Moral: In pre-civilizational times, biology played a greater role in human affairs than in later epochs in which rational deliberation became necessary for efficient trade and commerce [1][2].
Hierarchies – and thus some semblance of civil society – always exist as soon as humans find themselves in groups of virtually any kind [3][4]. Predation is a simple way that organisms can obtain an evolutionary advantage, and ostentatious displays of violent behavior can also be employed to form dominance hierarchies [5][6][7]. These rankings provide an assertion of an organism’s fitness for, and disposition toward, violent behavior; Consequently, competing organisms limit altercations in which injury and death are highly probable [5]. Dominance hierarchies are engendered by periodic (rather than continual) violence, and replace actual altercations with the constant but possibly unrealized threat of altercation [5].
In advanced primate species, a ‘revenge instinct’ likely evolved alongside dominance hierarchies, in which the threat of subterfuge and revenge by coteries of disenfranchised members of a clan served as an additional check on ostentatious displays of violence [8]. Those participating in predation would fear reprisal from coteries of the aggrieved, increasing the opportunity cost of selective violence [8]. While predation was more profitably directed toward other clans, oral traditions and collective memories of warfare would have also increased the opportunity cost of inter-clan violence [8][9]. Ritualistic sadism and religious-cultural-social ideologies favoring violence toward non-conformers as a means of boundary maintenance coevolved with predatory instincts [10]. Roughly 5000 years ago, the concomitant emergence of high volumes of trade [11], state-arbitrated systems of deliberative justice [12], and diminution of extra-judicial, violent means of dispute resolution emerged [13]. In human societies, rational collaboration is necessary for trade to flourish; Open discourse, commerce in goods and ideas, and the necessary development of correspondingly comprehensive infrastructure to support such aims collectively confer selective advantages to individuals and societies that rely upon trade and commerce rather than war and predation.
Indeed, trade and production invested the geneses of the most ancient civil societies (Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, etc.) with formal systems of arbitration [14]; Such juridical systems diminished the utility of perpetual internecine predation via the delegation of monopolies on violence to recognized civil authorities [15]. Systems of mathematics suited to exchange, credit, and trade conspired to increase the value of the Other’s life apart from the pronouncements of religious-moral sentiments [16]. Comparative advantage in productive enterprises demanded that, even in early societies with limited trade and production, the Other was worth more alive as a trading partner than dead as a victim of brigandry. In the Western world, free trade was invested with religious significance almost simultaneously with the printing press and the Protestant Reformation [17]. From the 16th century onward, freedom of discourse has typically been found in societies that correspondingly value freedom of trade and basic human rights [18][19]. All of these freedoms and many beside are the distinct hallmarks of Enlightenment Rationalism and Protestantism that would not have evolved in the absence of the Reformation’s emphasis upon rapid publication and dissemination of ideas [20]. This advent correspondingly demanded greater literacy and – in turn – a greater social acceptance of arguments derived from abstract rationality [21].
Relative freedom of trade in 17th-century Geneva, Amsterdam, London, and the Hanseatic cities fostered widespread acceptance of functional rationality and the calculus of comparative advantage among the bourgeois classes [22]. Along with an increased emphasis on rational consensus-building and deliberative justice, literacy and a commerce of ideas in the printed form eventuated in the revolution of Secular Humanism from its roots in the Renaissance [23]. In post-Medieval Europe, the invention of the printing press; limited government; divisions of labor; and the development of standardization of judgments in state-adjudicated means of arbitration all conspired to diminish the employment of murder and violence as viable, widespread tools for self-enrichment [24]. Because torture has little value in prolonged trading relationships, the aforementioned market forces serve to check sadistic tendencies embedded in reified, anti-rational social systems like the Inquisition. Sadism, ideological violence, and anti-rationalism are frequently found together [25]. This unholy fusion is especially pronounced in abstract ideological frames that dehumanize or objectify the Other as a dangerous, noisome, or subhuman entity [26]. Such systems suffer economically when they curtail trade with providers who, despite vigorous counter-claims, are human, rational, and productive. Sadism is often employed in support of utopian visions: Boundary maintenance results in polarization (ever-greater radicalism among members of a group) buttressed by symbolic universes that represent the Other as being in possession of an inferior status with respect to Divinity or the totem order [27][28][29].
These utopian visions are often – but certainly not always – deeply religious or counter-religious, and can paradoxically appear in both of these divisions at once [30]. Indeed, the manifold flavors of Marxism and radical Socialism are found in both religious and anti-religious contexts and have been the sources of the most prolific ideological violence in human history [31]. Like many theologically-motivated movements, violent flavors of Marxism require deep adherence to historically flawed, and scientifically untenable views of human history and lean on implicit threats of force to maintain ideological conformity. It is my ardent hope that the freedom of discourse furnished by advances in communication technology will ever more greatly favor rational deliberation rather than violence as a means of dispute resolution. The ecological concerns engendered by the unbridled expansion of markets as well as the profound inequalities generated by this expansion must be addressed via the very discursive freedoms that this paradigm permits [32]. Solutions from within a framework of internationally-accessible open information constitute a fecund source for ideas and collaborations [33].
In Honor of Steven Pinker.
Works Cited.
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