John Wilkins wrote:

Mr. Wilkins, what do you think of Robert Wright's take on cultural
evolution. He also seems to take the position of Leslie White and
Morgan. To him cultural evolution definitely shows directionality in
broad outlines. He states archeology shows this most clearly.

MR

Chapter One

THE LADDER OF

CULTURAL EVOLUTION

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.
-Don Marquis

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists commonly referred to
particular groups of people as "savages." Technically speaking, this
was not an insult (though it seldom came off as a compliment).
"Savagery" was just a stage in the orderly history of human cultures.
There had been a time when all human beings were savages, but then some
of them got a cultural promotion-to "barbarians." Or, at least, to
"low" barbarians. Barbarism had three subdivisions-lower, middle, and
upper-and a culture, after passing through them, could cross the
threshold into civilization. At that point its people could start
writing books in which other cultures were called savage.

The leading proponent of this savagery-barbarism-civilization scale was
Lewis Henry Morgan, who unveiled it in his 1877 book Ancient Society.
Writing less than two decades after Darwin published On the Origin of
Species, Morgan depicted human cultures as things that evolve. "It can
now be asserted upon convincing evidence that savagery preceded
barbarism in all the tribes of mankind, as barbarism is known to have
preceded civilization," Morgan wrote. These "three distinct conditions
are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary
sequence of progress."

Morgan was one of the world's first anthropologists. He was an
aficionado of American Indian societies, whose depredation by white men
he deplored. After Sitting Bull massacred Custer's men at the Little
Bighorn, Morgan came out in defense of Sitting Bull.

That's not to say Morgan was a radical. In addition to being a
selftrained scholar, he was a well-to-do lawyer. Still, his book was
embraced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who found it consistent
with their own teleological view of history. Like them, Morgan traced
history's direction to material factors, including technology. And like
them, he stressed changing notions of ownership. They loved his idea
that man's initial, "savage," condition was communal, with no private
property. Engels warmly quoted Morgan's prediction that in the end
cultural evolution would restore some of this primal egalitarianism.
"Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights
and privileges, and universal education," Morgan had written,
"foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience,
intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending."

The view that inexorable forces of history had created civilization,
that cultures "evolve" in broadly predictable fashion and would keep
doing so, was also held by the sociologist Herbert Spencer, who loathed
Marxism. Another proponent was John Stuart Mill, whose politics were
somewhere between Spencer's and Marx's. Back then, the idea of
directionality in history was almost conventional wisdom. Ideology
entered the picture only when you discussed the mechanism behind
history's obviously patterned course, and extrapolated into the future.

TRENDS BECOME UNTRENDY

During the early twentieth century, the conventional wisdom changed.
The ranking of some societies as "higher" than others seemed
increasingly unsavory, especially to scholars on the left. In
anthropology, the eminent Franz Boas led an assault on the idea that
human cultures tend to move in any particular direction. His most
famous student, Margaret Mead, would later summarize the Boasian credo:
"We have stood out against any grading of cultures in hierarchical
systems which would place our own culture at the top and place the
other cultures of the world in a descending scale according to the
extent that they differ from ours.... We have stood out for a sort of
democracy of cultures, a concept which would naturally take its place
beside the other great democratic beliefs."

Support for the Boasian perspective was intense and eventually
overwhelming. In 1918, an essay in American Anthropologist attacked the
idea of cultural evolution as "the most inane, sterile, and pernicious
theory ever conceived in the history of science"-and, moreover-"a
cheap toy for the amusement of big children." By 1939, another
anthropologist could report that "[cultural] evolutionism can muster
hardly a single adherent." Meanwhile, the idea of directional history
wasn't faring well among historians, either. During the nineteenth
century many of them had seen history as progress fueled by reason; the
conscious, rational pursuit of the good would bring everexpanding
freedom and political equality. But after two world wars in which
clever technologies had killed millions, the words "rational" and
"good" didn't seem hallmarks of humankind; and, with fascism a recent
memory and totalitarian communism still strong, "freedom" didn't seem
to be history's goal.

Further, hadn't the enemies of freedom, Hitler and Stalin, believed
that history was on their side? Maybe, then, theories of historical
directionality weren't just wrong, but dangerous! After the Second
World War, two of the most famous thinkers of this century-Isaiah
Berlin and Karl Popper-took up arms against such theories. In the
slim volume Historical Inevitability, Berlin attacked the notion "that
the world has a direction and is governed by laws, and that the
direction and the laws can in some degree be discovered by employing
the proper techniques of investigation." Popper, in The Poverty of
Historicism, announced that he had proved-literally proved-that
predicting the future is flat-out impossible.

After Berlin and Popper wrote, the kind of bigthink they
opposed-"speculative history," or "metahistory"-became an
endangered species. In the 1960s, one philosopher of history observed
that historians "tend to use the term 'metahistorian' to mark
deviations from normal professional activity in either the law-seeking
or the pattern-seeking direction." Not much has changed since then. The
one pattern-seeking work of history to make a big splash over the past
two decades-The End of History-was written not by a historian but
by a political scientist, Francis Fukuyama. Oddly, pondering laws of
history is less deviant behavior for a political scientist than for a
historian.

Opponents of "metahistory" have often been candid about their
motivations. The dedication to Popper's book reads, "In memory of the
countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell
victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of
Historical Destiny." I'll argue that Popper's analysis-and Berlin's
analysis, and Boas's analysis-was doubly wrong: wrong not just about
whether directional views of the past can be valid, but about whether
they are especially dangerous.

A SHORT-LIVED INSURRECTION

The war on directionality was not as successful within anthropology as
within history. At mid-century, small pockets of resistance began to
develop, notably at the University of Michigan. There a firebrand named
Leslie White rebelled against Boasian anti-evolutionism and devoted his
life to resuscitating and refining Morgan's ideas. This revival spawned
some advances in the field (including labels less offensive than
"savage" and "barbarians". Indeed, as we'll see, White's students and
allied colleagues laid a still-usable foundation for reassessing world
history. Nonetheless, in the 1970s, as multiculturalism gained
popularity, theories that seemed to rank the world's cultures lost
popularity. By the time of White's death in 1975, cultural evolutionism
was falling into neglect, if not disrepute.

Today the one part of anthropology that still harbors much sympathy for
evolutionism is not White's field-cultural anthropology-but
archaeology. To be sure, most archaeologists don't espouse as strong a
version of cultural evolutionism as will be espoused in this book; they
don't believe that the progression toward more complex society was
essentially inevitable, from the Stone Age right up to globalization.
Still, archaeologists can't help but notice that, as a rule, the deeper
you dig, the simpler the society whose remains you find. Plainly,
change in the structure of societies tends to happen sooner or later,
and is more likely to raise complexity than to lower it.

In a way, it's odd that the greatest sympathy for evolutionism is found
among scholars who study the distant past. For events of this century,
and especially of the last few decades, suggest that the arrow of
history identified by some social scientists of the nineteenth century
is roughly on target. Lewis Morgan's essential point was right: the
endless impetus of cultural evolution has pushed society through
several thresholds over the past 20,000 years. And now it is pushing
society through another one. A magnificent new social structure our
future home-is being built before our eyes.

To say that history has a direction is not to endorse all the tenets of
early cultural evolutionism or of nineteenth-century progressivist
history. It is not, for example, to blithely predict the triumph of
freedom and equality in all their dimensions. Indeed, though I think
history is on the side of human freedom in one sense, there is another
sense in which freedom is shrinking. If there is something magnificent
about the emerging social structure, there is something terrifying
about it, too. Fortunately, this structure, even if broadly inescapable
in the long run, is by no means inevitable in detail.

Anyway, the question of whether history's basic arrow will on balance
make us freer or less free, will make our lives better or worse, is one
I'll defer for now. I do think that in some respects history's basic
direction makes human beings morally better, and will continue to do
so. But- that isn't the immediate point. The immediate point, to be
made over the next thirteen chapters, is that if we leave morality
aside and talk about the objectively observable features of social
reality, the direction of history is unmistakable. When you look
beneath the roiled surface of human events, beyond the comings and
goings of particular regimes, beyond the lives and deaths of the "great
men" who have strutted on the stage of history, you see an arrow
beginning tens of thousands of years ago and continuing to the present.
And, looking ahead, you see where it is pointing.

An excerpt from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright,
published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright.
www.nonzero.org