationally, and so on—with the interest of the whole species and the living processes of the planet. What this typically points to, in living systems, he explains, includes “the near eradication of activities such as the inappropriate monopolization of resources by some members, the production of waste products that injure other members, and the withholding from others of the resources they need to realize their potential to contribute to the organization.”
The forces of pure competition cannot negotiate such delicate evolutionary challenges. But neither can cooperation for its own sake. Cooperation always needs a reason, a compelling and clear context and an organizing hierarchy—an overarching structure that gives meaning, purpose, and direction to the cooperative impulse. In our current global situation, some of that may come from the need to survive as a species, to face up to the genuine transnational threats to our civilization, be it climate change or some other clear and present danger. But an evolutionary context is not just about problems; it’s about possibilities. And if we start to see in the directionality of evolution a potential to be embraced rather than just a problem to be solved, then we are beginning to cast off a blinkered view of history and embrace a larger motive. If we understand the reality of the trajectory of life, as Stewart suggests, we can project it forward and see the potential of the human species to eventually participate in cooperative arrangements that may extend far beyond even our own planet and species.
But before we start drawing up charters for some galactic UN, it’s good to keep perspective. Even if we were to agree on a clear directionality in evolution, there are no guarantees in the process. There are no historical inevitabilities, at least not in sophisticated evolutionary circles, and no prizes for mere participation. The fact that we can begin to recognize the broad trajectory of evolution does not mean that enough people will actualize its potential by walking down that path.
What makes theorists like Stewart particularly interesting is that he is drawing his conclusions about directionality and progress in evolution primarily from science. Sure, one can venture outside those parameters into more philosophical, spiritual, theological, and metaphysical explorations, and sometimes there is good reason to do so. But evidence for directionality is not hard to see, even within a close and careful reading of nature’s scientifically revealed patterns. In this respect, Stewart reminded me of another self-deprecating, hardheaded rationalist back on this side of the Pacific Ocean—Robert Wright, the American Evolutionary who has been shaking up the establishment with his firm conviction that there is nothing random about the way in which not only nature but also culture is progressing.
SUGGESTIONS OF PURPOSE
In 1500 BC there were around 600,000 autonomous polities on the planet: 600,000 separate groups of people who had their own independent form of government. Care to take a guess at how many there are today? The answer, according to evolutionary theorist Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, is: fewer than 200. That’s quite a change in the last 3,500 years. Now, here’s the important question: Given this fact, would you say that culture over the last three millennia is progressing or regressing? Of course, it’s impossible to answer the question based only on this one simple fact. But barring an apocalyptic scenario, I’d say that most people would choose door number one—culture is progressing.
I first met Wright at the 2004 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Barcelona, Spain, a unique gathering that brings together leaders and laypeople from practically every religion on the planet once every five years to engage in dialogue and compare notes. The setting for our meeting was itself a powerful example of Wright’s field of specialization: cultural evolution. If one thinks back for a moment to all of the religious violence of the last several thousand years and then imagines the scene in Barcelona—nine thousand monks, priests, teachers, bishops, imams, theologians, scholars, saints, Sikhs, seekers, sheiks, priests, pagans, and laypeople from seemingly every religious tradition on the planet, all cooperating and getting along exceedingly well, this alone might be enough to convince one that some kind of cultural progress is occurring in the currents of history.
Wright, who was also in part inspired by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, claimed that evolution had an unmistakable direction, and that its trajectory could be clearly seen in the development of both biology and culture. He based his ideas on a term he borrowed from game theory, an obscure branch of mathematical studies that John von Neumann helped make famous in the 1940s. A “non-zero-sum” interaction is one in which both parties benefit: a win-win arrangement, as opposed to a “zero-sum” interaction, or a win-lose arrangement. If I produce a widget and sell it to a happy customer, we have engaged in a non-zero-sum interaction. I received money and the customer received a valuable widget. Both benefit; both are happy. It’s win-win. And Wright’s application of this idea to evolution was simple but brilliant. He suggested you could essentially track the evolution of culture by tracking the increase in “non-zero-sumness” throughout human history. Thus, as culture develops, human beings interact, economically and socially, in ways that produce more and more win-win arrangements for more people in larger networks in increasingly complex ways. Technology is a primary driver in this process, as it allows these links and connections to be established across wider and wider geographical areas. This increasing interdependence ties us all together in ever more vast webs of non-zero-sum relationships until . . . well, no one knows exactly where it’s all headed, but the direction is clear. Our own self-interest is increasingly connected to the well-being of civilizations and peoples half a world away. It’s not exactly the Age of Aquarius reloaded, but as a clear direction for cultural evolution it’s quite definable and defensible. As non-zero-sumness grows throughout history, a sort of directional moral trajectory can be seen in the evolution of culture. We are less likely to kill and make war on those with whom we are engaged in win-win relationships. Planetary goodwill is slowly prevailing over individual and group hatred.
Wright’s work calls to mind columnist Thomas Friedman’s observation that it is rare for two countries with Golden Arches to go to war with each other. Of course, that doesn’t have anything to do with any moral halo bestowed upon local populations by the presence of Big Macs; it is merely a metaphor showing how economic interdependence tends to lead to cooperative behavior rather than bloodthirsty killing. It becomes part of the economic self-interest of a nation to maintain peace. And while this self-interest may not have the same spiritual significance as selfless altruism, Wright argues that self-interest arising from non-zero-sum interactions is a powerful evolutionary driver in culture. The result is a snowballing globalization in which the fates of people around the world are increasingly linked—first in small clans and tribes, then in larger and larger collectives, and eventually in global non-zero win-win relationships. And he suggests that this direction to human evolution may be leading to a moral culmination, inciting us to develop the “infrastructure for a planetary first: enduring global concord.”
Historically, the amity, or goodwill, within the group has often depended on enmity, or hatred, between groups. But when you get to the global level, that won’t work—assuming we don’t get invaded by Martians or something. That cannot be the dynamic that holds the planet together. So we’re facing a new kind of challenge. . . . In the past, we moved from the hunter/gatherer village to the agrarian chiefs to the ancient state, so there are precedents for the expansion of solidarity between people. But what would be unprecedented is to have this kind of solidarity and moral cohesion at a global level that did not depend on the hatred of other groups of people. That would be a singular accomplishment in the history of the species.
Wright argues that this non-zero dynamic was also at work in the evolution of organic life, which echoes many of Stewart’s points about cooperation being critical to the evolution of biological systems. But Wright’s focus is on social evolution. His vision is optimistic, but it is a grounded optimism, one that offers no inevitabilities, no idealistic promises about the outcome of the human experiment. However, recognizing directionality in evolution does inevitably lead one down interesting avenues of conjecture. For example, when asked if the directionality of evolution implies a larger purpose to the process, Wright concedes that it is “at least suggestive of purpose. . . . A scientific worldview gives you more evidence of some larger purpose at work than most scientists concede.” Wright even wrote that “if directionality is built into life . . . then this movement legitimately invites speculation about what did the building.”
That’s about as far down the rabbit hole as Wright will venture when it comes to spiritual matters. Perhaps it is because of his experience growing up in a Southern Baptist family of a very conservative persuasion. “My parents were creationists,” Wright (a fellow Oklahoman), recently told the New York Times Magazine. “They brought a Baptist minister over to the house to try to convince me that evolution hadn’t happened.” Obviously, this attempt was unsuccessful. Wright’s evolutionary vision is strongly rooted in science. But he is trying to carve out room for legitimate speculations about morality, purpose, and even spirit in the framework of a rational, naturalistic picture of the cosmos. We don’t need to resort to supernatural explanations to find evidence that there is higher meaning and purpose to human life. We can see it right here in our own backyard, displayed prominently in the extraordinary trajectory of the evolutionary process.
If there is a wall between science and religion, then Wright’s work is like a large gap in that wall, excavated by him. He is standing atop the wall, inviting passersby to temporarily step through the gap and embrace another perspective. But he himself remains perched up there, refusing to come down on one side or the other. Like Stewart, he is a rationalist through and through. Perhaps partly as a reaction to his southern Baptist upbringing, he is highly suspicious of traditional mythical belief systems. Yet he also feels that a purposeless, meaningless cosmos does not come close to describing the processes and results he sees at work in evolution. He is a staunch Darwinian—a great believer in natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. It’s just that, from his point of view, that process moves evolution in a progressive fashion toward intelligence and moral development. In fact, he sees in it a directionality so remarkable, so compelling, and so clear that it suggests that there is a larger purpose at work in the unique logic of this historical unfolding. It is a nuanced position that has won him mainstream acclaim, but little love from evolutionary scientists, who have regularly accused him of opening the door to dangerous metaphysical speculations, raising fears that the forces of superstition are about to crash the gates of rationality.
In 2009, Wright’s former employer The New Republic asked popular evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne to review Wright’s latest book, The Evolution of God. The title of the review said it all: “Creationism for Liberals.” Coyne pulled no punches in his condemnation of Wright’s fence-sitting. To be called a creationist, even a liberal one, is of course, one of the worst accusations one can throw at an evolutionary theorist. Coyne’s choice of words captures just how unwilling or unable some are to distinguish between those philosophies of evolutionary purpose, meaning, directionality, and even spirituality that unambiguously represent a pro-evolution point of view and those that move us backward toward premodern worldviews and seek to undermine the integrity of evolutionary science altogether. In fact, it perfectly illustrates the confusion and conflation of these two vastly different approaches. Change is afoot, new philosophies of evolutionary directionality are coming soon to a bookstore near you, but the fears and failures of the nineteenth and twentieth century still, understandably, loom large in the collective mind of the twenty-first. Evolution, as always, takes time.
THE DARK AGES, THE GARDEN OF EDEN, AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
“Evolution meanders more than it progresses,” observed Michael Murphy, pioneer of the Human Potential movement. Wherever evolution is going, at first glance it seems to be taking its own sweet time, and getting quite distracted along the way. If self-reflective hominids were really where evolution was headed, couldn’t we have moved the process along a bit faster? Do we need 350,000 species of beetles? Biologist J. S. Haldane is famous for saying that if biology taught him anything about the mind of the Creator, it was that he or she had an inordinate fondness for beetles.
When it comes to cultural evolution, the same principle applies. If we follow too closely the rise and fall of civilizations and the turning tides of history from one century to another, it’s not always easy to detect real development—moral or otherwise—in human nature or in institutions of human culture. It’s only when we step back from the details and look at the larger trajectory of human civilization that progress becomes much more obvious and discernible. But even then, progress is unpredictable: different cultures develop at different rates and move forward at different times. And then there are these black spots on the historical record that always get raised as refutations of the whole idea. “How could cultural evolution possibly be true, given that X happened?” goes the usual argument. Perhaps the most common witness for the prosecution in this case is the so-called Dark Ages. Isn’t this period a black mark on the historical record that refutes cultural evolution?
In fact, it is not, for several reasons. First, it bears repeating that evolution meanders more than it progresses, and some of that meandering is sure to include major setbacks and all kinds of minor ones. Cultural evolution, in more sophisticated circles, is not imagined to be a simple upward slope of ever-ascending progress and development. Evolution simply doesn’t work like that, at any level. Goethe once wrote that “progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.” Crisis, catastrophe, and disaster are each a major part of evolution’s rich repertoire. Remember what we learned in the previous chapter—stress creates evolution. In fact, it is often life’s epic setbacks that set the stage for a new evolutionary advance. So it was with the extinction of the dinosaurs, when mammals were finally free to have their day in the sun. So it has been with almost every one of the major extinctions the earth has faced. That is why “evolutionary evangelist” Michael Dowd, whom we will get to know later in this book, likes to say “Love the bad news.” Somewhere, amid the crisis of the moment, the stage is being set for great leaps forward. In fact, that basic pattern can be seen in the case of the Dark Ages as well. Wright, for example, argues that this particular era was not quite as dark as generally imagined. He suggests that the massive decentralization that occurred, along with the economic and political experimentation of the time, set the stage for the great leaps forward in European culture in the later centuries. That doesn’t mean that we should embrace failure or pretend that the tremendous suffering endured as a result of the fall of the Roman Empire is somehow a good thing. Far from it. But the simplistic conclusion that these difficult times in history represent a wholesale refutation of the larger trend of cultural evolution is not necessarily supported by the evidence. When I asked Wright about the meandering nature of cultural evolution, he agreed:
It’s kind of like biological evolution. There are different directions that different lineages take. There is a lot of contingency, in that it was not at all clear a billion years ago which lineage would be the one that led to higher intelligence. On the other hand, if you just check back every hundred million years, the tendency was that at that point in time the most intelligent form of life was more intelligent than the most intelligent form of life had been a hundred million years earlier. And there were such epic setbacks that even that might not be true for a couple of hundred million years. And yet still the larger trends ultimately prevailed until you have intelligent, reflective, self-conscious, morally aware life. I think that property of higher intelligence was in the cards, so to speak—even though there were going to be all of these setbacks. I think moral progress in culture is similar.
A second example commonly used by critics of cultural evolution is closer to home, historically—the world wars of the twentieth century. Wasn’t the twentieth century the most violent in history? Wasn’t the Holocaust a perfect illustration of the naïveté of believing in cultural progress? Wasn’t Germany supposed to be the most advanced culture in Europe? How can we pretend that culture is moving forward amid the nightmares of the twentieth century?
This is perhaps a more difficult point to argue, if only because the pain and trauma of the catastrophes are so near. These disasters are still part of the living cultural memory of our time, only one or two generations removed, and so their proximity tends to fog our historical perspective. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been rudely upbraided for even suggesting that the twentieth century was not necessarily the most violent century in history and that we are actually becoming more peaceful as history progresses, despite clear and painful setbacks. But here again, I would suggest that the evidence is on the side of the directionalists.
Let’s look at the most important barometer of cultural evolution: moral progress. What about moral evolution? Are we becoming more peaceful over time? More caring and empathetic? More able to extend our concern to others, to appreciate the perspective of others, to walk in their shoes, so to speak? This is difficult to measure. We can argue for evolution in economic circumstances, political institutions, technological capacity, and societal complexity, but when it comes to assessing cultural evolution, those material measurements need to be married with a less material quality—the evolution of our inner lives. For the most part, I will address this dimension of evolution in later chapters, but for our purposes here we can still ascertain clear evidence for moral progress, even amid the carnage of the twentieth century.
The convulsions of the twentieth century, like those that began the Dark Ages, were the result of one kind of political organization giving way to another in the march of history. In the first millennia, it was of course the fall of the Roman Empire, and in the twentieth century it was the transition from the colonial empires of Europe to the new forms of political order that would emerge in the latter half of the century. Indeed, we can see how both world wars gave rise to significant new attempts at global governance—first the League of Nations, and then the United Nations, NATO, and the so-called Bretton Woods economic arrangements. Peace tends to follow in the footsteps of economic and political organization. As Stewart’s work makes clear, we cannot really hope to have global peace without first hoping for some kind of decently functioning global political and economic institutions. And following Wright’s non-zero logic, the more we are engaged in win-win relationships with others, the more we are likely to see ourselves as being “in the same boat” and to extend our circle of care and concern—to see our own self-interest as connected to and coordinated with the self-interest of the larger community. In this sense, we can ascertain a certain level of moral progress in history simply in the fact that these “circles of concern” have extended from clans to tribes to city-states to nations, and today, many people consider themselves to be world citizens first and foremost. Our perspective has evolved, from egocentric to ethnocentric to nationcentric to worldcentric. Never before in history have so many people considered themselves to be simply members of the human species or citizens of the planet as their primary self-identity. Such an idea would have been unthinkable a thousand years ago. And as political theorist Thomas Barnett recently reminded me, it’s the first time in history when all the major European powers are relatively peaceful, prosperous, and moving toward integration, even in the midst of current economic challenges. There is little concern about the possibility of another major war between great powers. That’s a huge step forward and a recent phenomenon. We can say the same thing about Asia. India, Japan, and China are all relatively prosperous, peaceful, and developing. This has never happened before in history.
None of this denies the tremendous challenges we face and the many contingencies that make progress tenuous. And it’s not to ignore some of the unfortunate and inevitable by-products of increasing levels of development. They bring their own complex challenges that would have been unthinkable in previous eras: terrorism and climate change being two that fill current headlines. But as we move further into the twenty-first century and the memories of the early twentieth century fade, I suspect we will be able to more accurately place the horrific events of those times in the context of larger patterns of history. Whatever the case, they stand as living reminders that any cultural progress is contingent upon many factors and that man’s inhumanity toward man can never be underestimated.
One scholar who has done much to help us place the violence of our own time in context is Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. Which brings us to a third argument often used to refute a directional view of cultural evolution. We might call it the Garden of Eden myth—the conviction that there was a peaceful, idyllic period somewhere in the mists of our prehistory. This notion is especially pernicious in some progressive circles. Weren’t we more peace-loving, happy, and free somewhere back there in the past, at some point before the evils of the modern world corrupted the hearts of men and women? Aren’t humans deeply good? Haven’t we just been corrupted by all of these layers of socialization and civilization? Weren’t we once in tune with the natural world? We don’t need evolution, such arguments go, as much as we need to undo the harm the modern world has inflicted upon the inherent goodness of human nature. We don’t need to evolve forward in history; we need to undo history!
LeBlanc’s scholarship, captured in his book Constant Battles: Why We Fight, is one of the more devastating objections to this idea. “Prehistoric warfare was common and deadly,” he writes, “and no time span or geographical region seems to have been immune.” More recently, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature has made a thorough and convincing case for the decrease of violence over the course of human history.
There is nothing new about the Garden of Eden myth. Since the moment “civilization” first became a word used to describe human culture, people have been longing to return to a time before whatever the present time period happened to be. We have always looked back to an era before the current toil and strife and imagined a more bountiful and peaceful Golden Age. Whether it was Rousseau in the seventeenth century claiming that without civilization, man would not know hatred or prejudice, or the recent movie Avatar that celebrated the peaceful, ecologically enlightened, spiritually rich, technologically poor forest-dwelling indigenous population of an alien planet, the idea of returning to a more peaceful, happy, socially free existence is a powerful and enduring cultural myth.
“The world is too much with us,” lamented Wordsworth in his famous sonnet, exclaiming that he would rather be “a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn.” For anyone who has spent a good deal of time lamenting the devastating effects of industrialization upon the beauty of the natural world, the poet’s words have a lingering power. Indeed, the rose-tinted sentimentality for the past has always had a strong currency in our culture. And today, with the sheer velocity of technological change, the dislocations caused by rapid globalization, and the many ecological challenges we face as modernity’s promise is embraced by billions of new people around the world, it makes sense that a certain longing for simpler times and a “creed outworn” would pervade the cultural zeitgeist.
Celebrated author Riane Eisler has been one of the most effective proponents of the Garden of Eden hypothesis in our own time with her 1987 book The Chalice and the Blade, which presented scholarly evidence for a prehistorical civilization in which matriarchy was the power structure, Goddess worship was the spiritual practice, and humans lived in a peaceful, harmonious, and nurturing way. Women were empowered but men were not subjugated and war was relatively unknown. She used as examples of her thesis the prehistoric cultures of Ireland and the early civilizations of ancient Crete. Eventually, according to Eisler, the rise of male-controlled “dominator” societies brought an end to this ancient cultural experiment, and violence returned to human affairs. Eisler is an accomplished author and her book caused quite a sensation, prompting many to reconsider the history we learned in school about the early civilizations and our prehistoric past. Over time, Eisler’s assertions about our matriarchal heritage have come under strong criticism, with many claiming that her scholarship is highly interpretive and that the archeological evidence ambiguous at best. In most cases, it appears that war and violence were a common part of all prehistoric cultures.
I suspect the historical evidence will ultimately tell us more about the brutality of earlier civilizations than their idyllic impulses. But whatever the merits of Eisler’s conclusions, there is a very clear motive behind her work. In fact, she has been quite transparent about her intentions. She is trying to show that violence and domination of one race by another, or one gender by another, is not an inevitable part of human affairs. Her work has been an effort, she writes, at “dispelling the notion that war is natural.” Raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, Eisler is attempting to help humanity move beyond the “dominator” ethos that still conditions so much of our culture today.
From a nonevolutionary perspective, I might understand her concern. But in the context of an evolutionary worldview, which allows us to chart the evolution of our own social identity from egocentric to ethnocentric to nationcentric to worldcentric and beyond, we have no need to reach backward to find a utopian model for a better future. Indeed, we can find all the inspiration and faith we need for the future not in any particular time period or event in the past but in the overall trend of history itself. That is what gives us the energy to move forward. It does not mean that missteps haven’t been made or that important breakthroughs at one stage of cultural evolution don’t provide the seeds for problems at the next. Every step forward presents its own unique challenges. Evolution is not a simplistic, all-or-nothing affair. It meanders more than it progresses, but it does progress. And we need only look back to get a sense of that progress and direction. “Because we can look back and see the pattern,” evolutionary theorist Beatrice Bruteau writes, “we can legitimately extrapolate and project the pattern into the future.” There is nothing mystical about this. Whether it is John Stewart’s revelation of cooperation and governance as providing the spur of evolution’s trajectory or Robert Wright’s examination of the unfolding social logic of cultural history, we can find a powerful, evidence-based argument for the reality of directionality in evolution. I have only begun to explore the implications of such a finding, but they are significant. They start first and foremost with the story we tell ourselves about our past and our future. No longer aimlessly adrift on a cosmic sea, we awake to find ourselves drifting forward. We can draw on that evolutionary trajectory not as unsupported confidence in the certainty of future advance but as a deep, rational conviction that amid the many headwinds of the present lies a subtle but unmistakable current, a direction, a positive indicator of a future trajectory. If we can see it, we have to help make it so.