This model of selection can account for much of the development and spread of new components of civilized culture. In part, culture is indeed a kind of market in which new possibilities - in making pottery, in telephone service, in musical expressions, in vaccinations - replace or supplement old because people want them. Without making any prejudgment about the nature and complexity of human wants, we may grant that choices based on those wants are important in determining the way our cultural systems evolve.
But this benign model of social evolution suffers from a fundamental problem. If such a process has governed the evolution of civilization, how are we to explain why human life under civilization has not been better?
The Rube Goldberg Problem: A Critique of the Commonsense Theory
The commonsense theory of selection by human choice leads one to expect a continuous betterment of the human condition. For a story of improvement, however, the history of civilization makes rather dismal reading, and as the culmination of ten thousand years of progress the twentieth century is deeply disappointing. It is not simply that history is strewn with regrettable events, with accidents leaving carnage and wreckage on the thoroughfare bound for Progress. The road itself has been treacherous. If the stupendous historical transformation in the structure of human life has been the result of people choosing what they believe will best satisfy their needs, why have not human needs been better met?
The idea of history as progress is itself of relatively recent origin. And those who endorse that idea are usually looking only at relatively recent history for support. Compare pre-modern Europe with contemporary Western societies, the argument goes. Have we not come a long way from those dingy and bloody days of superstition, plague, despotism, and poverty? But even the advances of modern civilization have their nightmarish side, escalating as they have the destructive capacities of civilization. We look with mounting apprehension at the weapons of thermonuclear warfare, at the repressive apparatus of the totalitarian state, and at the disruptions of the ecological flows upon which life on earth depends. And even if we embrace modernization as progress, this stretch of history is but a small fraction of the total span of civilization. Looking at history as a whole, it is far from clear that the main 'advances' of civilized societies have consistently improved the human condition. In earlier eras of history, the cutting edge of civilization's progress led from freedom into bondage for the common person. The great monuments of the ancient world were built with the sweat of slaves whose civilized ancestors had not known the oppressor's whip. After four thousand years the pyramids of Egypt can still stand as an emblem of the problem of civilization, that its achievements are more reliably impressive than benign.
If the same forces have driven social evolution throughout history, and if the way has been downhill at some times and uphill at others, we should not be sanguine that any recent trends toward progress point to the meaning of our destiny.
The idea of progress has relied in another way on the lack of a clear vision of the distant past. The life of primitive peoples is widely assumed to have been nasty, brutish, and short. The step from the 'savage' state to the 'civilized' is consequently assumed to have been straight up. Increasingly, however, as anthropologists have taken a closer and less ethnocentric look at hunter-gatherers, the evidence has shown that primitive life was not so bad. Primitive societies, a category confined in this paper to simple hunting-and gathering peoples, provide an important point of reference for two reasons: they give a perspective on civilization by showing the human condition that civilization has transformed; and they help to illuminate our nature as a species, for they show the kind of life we are biologically evolved to lead.
Without romanticizing the primitive condition into a paradise without ills, we must nonetheless appreciate that modern primitives (and, by an inferential leap, our primitive ancestors) led a surprisingly humane existence. Among hunting-and-gathering bands, the burden of labor is comparatively small, leaving more time than most civilized peoples have known for play, music, dance. The politics of these small socieities are largely free of coercion and inequality. Relationships are close and enduring. Primitives enjoy a wholeness and freedom in their lives which many civilized peoples may well envy.
This new view of our starting point demands a new look at the entire course. If we lift our vision of primitive life out of the degradation to which civilized mythology has consigned it, the commonsense view of social evolution becomes more difficult to sustain. Even if we grant that ten thousand years have improved the human condition, there seems something disturbingly disproportionate between the immensity of the changes that ten millennia of social evolution have wrought upon human societies, and the small (even debatable) advances in human well-being: If we were to persist in viewing the great edifice of civilization as structured for the purpose of meeting human needs, civilization would seem to be a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption. Rube Goldberg's machines were comic because of the grotesque mismatch between means and ends - like a structure the size of a house to light a cigarette, or a twenty-eight-step process for waking someone up in the morning. If we view social evolution as the result of people continually choosing better ways to meet their needs, civilization becomes a kind of joke.
But before we are reconciled to this vision of history as ludicrous, we should see whether the commonsense theory of social evolution can somehow survive the evidence that the progress of human well-being has been both inconsistent and disappointing.
One possible way of meeting the challenge is to argue that when people choose they do not necessarily choose wisely. Whether one attributes the limits of human judgment to folly or to sin, people evidently often make choices hurtful to themselves. Smokers keep smoking, fat people keep overeating, procrastinators avoid necessary tasks, and few of us are as good to those we love as we would like to be. Saint Paul saw it as central to the human condition that we cannot follow even our own best judgment. And, of course, even our best judgment may not be very good: we build high rises on hurricane coasts and on earthquake faults, we trust deceptive and hypocritical politicians, we exhaust our soils, we ingest pathogenic chemicals. . . . So it should not be surprising if the course of civilization is full of blunders - political arrangements that become oppressive, economic systems that lead to famine, social organizations that produce anomie.
One can add to the shortcomings of the human decision maker the extraordinary difficulty of these decisions. For the progress of civilization has been a continuous advance into uncharted territory. Even the wisest judge needs precedents, and civilized peoples have repeatedly been compelled to deal with unprecedented problems. Even intelligent people, under those circumstances, will adopt solutions which do not work or which work today but sow the seeds of tomorrow's problems. Irrigation brings a miracle of greenness in the short run but leads eventually to the disastrous spread of deserts over salted soils. People are attracted to the manifest abundance economic modernization can provide but may not realize the costs in social disruption and fragmentation that development may entail. In the marketplace of social evolutionary possibilities, the payment due is not always calculable until long after the contract for 'progress' has been made.
Both these ideas are valuable for understanding the problematic aspect of human destiny. People to indeed sometimes choose foolishly. And at the frontiers of social evolution people are faced with the difficult challenge of finding their way through uncharted, unexplored territory. These answers, however, do not seem sufficient to solve the problem posed by civilization's ills. The intelligence and industry of our ancestors is simply too impressive to allow us to load the failures of civilization to meet human needs onto their supposedly blundering choices. When we scrutinize what our ancestors in any given time and place were able to do with their situation, what generally stands out is not their folly but their soundness and their resourcefulness.
Something important is missing from the picture. It is like some problems that have arisen in the history of astronomy. What is visible fails to explain how the heavenly bodies are moving, so astronomers search for an invisible source of the disturbing force. Another body is presummed to exist even if it has not yet been seen, for its gravitational pull is manifest. Such is the gravity of the pull of civilization's evolution from the course of human welfare that we must posit a kind of social evolutionary black hole to account for the wide disparity between the expected and the actual movement of our systems.
It is time now to begin moving toward a new theory. We must go beyond the visible force of human actors making choices to discover a force more hidden yet powerful enough to warp the course of social evolution. Although the commonsense theory would lead us to expect history to bring the fulfillment of human dreams, one can as aptly call history a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken. Why?
Toward a Bigger Vision
But this benign model of social evolution suffers from a fundamental problem. If such a process has governed the evolution of civilization, how are we to explain why human life under civilization has not been better?
The Rube Goldberg Problem: A Critique of the Commonsense Theory
The commonsense theory of selection by human choice leads one to expect a continuous betterment of the human condition. For a story of improvement, however, the history of civilization makes rather dismal reading, and as the culmination of ten thousand years of progress the twentieth century is deeply disappointing. It is not simply that history is strewn with regrettable events, with accidents leaving carnage and wreckage on the thoroughfare bound for Progress. The road itself has been treacherous. If the stupendous historical transformation in the structure of human life has been the result of people choosing what they believe will best satisfy their needs, why have not human needs been better met?
If the same forces have driven social evolution throughout history, and if the way has been downhill at some times and uphill at others, we should not be sanguine that any recent trends toward progress point to the meaning of our destiny.
The idea of progress has relied in another way on the lack of a clear vision of the distant past. The life of primitive peoples is widely assumed to have been nasty, brutish, and short. The step from the 'savage' state to the 'civilized' is consequently assumed to have been straight up. Increasingly, however, as anthropologists have taken a closer and less ethnocentric look at hunter-gatherers, the evidence has shown that primitive life was not so bad. Primitive societies, a category confined in this paper to simple hunting-and gathering peoples, provide an important point of reference for two reasons: they give a perspective on civilization by showing the human condition that civilization has transformed; and they help to illuminate our nature as a species, for they show the kind of life we are biologically evolved to lead.
Without romanticizing the primitive condition into a paradise without ills, we must nonetheless appreciate that modern primitives (and, by an inferential leap, our primitive ancestors) led a surprisingly humane existence. Among hunting-and-gathering bands, the burden of labor is comparatively small, leaving more time than most civilized peoples have known for play, music, dance. The politics of these small socieities are largely free of coercion and inequality. Relationships are close and enduring. Primitives enjoy a wholeness and freedom in their lives which many civilized peoples may well envy.
This new view of our starting point demands a new look at the entire course. If we lift our vision of primitive life out of the degradation to which civilized mythology has consigned it, the commonsense view of social evolution becomes more difficult to sustain. Even if we grant that ten thousand years have improved the human condition, there seems something disturbingly disproportionate between the immensity of the changes that ten millennia of social evolution have wrought upon human societies, and the small (even debatable) advances in human well-being: If we were to persist in viewing the great edifice of civilization as structured for the purpose of meeting human needs, civilization would seem to be a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption. Rube Goldberg's machines were comic because of the grotesque mismatch between means and ends - like a structure the size of a house to light a cigarette, or a twenty-eight-step process for waking someone up in the morning. If we view social evolution as the result of people continually choosing better ways to meet their needs, civilization becomes a kind of joke.
But before we are reconciled to this vision of history as ludicrous, we should see whether the commonsense theory of social evolution can somehow survive the evidence that the progress of human well-being has been both inconsistent and disappointing.
One possible way of meeting the challenge is to argue that when people choose they do not necessarily choose wisely. Whether one attributes the limits of human judgment to folly or to sin, people evidently often make choices hurtful to themselves. Smokers keep smoking, fat people keep overeating, procrastinators avoid necessary tasks, and few of us are as good to those we love as we would like to be. Saint Paul saw it as central to the human condition that we cannot follow even our own best judgment. And, of course, even our best judgment may not be very good: we build high rises on hurricane coasts and on earthquake faults, we trust deceptive and hypocritical politicians, we exhaust our soils, we ingest pathogenic chemicals. . . . So it should not be surprising if the course of civilization is full of blunders - political arrangements that become oppressive, economic systems that lead to famine, social organizations that produce anomie.
One can add to the shortcomings of the human decision maker the extraordinary difficulty of these decisions. For the progress of civilization has been a continuous advance into uncharted territory. Even the wisest judge needs precedents, and civilized peoples have repeatedly been compelled to deal with unprecedented problems. Even intelligent people, under those circumstances, will adopt solutions which do not work or which work today but sow the seeds of tomorrow's problems. Irrigation brings a miracle of greenness in the short run but leads eventually to the disastrous spread of deserts over salted soils. People are attracted to the manifest abundance economic modernization can provide but may not realize the costs in social disruption and fragmentation that development may entail. In the marketplace of social evolutionary possibilities, the payment due is not always calculable until long after the contract for 'progress' has been made.
Both these ideas are valuable for understanding the problematic aspect of human destiny. People to indeed sometimes choose foolishly. And at the frontiers of social evolution people are faced with the difficult challenge of finding their way through uncharted, unexplored territory. These answers, however, do not seem sufficient to solve the problem posed by civilization's ills. The intelligence and industry of our ancestors is simply too impressive to allow us to load the failures of civilization to meet human needs onto their supposedly blundering choices. When we scrutinize what our ancestors in any given time and place were able to do with their situation, what generally stands out is not their folly but their soundness and their resourcefulness.
Something important is missing from the picture. It is like some problems that have arisen in the history of astronomy. What is visible fails to explain how the heavenly bodies are moving, so astronomers search for an invisible source of the disturbing force. Another body is presummed to exist even if it has not yet been seen, for its gravitational pull is manifest. Such is the gravity of the pull of civilization's evolution from the course of human welfare that we must posit a kind of social evolutionary black hole to account for the wide disparity between the expected and the actual movement of our systems.
It is time now to begin moving toward a new theory. We must go beyond the visible force of human actors making choices to discover a force more hidden yet powerful enough to warp the course of social evolution. Although the commonsense theory would lead us to expect history to bring the fulfillment of human dreams, one can as aptly call history a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken. Why?
Toward a Bigger Vision
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