Nothing kills your appetite, they say, like discovering how the sausage is made. In the realm of superhero cinema, origin stories explain our protagonist's driving motivations. But in the realm of faith and values? I stopped believing everything the tabloids said after I went on a school trip to the offices of my local paper. Others have grown disillusioned once they scrutinized the early history of their religion as historians, not as adherents. It's harder to keep believing some things once you find out why you believe them.
Naturally, I hold slavery to be an abomination and liberal democracies to be better than totalitarian dictatorships. But why? I could draw on my years of education to tell you it has something to do with my belief in freedom, autonomy, the awfulness of treating a fellow human being as a mere instrument. But a skeptic can point out that I had these convictions before I was ever in a position to articulate a cogent argument for them. The arguments came afterward; they are rationalizations of things I already believed.
The unflattering truth, this skeptic might continue, is that my views on slavery simply reflect the moral common sense of the society I was born into. My affection for liberal democracy may come from the simple fact that I grew up in one, surrounded by its propaganda. Who knows what I'd think if I'd been raised as a member of a plantation-owning family in the antebellum South, where abolitionists were regarded as dangerous eccentrics? I used to fancy myself a rational creature who believed things for reasons; now, attuned to the question of origins, I see myself as no freer of the nexus of causes than my dog, my cactus, or my tennis ball.
And not only me. We can all be viewed as the culmination of history, physics, and biology. Yes, our beliefs about math and the natural sciences are products of a history, just as much as our moral beliefs are. But, happily, we have something with which to assess our scientific beliefs. There are lab tests to determine whether Newton's first law holds. The trouble is that there's nothing we can test our moral convictions against -- except perhaps other moral convictions, our own and those of other people. Of course I think my moral convictions are the right ones; that's why they're my convictions. Maybe all I'm entitled to say, though, is that they happen to be mine -- as my tastes happen to be mine. A different childhood, different genes, and you'd find a man with the views of John C. Calhoun instead.
When the German philosopher Hanno Sauer titled his ambitious new book "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality" (Oxford), he made it clear that he sees morality as quite different from science. In his account, morality -- that body of judgments about good and evil, the practices that reflect those judgments, and the blame, guilt, and punishment that sustain them -- hasn't always existed. That's why it had to be invented, rather than discovered.
For Sauer, the story of the invention of morality is really the story of the evolution of humanity. The processes that produced our morality are simply the processes that produced us, produced us as beings who have this morality -- rather than, say, the norms that govern ants in their caste-bound colonies, or wolves in their packs, or the snow leopard in its solitude. To understand ourselves as moral creatures, we have to understand that we're built that way.
And who exactly are "we" in all this? That question can be answered in several ways. "We" might simply be all human beings, members of the species Homo sapiens. Or something much narrower: human beings in the twenty-first-century West, with all the values and behavioral quirks peculiar to us. Or something in the middle: human beings in a certain stage of a journey that began a few million years ago, shaped by some combination of physics, biochemistry, neurobiology, and history. The structure of Sauer's book reflects this ambiguity, dividing itself into sections that focus on distinct stages of human evolution, as he draws on research -- some of it now well known -- from evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and big-picture history of the sort done by writers such as Jared Diamond, David Graeber, and Yuval Noah Harari.
Sauer isn't the first writer to embark on an ambitious "genealogy " of morality. The example of Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of the most ambitious such work, makes one expect something similarly dark and unsettling. Curiously, Sauer's tour of the sausage factory, far from leaving him stricken with nausea, seems to have whetted his appetite for the product. To understand why, we might as well follow his example and start at the very beginning.
It was five million years ago, Sauer tells us, that creatures rather like ourselves, having only just evolved from some now extinct ape, started to develop the psychological dispositions that made them capable of coöperation. Unlike the chimpanzees and bonobos of the dense forests around central Africa, our ancestors had to survive in exposed grasslands. Coöperating for mutual defense against our predators, and for collectively pursuing prey, was our way of compensating for our new vulnerability. Among the dispositions that emerged to help us get along, Sauer writes, was the capacity for altruistic behavior: "putting aside the interests of the individual in favour of a greater common good."
Sauer enlists a thought experiment, proposed by the American anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, to bring out the distinctiveness of the human capacity for coöperating. Compare how human beings typically behave when flying -- "crammed together among strangers, silent and motionless" -- with how chimpanzees might act in the same conditions. "There'd be pools of blood on the carpet, torn ears, fingers and penises, countless dead apes throughout the plane, and great howling and gnashing of teeth," Sauer writes. None of this tells us that nonhuman apes can't coöperate. It does suggest, Sauer continues, that we may be unique in how we do it: "more flexibly, more generously, with more discipline and with less suspicion, even with strangers."
As our environments changed, five hundred thousand or so years ago, and our groups grew larger, we developed the useful new practice of punishment. In evolutionary terms, this was enormously significant. "A species that kills its most belligerent, aggressive and ruthless members over hundreds of generations creates a strong selection pressure in favour of peacefulness, tolerance and impulse control," Sauer argues. "We are the descendants of the friendliest."
These friendly apes were not so friendly that they gave up on their newly acquired "punitive psychology." They had some version of sentiments and customs we still recognize: blame and shame. But they also began to develop habits of trust and mistrust that enabled them to make good use of information and skills bequeathed by previous generations. So far, things were relatively egalitarian. Then, five thousand or so years ago, after agriculture spread and prehistory gave way to history, hierarchies emerged, dividing our societies into groups -- the socioeconomic élites and everyone else.
As things became more unequal, we developed a paradoxical aversion to inequality. In time, patterns began to appear that are still with us. Kinship and hierarchy were replaced or augmented by coöperative relationships that individuals entered into voluntarily -- covenants, promises, and the economically essential contracts. The people of Europe, at any rate, became what Joseph Henrich, the Harvard evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, influentially termed "WEIRD": Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. WEIRD people tend to believe in moral rules that apply to every human being, and tend to downplay the moral significance of their social communities or personal relations. They are, moreover, much less inclined to conform to social norms that lack a moral valence, or to defer to such social judgments as shame and honor, but much more inclined to be bothered by their own guilty consciences.
That brings us to the past fifty years, decades that inherited the familiar structures of modernity: capitalism, liberal democracy, and the critics of these institutions, who often fault them for failing to deliver on the ideal of human equality. The civil-rights struggles of these decades have had an urgency and an excitement that, Sauer writes, make their supporters think victory will be both quick and lasting. When it is neither, disappointment produces the "identity politics" that is supposed to be the essence of the present cultural moment.
His final chapter, billed as an account of the past five years, connects disparate contemporary phenomena -- vigilance about microaggressions and cultural appropriation, policies of no-platforming -- as instances of the "punitive psychology" of our early hominin ancestors. Our new sensitivities, along with the twenty-first-century terms they've inspired ("mansplaining," "gaslighting"), guide us as we begin to "scrutinize the symbolic markers of our group membership more and more closely and to penalize any non-compliance." We may have new targets, Sauer says, but the psychology is an old one.