Why have groups of people became more trusting and compassionate? When did society start to show signs of true civil behavior and not just esoteric pity for others? What is the factor or event that lead to us becoming more civilized?
The people, the government, and the culture have all became more civilized over time. Is there known genetic mutations or evolution that caused people to be more trusting and compassionate? Or maybe there’s a part of psychology that explains why humans want to act this way? I know it’s just common sense that people would want to live peacefully and not slaughter each other on sight. I’m looking for a scientific/social answer explaining the process or reason why things are the way they are.
Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature is a fascinating, though controversial, attempt to answer that question. He argues that Hobbes’s Leviathan, Singer’s Expanding Circle, game theory, and increasing communication (among other factors) have led to now being the most peaceful period of human history. Well worth a read. There’s also this 16-minute video summarizing some of his ideas.
I found Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue to be a fascinating look at why ‘altruism’ as it were might be evolutionarily selected for.
A large part of the book is discussing computer programs that basically act out the prisoner’s dilemma with each other and how the programs evolve to maximize their earnings.
A large part of it is that we don’t have to kill each other to survive any more.
It is only relatively recently that there actually were enough resources for everyone. When there is not enough to go around, then you are going to fight pretty damn hard for survival.
As agriculture and industrialization changed this dynamic to where we now have more than enough food, clothing and shelter for everyone, it becomes easier to view another person as a fellow human being with the same desires and rights as yourself, and not simply as a competition for limited resources.
When there is plenty, it allows liberal policies of sharing that plenty with those who are not able to compete well enough to earn a share to survive. It allows progressive policies about emancipating slaves, and treating the opposite sex as fellow humans, rather than as breeders and housekeepers.
When there is plenty, it even allows those with an eye towards improving society to push for the rights of those who are marginalized and have no voice of their own in society.
The main reason progress is slow is because many are still stuck in the survival mode. Many still see everyone else as a competitor, out to snatch up the last morsel of food, or take the last shelter, or procreate with the last fertile female. Their fear that if they stop concentrating on survival, and instead allow themselves to share the wealth and culture of society with others, then they will somehow lose, that they will no longer be able to support themselves and survive. It’s a valid mindset, and it is a mindset that is nearly impossible to shake off, but it is a mindset that holds back civilization.
I don’t think it’s a recent thing; civilization has always been better than the alternative, and as scarcity has decreased, there’s more opportunity to be altruistic and less reason not to be.
What I find fascinating is that civilization has become steadily more compassionate, in that attitudes and behaviors that were commonplace in medieval times and before have gradually been supplanted by less harsh ones. I mean, in those times, executions like crucifixion, impalement, etc… weren’t uncommon. Over time, there was a push for more humane executions, and gradually a push to get away from executions altogether. Similar things have happened in many other social areas over the centuries.
Why did this happen? I don’t know that a decrease in scarcity started that.
Your post sounds like Jonathan Haidt’s ideas about the psychological underpinnings of political ideologies. I was amused when I first read his ideas, because it’s essentially a more sophisticated form of the stereotypical feminist calling conservatives a bunch of cave men.
I don’t know if this is anywhere near a consensus or instead the pipe dream of romantic traditionalists, but I thought early agriculturists were individually worse off than their HG ancestors, being shorter, malnourished, and sicker. IIRC, sugar and other newer foods were terrible for their teeth as well.
Never had heard of him before, but with a quick google, I will take it is a compliment that I apparently have thinking in common with someone with his credentials.
I realize you did not mean it as a compliment, with your jab about “stereotypical feminist”, though I must say that I do not understand how you get there from what I posted.
I am just pointing out that it takes time for culture and attitudes to adjust to the very recent paradigm of plenty that we currently experience, and it is not entirely unreasonable to think that this current era of plenty may not last long, and we will need to go back to a survival mode, in which case, those pushing social advances at the cost of the individual efficiency of survival will be the ones holding doing the holding back.
It is possible that those who managed to survive in a HG society were healthier than those in an agricultural society, but what you fail to acknowledge is that the sicker and less healthy in a HG population simply died, while in an agricultural society, they had more opportunities to be useful to the community, and the community had more resources to spare to feed someone who was not fit to survive in a HG community.
Were the people of Rhodes and Pergamon, less civilized? Were the folks in Athens less civilized? They had Democracy, money, courts, voting machines and attended theatrical performances to see many of the same comedy routines we watch on TV today.
In the 1800s it was popular for the Church of England to disembowel heretics and quickly set fire to the intestines of the alive and conscious persons. The event drew large crowds. Were they civilized?
In Botswana the San People sued the government for the right to return to the Kalahari Desert and live a traditional lifestyle. Are they uncivilized?
I wonder what role technology and medicine played in all this. I’ve heard sayings like only starving, angry people join fascist movements. Happy, well fed, well adjusted people do not join brutal movements.
If the saying of ‘hurt people hurt people’ is true, then perhaps because technology and medicine allows us to more easily meet our own needs causes us to then become better people towards those we interact with, positive feedback mechanism.
Also there is game theory. In modern civilization, violence carries a lot of negatives but few positives. In prehistoric societies violence had a different pro/con ratio. People are aware of their incentives.
With minimal resources when someone trusts you with an entire cow you’re more likely just to run off with that cow. Compared to when you have multiple cows you’re less inclined to betray their trust. The other reason for this is because you want to be able to trust them in return. It’s an exchange of trust that helps advance society.
You can argue our compassion for each other may not have changed. But our trust in each other has definitely changed.
Compare the experiences of the Asian Countries with those of the European Countries from 1000 - 1700 CE.
The Asians were living in larger cities, and had more “social graces” than the Europeans of the time.
Many Asian customs were about easing inter-personal frictions - the custom of the senior person bowing more deeply than the junior person is a classic of this.
Wouldn’t this come back around to abundance of resources? What was the resource usage of Europeans/Asians during that time? Did europeans have more resources, technology, medicine or did the asians?
People living good lives tend to act better than those living crummy lives.
It wasn’t a jab, it was a reference to a cultural trope. I didn’t mention Haidt as a compliment or a criticism of your post, just adding a reference to anyone who may be interested. Haidt’s moral foundation theory is one of the more interesting political ideas I’ve seen in the past decade or so, though it may have some holes, e.g. liberals do have purity/contamination/sanctity morals, except instead of sex or religion they focus on the environment, health, and food. But overall it rings true to me.
As for the caveman bit, that would be a time of scarcity, extreme violence, and uncertainty, which means a time where conservative thinking was best adapted, or as you say “survival mode.” Conservatives in liberal democracies meanwhile are out of step with their environment, or so the argument would go. This idea is touched upon in Slate Star Codex’s A Thrive/Survive Theory Of The Political Spectrum, except he uses the zombie apocalypse instead of HG societies.
An opposing intrepretation you see in some liberal circles, perhaps over-romanticized though there’s different varieties of the argument, is the idea that HG societies were egalitarian, maybe even matriarchal, and only turned into hierarchical patriarchies after agriculture and civilization demanded women turn into baby factories to make farmers and soldiers. So in that worldview early civilization was actually less civilized. Not sure how they explain the crazy high murder rate of HG societies, though.
That’s an interesting dynamic I like to see explored in post-apocalyptic fiction. How long could liberal values survive in such a Hobessian hellhole? Would the first generation hang onto egalitarianism, only to watch their values be lost in their children’s generation? Or perhaps it would be a mish-mash of value systems, hanging onto Enlightenment thinking where it didn’t harm survival.
So many complicated concepts and ideas about this. Even the referenced “experts” seem to go overboard.
Okay, here’s my take, based on six decades of direct observation, study of histories, and putting up with so far endless guesswork from others.
Very significant and so far not mentioned here: humans are not the only critters that behave in a “civilized” way. In this case, I’m using what seems to be the prevailing concern by the original poster and several respondents, that “civilized” refers to cooperative behavior and living in coordinated groups.
Lots of assumptions in the opening question, which need to be specified, of a complete reasoning is to be accomplished. More than anything else, what is assumed, is that humans were once NOT “civilized.” This is a very common assumption, but it isn’t borne out by the known archaeology. Most humans discovered have been dated to times where group living was confirmed in various ways. Ritualized burials of Neanderthals and others have been confirmed.
There is a recognized Historiographic bias in how most humans talk about themselves, based on the (I think wishful thinking) that with technological advances, have come sociological and philosophical and other “soft” advances. This is behind a lot of the nasty insults about our predecessors, that pass for “histories,” and is no doubt also linked to a lot of the politics of egotism and comparative cultural antagonisms we suffer from. You can’t declare your opposing society to be “backwards,” without the belief that humans can and do “advance” socially.
That all makes it important to be more careful about exactly what question you want to pursue.
I personally don’t find support for the idea either that humans had to change to start to “civilize,” nor the idea that they are nowadays significantly different beings from their ancestors of ten, twenty, and more millennia ago.
I want to know what people’s take is on the topic of society becoming more civilized over time. It’s not black and white. I’m very interested in how we’ve began to trust others and show more compassion which in return has given us what we got now. A superpower country where it’s almost impossible to starve but we continue to slaughter the masses like it’s nothing.
Are you saying you don’t believe in social advancement? Are you some variety of moral anti-realist? Reactionaries disagree with its goals and don’t characterize it as an advance, but recognize the effect. I’d expect future societies to see our current culture as backward, and I’d probably agree with them.
They also owned slaves, exposed infants to death, and severely discriminated against women.
Sorry but that’s so ridiculously incorrect that I don’t know where to begin. Your average Regency or Victorian vicar would have horrified by the very concept of this.
I think its pretty clear that Christianity in at least its Western version and the humanitarian ethics it inspired played a major role in “civilizing” much of the world. As someone of Korean descent who admires the brilliant heritage of East Asian civilization, it still has to be remembered that infanticide was widely practiced in China, Korea, and Japan until the arrival of Western missionaries.
I kind of want to see this get worked up into a maxim that ‘a lack of power tends to corrupt; but toss him some power, and suddenly he can afford to be a nice guy.’
On the other hand, Christianity coexisted for a thousand years or more with one hell of a lot of bear-baiting, chattel slavery, drawing and quartering, imperial conquest and exploitation, and occasional pogroms, witch-burnings, and crusades against heretics.
There’s certainly no straight line between Christianity and society being unambiguously more “civilized” than pre-Christian civilizations.