NONZERO

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?

Excerpt from

Chapter Fourteen

AND HERE WE ARE

[SNIP]

Even early "western" civilization didn't bring great moral improvement. Classical Athens is famous for its enlightenment--its art, its science, its egalitarian ethos. But when conquering other cities the Athenians had a habit of executing all male citizens.

Yet progress was in the cards. The reason is that for the Greeks as for everyone else broadening interdependence was in the cards; and interdependence has a way of breeding respect, or at least tolerance. In the case of the Greeks, the interdependence was partly economic, but mainly military. As various Greek states found common cause in fighting off Persians, Athenians began to concede the essential humanity of non-Athenian Greeks.

That this advance in moral philosophy extended no further than the expanding web of interdependence is evident in the counsel that, according to Plutarch, Aristotle gave to Alexander the Great: "to have regard for the Greeks as for friends and kindred, but to conduct himself toward other peoples as though they were plants or animals." Even today, for that matter, respect for people's basic humanity--that is, viewing people as people, worthy of decent treatment--may not extend much further than practical considerations dictate. But practical considerations dictate a larger moral sweep now, because interdependence has grown further. You simply cannot do business with people while executing all their male citizens, and increasingly we do business with people everywhere. The growth of non-zero-sumness, a growth driven by technological change but rooted more fundamentally in human nature itself, has in this one basic and profound way improved the conduct of humans. In fully modern societies, people now acknowledge, in principle, at least, that other peoples are people, too.

[SNIP]

The world remains in many ways a horribly immoral place by almost anyone's standard. Still, the standards we apply now are much tougher than the standards of old. Now we ask not only that people not be literally enslaved, but that they be paid a decent wage and work under sanitary conditions. Now we ask not only that dissidents not be beheaded en masse, but that they be able to say whatever they want to whomever they want. It is good that we thus agitate for further progress, and all signs are that this agitation goes with the flow of history. Still, it is hard, after pondering the full sweep of history, to resist the conclusion that--in some important ways, at least--the world now stands at its moral zenith to date.