Customer Reviews

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Thankfully, an increasing number of authors (Landes, Diamond, et al) have been tackling social evolution - a crucial topic that's been shied away from for too long. Wright's effort is inspired, intelligent, engaging, erudite, not the least bit pretentious, and exceedingly well-written. Wright's basic message is that living organizations - both organisms and the groups they form - have been getting increasingly complex and well-integrated since life began, so it's a good bet that this trend will continue into the future. He presents a general hypothesis, and then provides a mountain of fascinating evidence to back it up. It's not experimental science, it's theory-driven science, but it's definitely not "bad science" as a few reviewers (usually non-scientists, interestingly) have said. Reading this book will definitely increase your knowledge and understanding of the history of life on earth, and as the goal of science is to increase knowledge and understanding, I'd say the scientific value of this book is high - much higher than most history you will read (historians usually don't even try to make their interpretations consistent with biological knowledge). Though not the last word in social evolution, this book is an excellent leap forward, and anyone interested in history, biology, or social evolution should read it, and have a great time doing it. Highly recommended.

Robert Wright has the odd distinction of having written one of the best non-fiction books of the past decade (The Moral Animal) and now, with Nonzero, one of the most disappointing.

How it happened is a bit of a mystery. The Moral Animal, a summary of developments in the field of evolutionary psychology, was tightly organized, well-argued and eloquent. The book's thesis--that human nature is rooted in our genetic code, itself honed through millions of years of evolution-stood on the shoulders of the giants (from Darwin to Dawkins) who laid its scientific and theoretical foundation. Wright's contribution was to distill their work into an accessible but lucid package, with the particularly clever device of illustrating the principles that guide human behavior with examples from Darwin's own life.

With Nonzero, Wright extends the argument to claim that human societies (like the species itself) evolve, compete and adapt. That idea itself is not controversial. But Wright adds the gloss that societal evolution takes place in an arc that inevitably leads to further complexity and "progress". Here, unfortunately, he is trying to be original. Even if Wright happens to be right--and he may be--the lack of a scholarly foundation for his arguments is painfully evident throughout the book.

Wright proves again and again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. His acquaintance with history is broad but not deep. Errors, overgeneralizations and a tendency to confuse trivia with truth riddle his accounts of human civilizations. He is willing to toss in any idea--no matter how thinly reasoned--that supports his argument on any particular page. This leads to breathtaking leaps of fact and logic, such as a passage attributing the "many millions who died in the Holocaust" to the 19th century German nationalism provoked "when industrialization swept lands that had just barely left the Middle Ages."

It's not just that Wright knows next to nothing about 19th century Germany--or Ming China, or Tokugawa Japan, or Medieval Europe, or dozens of other civilizations he discusses. It's not just that he gets facts wrong or (more often) rips them out of context. It's that he doesn't seem to care. He's so sure he knows the arc of civilization that the details don't really matter. Inconvenient facts are disregarded or sculpted to support the narrative. Thus the Dark Ages and Feudalism are represented as advances over the Roman Empire. The collapse of great civilizations is always portrayed as the triumph of some progressive force (Wright even offers six bullet points in favor of barbarians). All developments--even contradictory ones--are presented as positive. Centralization or decentralization, political unity or disunity, nationalism or transnationalism--it's all good, according to Wright, at the particular moment they arose.

Here Wright dangles perilously between the dialectics of Hegel and the optimism of Dr. Pangloss. Which, incidentally, suggests a possible reason for the failure of the book. Unlike The Moral Animal, where Wright obviously profited from immersion in the major works of evolutionary psychology, Nonzero gives short shrift to the theorists who have explored the meaning and direction of history in much greater depth and breadth than Wright has. (Hegel, Marx, Toynbee and Spengler come to mind). There are some shoulders to stand on, but Wright prefers his own two feet, however shaky. Perhaps he thinks that evolutionary psychology and game theory are ideas that make previous efforts obsolete. They don't. There's nothing in the notion that societies compete and adapt and evolve that would have astonished Kant or Hegel. And there's nothing to suggest that Wright's vantage point at the beginning of the 21st century allows him to see more clearly than his precedessors--and plenty of reason to believe that it doesn't.

The book recovers somewhat (and earns a second star) in its final chapters, when the subject shifts from history back to science. Still, Nonzero reads like two separate books (or long essays) awkwardly fused together.

Beyond the merits of its argument, the book's glib and casual style is tiring. The lively, measured prose of the Moral Animal has gone AWOL. (And surely the author could have found alternatives to countless appearances of awkward phrases like "non-zero-sumness").

Is Nonzero worth reading? No time spent thinking about these subjects is wasted, but there are better guides than this one.

Back in 1794 the Enlightenment philosphe 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 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--from the year 200 on one could travel from Gibralter to the mouth of China's Yangtze River and cross only three borders--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: 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...." 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 up on 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. 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." 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."

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.

Over 10 years ago, accomplished journalist Robert Wright wrote the acclaimed "Moral Animal," summarizing the findings of the new (or at least reborn and renamed) science, evolutionary psychology. I read, reread, and underlined "The Moral Animal," convinced that I had finally found an explanation for human behavior I could wholeheartedly believe in. With great expectation, I approached "Nonzero."

In "Nonzero," Wright relies on "Moral Animal," but has a much more ambitious thesis. He draws heavily on game theory which Wright broadly divides into competitive games (I win, you lose) and co-operative games (win-win). He acknowledges the constant presence of both types of games in human interaction, then relentlessly develops the hypothesis that real cultural progress is always the result of technological advance PLUS a co-operative (nonzero sum) cultural interaction. Progress builds on itself and a complex society eventually develops.

In Part I (long), Wright considers hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, war, culture, technology, chiefdoms, barbarians, China, Romans, Dark Ages, modern times, and the Globalization of world commerce. One by one, he uses impeccable logic to show how progress in cultural evolution has been made through co-operation, and how improved technology then forced further nonzero sum (co-operative) games.

In Part II (short) he applies the same thinking to biological evolution.

In Part III (short) he ambitiously speculates on the meaning of life, God, and Globalization issues.

This is a very different book than "Moral Animal." In that situation Wright took an already coalescing collection of data about a new field of study and presented it in a cohesive form for public consumption. Matt Ridley did the same in his excellent book "Red Queen" while a whole group of similar thinking scientists cheered them both on.

In "Nonzero" Wright cuts across several disciplines, developing his own ideas, alone. For this, he has been criticized by academians from history, biology, philosophy, anthropology, economics, politics, and theology - though his rough drafts were critiqued by representatives from all these disciplines.

Although Wright makes a good case, his subject matter is more amenable to speculation than proof. Evolution has hard evidence from molecular biology, the fossil record, DNA, and elsewhere - every new finding fits easily into the framework of existing knowledge. Not so with the game theory analysis of historical cultural evolution - any plausible theory can be just as logically advocated as the next.

That being said, Wright makes a compelling argument with valid points on every page and writes in an informal, conversational, non-abrasive style. Throughout the chaos of history, he concentrates on the good (progress) that accrues, even if he's describing the barbaric overthrow of a society that had become corrupt - always maintaining a "fireside chat" style sense of humor: "This view of history, intent on generalizing, ignores the fascinating and consequential differences between civilizations. For people who lodge this complaint...you're in luck! There are thousands of books you'll love reading..."

Probably you'll disagree with some of Wright's conclusions, but that does not make the reading of this book any less compelling. Like "Moral Animal" it is firmly grounded in evolutionary psychology and is a highly entertaining, educational, and unique sidetrip through history from Wright's perspective - his point of view being that despite the constant historical presence of both competitive and co-operative games, the co-operative (nonzero sum) ones alone contributes to cultural progress.

Nonzero is a work of amazing erudition and daring. Wright takes on the entire sweep of history-both human and biological-and reinterprets it through the prism of games theory. And it works. The whole question of proof or non-proof seems beside the point to me (Was Kant or Hegel ever proved right or proved wrong?). Rather, Wright has given us an astonishingly powerful tool with which to analyze the larger movement of history. This is no simplification; Wright takes pains to point out that, on the micro level, history is full of countercurrents and various other aberrations; but his case for the general movement toward greater complexity and greater cooperation is extremely persuasive. Naturally, since this is Big Think analysis, it will stir up controversy among more traditional thinkers eager to defend their turf. But anyone who really cares about recent developments in modern thought must read this book. It's probably the most exciting-and, given Wright's humor and razor-sharp style, the most entertaining-books I've read in a long, long time.

Wright's ambition is no less than to offer an analog of physical science's elusive unified theory. He wants to explain the entire course of human history. To an astonishing degree, he succeeds. His erudition is almost overwhelming. He ranges fluidly from cellular biology to Chinese history to Islamic theology. And he does so in a style that is both friendly and accessible. Reading Nonzero is like having a pleasant, extended conversation over brandy with a wise friend who's had time to read and ponder all the books you've wished you read but haven't gotten to yet. No doubt this will expose Wright to scads of petty complaints from academics who are so narrowly focused on departmental politics and the minutiae of their dissertations that they not only can't see the forest, but have forgotten its existence. For the rest of us, though, Nonzero is a treat.

Back in 1794 the Enlightenment philosphe 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 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--from the year 200 on one could travel from Gibralter to the mouth of China's Yangtze River and cross only three borders--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: those societies that did not have temples and priests did not flourish.

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."

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.

This is a brave attempt to bring a very intimidating and contentious subject to popular attention. It is fashionable to insist that science has poven that life has no purpose or direction. Wright argues instead for the idea of evolution as having "complexity", intelligence , and, hopefully, some measure of moral progress as its goal. Contrary to making modern life meaningless, science of evolution has opened up the possibility that human consciousness has a place in an ongoing process towards a better world. I thought his speculations on "meta evolution" and religion were particularly insightful.

It is a much more personal, speculative, and far reaching book than his excellent " Moral Animal". Wright is taking some personal risks in stating his beliefs so openly -something that most scientist cannot or will not reveal. I can think of few subjects that become so pretentious and overbearing, yet Wright very deliberiately attempts this important subject in a direct and down to earth manner designed not to impress but to communicate to as wide a readership as possible. It is a record of a man trying to think through a difficult subject as earnestly as he can, knowing that he cannot have all the answers. It his best honest guess about one of the most important issues of the day. If anyone has ever read a better spin on this subject I would love to know about it.

One caution: I would read "The Moral Animal" first. "Non Zero" is very much a follow up.

I read his prior book The Moral Animal, and found Nonzero proof that someone who can write one good nonfiction book has at least one more in him. As an economist I appreciate the prominence given to game theory, as it lurks above everything (in the book and in life!). He writes in a compelling, fair, and entertaining way: classic popular nonfiction. The application to the meaning of life and its direction is something more pusillanimous academics would never attempt, so the new thing to me is actually writing out the interesting and straightforward implications of various well-accepted findings (anyone who thinks this is all based on speculative ideas is a dilettante). More to the point of population contention, the thinking that life in general isn't mere happenstance, is good cocktail chatter.

Twenty five years ago, Albert Camus' The Stranger overwhelmed me; it seemed to speak directly to my teenage angst. I plunged into the stacks to read (or try to read) other "existential" writers, and though I didn't find the answers I was seeking, Camus' book started me down a path of my own making. Robert Wright's Moral Animal had the same dramatic impact on my thinking; my interest in evolution started with Stephen Jay Gould's Reflections on Natural History series and accelerated with Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, but Wright's book articulated evolutionary theory by speaking to the most personal of human experiences: relations between men and women. The ideas weren't his, he just provided the magnifying glass and suddenly many things came into focus: never seen before but now perfectly obvious. My book list swerved heavily through his bibliography, and reading suddenly felt urgent. One quickly realizes, however, bold new ideas in this field are hard to come by. In many cases, writers such as Gould and Stephen Dawkins, appear to have been distracted by their public relations battle with the forces of creationism. Their books read like it. Wright and Pinker seem to have a different perspective, one that assumes the world accepts evolution as fact and settles into the next stage of the discussion: what does it truly mean?

In his new book, Nonzero, Robert Wright offers a few ideas of his own. As a result, whereas Moral Animal had a crisp pace, now he must spend more ink detailing the evidence that supports his credibility. The book reads long but as anyone who has perserved through Stephen Dawkins' books knows, the ideas are what matter most. Is evolution directional? Is it directional because we tend to cooperate. I believe and hope our children will look back from a better future and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Most of those publishing commercial books on human evolutionary theory are academics; as an accomplished journalist and a writer incapable of writing a boring sentence, Robert Wright has little competition. His ability to attract a mainstream audience makes him one of the most important voices on this subject.