Source: The New Yorker.
In a book review in "The New Yorker" of Hanno Sauer's new book "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality", Nikhil Krishnan writes:
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.”Source: Nikhil Krishnan.
In short, according to this theory, there was a competitive advantage for our species to cooperate. Today, when we're good, it's because we evolved that way. So, how do we explain wars? Or even closer to home, how do we explain the rancorous divisions in America's body politic?
Krishnan writes:
In the standard picture of moral progress, popularized by philosophers such as Peter Singer, morality advances when we expand the circle of our concern beyond the narrow original in-group of family or clan. The welfare of human beings from other tribes and nations starts to count, too...
Yet that vaunted expansion itself creates a new out-group, the deplorables who, say, persist in voting against greater immigration or who won’t sit quietly and eat their tofu. In other words, we learn to define the out-group—the people we don’t have to care about, rather like the orcs in a fantasy video game—by its moral failings. The in-group is diverse in terms of race and gender, but morally homogeneous.
Source: Nikhil Krishnan.
This reminded me of something I wrote two days after the 2024 election. I suggested there might be a natural limit to how large you can grow an in-group before group cohesion inevitably breaks down.
Democrats championed women, Blacks, Brown people, Asians, LGBTQ, disabled people, poor people, immigrants, Palestinians, children, unions, and trans people. Their tent grew bigger. Eventually, they were done in by diminishing returns. Each new group they brought into the tent had fewer people than the number of people who left the tent because they didn't like the new people.Source: Mark Steger.
Extending this beyond politics to religion, I'm reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan. In that story, "God's love is represented by the Samaritan's act of compassion towards a stranger in need, demonstrating that true love extends beyond social boundaries and requires active, selfless care for anyone who needs it, even those considered enemies or outsiders; essentially showing that God's love is universal and calls us to love our neighbors, regardless of their background." (Google Generative AI).
If there's some kind of evolutionary limit to the maximum size of in-groups, it's not a good sign for humanity. It suggests that all the preaching in the world, even by Jesus himself, will never achieve universal love.
All of this is explanation of the malady, not a prescription for a cure. If there's any truth to it, there might not be a cure, except perhaps in the far distant future, if evolution finds universal love to be a competitive advantage for our species. And with that cheery thought, Happy New Year 2025!
"Tribal hearts resist,
Universal love falters,
Natural law reigns."
—h/t ChatGPT
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