Preface

Status: draft.

This book started from an uncomfortable observation: humanity has been writing down its best guesses about how to live well and organize itself for at least five thousand years, and almost none of that accumulated guesswork talks to the rest of it.

A Stoic and a Confucian scholar, separated by a continent and four centuries, arrived independently at something close to the same claim about where a person's peace has to come from. A Hebrew prophet and a Buddhist sutra, with no contact whatsoever, both concluded that cruelty done in the name of righteousness is still cruelty. A twentieth-century game theorist proved, with mathematics, something that Confucian reciprocity and Christian love of neighbor and Ubuntu personhood had each already stated in their own vocabulary — that a community's stability depends on its members treating defection as costly and cooperation as rewarded.

None of these traditions were built to be compatible with each other. They emerged from different landscapes, different scarcities, different catastrophes, different languages for the sacred. And yet the same handful of problems keep showing up in all of them: how do you stop the strong from crushing the weak, how do you keep truth-telling more rewarding than flattery, how do you interrupt a cycle of revenge, how do you get people who will never meet to cooperate anyway, how do you keep power from calcifying into permanent hierarchy, how do you raise children who become adults worth having around.

Every tradition that survived long enough to be written down had to solve some version of these problems well enough to keep its people alive for a few more generations. That survival is not proof that any single tradition got the metaphysics right. But it is evidence — genuine, if partial and noisy — that something in the accumulated practice was tracking something real about how humans actually behave in groups.

This book treats that accumulated practice as data. Not as sacred instruction to be obeyed uncritically, and not as primitive superstition to be dismissed uncritically, but as centuries of applied, trial-and-error research into a problem we still have not solved: how a species with Paleolithic instincts, medieval institutions, and godlike technology can keep from destroying itself, and might instead build something worth the name civilization.

We are not trying to prove that any one religion, philosophy, or ideology had it right. We are trying to find out whether, taken together, they add up to something usable — a set of tested principles that a wiser, healthier, more cooperative planetary civilization could actually run on.

That is the entire ambition of this book. It is a large one. We do not expect to finish it so much as to leave it in better shape than we found it, for whoever picks it up next.

A note on method appears in the introduction; a note on how the chapters are organized, and how skeptically to read each claim, appears in how to read this book.