Published by EH.NET (July 2000)
Robert Wright, _Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny_. New York: Pantheon
Books, 2000. x + 435 pp. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-679-44252-9.
Reviewed for EH.NET by J. Bradford De Long, Department of Economics,
University of California-Berkeley. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back in 1794 the Enlightenment philosophe Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas
Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet wrote his _Sketch for a Historical Picture
of
the Progress of the Human Mind_ -- the boldest of the eighteenth-century
declarations that humanity had and was destined to see Progress with a
capital P. Condorcet was a powerful and convincing advocate-- Malthus
wrote
his _Essay on Population_ explicitly against Condorcet. But that was the
high water mark of belief in Progress. By and large the past two
centuries
have seen the reaction, and confidence in human Progress --
technological,
political, humanistic, and moral -- fell out of intellectual favor.
Now comes Robert Wright, previously author of _Three Scientists and
Their
Gods_ and _The Moral Animal_, with an excellent book accompanied by an
enthusiastic blurb by William McNeill. Wright's purpose is to set out
the
gospel of progress anew, this time using the language of game theory as
his
principal mode of rhetoric. At its most basic level Wright's point is
that
interactions are positive-sum: there are gains from cooperation. Thus
human
cultural evolution has an arrow and a direction: toward greater
complexity,
toward higher civilization.
The direction arises at two levels. First, individual humans seek out
things that increase their own powers and capabilities. Cooperation
tends
to do this, so people find ways to cooperate. But the most important
form
of cooperation is one that is almost impossible to stop: the simple
sharing
of knowledge. Two heads are better than one. The denser the population
(and
the better the means of communication) the more ideas will be generated,
the larger the number of ideas that turn out to be useful, and the
faster
will be progress. People are, Wright argues -- in my view correctly --
naturally acquisitive in that they want useful things, and will eagerly
copy new technologies they hear about. Thus Wright sees inventions such
as
agriculture as inevitable -- not as a lucky accident.
Second, at the level of human societies, the societies that are more
powerful -- have better technologies, more effective social
arrangements,
greater population densities, and so forth -- either swamp their
neighbors
or force their neighbors to copy them in order to maintain their
autonomy.
In Eurasia, where contact was constant from an early age -- as Wright
points out, in 200 on one could travel from Gibraltar to the Yangtze
River
and cross only three borders (p. 117) -- a good innovation at one end
would
diffuse all the way to the other in a matter of centuries. He believes
that
the wide spread of religion in agricultural civilizations proves that
its
productivity-boosting and division of labor-enhancing effects outweigh
its
exploitative side (p. 86): those societies that did not have temples and
priests did not flourish.
Wright dismisses gloomy talk of barbarian invasions and the fall of
empires
by asserting that one goes from furs-and-swords to linen-and-pens in
three
generations: "The Romans weren't exactly hailed by the Greeks as
cultural
equals when they happened on the scene.... Yet they were massively
infiltrated by classical Greek memes, which they then spread across the
wider world. In Horace's phrase, 'The Greeks, captive, took the victors
captive'. And, anyway, who were the Greeks to look down on intrusive
barbarians? ... The early Greeks had a title of honor, ptoliporthos,
that
meant 'sacker of cities'.... But whether these 'barbarians' sack cities,
or
hover on the periphery and trade ... or ally with them in war or ally
against them, one outcome is nearly certain: win, lose, or draw, the
'barbarians' become vehicles for advanced memes..." (p. 131). For what
truly matters are the basic technologies of agriculture and craft, not
the
products of high civilizations. And even when you do have significant
regression -- in the post-Mycenean Dark Age, in the post-Roman Dark Age,
or
in the wake of the Mongols - Wright reminds us that "the world makes
backup
copies."
Wright also dismisses gloomy talk of the stagnation of Ming and Qing
China,
the fall of the Mughal Empire, and the technological and organizational
stasis of the Ottoman Empire by arguing that the key unit is not Europe
vs.
Asia but is instead Eurasia. Sooner or later, Wright argues, some part
of
Eurasia -- it did not have to be Europe - would have hit upon a superior
social and technological recipe to that of the mid second millennium
empires, and when it did the rest would have copied it. Wright is of the
school that holds that China almost broke through to modernity, writing
of
how paper and woodblock printing were used to distribute useful texts --
_Pictures and Poems on Husbandry and Weaving_, _Mathematics for Daily
Use_,
and the _Treatise on Citrus Fruit_ (p. 159). The recipe that ultimately
proved successful -- what Wright calls the economic logic of freedom --
was
stopped in many places: "indeed, on balance, in the centuries after the
printing press was invented, European governments grew more despotic"
(p.
185). But it only had to succeed once. And given sufficient cultural
variation, sooner or later a breakthrough was inevitable.
But even if you buy all of Wright's argument that forms of increasing
returns -- non-zero-sum-ness, as Wright calls it -- impart an arrow of
increasing complexity and division of labor to human social, cultural,
and
economic evolution, this does not necessarily amount to Progress -- at
least not to anything we would see as progress in human morality or
human
happiness. For why should organizational complexity be Progress? As
Wright
puts it: "... it would be hard to argue that there was net moral gain
between the hunter-gatherer and ancient-state phases of cultural
evolution.
The Egyptians had slaves -- which virtually no known hunter-gatherer
societies had -- and their soldiers returned from wars of conquest
proudly
brandishing the severed penises of their slain foes" (p. 206).
So in the end Wright is forced to play a game of three-card monte to
reach
conclusions that support his belief in Progress. The card labeled
"complexity" must be switched for the card labeled "Progress" without
our
noticing. In the industrial core, at the end of the twentieth century,
we
are inclined to tolerate this switch -- to say that it is obvious that a
highly complicated and productive civilization will have
widely-distributed
individual wealth, lots of individual freedom, and soft forms of rule,
and
that social complexity is civilization. But back in the middle of the
twentieth century this switch could not have been accomplished at all:
"complexity yes," people would have said, "but progress no." And who
knows
how things will look in a hundred more years?
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794),
was
an aristocrat, a mathematician, an official of the Academy of Sciences,
and
was a friend of Voltaire (1694-1778). He strongly supported the
revolution
of 1789 as an example of human progress. But the Committee of Public
Safety
turned on him: he was arrested, and died in prison before he could be
executed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*The above review covers only the first two-thirds of the book. At that
point Wright asks the question: "Aren't organic evolution and human
history
sufficiently different to demand separate treatment?"
I think the answer to this question is "yes," and that the book should
stop
at that point. Wright thinks that the answer is "no," and so the book
continues. He goes on to draw analogies between human cultural evolution
toward greater complexity and biological evolution toward greater
complexity.
Wright's argument that biological evolution has an arrow as well --
tends
to produce animals with big brains that think -- runs roughly as
follows:
Life starts out simple. It then evolves, with variation and with the
conservation and spread of successful variations. Thus evolution
generates
increasing diversity, and increasing diversity generates increasing
complexity: it is hard for a one-celled organism to become less
complicated
(although viruses have managed), and easy for it to become more
complicated.
But wait! Most of your environment is made up of other living creatures.
Hence the environment becomes more complicated over time too. And
because
the environment becomes more complicated over time, there is increasing
adaptive value in information acquisition and information processing
organs: better eyes (and ears) and bigger brains. Random evolution
creates
increasing diversity and complexity of life. Increasing diversity and
complexity of life make for a more complicated environment. And a more
complicated environment generates strong evolutionary pressure for eyes,
hands, and brains.
Maybe his biological argument is right -- I'm inclined to think it
probably
is -- but maybe not. Big eyes and big brains are expensive in terms of
energy. Why not go for bigger teeth or stronger legs? And large
complicated
animals seem to be (so far) at a disadvantage in species survival when
the
asteroids hit.
J. Bradford De Long is a professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley, and is
the author of the forthcoming "America's Historical Experience with Low
Inflation" (_Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking_), and the recently
published "Some Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy"
(_First
Monday_) and "The Triumph[?] of Monetarism" (_Journal of Economic
Perspectives_).
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