This paper argues that the future of humanity depends in large part on understanding our moral past – the origins of morality1 in prehistory and early civilisations. Key limitations on morality today are due to the legacy of early moralities and the evolution of an ambivalent human nature. Using evolutionary theorising, supplemented by diagrams, the paper shows how three kinds of early morality arose in the human line of descent, from great apes to hunter-gatherers to the codes of early civilisation. The three kinds were parochial forms of ego-kin, partner and social morality. Social morality exhibited three varieties. Early morality was a necessary social response to shifting ecologies, both natural and social. Morality was an attempt to improve the band’s chance of survival. The evolution of humans and their moralities led to a complex, conflicted human nature with both hard Darwinian traits and softer collective traits. Humans inherited parochial impulses toward egoism, nepotism, aggression and tribalism. We also inherited the inclination to adopt the ‘enemy stance’ towards strangers which undermines moral globalism. Humans can be nasty or nice. The paper argues that, while these moralities and traits were adaptive in their time, they bequeathed to human nature and society features that today can be maladaptive and out of step with global society. Parochial social morality is no longer a sufficient ethic for our species, but much of our nature resists moral globalism. The paper concludes with thoughts on how to strengthen moral globalism. For instance, it argues that there is a need to develop a global coalition of media practitioners, technological experts and social actors to create a ‘macro-resistance’ (Ward 2024) to the agents of extremism and misinformation.
Key words: moral origins, evolution of morality, global morality, human nature, future of humanity, media
The destiny of civilised humanity depends more than ever on the moral forces it is capable of generating – Albert Einstein, 1932 (Calaprice 2005: 273)
Introduction
The future of democracy, where issues are debated by reasonable publics, is in doubt. The future of our species is not assured. We live in a global world, but we think and act with the parochial mindset of pre-history humans and their successors in early civilisations. Egoism, aggression and dominance, war and power-seeking, racism and tribalism regularly trump the global values of human rights, a just economic system, peace and cooperation, and humanitarianism. Moral parochialism – the idea that parochial values should be the basis for action and moral thinking – is an out-of-date and sometimes dangerous creed in an interconnected, plural world. The future of humanity depends on our capacity to affirm moral globalism in theory and practice. Humans face nuclear extinction or a politically dystopic, environmentally degraded, 1984 unless they can create global societies that trigger moral traits for tolerance and cooperation, with a respect for both humanity and nature. Moral globalism – the idea that global values should be the basis for action and moral thinking – is the way forward. But can we move in that direction?2
Central to the project of moral globalism is understanding our moral past – the origins of morality. From the beginning, morality has been parochial and tribal, a response by bands, tribes, federations of tribes and then civilisations. ‘Morality’ in this context refers to the use of norms to control and manage the conduct of individuals in a group. Morality exists even if it is not written down in propositional form. Apes and other species similar to Homo sapiens engage in morality implicitly through forms of behaviour that express social expectations, common practices and disapproval.
Using evolutionary theorising, supplemented by diagrams, this paper shows how three kinds of early morality arose in the human line of descent, from great apes to hunter-gatherers to the codes of early civilisation. The three kinds were parochial forms of ego-kin, partner and social morality. Social morality exhibited three varieties. Early morality was a necessary social response to shifting ecologies, both natural and social. Morality was an attempt to improve the band’s chance of survival. The evolution of humans and their moralities led to a complex, conflicted human nature with both hard Darwinian traits and softer collective traits. Humans inherited parochial impulses toward egoism, nepotism, aggression and tribalism. We also inherited the inclination to adopt the ‘enemy stance’ towards strangers which undermines moral globalism. Humans can be nasty or nice.
The limitations on morality today and the ability of humans to be moral are due to the legacy of these early moralities and the evolution of an ambivalent human nature. While these moralities and traits were adaptive in their time, they bequeathed to human nature and society features that today can be maladaptive and out of step with global society. Parochial social morality is no longer a sufficient ethic for our species. The paper concludes with thoughts on how to strengthen moral globalism.
Since philosophy began, thinkers, fortune tellers, apocalyptic preachers and people who believe they are like Cassandra – a gift for prophecy but cursed not to be believed – have forecast the end of the world, perhaps in a ball of flames. I am no Cassendra. But I do take the question of the future of humanity seriously, and hope for rational, humane, globally collaborative solutions. The question of humanity’s future became real and urgent, as never before, on 6 and 9 August 1945, when the United States detonated two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Einstein’s formulas on mass and energy were used to create the bombs.3 After the horrific bombings, Einstein realised that technology now outstripped current capacities to prevent a conflict that would destroy civilisation. He spent much of the rest of his life hoping that new international structures and other initiatives could generate the ‘moral forces’ necessary to prevent catastrophe. This paper is about those moral forces.
Naturalism, transactions and gradualism
To know yourself, know history – Auguste Comte
My approach is a combination of philosophical naturalism and a transactional view of human agency and evolution. Philosophical naturalism attempts to make sense of the leading edges of scientific and other forms of knowledge for non-experts – here, the evolution of mind and morality.4 Philosophical naturalists also do cultural ‘plumbing’ to use a phrase from English philosopher Mary Midgley (2010). They lift up the floorboards of a troubled society to evaluate the ideas affecting their times. Philosophy is a critical hermeneutics about what new ideas mean for life.
It is only in the past several decades that there has emerged enough knowledge about the brain, the evolution of mind and society and ancient DNA to begin creating strong scientific hypotheses about how Homo sapiens became Homo philosophicus. In the sciences of the human, one set of researchers studies how societies created minds and culture (Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar 2014). Another set of researchers, travelling in the opposite direction, studies how minds make societies (Boyer 2018). Hopefully, they will meet in the middle as they burrow their tunnels from opposite sides of the mountain. Then we will understand how biological and symbolic intelligence converged in the same species, how hot emotion and cold thinking united to form our emotive-cognitive mind with multiple connections among functioning levels of the brain.
I use the term Homo philosophicus to denote those aspects of humans which make them distinct from most other species on earth. Rational, explicit morality is one of them. ‘Philosophicus’ does not mean a species that spends its time reading philosophy in academia. It means an animal that has what I call ‘high consciousness’, that is, an animal engaged in understanding its world, conceptually, artistically, scientifically and morally. Part of our mind makes us philosophical animals distinct in our symbolic interests. Another part makes us biological animals, needing homeostasis, food, sex, shelter and the company of other humans. We are apes who developed, due to the open-ended contingencies of evolution, a mind which, among many things, has the capacity for symbolic awareness not tethered tightly to current perceptual objects.
I call my approach transactional in honour of the American pragmatist John Dewey who applied the concept of agent-world transactions to his philosophy of the human. Dewey’s transactionalism has been an inspiration for recent developments in the philosophy of the mind and of the human, from ‘embodied cognition’ to ‘enactive’ psychology (Colombetti 2014). Transactionalism is ‘philosophy in the flesh’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). The mind is not a theatre of private ideas inside the skull. ‘Mind’ is an umbrella term for how we, as agents, continually transact with our natural and social ecologies, at the crossroads where inner and outer meet.
Gradualism is a core concept of my evolutionary theory. Gradualism means that most of our traits and capacities – physical, biological, mental and cultural – developed by intermediate steps and adaptations. Hence, much of evolutionary change is a matter of degree, e.g., a visual system that is more powerful. Change is typically not the sudden appearance of things radically different in kind, out of the blue. The slow development of stone tools during most of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic periods is an example of gradualism. So is the evolution of the brain from lower brain and mid-brain (e.g., cerebellum) to the upper brain (e.g., neocortex).
Evolution displays continuity. We should be sceptical of theorists who contend that adaptations such as human language or consciousness suddenly appeared sui generis in the historical record. Gradualists can (and should) acknowledge eruptions and novelties, where spikes of rapid change occur. Language, cave art and extensive human networks in the late Paleolithic period were spikes in social and cultural development. Novelty occurs when accumulated changes reach a threshold that tips over into something quite different, the way that the representation of external objects gradually became a representation of the representer, or the self. What gradualists deny is the belief that most or all eruptions have no prior causes and occur suddenly, inexplicably. Eruptions take time: a mountain crater may erupt after decades of developments below its surface. The elements that converged to produce the European ‘cultural revolution’ in human pre-history, dated about 40,000 years ago, stretches far back into hominoid development in Africa. The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted after centuries of Tsar tyranny against the lower classes.
To say that humans are distinct is not to say that other species are not distinct; nor does it imply that humans are superior to other species. Many species have competencies that we do not have, or we have them in a less developed form. Bats and owls can navigate dark spaces better than humans through echolocation and large rod- packed eyes, respectively. Geese migrate to other continents without a map or a GPS. Schools of fish move quickly as if they constituted one organism. Individuals rarely collide with each other because they innately ‘know’ the physics of fluid dynamics. That is, staying in that sweet spot or ‘draft’ behind the leader or another fish (Newbolt, Zhang and Ristroph 2019). Higher animal species such as chimpanzees or whales have communities and communication systems. They can display emotions such as empathy, show evidence of practical thinking to solve problems and have a basic theory of mind (reading the other’s intentions) which allows them to act deceptively. Humans have certain traits that other species do not have or have to a lesser degree, such as self-consciousness and abstract mathematical capacities. We can do high art, write philosophical treaties about the world and experience complex emotional states made more precise through language. We are the only species who investigates its origins. We can despair of meaning in life and commit suicide.
Kinds of mind
Transactional stages
The capacity for human morality implies a complex society inhabited by individuals able to structure their transactions around agreed-upon norms and collective goals. To reach that point, there had to be a long development of meditating forms of life and kinds of minds. In this section, I use diagrams to provide an overview of that development, as preparation for a discussion of kinds of morality.5
Diagram 1 depicts the evolution of Homo philosophicus as the evolution of five kinds of organism-environment transactions. The five transactions constitute three major domains of life. The domains are that of animality, the first animals seeking natural meanings in the ecology; mentally developing animals seeking both natural and symbolic meaning. Denizens of this group include great apes, early hominin,6 hunter-gatherers and Homo philosophicus. Many of the adaptations of each transactional stage are maintained in the next stage. At thresholds, something new appears. Each stage requires the animals or humans to acquire new mental powers, new emotional adjustments, new skills and better knowledge. In turn, these adjustments produce technology, morality, art and other responses which alter the ecology.
Animality is the sphere where organisms appraise stimuli in their environment with respect to their innate needs and instincts through their sensory and bodily apparatus. Animals appear to have emerged about 800 million years ago. Their capacity to respond to a sensed object was first developed by primordial multi-cellular life on earth, billions of years ago. With the emergence of animal life, organisms
Diagram 1: Transactional stages
had more complex organs for detecting the meaning of natural events around them. An important development for human evolution was the appearance of mammals that first appear in the fossil record during the late Triassic period, about 225 million years ago. Mammalian key traits are lactation, larger brains, small litter sizes, ‘family’ groups, keen senses, spines (vertebrates), greater mobility, being warm-blooded, giving live birth (not laying eggs), having either hair or fur and species rivalry, including the eating of other species. Mammals exhibit a biological intelligence – responding intelligently through their body, instincts and innate capacities, rather than explicit mental representations or logic. We are in the realm of biological meaning. Mammalian traits would appear among hominids.
Mentally developing animals are those who not only had a higher mentality than prior species but also increasingly used that mentality to guide their natural and social transactions. Their development has two stages: first, the ape and early hominin species; second, the emergence of the Homo genus which leads to us. Among the apes and early humans, biological meaning was supplemented by mimetic meaning (copying others and social practices) and eventually through symbolic meaning – the use of symbols to represent objects. The highly social nature of these groups encouraged a social mind able to understand the intentions and signals of group members. Sociability also further entrenched soft and hard traits into human nature. These developments were made possible, psychologically, by a mental adaptation – an enlarging mental space for thinking between stimuli and response. That mental space would eventually contain the faculties of emotion, cognition, enhanced memory and imagination. This quartet freed us from the tyranny of present stimuli and automated bodily response. With Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, practical reasoning and aesthetic impulses appear. Full language arises among Homo sapiens. Language supported an eruption of culture as a mode of responding to the ecology. Late Paleolithic art – pictorial images and abstract forms in caves and on rock faces – shows signs of conscious selfhood, such as in the famous ‘hand stencils’ on cave walls and ‘artists’ who marked the artwork as their creation (Clottes 2016).
The domain of the person or Homo philosophicus is that of modern and ‘settled’ Homo sapiens in the agricultural revolution across the Mesolithic and Neolithic era and into the Bronze Age where humans transacted heavily through culture and institutions. The high consciousness of Homo philosophicus arrives.
What about emotions? The origin of our emotions is in something more basic – the capacity to feel and to have an affectual consciousness, such as the sensation of pleasure and pain. These feelings were originally biological and not consciously represented, such as the attempt by an organism to maintain homeostasis by seeking food, warmth and so on (Asma and Gabriel 2019). Seeking objects presumed sensation and feeling. An organism in need becomes agitated, aggressive or vocal. Its feelings signal a gap between what the organism wants and what the world offers, e.g., between hunger and the availability of food. By emotions, I mean conscious experiences that came into being among early humans, preceded by the great apes. At this point, emotions helped us to shape judgement, understand the world, appreciate beauty and appraise objects. As groups and ecologies changed, early humans had to learn new emotions and emotional skills. The first moralities were largely about the restraint of emotion, or a re-channelling of emotions.
Kinds of mind
I now turn to the evolution of the human mind within the larger story of the transactions of life forms, described above. Diagram 2, below, focuses only on the mental development side of Diagram 1.
Diagram 2: Kinds of Mind
I divide the story of mind into a three-part prehistory mind and a two-part civilised mind in history. The span of time is roughly equivalent to the evolution of transactions in Diagram 1 from the third stage to Homo philosophicus.
The stages of prehistory mind are: the episodic mind of apes and early hominin mainly in the Miocene, the mimetic mind of hunter-gatherers in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic and the integrative mind of Late Homos and Homo sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic. The two stages of civilised mind are symbolic and philosophic mind in the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and in antiquity.
Episodic mind
Episodic mind is exemplified by the great apes who, then and now, have a good awareness of their current situation and a good memory for prior experienced episodes, such as those that ended well or were painful. To be episodic is to respond biologically to current stimuli and the situations that make up the present. Episodic mind comes in two forms: a basic instinctive mind and a more developed strategic mind.
Instinctual mind consists of instinctual and reflexive responses to stimuli which cause the organism to react in regular ways to regularly occurring events. Key stimuli are recognised. These hard-wired responses have been favoured by natural selection. The organism appraises natural meanings through scent, colour, movement or some other feature. The biological representation of the world is closely aligned to perception. All animals have episodic- instinctual minds.
Some animals also have an episodic-strategic mind as found in apes and early hominoids, and ‘higher order’ animals such as whales, octopus, wolves and lions. A strategic mind responds to episodes with more intelligence, more comprehension and a greater capacity to strategise – the way a band of coyotes consider their strategy as they approach prey. We understand their behaviour by attributing to them beliefs, choices and intentions. We adopt towards them what Dennett called ‘the intentional stance’ (Dennett 1987). Strategic mind is encouraged when individuals have a complex social life. The great apes, for example, combine an intense episodic awareness of their situation with a great sensitivity to social signals and relationships. All of this requires some level of representation of the world, plus many other things, such as motivational states, social cognition and memory.
In summary, many pre-human animals live largely in an episodic world of the present, the particular and the practical; not the non-present, the universal nor the theoretical. Yet they are capable of amazing competences. Species create elaborate structures, such as termite castles, the spider’s web and the intricate bower of the bowerbird (Prum 2018).
Mimetic mind
Mimetic mind is the mind of an animal which learns important skills, emotional expression, forms of communication and social practices by imitating others. It is a practical, bodily form of knowing, a ‘knowing how’, as in knowing how to ride a bicycle. It is different from ‘knowing that’ which is the logical understanding of an explicit proposition. It has long been known that imitation is crucial for childhood learning. Children imitate the sounds, gestures and movements of family and the objects they see. Among adults, many skills require sophisticated bodily movement learned through imitation and repetition, such as playing the violin, doing fine carpentry or becoming a figure skater. The apprentice learns from a master craftsman by doing, by learning ways to use one’s body under a critical eye.
In evolutionary psychology, the importance of mimetic learning to hunter-gatherers, e.g., to wield a tool, to hunt game, to copy how groups act and to dance or speak has been growing in importance. For hunter-gatherers, mimesis was necessary to teach cooperative practices, or to learn their proto-language and music (Mithen 2007). Without a full and complex language, and without instructional books, they learned by mimesis. The emergence of stone tools 2.7 million years ago shows the importance of mimetic mind for human evolution. For the stone tools to be used effectively, novices had to imitate the skilled expert. Between teacher and learner, there had to be shared attention and intentionality. For a hunter-gather to create an Acheulean handaxe, they had to form in the mind a mental template of the axe and integrate it with hand movements and an aesthetic sense of what looked and felt good. Mimesis vastly increased the number and nuances of human skills, and was a basis for cooperative behaviour.
Integrative mind
Integrative mind is the mind of late Homo species in the Upper Paleolithic, especially Homo sapiens. Late prehistory humans advanced to language, culture and new ways of living not only because they developed a large brain encouraged by social living (Dunbar 2009) but also because there was a change within the human brain’s architecture. As Mithen argued, the human brain developed a ‘cognitive fluidity’ (Mithen 1998) when brain-supported functions formed connections. This allowed knowledge gained from perception, emotion, imagination, bodily knowledge, speech and thinking to integrate and work together. The result was culturally modern humans.
Civilised mind began in the Mesolithic and Neolithic, the last two epochs of the Stone Age. Humans began, gradually, to give up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settle into permanent communities (Cauvin 2000).
Symbolic mind arose and material culture became symbolic. Symbolism and sedentism developed simultaneously. Symbolic material culture meant that material things became symbols of life, birth, power, special knowledge and what was good or bad (Renfrew 2008). Statuettes and other artworks helped humans invent the gods. Myths and stories about the fate of humans increased in number, showing a cosmological interest in the nature of the world and human life. Symbols were used in social ceremonies and rituals. Symbolic art of all kinds was placed in burial sites to identify the dead person’s social status, and perhaps speed them on their way to the other side. Monuments played a substantial role in social life and in interpreting the world. The symbolic capacity of the human mind, once established, became a sort of ‘runaway’ process taking over much of life. Humans began to use symbols cognitively for thinking about purposive behaviour and planning; socially for coordinating and informing conduct, and religiously to communicate with the supernatural. With symbols, humans found a new method of adapting themselves to their environment. Humans no longer lived only in nature. They also lived in that part of reality which they had constructed (Boyd 2018).
Philosophical mind
Philosophical mind was built upon symbolic mind and written language. Philosophical mind goes beyond mimetic imitating to thinking rationally, logically, independently and creatively about the world. Philosophical mind flowered – or so it seems to us – in the 6th century B.C. mainly in the Mediterranean and Near East region (Van De Mieroop 2015). Central to this development was the invention of (cuneiform) writing during the 4th millennium in Mesopotamia, a powerful external memory system and shaper of society. Philosophical mind produced philosophies of nature, mathematical thinking and theoretical inquiry for its own sake. We have theories of the planets and their revolutions; theories that predict Nile floodings; the use of geometry to mark land for taxation and architectural texts on how to construct various structures such as temples. We have writings by the natural philosophers in Ionia and the Pythagoreans in Italy. In the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, wrote systematic treatises in philosophy, logic, ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. Reason erupted. Tensions grew among critical philosophy, poetry and traditional religion. The philosophical mind was not one stripped of the ideas that had come before. Philosophical concepts of the psyche, the human soul, of fate and the forces in nature, and of a superior but hidden reality, owed much to prior mythological and religious ideas (Cornford 2004). Plato frequently resorted to myth in his dialogues to make a philosophical point. Moreover, the belief in non-rational powers, in magic, in curses and portents never disappeared. Participation in ecstatic mystery cults continued.
The evolution of psychological functioning can be described using scientific terms for the brain – primary, secondary and tertiary processing. Primary processing is dominant in the domain of animality. It consists of drives, instincts, motor responses and reflexes. As animals became more complex, they were capable of secondary processing which consists of less rigid instincts, conditioned learning, habits and propensities. These components are largely under the non-conscious control of systems responsible for affect and emotion deep in the brain, such as the cerebellum. The systems appraise on-going experience as to its success and valence. Secondary processing is strong in the early stages of the domain of mentally developing animals as with apes and early hominins. In the domain of Homo and then persons, humans develop tertiary processing for a mind-endowed and symbolic human. This level uses the powers of the neocortex and the rest of the higher mind. The upper brain exerts executive control over lower levels to produce rational, conscious action.
With Homo philosophicus, tertiary processing become increasingly dominant until cold (or abstract) cognition is evident in logic, science and mathematics (Asma and Gabriel 2019). The mind improves its capacity to think abstractly, placing even greater distance between itself and the ambient objects of its environment. Tertiary processing created the social and autobiographical selves. The social self represents itself in terms of comparisons with others; the autobiographical self tells stories about itself to itself. All of this was deeply defined by culture. Psychologists and archeologists now talk about the human mind as embodied (in the body), extended (it persists and changes over time) and distributed (shaped by groups) (Dunbar, Gamble and Gowlett 2009).
Early morality
The human species has spent 95 per cent of its life as hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age. So has morality. The first appearance of Homo sapiens in the fossil record is about 300,000 years ago. By about 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was the only standing Homo species. During this long period, incredibly, the groups survived Ice Age cold, fluctuating food resources, predators and rival groups and changing ecologies. At times the world’s population of Homo and Homo sapiens dropped perilously low. Nonetheless, Homo sapiens would grow in number as the last glacial maximum receded. They would eventually occupy sites across Eurasia before moving into the Americas.
Diagram 3 shows the timeline for the major groups in moral history.
Diagram 3: From ape to culturally modern human
Diagram 4 shows the development of five early moralities.
Diagram 4: Early morality
Stages of Early Morality
Ego-kin morality for apes
The story of human morality begins millions of years ago in Africa. There, our unknown ‘common ancestor’, an ape living between 8 and 10 million years ago, foraged in a perilous ecology. The lineage of the common ancestor split into the great apes. A branch leading to orangutans split off around 10 million years ago; another line leading to gorillas split between six and 10 million years ago; and humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees as late as five million years ago.
Morality began with the great apes living in kin-based foraging communities, mainly in rainforests. These kin groups existed within a political hierarchy of forceful egoists – the alpha males, such as the silverback among gorillas. The social life of apes in the wild, especially chimpanzees, is redolent with hierarchies, social signalling, alliances, politics, challenges to the leader, verbal or gestural communication, empathetic moments and other complexities.7 Some authors attribute complex cognitions to non-human primates (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; Goodall 1986; Byrne and Whiten 1988).
Ape politics is about power and submission. The alpha male in pre- history was not an absolute ruler but he had great influence on the group, such as where they foraged. He repelled intruders and had his choice of sex mates. One of his duties was peace-keeping, e.g., to break up fights. If we focus on the struggles for power among gorillas and chimps, egoism appears very dominant, to the exclusion of almost anything else. But this is not the whole story. The great apes could not be political animals unless they were skilled in social intelligence and negotiation. They needed to know when to form an alliance and when to fight and then make up – if the relationship were important to the apologiser. In the mid-1980s, primatologists and evolutionists took a keen interest in one form of social intelligence, what came to be called ‘Machiavellian intelligence’ (Byrne and Whiten 1988). Rather than focus only on ape intellect through tool use and cooperation, researchers studied how ape intellect developed through their manipulation and deception of other members of their species.
Pre-history ape morality, politically, was pre-human authoritarianism. But it is never completely stable, as ‘coup d’états’ kept occurring. Transference of power, as in many human authoritarian groups, was a process fraught with tension. Socially, communities had kin groups with females at the centre of things. Often, males showed indifference to their progeny. This social structure was maintained by the early hominin (who were more ape than human) after their separation from the common ancestor and before bipedalism.
In sum, ancient great ape life, especially among gorillas and chimpanzees, was in a constant tension between different impulses and desires. There was conflict and cooperation. There was fighting and quarrelling but also peacemaking, empathy and reconciliation. There was both alpha supremacy and rebellion. There was female subordination but also female strategies to control males. There were fearsome status challenges between large males but also the abandonment of challenges without serious incident. Soft and hard traits co-existed.
Non-kin partner morality
About 400,000 years ago, ecological changes due to the Ice Age required hominin – before Homo sapiens appeared – to alter their parochial ego-kin mindset and to cooperate more extensively with non- kin (Tomasello 2014: 4). These early hunter-gatherers were only one of many species hunting for the same limited supply of food. They began to form partnerships to forage and hunt for food, from honey to larger game such as antelope and wild cattle (aurochs). It appears that a direct human ancestor in Europe, Homo heidelbergensis, began the big game hunt, as opposed to small game, like rabbits. Big game hunting required the cooperation of many people. This was the birth of joint intentionality between pairs or small groups of hunter-gatherers. It was the first glimmer of the full cooperative mentality to come. Although reciprocity existed in prior groups, e.g., grooming behaviour among apes, partner morality came into its own among the nomadic hunter- gatherers in the human line of descent. Partnership required a trust and reciprocity beyond kin bonding. It encouraged communication, theory of mind and mimetic learning. Politically, partner morality modified but did not change the authoritarian hierarchies of these primordial human ancestors.
Social morality 1 (group-wide morality)
Social morality arose among later, Ice Age, hunter-gatherers of the Middle Paleolithic. A morality of group-wide norms, enforced by the group, superseded kin and partner modalities as the primary ethic. Kin and partner arrangements continued to exist but they were increasingly secondary to the good of the whole band. The joint intentionality of partnerships – the original social contracts – was superseded by a collective intentionality of the group. Group morality was caused by growing populations, worsening climate and the increasing dependency of hunter-gatherers on each other. Everyone had to follow norms of cooperation to survive. They had to participate in group activities such as hunting, foraging, moving camp, cooking and helping mothers rear their children. Groups became more egalitarian in their structures, as seen today among extant foraging groups (Kelly 1995). There was a less rigid hierarchy, group discussion to make decisions and group techniques (called ‘levelling’ methods) to prevent any would-be alpha male from seizing power. Cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm (2012) estimated that by 200,000 years ago, almost all hunter-gatherer groups were egalitarian.
Under social morality 1, each member owed a primary duty to the group, and norms applied to all members equally. This is the origin of moral impartiality and the idea of moral rules as universal (within a group). Meanwhile, groups continued to struggle to balance the soft and hard traits of their members. The group rewarded altruistic and cooperative behaviour within the group, while trying to control the hard traits by directing aggression against other groups. Parochialism was defined by altruism (internal) and tribalism (external). Today, this combination remains a feature of most group moralities. Aggression was (ideally) reserved for situations where it was needed. In-group violence could sap the group’s strength or lead to group extinction. Peace- keeping within the group was costly, time-consuming and imperfect. Meanwhile, elements of moral being appeared as social adaptations. Males became more directly involved in family and group child-rearing activities. Pair-bonded couples (parents) began (Chapais 2008). Both activities strengthened the softer traits in males. Altruism, however, was never enough so egalitarian groups resorted to punishment, shunning and other means. The first forms of moral shaming, moral conscience and genuine altruism appear.8
A new moral psychology – collective intentionality – arose: we are all in this together. Tomasello calls this the ‘interdependence hypothesis’ (Tomasello 2016) and he uses it to explain the rise of morality. To what extent did these nomadic hunter-gathers live in highly interdependent, egalitarian societies? Consider these facts. Many of the members were unrelated (non-kin). Child rearing was cooperative. Humans were cooperative breeders. Young mothers could not raise a child alone so they received help from fathers, grandmothers, older siblings and non- kin members. In many groups, there was a sexual division of labour: food gathering for women and hunting for men. Both required cooperation. The honey and meat that was gathered was shared among families. As noted, it was impossible, given the weapons available, to hunt for large game alone. In learning to cooperate, humans learned, from necessity, to ‘put our fate in one another’s hands’ (Tomasello 2018).
Social morality 2 (Homo sapiens culture-intensive morality)
Social morality 2 extended from Homo sapiens (about 100,000 years ago) to the end of Neolithic epoch, about 2,000 BC). During a period of impressive cultural evolution, big-brained Homo sapiens developed group morality further, using culture, language, cognition and art. Within groups, egalitarian morality becomes a morality of the we – the primacy and authority of the group and its common good. With language, moral discourse could begin in earnest around the group fire after the day ended. Dialogue reinforced responsibility, conscience and solidarity. The modern notion that moral imperatives are a special duty or have a special necessity has its roots in hunter-gatherer social life. At this time, humans were starting to exhibit what Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), eons later, called respect for the moral law. When life depends on agreement, morality becomes concrete, objective and real. Unfortunately, the rise of moral discourse and debate opened the door, historically, for what I call ‘moral bullshit’ where people pretend to be virtuous and not self-interested. The misuse of morality began here.
During this period, ecological pressures of the Lower Paleolithic began to change social structures and challenge the strong parochialism of small human bands. Under favourable conditions, human bands grew larger. With more mouths to feed, and limited food resources in their local area, groups had to forage over much greater areas. To cope with increased populations and workload, human bands began to form federations or networks with other groups. Hierarchies and social roles became more important. Networks increased learning, cumulative culture and cooperation. It was a new form of collective intentionality across groups.
Another survival strategy was ‘fission-fusion’ culture. Fission meant that sub-groups specialised in important tasks for the group as a whole, such as foraging for a type of food far from the home camp. Fusion meant new practices and objects that enhanced group solidarity. Networks encouraged what we call ‘ethnic markers’ – items that showed to what group an individual belonged. Culture and art played a large role in this process. Group rituals, wearable art (early jewellery) and distinct designs on one’s tools or weapons asserted group identity. Cave art was often a group activity. The pictorial narratives emphasised the life, beliefs and nature of groups (Bahn 2026). It also encouraged self-consciousness (Lewis-William 2004).
Social morality 3 (Civilised morality)
Civilised morality develops during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods and into the Bronze age. Prehistory ends. Written language allows for the recording of events. Settled communities and agriculture begin, and are followed by large societies by the 4th millennium BC. The complexity of these civilisations led to the first written codes of ethics and law. Morality was employed to stabilise civilisations and their power structures. Morality returns to its original authoritarian and hierarchical form to respond to enlarging cities and more complex social structures. Examples of this neo-authoritarianism are civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere – usually along major rivers and fecund land (Van De Mieroop 2015). The threat of famine and starvation declined as irrigation and agricultural production improved. A civilisation was more than a group of agricultural settlements. It was a cultural creation, an institutional web of social structures. Many of the main early cities, such as Uruk in Sumer, in the Fertile Crescent of modern-day Iraq and Syria, consisted of a central temple area, a city wall, agricultural lands, artisans, architects, metal workers, a military, courts and clear social classes. These institutions gathered around a pharaoh, city war-king, or a military leader – a strong man (Kramer 1971). Morality and religion were codified and institutionalised. It was mainly the responsibility of a priestly class and religious leaders whose temples were symbols of both worldly and other-worldly power. Their rituals and appeals to the city’s protective god were thought to influence the fate of a war. It could end a drought. Moral leaders, such as the chief priest of the temple, worked with secular and legal officials to restrain unethical or illegal actors – the distinction was not clear. The Sumer city-state system was socially stratified, with winners and losers. Beyond the slaves, women and commoners, new powerful positions and classes emerged, such as the high priest, the chief of the trade agents, and a troop of administrators and scribes for centralised state functions such as taxation. However, the majority of citizens were farmers and cattle breeders, boatsman and fishermen, merchants, doctors and architects, masons and carpenters, smiths, jewellers and potters. The city, from a sociological view, was a ‘heterogeneous, complex, messy, constantly changing’ invention (Leick 2002: xvii).
The common good of the ‘we’ was identified with the good of the leaders and their aristocratic and religious classes. In Sumer, for example, mythical origin stories justified and explained the current political order by showing how the gods developed the human world and favoured certain leaders. At the start of the 3rd millennium B.C., social anxiety in Sumer generated a new ‘saviour-figure’, a ruler exalted above all men, fearsome as a warrior and awesome in the power at his command (Jacobsen 1976: 78). Vengeful gods saw what individuals were doing, even when not perceived by other humans. Gods might penalise selfish or blasphemous individuals. Culture and art largely served the status quo. Monumental art (e.g., temples, palaces, pyramids), poems, epics and social festivals testified to the nobility of the ruler, the power of the gods and the naturalness of the hierarchical structure. Myth and metaphysical narratives – such as the epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia, the Babylonian cosmogeny of Enŭma elish, and the Egyptian Book of the dead – explained how the civilisation and its rulers were part of the cosmos, and the virtuous could reach the afterlife. As in the days of hunter-gatherers, morality favoured order and cooperation within the group and tribalism towards foreigners. Only now the scale of aggression, war and tribalism was on a much larger scale, including the building of empire and the enslavement of others. Hierarchies were larger and more rigid.
As Mesopotamian artists constructed flattering images of the king and wrote extravagant hymns of praise, they helped to create a ‘cult of personality’. Consider the following two compositions of praise for an authoritarian leader:
Who is mighty as you, and who rivals you?
Who is there who from birth was so richly endowed with understanding as you?
May your heroism shine forth, and may your might be respectfully praised!
The second composition:
Thou who broughtest man to birth. Thou who fructifies the earth, Thou who restores the centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring .
Thou who makest vibrate the musical chords Thou, splendor of my spring. O thou,
Sun reflected by millions of hearts.
The first, more restrained, piece is a repeated refrain from a hymn written for King Shulgi of Ur (2094-2047 B.C.) sung in temples. Paul Kriwaczek calls it ‘the ancient equivalent of a PR campaign’ (Kriwaczek 2010: 15). The second composition, ‘Hymn to Stalin’, was addressed to the murderous Soviet leader.9
My schema for early moralities shows that an important feature of moral evolution was the gradual extension of morality’s circle of concern, from the individual and kin to non-kin partners and then to the whole group. But there was a limit to this expansion. All of these moralities were parochial.
Ambivalent human nature
We are moral beings to the core. . . . We are social to the core
– Frans de Waal
Homo homini lupus (Man is wolf to man)
– ancient Roman proverb
By human nature I mean a composite of innate capacities, proclivities and evolutionary adaptations that are the common heritage of most infants born into our species. They are adaptations that arose as responses to ecological challenges and were favoured by natural and/ or group selection. These innate traits express themselves in multiple ways as the individual grows and interacts with the world. We are not captive to a deterministic nature. Coming from the humanities, I think of human nature as not a set of genes. It is a gene-supported repertoire of capabilities for performance in the drama of life.
Ambivalent human nature and extremism
So far, my overview of morality has argued that, historically, morality emerged as a group exercise in support of certain traits of human nature that were deemed to promote survival and the common good; while restraining certain traits of human nature that were deemed to jeopardise survival and worked against the common good. Many theorists have presumed that the traits that support morality are the softer, social traits of empathy, compassion, sharing, reciprocity and cooperation. The traits that work against morality are the hard or Darwinian traits that promote the individual to the detriment of others, such as selfishness, greed, envy, fierce ambition, cruelty and xenophobia towards strangers. Thus, Boehm described human nature as ‘ambivalent’ (Boehm 1989: 921).
This formulation of our rival traits has its merits. It is generally true that the hard traits, such as greed, involve individuals who chafe at the restraints of collective values – the values of the group. It is often the case that two kinds of trait, hard and soft, are in tension, seeking different ends, e.g., envy versus friendship, selfishness versus a willingness to share. Our everyday moral reasoning is full of these tensions. But this traits-in- tension view can be too simplistic and too dualistic. Conceptually, this view depends on a loose metaphorical distinction between hard and soft which is not as clear as we think it is. Moreover, the dualism tends to presume that all individualistic traits are hard and anti-social – the sole source of immorality is individualism.
What is needed is a more careful semantics for hard and soft traits. The first thing to do is to separate the distinction of individual and collective traits (or values) from the distinction of hard and soft traits. Human nature comes with impulses towards individualism which in this context means, as Spinoza said, the impulse in all living things to continue to exist (Spinoza 1996 [1677]) and by implication to develop and do well. Similarly human nature has impulses towards collectivism which in this context means that individuals desire to be with other people, to enjoy social life and its benefits and to care about the common good. As such, there is nothing morally wrong about either set of traits. So the individual-collective distinction is not the distinction between the immorally hard and the morally soft. The problem of human nature is not reducible to the problem of hard, individual traits. A moral problem surfaces when any trait of any kind unreasonably harms others or harms the common good. This typically happens when individual or collective traits take on an extreme, unreasonable or maladaptive form. Such a trait is immoral. Both individual and collective traits can take extreme or unreasonable forms in society. It is not only individual desires that become hard and extreme. So can the social traits and values such as patriotism, tribalism and an authoritarian demand for strict social order impinging on rights and freedoms. Our social traits are not always soft, like kindness, empathy and compassion.
I prefer to speak of a tension between moderate, reasonable, adaptive expressions of the traits of human nature – individual or collective – as distinct from extreme, unreasonable and maladaptive expression of these traits. Extreme means exercising a trait beyond its normal range, e.g., having little control over one’s anger or aggression. Unreasonable means the conduct is not based on fact and logic, or some reasonable link between means and ends. Rather, it is based on things such as hot emotion, bias and fear. Maladaptive is a scientific term referring to whether the adaptation, in the long run, promotes the continued existence and flourishing of a group or species. What is extreme, unreasonable and maladaptive is often contextual: it depends on the place, time, nature of the conduct and its consequences. It also depends on what moral system we use to evaluate the conduct.
Further, hard traits are part of our social life and can be supportive. It is incorrect to assume a dualism between hard, individual and anti-social traits and soft, social collective traits. Morally, the issue is not about individual or collective traits but about extremism and how we employ our traits. The extreme manifestation of either individual or collective traits can damage the common good.
That hard traits are social is clear if we reflect on prehistory morality. Prehistory groups needed traits that defined reliant strong individuals and traits that defined reliant, strong groups. Both were needed. Both were social. Moreover, it was a time when extreme versions of traits were adaptive and necessary. Prehistory groups could not ‘ban’ all expressions of individualist, Darwinian traits – their extreme expressions – because these expressions were natural and ineliminable and, at various times, essential to group survival. Among hunter-gatherers, the strength, aggression and courage to hunt animals were central to feeding the group. Aggressiveness was needed within the group to control individuals who violated norms. The extreme versions of Darwinian impulses were necessary for effective collective defence against predator big cats or human group rivals. Tribalism was necessary in a world of conflicting groups. Human groups fought small-scale fights, staged raids or entered into all-out wars with migrating groups. Studies of ancient DNA indicate murderous mass migrations across Europe and North America in mid- to late-pre-history (Reich 2018). Some migrations were peaceful and the migraters mixed with the indigenous population. But many other migrations were brutal events as the migraters replaced, by attacking and killing, resident populations. We sometimes wonder why people have the capacity to harm others, to hate, to be out-of-control angry, to believe conspiracies about others and to use weapons of war. From an evolutionary view, there is no mystery. Evolution developed us as hyper-alert, self-interested creatures in groups seeking survival. The propensity to hate, to harm and to be violent was a natural outcome.
The problem with hard Darwinian traits of hyper-aggression and tribalism for contemporary society is that, in their extremity and unreasonableness, they have become highly maladaptive for our global world. All humans today have hard and soft traits, and most of us are capable of expressing them in the right circumstances. A women pursued by a rapist rightly uses her aggression and fierceness to repel the threat. The combat soldier, like a primordial warrior, must rouse his extreme traits to kill the enemy, when face to face. But there are also morally dubious, extreme manifestations of hard traits. Theories of evolutionary cooperation among early humans may give the reader a false impression: that the emergence of morality was a victory of the nice traits over the nasty traits. But in human affairs, there are no permanent or complete victories for the nice, the good or the righteous. Our moral agreements are contingent and ringed with selfish motives which threaten our best attempts to be morally good. The wells of human altruism are not deep, especially when resources are scarce or greed spurs us on.
Nonetheless, we must not sink into cynicism about humans, a view that Frans de Waal (de Waal 2006) called the ‘veneer theory’. According to this theory, the bad side of humans is our true nature. We cover it over with a thin veneer of hypocritical, positive actions. Other thinkers, such as Thomas Huxley in the 19th century – Darwin’s bulldog – argued that morality is foreign to our biological inclinations, which must be controlled (Huxley 1989 [1893]). But this is false. Morality and sociability were baked into our early groups: ‘We come from a long lineage of hierarchical animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival strategy,’ observed Frans de Waal. ‘Any zoologist would classify our species as obligatorily gregarious. ... we are social to the core’ (de Waal 2006: 5).
So, the task for morality today is to help humans reach a balance between individual and collective values in a global world, a world that avoids triggering our extreme traits. The fact of individualism and collectivism in our nature is indisputable and ineliminable. Ideally, we create societies where individualism and collectivism cohere. The question is what causes us to prefer strong or extreme forms of individualistic and collective action.
The enemy stance
Much of the maladaptive use of Darwinian traits today is done by political extremists and individuals with a predisposition towards authoritarian (and hierarchical) social structures – a predisposition inherited from our ancient past. It is important to theorise about this manifestation of extreme hard traits because of its dramatic impact on egalitarian democracies and global peace.
Extreme authoritarians are people who want a strict, hierarchical, top- down order in society and are typically xenophobic and tribal with regard to people unlike themselves. Sameness not diversity is the goal. One estimate is that at least a third of individuals in any country’s population have an authoritarian personality (Stenner and Haidt 2018). Many people are attracted to what I have called ‘the erotic absolute’ – the love of being submissive to an absolute leader or regime (Ward 2024b). Extreme authoritarians not only dislike pluralism and egalitarianism. They hate it, fear it or loathe it. Extreme authoritarians, from strict law-and-order proponents and racist groups to fascists, are also distinguished by what they are prepared to do to advance the domination of their values in society, such as joining in verbal or physical attacks against those who disagree, taking steps to underline egalitarian democratic processes, joining right-wing intolerant groups or supporting an authoritarian leader’s coup d’état.
There is a mindset that often accompanies this authoritarianism and gives the view of its Darwinian hardness. It occurs when individuals and even groups adopt ‘the enemy stance’ towards other people, groups and nations. To adopt the stance is to regard the other or stranger as an enemy. It consists in extremely negative apprehensions of others in the social environment. Intense feelings devolve into stereotyping, scapegoating and paranoia. The mindset, once adopted, is resistant to change. It impairs the critical, objective functioning of the mind.
The enemy stance is a judgement about a group, or a member of a group. The group is treated as a foreign and polluting element. The other is not part of my favoured group – my race, my ethnicity, my religion, my nationality, my gender, my sexual orientation. The inaccurate perception of someone as an enemy simply because they are of another race or nationality is not a factual error that, when pointed out to people, will end the hostility. This mistakenly assumes that the people are holding this stance on a rational basis, i.e., based on facts and objective thinking.
Diagram 5, below, is a model of the enemy stance based on psychological studies of authoritarian personalities, extreme cults, paranoid and narcistic personalities, and people holding unsubstantiated fears of other people.
Diagram 5: The enemy stance
The components are grouped according to three tiers of factors: psychological inputs, psychological pre-conditions and primordial origins from evolution. Tier 1, psychological inputs, includes current mental states such as attitudes, beliefs and biases; the environment which includes the social ecology. plus stimuli (or triggers) for intolerant responses. Tier 2, pre-conditions, comes in at least two kinds: personality and mental disorders. Tier 3, primordial origins, refers to the evolutionary heritage of ambivalent human nature, including the hard and soft traits. My claim is that factors from all three tiers are at work when someone adopts the enemy stance. The enemy stance is not a one-off affair, an aggressive response to some situation which you may later regret. The stance is a standing psychological propensity to adopt the stance, often without provocation or adequate evidence of a threat. These people are ‘prisoners of hate’ (Beck 1999).
The person in the enemy stance adopts a hyper-alert ‘war mode’ (ibid). The person is wary of the social environment, especially of other groups. Fear is a common trigger for the enemy stance, and it leads to inappropriate levels of aggression. In this wariness, one recognises the primordial hyper-alertness of animals and early humans. Primordially, all stimuli had to be assessed quickly and dualistically as either friend or foe, threat or non-threat. The organism errs on the side of safety, even if it results in false alerts. Today, this alertness continues to exist and can have valid application. A person rightfully senses danger in an alleyway. The problem, however, is that the enemy stance is fuelled by an over-heated surveillance system. The extremist sees too many things as a threat, and it is too easily aroused to be aggressive and tribal. The person’s surveillance system is applied to others who are not threats, but selected on racist or other grounds. The primordial alert system is today appropriate in only a small percentage of situations. We are no longer hunter-gatherers with spears.
Tier 1: Psychological inputs
The enemy mindset is shaped significantly by our ecology. Individuals are more likely to endorse extremism if their mental ecology consists in extreme ideas regularly circulated by prominent leaders and their upbringing has given them social biases. Triggers arouse these tendencies. Leaders may use public media to prime a public to go to war by accusing the enemy of brutal acts against co-nationals. Racist groups may flood the public sphere with negative media messages, blaming problems on immigrants. Others spread conspiracy theories aimed at pre-existing biases in their target audience. For example, male racists who lynched black slaves in 19th century America spread the lie that the slaves were secretly fornicating with white men’s wives or daughters. This belief raised anger in the mob, triggering biases. Other triggers are better called ‘enablers’. They include economic distress, social frustration, polarisation in politics, social inequality, propaganda in the media system and an authoritarian personality threatened by pluralism. Sometimes, we do not know the strength of a society’s prejudice until a trigger brings it out into the open. Recall the hostility directed at Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) by white Americans when he broke the black barrier in professional baseball.
Finally, the mindset results in outputs. Extreme motivational systems of disgust and aggression, once aroused, call for action. Some bigoted people may remain relatively passive, joining intolerant groups online to shared ideas, but they do not take action. Others may participate in intolerant acts or settle for supporting groups that do act intolerantly.
Tier 2: Underlying psychological conditions
The enemy stance of Tier 1 rests upon a deeper psychological basis, which includes one’s personality, which is partly inherited, personal history and pathological conditions such as paranoia and narcissism. Personal history includes past experience and upbringing. Various degrees of paranoia, narcissism and excessive fear have been found among people exhibiting the enemy stance (Robins and Post 1997). My claim is not that all people who adopt the enemy stance are psychotics. My claim is that pathological tendencies can lead people to adopt the enemy stance. Pathologies promote irrational, maladaptive or reality- averse thinking (Giudice 2018).
Tier 3: Primordial Origins
At the base of the system is ambivalent human nature, with its innate adaptations and potential for extreme psychological traits. The primordial traits give individuals a propensity to adopt extremism. However, not all people express this propensity in action. Among individuals, we can expect the propensity to be extreme to have different strengths. The existence of a general propensity, even if innate, does not, by itself, explain why the propensity emerges in this person at this time in this location. To be this specific, the explanation needs to take into account factors on Tiers 1 and 2.
Conclusion: Strengthening moral globalism
We return to the issue of how to practically restrain harmful parochialism and strengthen moral globalism. First, we need to get the goal of moral globalism right.
The moral question facing humanity is not the bare possibility or impossibility of moral globalism as a theory or practice. After all, the aims and values of moral globalism exist today in international agencies for peace and justice, and cosmopolitan moralities based on the equality of all humans. The question is more nuanced. Is it likely that moral globalism can become a more dominant, practical influence on human affairs? To what degree can moral globalism become a force in the world? Also, can we reach that stage before our species reaches a tipping point and seriously declines, or disappears?
Moral globalism will never be an absolute, singular ethic for mankind or even for particular societies because we have other kinds of values. We love what Aristotle called ‘the near and dear’ (1976: 1155a24: 58). We love our family and kin, ethnic group, culture, community or nation. Kin, partner and social values, embedded in our nature, cannot be, and should not be, eliminated from moral reasoning. Any global moralism must co-exist with parochial values. The issue is what value scheme is fundamental to our belief system. ‘Fundamental’ is a matter of priority. Moral globalism contends that global values should be fundamental in the sense that they take priority. They restrain or trump parochial values where the global and local conflict, such as wars justified on patriotic and colonial grounds. Thus, the goal is not the replacement of other moralities by a uniquely dominant moral globalism. The goal is to increase the influence of moral globalism on human life, to apply it in different ways in different cultures and to construct practices that make moral globalism the basis of decision-making.
Diagram 5 showed us what we can do and cannot do. It is difficult to change human nature and inherited traits but we can change how we experience life. We can change the structure of our social life and our communities so that our cooperative and empathetic traits are triggered. The issue boils down to social design. Can we redesign our natural and social ecologies to allow a wide number of citizens to practise global values? Can we design social, educative and media spaces that trigger cooperation? Can we make our good traits and their triggers align?
Moral globalism will only become a greater moral force when global values are experienced in daily life, and not simply preached as abstract principles in moral theory. Global values need to be embodied in social and political practices, including the practice of global media. Global values should live among humans in their daily life.
How that re-design should go, in detail, I will leave to experts and practitioners in social design and social reform. But here are a few thoughts. We need to embed moral globalism and media ethics literacy deeply and extensively into our education systems. We need to create education systems where students learn to appreciate and practise the values of global humanitarianism and egalitarian democracy. We need to develop a global coalition of media practitioners, technological experts and social actors to create what I call a ‘macro-resistance’ (Ward 2024) to the agents of extremism and misinformation. Without such action, we cannot de-tox our public channels of communication. They will remain vehicles to stir the enemy stance. We need to put a massive effort into forming cross-border dialogue among plural cultures and to create more opportunities for young people to travel to other nations. They need to soak in other ways of living. We can design better urban ecologies. We can design living spaces so we regularly encounter people unlike ourselves. We need to think of the fate of democracy as dependent on the preservation of egalitarian democratic communities, not just bricks-and-mortar institutions. The laws of democracy and its institutions only have vitality when they are the formal expression of non-formal democratic values spontaneously affirmed in everyday life.
These values should exist first in our hearts and then in our legal codes: the willingness of people to seek rational foundations for their beliefs; to be more than partisan; to desire respectful discourse; to disagree productively; to see compromise as not a weakness but a strength; and to love justice.
I think humanity can make progress. We are not without resources. We are not slaves to our extreme traits. We have our rationality. We are capable of cooperation and even benevolence. We have education, humanistic teaching and the arts. But preaching moral globalism has never been enough. Essential to the human future and morality is hope and engagement: the capacity to hope that things can get better if we become engaged with our world, our village, our school. Schopenhauer said that ‘to preach Morality is easy, to found it difficult’ (Schopenhauer 1915 [1839]). Dewey said that ‘moral conceptions and processes grow naturally out of the very conditions of human life’ (Dewey and Tufts 1908). Both were right: morality is difficult and natural.
In a world that regularly insults the dignity of the person, we should protect humans as humans and admire them as philosophical animals, lest the human disappear from the face of the earth..
Notes
1 In this paper, I use ;morality’ and ‘ethics’ as synonyms
2 This paper distills ideas I have been developing for several years and organises them into one paper; for the first time I focus on ideas about morality and its history. However, at the end of the paper I discuss some general implications of my theory for taking action today. I have discussed practical initiatives to weaken extremism in society and to detox our global media sphere in other works such as Ward 2024b
3 Einstein was not asked to work on the Manhattan Project because his political activism made him suspect among American officials. However, he sent a letter to President Roosevelt on 2 August 1939, arguing that the United States had to take quick action before nazi Germany created one. The letter did not explicitly urge the U.S. to build a bomb, but to increase research, provide better research funding and improve communications among scientists and other groups. But he knew that such an escalation would likely lead to a bomb. Later in life, he regretted the letter (Calaprice 2005: 377-379)
4 I am selective in references because the number of disciplines working on the origins of the human mind and society has proliferated in the past several decades. The disciplines I have consulted include archaeology – physical, cognitive, and genetic; evolutionary biology and psychology; cultural anthropology; neuroethics; evolution theories of consciousness and moral history. In addition, I have consulted work on the evolution of the aesthetic impulse and cave art, the origins of language, and studies of existing great apes and hunter-gatherers
5 Many of the dates used in the diagrams and in this paper are rough estimates. There is a constant debate over the dates on eras, trait development and when kinds of mind appeared. New discoveries alter previous timelines. One would never write anything
in this area if one waited for a full and unchanging consensus on the dates. Some estimates must be chosen
6 The terminology around humans and apes is ridiculously and unnecessarily complex because apparently rational scientists decided to use similar terms for the genus, species, family and superfamily of the human and great ape lines of decent: hominin, hominid, hominoid, hominidae and so on. By hominin I mean existing (Homo sapiens) and extant human species and their ancestors. Not great apes. By hominid, I mean hominins and great apes
7 The bonobos are an interesting variation on the hierarchy pattern. They are a female- dominated society with a more egalitarian structure
8 Genuine altruism refers to actions done at some cost to the doer for which the latter does not expect any compensation or reciprocal return
9 This ‘Hymn to Stalin’ is in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Available online at https://origin.web.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/stalin-worship.asp
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Conflict of interest declaration
The author has not received any financial assistance for the research and/or publication of this paper..
Note on the contributor
Stephen J. A. Ward, PhD, is a philosopher, historian of ideas and author of 12 books on media ethics and public philosophy. He is Distinguished Lecturer on Ethics at the University of British Columbia. He was founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin and former director of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He was a war correspondent, foreign reporter and newsroom manager for 14 years and has received a lifetime award for service to professional journalism in Canada. His current work is on the origins of ethics, global ethics and the growth of intolerant publics.