The Invention of Good and Evil

For almost five million years, humans have been locked in a relationship with morality, inventing and reinventing the concepts of ''Good'' and ''Evil'', and weaving them into our cities, laws and customs. Morality is a concept that can feel joyless and claustrophobic, associated with restraint and coercion, restriction and sacrifice, inquisition, confession and a guilty conscience. For many, it is a device used to shame us into compliance. This impression is not necessarily incorrect, but it is most certainly incomplete. Hanno Sauer traces humanity''s fundamental moral transformations from our earliest ancestors through to the present day, when it can often seem that we have never disagreed more over what it means to be good, and what it means to be right. But we can use our past as a basis for a new understanding of our future. Our current political disagreements may feel like the end of the world, but where will the evolution of morality take us next?

Vorwort
A grand, sweeping history of the evolution of morality across the existence of human civilization

Autorentext
Dr Hanno Sauer is an Associate Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and a member of the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His current research takes an interdisciplinary approach to ethics, involving empirically informed metaethics that blends fields of neuroscience, cognitive science politics and social psychology.

Klappentext

'This fat, complex, good-natured and intriguing book is full of such memorable material...startling and often thrilling' Spectator

'*A heroic effort...rich with complex narrative, full of unexpected twists like the inquisitors' tale' *Economist

For almost five million years, humans have been locked in a relationship with morality, inventing and reinventing the concepts of 'Good' and 'Evil', and weaving them into our cities, laws and customs.

Morality is a concept that can feel joyless and claustrophobic, associated with restraint and coercion, restriction and sacrifice, inquisition, confession and a guilty conscience. For many, it is a device used to shame us into compliance. This impression is not necessarily incorrect, but it is most certainly incomplete.

Hanno Sauer traces humanity's fundamental moral transformations from our earliest ancestors through to the present day, when it can often seem that we have never disagreed more over what it means to be good, and what it means to be right. But we can use our past as a basis for a new understanding of our future. Our current political disagreements may feel like the end of the world, but where will the evolution of morality take us next?

Leseprobe
This story is about everything that has ever been important to us: our values, our principles, the roots of our identity, the foundations of our coexistence. It's about working with each other and against each other; it's about judging and being judged; and it's about which of these two sides we'll find ourselves on tomorrow. The story I want to tell is a history of morality. What can give us our bearings? How do we want to live? How can we get along with each other? How did we manage in the past, and how will it be possible in the future? These are all moral questions. Morality can make us think of any number of things. Restraint and coercion; restriction and sacrifice; inquisition, confession and guilty conscience; chastity and catechism. For many, it is a concept that feels joyless, claustrophobic, an admonishing finger to shame us into compliance. And this impression is not necessarily incorrect. But it is most certainly incomplete, just one part of the picture that needs to be filled in. This story will trace humanity's fundamental moral transformations, from our earliest, not-yet-human ancestors in East Africa to the recent conflicts over identity, inequality and oppression which are all being played out online from today's global metropolises. It explains how our human society has changed through the ages, how new institutions, technology, knowledge and economic forms have developed in parallel with our values and norms, and delves into the fact that each of these changes has more than one side: anyone who lives in a community excludes others; anyone who understands rules wants to monitor them; anyone who trusts becomes dependent; anyone who generates wealth creates inequality and exploitation. Every change or welcome development has a hard, dark, cold side and every advancement comes at a cost. Our early evolution millennia ago made us cooperative, but it also made us hostile to anyone who did not belong to our group - by learning how to say 'us', we also needed to be able to say 'them'. The development of punishment was a form of self-domestication and made us friendly and peaceable, but it also gave us powerful punitive instincts that we would use to monitor compliance with our rules. Culture and learning gave us new knowledge and new skills that we learned from others - and consequently made us dependent on those others. The emergence of inequality and domination brought unprecedented wealth but alongside that, hierarchy and oppression surfaced. Modernity set individuals free to bring nature under control with science and technology; in the process, we explained away all the magic and disenchanted our world, as Max Weber put it, and uprooted ourselves from tradition and community, and created the conditions for colonialism and slavery. The twentieth century's aim was to create a peaceful society with the help of global institutions, a society where everyone would enjoy the same moral status, but it brought us some of the most breathtaking crimes in human history and has manoeuvred us to the brink of ecological collapse. Recently we have been trying to finally cast off racism, sexism, homophobia and exclusion. There will be unforeseen aftereffects of this progress too, but it will be worth it. Our morality is a palimpsest: a parchment that's been written over time after time, often illegible and difficult to decipher. But what is morality? How can we define it? It may be better not to: as Nietzsche wrote, 'it is only that which has no history which can be defined'.[1] But our morality does have a history, and it is too complex and unwieldy for the sterile formulas we come up with in our armchairs. But the fact that we have difficulty defining what morality is does not mean it's impossible to say what it is with any clarity. It's just that it can't be said concisely. A history of morality is not a history of moral philosophy. We have been thinking about our values for a long time, but it's only in recent times that we have been writing down our thoughts. The Code of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, Kant's categorical imperative and Rawls' veil of ignorance all play a part in this story, but only a comparatively minor one. This is the much bigger history of our values, norms, institutions and practices. Our morality is not in our heads, but in our cities and walls, laws and customs, in our rituals and wars. As well as helping us understand the past, this long history of morality will also, I hope, contribute to our understanding of the present. Modern societies are currently under moral pressure to reconcile the prospect of their own existence with the most unpleasant truths of their origins. How can we map out the ongoing changes to our moral infrastructure in a way that makes 'light dawn gradually over the whole'[2]? Where did the dynamic of polarisation we're seeing right now come from? What is the relationship between cultural identity and social inequality? To understand the present, we have to turn to the past. Over the course of this book, we will go on a journey together to chart the evolution of our morality; it made us capable of cooperation, but confined our moral dispositi…