This book has addressed an ancient curiosity about human origins, and about our moral origins in particular, and as such it qualifies as pure science. Here, briefly and as an afterthought, I shall carry the evolutionary analysis into an at least partly knowable future as I consider the more immediate practical prospects for our world moral community of nations.
We won’t be considering the future of the human gene pool here, but rather how what is essentially a Pleistocene human nature impinges on our civilized moral future. In times to come, the cultural side of our ongoing moral life faces at least one profound challenge. Rather than rising from the vagaries of an often perilously unstable Pleistocene environment, this challenge is partly one of our own making. It has to do with the further development of our entire planet as one big moral community, that is, as a Durkheimian type of society that can promote cooperation and regulate deviant behavior.
Over the past 12,000 years we humans have increased the sizes of our social communities from bands to agricultural tribes to chiefdoms to nations, and at all of these levels we have basically succeeded, and succeeded fairly well, in sorting things out so that destructive internal conflict doesn’t rule excessively and bring us all down. When such chaos phases in today, we call the nation in question a state that has failed. But most nations are far from being failed states, for they function quite well with their formal legal systems and their institutional approaches to law and order—institutions that basically are thousands of years old and can be traced back to Hammurabi’s laws in Mesopotamia, inscribed on a black stone tablet, and beyond.
In several important, functional senses a powerfully centralized nation is still quite similar to the self-regulating, band-type of moral communities we’ve discussed at such length. This is the case even though small bands sharply dislike anything smacking of centralized authority, whereas people in nations know that they need some authority in order to avoid serious internal conflict and possibly civil war.
Like nations, bands are highly aversive to conflict; indeed, a dislike of angry tensions and social disruption is an important part of being human. However, the means of conflict management vary. Bands, like nations, rely heavily on social pressure and mediation, but ultimately bands can rely on avoidance at a distance—either the band can split up or else one party to the conflict simply moves to a different locale and the conflict’s over. Fini. With nations things are quite different. Conflicting factions within nations obviously cannot move in space, which is why ultimately national stabilities have to be based on centralized coercive power—power sufficient to hold down socially disruptive deviance and, if necessary, step in and crush an incipient internal conflict. Bands, in contrast, can make do quite nicely with persuasion, mediation, and long-distance avoidance.
When it comes to the entire culturally diverse global society of nations that inhabits this planet, we have yet to find any really effective means of international social control and conflict resolution.1 Indeed, at any given time the number of smaller wars, between and within nations, is shocking. Worse still, there’s always the possibility of a really major war, which by today’s standards means a nuclear conflict that can affect the health and livelihood of every nation and every person in the world. Thus, when it comes to our global community of nations, in this sense we’re hanging in a major political limbo.
In practical terms, what we’ve done is to carefully design a world government that looks like an effective national government, but then we’ve made sure that it can be sabotaged from within when it comes to being decisive in really important matters of war and peace. I have in mind, obviously, the effective powerlessness of the United Nations General Assembly, and the Great Powers’ absolute vetoes in the Security Council. In an important sense, then, we’ve designed a world moral system that too often, and especially with any serious differences of opinion that involve Great Powers, lacks the teeth to sanction deviant nations or to intervene in conflicts when these become dangerous to our entire planet.
With this less than potent “world government,” we face profound global political challenges. These range from local genocides and conventional wars to the specter of worsening nuclear proliferation, to the threat of terrorist use of bacteriological or chemical or even nuclear weapons, to future problems we cannot even predict. And we continue to face the distinct possibility that our planet could be sullied radioactively by nuclear accidents still worse than those we’ve now experienced, or be all but destroyed as a usable habitat by outright nuclear warfare between nations so equipped. Those are just the obvious problems.
Unlike an LPA foraging band, our world of nations is far from being economically egalitarian. No sage prognosticated, as the Cold War ended, that a Medieval-Crusades type of global conflict with potentially nuclear terrorism as its objective would so quickly replace it, even though both sets of tensions seem to have been based importantly on resentments of have-nots toward haves. We must assume that future sources of envy-based conflict could be both equally unexpected and still more insidious. But what we can count on for certain is a future collision of superpowers as China builds its economic and military strength and the United States quite possibly declines. Thus, we may face another simmering “cold war” that could become susceptible to its own unpredictable dynamics in the absence of effective international control, with similarly enormous, overkill nuclear arsenals on both sides.
The future of global morality—and global social control—will have to be watched with care, for as the means of inflicting grievous damage on others become more sophisticated, more varied, more readily available, and more widespread, and as an ever-divided “community of nations” continues to be far less than potent in containing many of its clearly apparent threats, our world system of law and order seems increasingly precarious. This is the case even though humanity’s statistical rate of killing in warfare has been radically abating since 1945.2 One obvious problem is that—reminiscently of hunter-gatherer bands—this huge world community of nations resolutely resists forming any efficient type of a supergovernment, an empowered one that could do for a world of nations what a single successful nation’s centralized government does for its people.3
Our world is probably too large, too diverse, and too dangerous to continue to conduct its affairs informally in the hopeful style of a well-united egalitarian band that can readily coalesce as a moral community when needed, do so usually without people taking sides, and resort to avoidance if need be. As basic problems, globally we face the sheer scale and number of the political units involved and the profound cultural differences among some of our nations. And then there’s a basic problem that stems directly from our human political nature: like the individual hunters in a band, these nations are too intent on their sovereignty to allow one big supernation to be built, with a trustworthy central world government strong enough to ensure the rule of international law and guarantee the peace—and if need be, do so invasively.
The last thing we need is a well-armed world of nations behaving like one big failed state, but the potential at least looms. We do have the 1949 Geneva Convention’s “humane” rules of (conventional) warfare, so fortunately our global community is not entirely without laws—even though it resists creating the all-encompassing, institutionalized centralized command and control needed to back them up. Two things we do have to work with, however, are our evolved and shared sense of morality and the fact that most of us, as nations, agree on certain matters, such as the nature of basic human rights, the undesirability of poverty and disease, and the need for self-determination.
Another note of hope is that we form a species that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand its own societies and help them to function—by suppressing antisocial deviance, by socially rewarding those who are altruistically generous, and by otherwise “tweaking” our social systems to make them work better for us. The foregoing chapters have made this abundantly clear. In addition, in our bands and also later in our more complex societies, we have created national safety nets that “insure” us against personal disaster, and on occasion, at least, have behaved as unified moral majorities when we felt threatened by lawless, greedy, socially disruptive deviants like Hitler or Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. We’ve also tried hard to manage our internal conflicts and contain their destructiveness, and the nations of this world do try to mediate the conflicts of others.
All of these important and valuable features of prehistoric and contemporary human life are nascent in a seriously underfunded, deliberately disempowered United Nations that can only be in a position to do these things effectively and consistently if the five Nuclear Great Powers happen to agree—and also are willing to cough up the money. We must hope that somehow, eventually, these well-evolved potentialities will be expressed far more effectively in helping to shape a stable world society of nations, many of them nuclear, that has to be our future greater moral community.
Perhaps one past lesson for present and future major powers to consider would be that not only applications of power but also extensions of generosity can be a strategy for social success, and that sometimes a generous approach, in spite of the risks, may pay off handsomely in the long run. After World War II, for instance, America’s popular and massive Marshall Plan was a generous (and politically useful) move that helped to build a successful and nonconflictive Europe, while more or less altruistic foreign aid to other parts of the world was also forthcoming on a substantial basis. The United States was viewed as a rich and generous nation that deserved the goodwill of others, comparable to the unusually productive and also unusually generous Aché individuals we met with, who were helped abundantly in their own time of need. However, in this present century America has had neither the will nor the budget to follow this precedent, and our reputational standing is at low ebb because economic generosity has been so strongly eclipsed by one maladroit political power play—the second invasion of Iraq—which in the world’s eyes violated another nation’s sovereignty and was not based on a consensus by a world moral majority. This was comparable to a bully’s throwing his weight around in an egalitarian hunting band, and America’s global presence changed for the worse.
In bands, everybody shares the same culture, and in an important sense their generosity-based cooperative systems of indirect reciprocity can be based on a sense of personal trust that underlies any potential actions of the group as a moral community. Furthermore, people are egalitarian, which means that their political and economic pie is divided more or less equally. For a huge, competitive community of ethnocentric and religiously divided nations that includes enormous (and too often growing) differences between haves and have-nots, to accomplish something similar involves far greater challenges.
If like a foraging band our global community of nations is vehemently unwilling to trust a centralized system of command and control, we must hope that somehow these challenges can be met with the same degree of insight and realistic goodwill exhibited by our Pleistocene hunting forbears, when they realized that if they wanted to live well as hunters they had to merge their competing interests and cooperate, and they proceeded to do just that in the absence of strong chiefs. That is one note of hope. Another basic reason for optimism lies in our evolutionary gifts of sympathy and generosity. Such feelings apply very readily to our children and to other kin, also to our friends and socially familiar neighbors. It is also within our potential for them to apply to others much more distant with whom we feel culturally bonded, and sometimes, at least, to total strangers.
In a very general and very important way, I’ve suggested that in human forager communities, generosity and the resulting altruistic acts grease the wheels of cooperation. However, in today’s world community the further our potential cooperation extends from home, the more its tenor becomes unpredictable. The world’s nations may be reaching out to unknown victims of a natural disaster one day, and the next day a member of this same “community” may be committing genocide against its neighbor, quietly sponsoring vicious attacks on others by “guerrillas” whom the victims designate as terrorists, or covertly or openly trying to bring down a government it doesn’t like. It’s because our potential for sympathy and altruism is relatively modest, that it can be eclipsed so readily by less prosocial psychological dispositions that have come down to us from Ancestral Pan.
Where we moderns are similar to our hunter-gatherer forbears is in our vulnerability to conflict. A band is vulnerable because it will not allow sufficient centralized power to develop to make possible some usefully “authoritative” means of conflict resolution to go to work, especially when its more powerful members come into conflict. Exactly the same is true of our global community of nations. In combination, the Security Council veto and a noisy but politically impotent General Assembly see to that. If smaller nations are considered along with large ones, at any given time the number of ongoing wars in our worldwide “community” is still staggering, and if you add in the threat of a serious nuclear miscalculation our planet becomes a truly dangerous place. Unfortunately, after over half a century of this dire threat, we’re getting used to the risk. And familiarity breeds inaction.
In coping with disruptive behavior a foraging band can be quite active. It readily coalesces into a moral community because it is bioculturally evolved to be moral, and living in moral communities provides a very immediate forum for gossiping individuals to agree on the threats they face and to cope with the deviants in their midst. As their fear of a dangerous deviant mounts, they can increase social distance, and in the case of a really serious general threat, they can agree very privately (and very decisively) to do away with him—if avoidance or ostracism or banishment can’t do the job.
Our world of nations makes partial attempts in a similar direction, for manipulative formal boycotts and once in a while active blockades are attempted with a rogue nation’s reform as the goal. However, cross-cutting alliances often make effective international ostracism difficult, and sterner steps are very difficult to agree upon. Furthermore, with their vetoes the five nuclear Great Powers are selfishly exempt—and unfortunately they also are prone to back their allies, including ones that are nuclear.
Bands can solve a really serious social problem by killing the deviant. Anything analogous to capital punishment at the level of a nation is out of the question—unless a dictator can be taken down. But too often one nation’s dictator is another nation’s useful ally, and in any event the United Nations is not in the business of nation building. The basic problem is that any real and universal centralized power with the capacity to punish would be taken as a potential threat to all, and the main sovereign bullies on this political stage (that same Nuclear Club that was formed in the midtwentieth century) have both the most to lose politically and their vetoes to ensure that they don’t lose it. In a number of ways, then, individuals in foraging bands have far more to work with in curbing or stopping deviance, especially serious deviance, than do the culturally and religiously diverse nations of the world community we live in today.
People in a band have some truly major advantages. They share the same culture. They also speak the same language, and they know one another personally. They gossip together, which builds trust. And they know that often they can leave their band, if necessary in a hurry, if a local situation becomes too conflictive. A world of culturally disparate nations, from which there is no exit, is a different kettle of fish. Nations are fixed in space, so if they can’t settle their differences in any other way, they have to fight wars.
There does exist something called world public opinion. All of our nations’ foreign ministers understand this well, for they play to it constantly. In that particular sense our community of nations is, in fact, very much like an LPA forager moral community writ large. In the days of the Cold War, some grand theater played out with the United Nations General Assembly as a venue for the “United States versus the Soviet Union Show.” However, there was no way that the rest of the nations—the ones being imperiled by the two alpha superpowers—could use public opinion to seriously rein them in. This international moral stage continues to serve us today from time to time, and it is something that could be built upon. But even in the absence of such a formal international forum, world moral opinion will coalesce simply because, as a species, we are moral—and because television exists.
A great question for our global future is whether we will rise to the occasion as threats to our entire world community become more complicated, still less predictable, and possibly far more perilous. Very scary at first, the straightforward bilateral nuclear balance of power we lived with for the second half of the twentieth century became simply another fact of life. This was partly because the players on both sides had large populations, and enormous infrastructures to lose, were the tensions to get out of hand. Even so, history has taught us that the Cuban missile crisis was in fact a true crisis, in which the leaders of two nations, in spite of being moral, were playing a game of chicken that could have brought untold destruction to parties outside the conflict. Today, as a picture in our minds, that outcome remains difficult to conjure up realistically, because of its sheer horror.
An already dangerous balance of nuclear power became still more dangerous with the entry of India, Pakistan, and North Korea into the nuclear arena. To complicate matters, at this writing Iran seems to be arming against a nuclear Israel. Add all of this up, and it seems that a general situation of potential peril and distrust among nations may become too exacerbated for any more effective world system of governance to be gradually built—unless some event (short of total catastrophe) serves as a warning and galvanizes the world’s nations into action.
In fact, and grimly, a possible catalyst for progress in world governance, and for world security, might actually be a limited global disaster. Imagine, for instance, a smaller nuclear war that would seriously poison our planetary atmosphere but leave most of our world population and economy intact. If a calamitous World War II taught the Europeans not to fight, perhaps a small (and equally destructive) nuclear war might galvanize our entire world of nations to create a similar and safer union.
This is indeed a bleak prognostication. But realistically, with national sovereignty being as sacred as it is, it may be the best we may hope for if a safer world community is to be built in the face of nuclear proliferation. Meanwhile, free trade at least makes us more interdependent in the economic sphere, and, as we’ve seen, economic interdependence was a major factor in LPA hunter-gatherers forming efficient moral communities that regulated the use of large game. In this sense, as a social catalyst modern free trade may be functionally analogous to meat-sharing among our forager predecessors. People who depend heavily on one another in the basics of making a living are likely to become more efficient at resolving conflicts—and to learn that a trusting type of generosity can pay off quite handsomely in situations where mutual assistance based on indirect reciprocity is useful to all.
Also on the positive side, we all share a basic, prosocially-oriented moral capacity, which is inherent in being human. This at least enables us to reach out to distant others when safety nets are needed, and, we can hope, it helps world political leaders—those with normal consciences—to think twice before they start brutally hurtful wars. The underlying sense of sympathy for other human beings will always serve as a counterweight to conflict, and in a community that feels itself to be “one,” as we’ve seen these prosocial feelings can be systematically and effectively amplified for the greater good, precisely because people do have consciences.
That’s how we worked things in the bands that basically got us through the Pleistocene, and these dynamics have continued in force as we’ve moved on to live in farming tribes, then chiefdoms and kingdoms, early civilizations, and modern nations. Now, finally, we live in a world community of nations that is at best a work in progress—and at worst could become a failed state writ very large. From bands to nations all people develop similarly moral communities in several important respects. For instance, judgmental public opinion exists at all of these sociopolitical levels; attempts are made to manage conflicts; informal rules or laws are agreed upon; and criminal behavior is deemed to be punishable.
From the viewpoint of an evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker suggests that our rates of killing people in warfare have been declining quite drastically for some time, even as the use of nuclear weapons has become morally taboo.4 Some of this peace-bonus effect surely comes from a simple fear that wars with nuclear weapons will be unwinnable for either side, but the moral component is very important, and it does exist prominently in a world moral community that remains only tentatively structured to do its job.
Attempts to build a (totally powerless) League of Nations almost a century ago tell us that even in the 1920s the need for some kind of morally based command and control at a global center was obvious enough. Today, with a somewhat more potent United Nations, we seem to have exchanged the reality of recurrent and very costly but survivable large-scale conventional warfare for the risk of total catastrophe. Thus, at least in an actuarial sense, today the stakes are even higher.
What, then, are our global possibilities insofar as they may be “predictable” in certain ways from our evolutionary past? One guess would be that a benign and generous superpower might dominate the entire world and impose political order without dominating too strongly. America enjoyed this possibility after the Soviet Union collapsed. However, the second invasion of Iraq, as just one of many sovereign nations ruled by seriously offensive dictators, didn’t help us to stay in this morally acceptable, altruistic role. By this act, an aggressive Bush conservative elite, with the compliance of a sheeplike Democratic Congress, spent not only our treasure but also our political and moral capital for many years to come.
Interestingly, one reason this ongoing political enterprise was so costly financially was that America, once the idea of permanent (anti-Iranian) military bases was eschewed, felt a moral obligation to create a stable nation in Iraq before it would be conscionable to withdraw. Thus, as a nation we’ve been condemned for an invasion that basically went against the global community’s mores with respect to national sovereignty, but we have received little credit for at least staying an expensive course with respect to nation building once Iraq was seriously “broken.”
If the United States for a time did have a flourishing benign role right after World War II, soon the Cold War saw the generosity image fade away as the sponsoring of military alliances and warfare by proxy became global preoccupations, and major conventional warfare returned with an ugly vengeance not only on the Korean Peninsula but also in Vietnam. With respect to being helpful to other nations, American foreign policy continues to be dominated by a highly self-interested political emphasis as we dedicate the great bulk of our foreign aid to shoring up internationally controversial regimes that are prone to keep major world conflicts alive. Too often, this dilutes our idealistic messages in promoting democracy and makes us widely unpopular. In terms of world public opinion, most likely we have politically disfigured ourselves by failing to look at the big picture with its important moral intangibles, and we may well have relied too much on our power and far little on our generosity as a nation.
As an evolutionary anthropologist who tries to view things from a distance, I keep noticing a fundamental political problem. The LPA bands that evolved our genes for us were fiercely egalitarian, and the price they paid for this political equality was having to do without the benefits of centralized command and control that could have kept their bands from occasionally splitting asunder when a social problem or conflict did get out of hand. In a hunting band, it’s the militant sovereignty of the individual hunters that decentralizes politics and keeps things that way. In a global community, it’s love of national sovereignty that does exactly the same thing. However, people in a band are basically economic equals, whereas our world of nations is very far from being egalitarian in this way. This economic inequality can be seen as a special engine that helps to drive international conflict, and it stands in the way of creating a more effective international order.
The frightening balance of power among competing, economically unequal nuclear nations at least may have ended very large wars of a conventional type. But probable dangers inherent in this morally reinforced balance of terror, which is subject to both technological and human error, must be multiplied by the number of nations with nuclear arsenals, and our world order is susceptible to coming seriously unglued if ethnocentric hatreds get out of hand. Both India and Pakistan and, in the near future, Iran and Israel, come to mind, and in some cases the combined nuclear arsenals, if employed, would be large enough to very seriously threaten our entire planetary environment. With such heated conflicts, the “taboo” on nuclear attacks could be set aside, just as it could have been in the Cuban missile crisis.
In this very political world of ours, continued nuclear proliferation seems likely not only because the nation in question’s military potential will be enhanced, but also because basic political “respect” on the world stage all but skyrockets with a nuclear capability. It’s worth noting the major hypocrisy when five nuclear nations that are already enjoying such respect preach against proliferation, and thereby try to deny to lesser nations the right to improve their international status.
Power balancing is another ancestral trait, as described for chimpanzees by Richard Wrangham.5 In this context, any really serious world domination by any one nation does seem unlikely. This is because the would-be dominator would still be vulnerable to devastating attack—as long as antinuclear defense systems remain as fallible as they seem to be. Thus, among the major nuclear powers the political dynamics are similar to those in a politically and economically egalitarian band of well-armed hunters, who are obliged to respect one another’s lethal fighting weapons—and the possibility of ambush—even though some of the hunters may be much stronger than others.6 In a real sense, nuclear weapons have created a kind of modern political egalitarianism that is similar, but this applies just to the nations in an erratically expanding Nuclear Club.
If the world were inflicted with a mercifully limited nuclear disaster, expectably the shocked surviving nations might fearfully set aside their differences, compromise their respective autonomies, and at least take some further steps in the direction of creating a safer world order. Logically they would use an orderly, politically centralized, multiethnic nation as their model, and already in place is a United Nations General Assembly that can be likened to the U.S. Senate—aside from the UN’s lack of power. There is also a Security Council, which, if stripped of its absolute power, could function like the U.S. House of Representatives to give the powerhouse nations some special representation. We must hope that such a dreadful catalyst never comes, but at least we’ll have a general model to think about if it does.
Another possibility would be that some very immediate external threat could unite our dissident nations, but such a threat is difficult to imagine unless a predictably wayward comet might do the trick. In this improbable fantasy, all the nuclear nations would be impelled to expend their arsenals in order to save the planet. In another, the threat that might best unite our world of nations would lie purely in the realm of science fiction in the form of an imaginary alien political empire intent on interplanetary domination. Just as rivalrous male chimpanzees set aside their differences on patrol when attacking a stranger, it is quite predictable that our world of nations would unite under such putative conditions, and that it might do so if a real political threat of sufficient gravity were to arise.
Much closer to reality, climate changes leading to global starvation might unite us for a time. However, when such chips were really down, we might follow the path of a hunting band that is up against the wall and socially “atomize,” with every nation looking out for itself and fearing its hungrier neighbors. Perhaps new epidemic diseases might galvanize cooperation, depending on the nature of the disease, and do so in a way that would induce enemies to become friends, so there’s yet another “external threat” that might tend to unite us. But I believe that the most potent threat of all is that of nuclear annihilation, and so far, in my opinion, we’ve been willing to rely on a cross between an acephalous egalitarian hunter-gatherer political system and a despotic but essentially uncentralized chimpanzee system to contain this threat—without forming a really effective global moral community.
Perhaps our greatest hope should be placed in a world economic system that flourishes because of free trade, for as I’ve said this creates interdependencies that make serious conflicts costly in ways that are new. Another potentially positive factor, well worth mentioning, is global communication media. Eventually, global television and particularly the Internet may have some effect in significantly homogenizing our world culture and in thereby breaking down some of the cultural and religious diversities that work against trust among nations and can easily foster conflict. At the same time, certain shared aspects of world religions, including the Golden Rule, provide the potential for developing a greater moral community of interest. However, both modern communications and organized religion obviously can set us apart as well as help us to grow together, because either can tie in to ethnocentrism and foster xenophobia.
Still another major factor in at least trying to predict our future as a global community is simply the human political mind, which provides exactly the same potential that shaped earlier efficient moral communities in the form of egalitarian hunting bands—with an insistence on no centralized power, which made sense because to resolve serious conflicts avoidance was possible. In our later political evolution these same political and moral minds have created and accepted command and control as needed to make possible the centralized functions required to run much larger, sedentary societies as these develop. Again, our famous social and political flexibility has been at work, and up to the level of nations it has done its job well.
Flexibility means we are not by evolutionary design just lovers of equality. Indeed, in terms of human nature we seem to be just as capable of following leaders as we once were of getting rid of them generically. The basic political tendencies were present in Ancestral Pan, who had hierarchies with aggressively greedy alpha males that helped to keep down conflict with their forceful interventions—and therefore were at the same time resented and appreciated. Our very nature sets us up to be ambivalent about the exercise of power from above, and we’re quite good both at holding down leaders and at appreciating command and control where we see this as being worthwhile or necessary to avert chaos, or where its image is one of generosity. This flexibility could be useful in the future, just as it was useful 45,000 years ago, and more, in often dangerous Late Pleistocene settings that because of large-game hunting generally favored a rampant version of egalitarianism at the expense of centralized governance.
Fearing undue domination, democratic nations resolve this ambivalence constitutionally, by keeping governmental powers checked and balanced. The global problem is that trustworthy checks and balances remain to be invented. Furthermore, the world seems to be simply too big—and perhaps too diversified—to ever agree upon a single leader unless the right and truly trusted “charismat” were to come along and gain the confidence of all. Even the hideously conflicted Balkans were united for decades by a charismatic Tito, while a highly respected George Washington managed to get a handful of quite disparate former British colonies off to the right start—even though as with the Balkans a civil war ensued. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to visualize a formal world governmental structure, which at least in theory might work, than it is to create trust among competing and quite disparate nations with histories of rivalry and conflict.
I’ve said that the international system we actually live by looks like a cross between a band society—in which nobody wants to be bossed around—and a chimpanzee community, in which the big guys forcefully run the show and hog the resources but also serve usefully as effective and impartial peacemakers. I emphasize that globally, whoever fills the role of chief dominator is also expected to intervene impartially in conflicts and pacify them. For over half a century a major and perpetual problem faced by Superpower America has been its chosen role as a committed partisan supporter of an embattled but territorially aggrandizing Israel, which continues to make any really effective US role in mediation between Israelis and Palestinians extremely problematic. Unfortunately, this conflict provides the political engine that drives much of today’s world conflict, as we begin to struggle through the second decade of the twenty-first century.
That’s where we find ourselves, with our world of nations. Our ambivalent natures do provide us at least with an altruistic sense of empathy for others, which in the right contexts seems to be extendable to all of humanity. And we do have a sense of morality that helps us significantly in building very large national communities of interest which (as with our American political union) may with difficulty endure—but which (as with the Soviet Union) also may fall apart. Morally, we do behave in many contexts as a world community that judges individual nations in terms of right and wrong; we even have functioning international courts, though their jurisdiction is not accepted universally. These are significant signs of some limited unification for the common good—if not some kind of a serious and binding political confederation.
At the same time, we’re faced with hundreds of sizable, often well-armed national sovereignties, which can become heavily involved with ethnocentrism—and sometimes with raw xenophobia—to create global situations of sharply competing alliances and mistrust. We’re also susceptible to morally based ideologies, some of them destructive to world cooperation and some, like the ongoing nuclear taboo, highly benign. Fortunately, ideologies that promote generosity are grounded deeply in our nature, and in our cultures as well. The Golden Rule has been a human universal for at least 45,000 years, and this continues today. Such ideologies may help significantly in facilitating a world order that could be made to be more trusting and interdependent—and hence at least somewhat less competitive and dangerous.
In its specifics our future history is unpredictable at the global level, even though supposedly the past can predict the future. What the recent historical past tells us, in statistical terms, is that death and destruction owing to warfare may well be declining. But does that mean that ultimate risks are declining as well? Our much deeper evolutionary past provides a different means of prediction, and what it seems to be telling us, here, is that human nature gives us a great deal to build upon, but also a great deal to fear. In solving future problems, I believe that it’s important to know about the basics of what we have to work with. I also believe that as time takes us forward, the great similarities between the world community of nations and an LPA band can provide us with some important food for thought, as do the several signal differences I’ve just discussed.
In searching for our moral origins in the preceding chapters, we’ve taken an enormous journey. And perhaps what we’ve learned about the Late Pleistocene can teach us a bit more about the global problems we’ll be facing as this journey continues. Our moral capacity is part of the potential we carry into this future, and one thing we’ll have to work with, whenever we’re ready to move in the direction of creating a less risky global moral community, is the same moral nature that archaic and then culturally modern humans evolved for us in the Late Pleistocene. Combine this with our rather remarkable political inventiveness, and humanity may have some major reason for hope.