• Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

• 1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
• 2. The Way We Were
• 3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
• 4. The Invisible Brain
• 5. War: What Is It Good For? 
• 6. The Inevitability of Agriculture 
• 7. The Age of Chiefdoms
• 8. The Second Information Revolution
• 9. Civilization and So On
• 10. Our Friends the Barbarians 
• 11. Dark Ages
• 12. The Inscrutable Orient
• 13. Modern Times
• 14. And Here We Are
• 15. New World Order
• 16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

• 17. The Cosmic Context

• 18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness

• 19. Why Life Is So Complex

• 20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

• 21. Non-crazy Questions

• 22. You Call This a God?

• Appendix I: On Non-zero-sumness

• Appendix II: What Is Social Complexity?

Goldberg accurately cites the official United Nations definition of genocide as any “attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” My main disagreement with him is over the meaning of the phrase “as such”. I take it to mean killing people because they are members of one of these groups, as opposed to killing them to realize some military or political goal. This interpretation makes it easy, for example, to fend off the occasional claim that Truman committed genocide. True, in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki he meant to “destroy... in part, a national...group.” But his ultimate goal was to win the war, not kill Japanese, and once the war was over he quit killing Japanese. Hitler, in contrast, would never have quit killing Jews, because his goal was to kill Jews.

Goldberg, as I understand him, believes that it doesn’t much matter what your goal is; it’s irrelevant whether Saddam killed innocent Kurds in order to stamp out a nationalist insurrection, or killed innocent Kurds just to kill Kurds. He approvingly cites the view of one scholar that “Saddam's genocide of the Kurds was primarily instrumental, rather than ideological, but that the distinction does not matter, legally or morally.” 

Obviously, reasonable people can disagree on this issue. There are plenty of thoughtful human rights activists who agree with Goldberg on whether Saddam committed genocide, including the estimable Human Rights Watch. And, to be honest, if I'd realized how widespread Goldberg's view on the question is, I'd have been less sanctimonious in lecturing him on his use of language, since his usage is in keeping with one common convention. But I still take issue with that usage. My view remains that, though what Saddam did is almost unimaginably bad, what Hitler did was qualitatively different—and warrants a word all its own.

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