The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality

by Hanno Sauer

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? In the vein of Sapiens comes a grand history of our universal moral values at the moment of their greatest crisis.

How did we learn to distinguish good from evil? Have we always been capable of doing so? And will we still be in the world to come?

In this breathtaking book, ethics expert Hanno Sauer offers a great universal history of morality in the era of its darkest crisis. He finds that morality existed long before there was talk of God, religion, or philosophy.

Its history is, first of all, the fruit of a process of natural selection, going back to the dawn of humanity, in the forests of East Africa which, five million years ago, thinned out owing to climate change. Among the early humans that came down from the trees, there were also our ancestors, who adapted to open spaces by organizing themselves into large groups. Under the pressure of environmental factors, morality emerges as the foundation for cooperation, a quality that is as precarious as it is essential to the survival of the species.

Moving between paleontology and genetics, psychology and cognitive science, philosophy and evolutionism, Sauer traces a genealogy of morality and along the journey, marks the main moral transformations in the history of humanity. In the end, he concludes that millions of years of stratifications has led to the moral crisis of our present—and the only way to build a future together is to retrace our history.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Religion, Audiobook, World History

413 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 12, 2024

Reviews

[AnetteS13 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sehr interessantes Thema
Beim Verständnis unserer eigenen Moral haben wir dringend Hilfe nötig. Wüssten wir, sie besser einzusetzen, sie den aktuell kritischen Bedingungen anzupassen, könnten wir das Ruder vor den schlimmsten Stürmen der Klimakrise vielleicht noch herumreißen. Darum habe ich erfreut zu dem Buch von Hanno Sauer gegriffen, der sich in "Moral" anschickt, die Herkunft und die Zukunft unseres inneren Regelgebäudes zu erforschen.

Behauptungen, die nicht auf der Höhe der Zeit sind
Leider aber wird Sauer seiner eigenen Absichtserklärung nicht gerecht, die Ursprünge unserer Moral auf der Höhe des aktuellen Wissenstands zu erforschen. Seine Quellen sind fast durchgängig mindestens ein bis zwei Jahrzehnte alt und vertreten überwiegend inzwischen widerlegte Auffassungen, wie zum Beispiel, dass die Gruppen, in denen die Wildbeuter-Gemeinschaften lebten, generell anderen Gruppen gewaltsam begegneten. Hier hilft ein kurzer Blick in den Wikipedia-Artikel, um dies als inkorrekt zu entlarven. Von Epigenetik (grob gesagt: Weitervererbung durch Lebens"erfahrung") hat er noch nichts gehört und verharrt in einem Evolutionsbild, nach dem nur zufällige Mutationen weitervererbt würden. Da wissen Oberstufenschüler inzwischen besser Bescheid, und nicht nur die mit Leistungskurs.

Stephen Pinker als Vorbild
Was sein Menschenbild angeht, stützt er sich u.a. auf Stephen Pinker, dessen polemische und verfälschende Darstellung von Forschungsergebnissen ihm viel Kritik eingetragen haben. Vor Kurzem habe ich in "Wir konnten auch anders" von der Historikerin Annette Kehnel nachlesen können, wie wenig diese von Pinkers flachen und verfälschenden Behauptungen über die historischen Lebensbedingungen unserer Vorfahren hält, auf denen er sein Gedankengebäude in "Gewalt" aufbaut.
Sauer ahmt diesem Beispiel nach und belegt eigene Behauptungen auch mal gar nicht.
"Dass Kollektivhandlungsprobleme nur dann entstehen, wenn man annimmt, der Mensch sei ein auf die ideologischen Prämissen der Wirtschaftswissenschaften eingeschworener Homo economicus, ist ein gern geglaubtes Märchen, das längst widerlegt ist."
Ohne Fußnote. Wir erfahren nicht, wer diese Idee längst widerlegt hat.

Der Kampf der Anthropologen
Mein Bruder der Ingenieur war bass erstaunt, als er feststellen musste, dass Anthropologen sich offenbar in sehr voneinander entfernte und sich bitter bekämpfende Schulen aufteilen. Für einen Naturwissenschaftler ist es schwer, nachzuvollziehen, wie man auf der Grundlage derselben Beobachtungen zu zwei widerstreitenden Schlüssen kommen kann. Ist der Mensch nur durch Zivilisation, Regeln, höhere Macht kooperativ und würden wir, uns selbst überlassen, ungehemmt stehlen, morden und zerstören? Oder sind wir - wie alle Säugetiere - von klein auf einander mit Empathie verbunden und haben uns nur darum zu Bestimmern auf unserem Planeten durchgesetzt, weil wir so verdammt gut im Kooperieren, im Planen sind und darin, Unstimmigkeiten zugunsten höherer Ziele zu überwinden. Ich möchte darum nicht ausschließen, dass ich den von Sauer dargelegten, immer gleichen Argumente der "Der Mensch ist des Menschen Wolf"-Seite einfach nicht das Interesse entgegenbringe, das ich bräuchte, um Sauer weiter auf seiner Erzählbahn zu folgen.

Schade
Ich finde es sehr bedauerlich, dass ich auf den ersten 50 Seiten über so viele Stellen gestolpert bin, die mir das Vertrauen in die weiteren Ausführungen genommen haben. Und damit auch die Lust, weiterzulesen, was wirklich schade ist. Eines Tages werde ich mir aber sicher die letzten Kapitel ansehen, denn auch auf einem wackeligen Fundament könnten durchaus interessante Ideen thronen.
"

[Laurent Franckx · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't finish it.
The first half of the book will sound perfectly familiar to anyone familiar with the Dawkins' Selfish Gene and Joe Henrich's "The secret of our succes" and "The WEIRDest people in the world". Note that these chapters are not per se bad: it's just that they do not add anything to what is already known.
Where the book becomes really problematic, is in its discussion of more recent developments. Sauer seems to be completely unaware of the fact that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Eichman as "the banality of evil" has been completely refuted, or that Stanley Milgram's famous experiment has also been found to be deeply problematic, both scientifically and ethically. (Also, when it comes to discussing My Lai, I think the starting point should be that the one person who tried to stop the massacres was an outsider - a helicopter pilot).
I dont' understand why this book has received so much critical acclaim.

[Rene Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hanno Sauer tries to break down the history of human moral psychology on 350 pages which is not an easy feat. Largely, he succeeds, even when he uses some trickery to get there.

For instance, he brushes away half of the field of evolutionary psychology for being chauvinist, which is a bit funny in the first chapter devoted to our first non-chimp steps out of the forests 5 million years ago and where you have not much else to point to except anthropology and evolutionary psychology when it comes to morals. So he spends half the chapter with game theory, which is interesting but only very abstractly connected primates.

But this is a minor quibble in an otherwise satisfying and surprisingly nonideological book which devoted it's last quarter nearly exclusively to culture war topics and stuff like wokism and effective altruism. His distanced but still clearly positioned writing here is refreshing, pointing out that the motives of these movements are morally just and necessary, but that there are inherent philosophical paradoxes that are not easily overcome, especially when you look at them through the lense of the psychological evolution of morals as a societal tool for cooperation.

There's some inconsistencies in his arguments, for instance when he mentions early David Graeber and David Wengrows point made in their book *The Dawn of Everything*, that pre-neolithic societies likely were *not that* egalitarien, but likely showed a diverse range of everything from despotic strong hierarchies to stone age hippie communes, so that you can hardly argue that "agriculture brough inequality" into human culture. Doesn't matter. Later he simply falls back to the old common tale that pre-neolithic societies were egalitarian and just and agriculture brought exploitation and inequality. He also later argues that "moral equality" is a mysterious thing because "human suffering doesn't matter", which is decidedly not true, especially when he later writes pages about the new universalism of moral values in human societies, which clearly shows that, yes, human suffering *does* matter a good deal. These simplifications, however, are excusable and explainable by the books' rather short length, given it's enourmous topic.

The book starts to really shine when he incorporates Joseph Henrichs theory on WEIRD-people (wester, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) into his model of the history of morals, which is a psychological counterintuitive development. Human, due to their reliance on cultural evolution and memetic transmition of ideas and concepts, developed a paradoxical relationship to strangers in WEIRD locations, where people became more trustful towards institutionalized entities and developed an "impersonal" prosociality that goes beyond usual family structures. In other words, WEIRD people trust strangers more than their neighbors and next of kin, against their evolutionary moral instinct. This is one of the main reasons for the universalism of modern moral values, where we ascribe basic human rights to *everyone*, not just our tribe. This clarifies a lot, and i ask myself if, when tribalist societies are low on impersonal prosociality and the internet sorting people into tribalistic structures, this might, at least in part, explain the upheavals on social media and the free fall of trust in institutions. (Regarding the last point, i think austerity programs and neoliberalism might play a nontrivial part in that story, too.)

In the last chapter, with a cold analytical eye Sauer disarms the culture wars and claims that wokeness will be devoured by economic and political elites (it already is) and that it will loose it's radical edge, becoming just another set of norms that are here to stay, simply because many of them make sense, adding some necessary toolsets to our moral vocabulary. This is a good take. He also correctly points out that the discourse about wokeness oftentimes is held on an abysmal niveau, and nobody wins anything by debating the most extreme and absurdly stupid arguments. Unfortunately for everyone socmed and attention economics select for exactly these extreme and stupid arguments, creating an intellectual downward spiral in the discourse and at the end, critics only disarm extremists and woke activists only disarm stupid rightwing clowns. I like that he consciously bothsides the debate on wokism in that regard, ignoring extremists and simply saying: Leftwingers should aknowledge some incoherencies in their ideas, and rightwingers shouldn't act as if they never learned new words. (AFAIK at least the smarter wokesters *know* that their movement stands on a somewhat paradoxical philosophy, that overemphasizes identity markers which *formally* are overcome in modern societal contracts, making the movement both progressive *and* regressive at the same time. Those smarter people know that this overemphasizing can only be a temporary measure. It's good to see such a take from a scholar in moral psychology.)

He then goes on to discuss fake news and epistemic pollution, pointing out that it's "a damaged environemt of knowledge transmission that enables fake news and 'epistemic pollution'", not some personal deficits of an individual. In that informational environment that sorts people into ideological tribes, it's more important for a MAGA-clown to share fake news on "Steal the Vote"-nonsense to show tribalist markers of belonging, than sticking to fact checked hard news, which results in a "Radicalization (which) stems from one upping each other in exreme political positions traded for social prestige".

He's pretty much up to date with academic literature with takes like these, and he actually made me laugh out loud at one point, when he writes that "polarisation doesn't run very deep" and "we are not of opposite oppinions, we just hate each other". This is a remarkably human sentence in a book about the cultural evolutionary history of morals, even when it's implications are depressing. But he warned us in the introduction that "this is a pessimistic story of progress", and this is exactly what we get: A history that shows that the cultural evolutionary development and transfer of moral landed us in a highly complex situation that will not be easily solved, and that is full of traps and paradoxical philosophies. I consider it a strength of this book to not shy away from this revelation.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, all good points but nothing new, a rehash of known works by the usual suspects (Malthus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Foucault, Diamond, Dawkins, Dennett, De Waal etc.); if you want to read a decent general primer on the history of morality, then pick up this volume, otherwise, skip and don’t be the lesser for it.

[Letterrausch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hanno Sauer, der Autor des sowohl für den Deutschen als auch den NDR Sachbuchpreis nominierten Buchs „Moral – Die Erfindung von Gut und Böse“ lehrt an der Universität Utrecht Philosophie und Ethik. Beste Voraussetzungen also, um sich auf 400 Seiten an einer Geschichte der Moral abzuarbeiten. Dabei ist der Aufbau des Buchs recht konservativ: Historisch bei den ersten Menschen(ähnlichen) startend, arbeitet er sich über die Zeitachse in mehreren Kapiteln durch verschiedene Entwicklungsschritte von vor 5 Millionen Jahren bis vor fünf Jahren. Dies soll plausibel machen, wie sich menschliche Gesellschaften entwickelten und veränderten und fortan so etwas wie „Moral“ herausbildeten, um das Zusammenleben überhaupt möglich zu machen und im folgenden zu organisieren.

Denn am Anfang standen, das ist Sauer offenbar wichtig, kleine familiäre Gruppen oder Sippen bis zu 150 Mitgliedern. Für Sauer scheint diese Kleingruppe so etwas wie der idyllische Urzustand zu sein, denn in diesen Gruppen gibt es: Kooperation. Kooperation erlaubt, größere Tiere zu jagen die Aufteilung von Arbeit. Allerdings funktioniert Kooperation eben auch nur in solch kleinen Gruppen. Sie war der Startschuss zum Siegeszug des Menschen, doch mit den ersten größeren Gesellschaften brauchte es eine Möglichkeit, Kooperation durchzusetzen: nämlich die Strafe.

Hanno Sauer arbeitet sich durch die Menscheitsgeschichte und verfolgt dabei unsere moralische und kulturelle Evolution. Aufgeschrieben und logisch hergeleitet erweckt so etwas immer den Eindruck einer logischen Entwicklung hin zum Besseren oder zum Ideal (hin zu unserem jetzigen Ist-Zustand). Doch, wie gesagt: Für Sauer sind die kleingruppen-organisieren Urmenschen ein früher Idealzustand: Es herrschte große Gleichheit innerhalb der Gruppen (allerdings auch durchaus Agression nach außen als Abgrenzung zu anderen Gruppen) und als damaliger Mensch hatte man deutlich mehr Freizeit als ein Vollzeitarbeiter im heutigen kapitalistischen Hamsterrad. Mit den ersten Großgesellschaften und Großreichen kam dann erstmals auch die wachsende Ungleichheit, die wir – besonders ab dem 20. Jahrhundert – versuchen zu bekämpfen und zu überwinden.

Darum beschreibt er in den letzten Kapiteln genau diesen Kampf. Es geht um Idenitätspolitik, Wokeness, Cancel Culture und effektiven Altruismus. Manches davon führt nicht weit, weil er nicht über eine schlichte Definition des Begriffs hinausgeht. Anderen Begriffen beziehungsweise politischen Strömungen widmet er ein ganzes Kapitel und schafft es dabei fast gänzlich, sich auf einen deskriptiven und interpretatorischen Duktus zu beschränken, ohne seine eigene Agenda zu pushen oder sich sonstwie (politisch) zu positionieren. Für Sauer gilt nur folgendes: Die Motive hinter diesen Trends sind wichtig. Ungleichheit und Diskriminierung zu überwinden sind – auch im Hinblick auf seine bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt beschriebene Kulturevolution – die essenziellen Punkte unserer modernen Gesellschaften. Nachdem tausende Jahre Menschheitsgeschichte zu immer mehr (sozioökonomischer) Ungleichheit geführt haben, ist es die Aufgabe unserer Zeit, endlich zu (mehr) Gleichheit zu finden. Die Versuche, dies zu erreichen, beschreibt Sauer. Ob diese Versuche den gewünschten Erfolg haben werden, wagt auch er nicht zu prognostizieren. Aber darüber kann vielleicht in 100 Jahren der nächste Philosophie-Professor schreiben …

Sauer schreibt gefällig und hat durchaus ein Talent dafür, wissenschaftliche Zusammenhänge auf ein allgemein verständliches Niveau herunterzubrechen. Damit wird „Moral“ gut lesbar und auch die Fußnotenfrequenz ist überschaubar. Wer sich also für das Thema interessiert, sich aber nach einem langen Arbeitstag nicht mit anstrengendem Wissenschafts-Sprech und einer hohen Fremdwortdichte herumschlagen möchte, der wird bei Sauer fündig. Sein Anspruch ist durchaus, über die reine Wissensvermittlung hinaus, lesbar und unterhaltsam zu schreiben. Naturgemäß werden für die meisten wohl die letzten Kapitel die spannendsten sein, weil er hier von einer weit entfernten Vergangenheit in die jüngere Geschichte und sogar in unsere aktuelle Gegenwart springt und uns „die Welt erklärt“. Das tut er fundiert, allgemein verständlich und – immer gern gesehen – unaufgeregt. Eine Empfehlung.

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

252109: first, I am no sociologist, I am not too aware of current or historical, theories, disputes, assertions, arguments-and here this does not matter, or at least no more than in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies or The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. this is ultimately Eurocentric if not simply Christian-centric history of our human moral universe. however much I can agree with posited evolution of morality, agree with conclusions, agree with premises, there are disjunctions of thought that bother me..

I do not believe good and evil are ever invented, or found, or inherited, but are human intuitions that start at birth, and we only imagine that they are anything else when maturing experience shows that others do not share the same expression of values... when we mistaken or are misread, or are mistreated, or are mislead, or ourselves do any of these wrong acts to others, but the intuition remains solid in place, only by madness, confusion, self-deception (otherwise known as bad faith), can we temporarily escape moral claims...

I do not believe good and evil are forces, entities, shape-shifting 'cause' religious supernatural magic or whatever, of moral states: I believe they are rather 'results' of given action on our human part, humans judge what is evil, humans commit what is evil, and so it is with good, we do wrong to ever name, ever identify natural processes...

but perhaps I am calling for an unreasonable clarity of motivations, such as I myself can never claim total, and should be more understanding of our shared ambiguity of human beings...

this text proceeds in logarhythmic chapters from 5 million years ag0 to 5 yrs ago (2019), that I find more convincing in broad strokes than current details, as in some ways the closing optimism seems hopeful rather than dire diagnosis. and even in the few years since published, the political state has worsened...

[Garrett Maxwell]

See my review here: https://open.substack.com/pub/theutah...

[Eloy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesante obra de divulgación de la psicología antropológica. Complementa otras obras sobre la evolución humana desde un enfoque moral, siendo esa moralidad de los grupos humanos, cada vez más complejos, el eje en el que se sustenta el progreso de las civilizaciones hasta hoy. En mi opinión, da unas claves muy acertadas sobre nuestro comportamiento y cómo dependemos de los constructos sociales aprendidos por millones de años. Muy recomendable para cualquier lector con curiosidad sobre estos temas.

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read for me, as I had cataract surgery on both eyes. But, I enjoyed this book and its sweep of moral history in the western world. Of course, many sections will be re-read.

[dinozor gibi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hanno Sauer, ahlakı sabit ve evrensel bir normlar kümesi olarak değil; tarihsel olarak şekillenen, toplumsal ihtiyaçlara yanıt veren bir yapı olarak ele alır. Ahlak, insan türünün birlikte yaşayabilmek için geliştirdiği; güven, karşılıklılık ve işbirliği gibi sorunlara çözüm üretmeye yönelik bir normlar sistemidir. Bu nedenle yazar, ahlakı yalnızca “iyi” ve “kötü” ayrımına yanıt veren bir değer yargısı olarak değil; hangi bağlamda, kimler tarafından ve hangi işlevleri üstlenmek üzere üretildiğini sorgulayan bir inşa süreci olarak düşünmeye çağırır bizi. Ancak kitabın ilerleyen bölümleri, kültürler arasında bazı temel ahlaki ilkelerde yüksek düzeyde ortaklık olduğunu da ortaya koyar. Yani yazar, ahlakın icat edilmiş bir yapı olduğunu savunurken, bu icatların bazı ortak biçimlerde ortaya çıkabildiğini de teslim eder.

Kitabın ilk bölümleri bu “icat” fikrine güçlü bir teorik zemin sunar. Evrimsel biyoloji, grup psikolojisi, ceza, karşılıklılık ve güven gibi kavramlar üzerinden ahlakın neden genetik değil, kültürel yollarla kurulan bir pratik olduğunu gösterir. Ahlak, birlikte yaşamaya dair zorluklara verilen kültürel bir yanıttır; sabit değil, uyarlanabilir ve bağlama duyarlıdır.

Yazar kitabın ilerleyen bölümlerinde, günümüzün ahlaki krizini bir temsil krizi olarak tanımlar: kutuplaştırıcı söylemler, insanların ortaklık taşıyan yönlerini değil; farklılıklarını ve kimlik aidiyetlerini görünür kılar. Evrimsel işbirliği davranışı, günümüzde dar kimlikler etrafında şekillenerek kolektif dayanışmanın önünde bir engele dönüşmüştür. Bu nedenle yazar, “biz” ve “onlar” ayrımını aşan, daha kapsayıcı ve temkinli bir toplumsal işbirliği anlayışının inşa edilmesi gerektiğini savunur. Gerçek ahlaki ilerleme, toplumda en dışarıda bırakılanı merkeze alma cesaretiyle başlar. Bu dönüşüm dışlananların haklarını tanıyan, görünmez olanı tanımlayan ve kapsayıcı kurumsal yapılarla gerçekleşebilir. Ahlak, yalnızca bireysel vicdan meselesi değil; kolektif yeniden yapılanmanın zemini olmalıdır.

Ahlak, günümüzde sıkça bir kontrol aracı, bir baskı mekanizması olarak kullanılsa da; çıkış noktası silahlarını kuşanmış bir zorbalık değil, zarar vermemeyi, dürüstlüğü, iyiniyeti ve hakkaniyeti esas alan bir birlikte yaşama arzusudur. Hukuk temelli düşünen biri olarak bu ilkeleri merkeze aldığımızda, ahlakın hepimize yeten, hepimize esenlik getiren bir dünyanın taşıyıcısı olabileceğine inanıyorum. Bilmem sen de inanır mısın Can…

[Michael Muntisov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why did Homo sapiens triumph over other Homo species? And then how did we become the dominant species on the planet? Academic Hanno Sauer addresses these questions and more in his insightful book “The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality.”

One reason for our success is that we, as a social animal, have a spontaneous and surprisingly flexible capacity for co-operation. Modern group experiments show that humans are intrinsically generous and altruistic but that an individual within a group has a better chance of “winning” if he is selfish, even at the expense of the group. Sauer argues that in our original small groups the benefits of co-operation could be policed by the bonds of close kinship, leading to co-operative and egalitarian groups of Homo sapiens who could protect each other from predators, hunt together, safeguard each other from hardships, and as a result become better at surviving.

As we grew in numbers the bonds of kinship became weaker. To enforce the benefits of co-operation, but in larger groups, we acquired the ability to monitor and punish the violation of norms. Our group-oriented moral psychology became punitive. Through countless generations, aggressive individuals who would not conform would be ostracised or even killed, thus allowing co-operative genes to dominate. In so doing we developed a powerful punitive instinct with an unfortunate tendency to excess, leading to a delight in cruel punishments.

With this development we acquired the ability to live together in larger groups enabling development of techniques for clothing, housing, weapons, food and knowledge that gave us an advantage as cultural learners. We could pass on knowledge from generation to generation. We became social learners. We learnt to trust and imitate others through shared values and identity markers.

The technological advances enabled by social learning allowed us to produce economic surpluses under the right conditions. This change is often taken to correspond with the birth of agriculture and the first civilizations around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Despite our inherent preference for egalitarianism, societies of ever-increasing size emerged which could only be organised by imposing hierarchy and funding a central bureaucracy through taxation based on grain. Thus evolved a small ruling elite (with inherited privileges) and a majority of exploited, oppressed people. This is when slavery, foreign rule and inequality bloomed, creating the ideal breeding ground for religions based on salvation and afterlife.

In the last five hundred years, socio-cultural evolution progressed sufficiently that social norms and institutions emerged which began to question the function of kinship as a key organizing principle of society. The roots of such evolution in Western Europe at least can be traced back to changes in kin rules adopted by the Catholic Church some one thousand years ago. This evolution was accelerated by the growth of markets and emergence of democracy.

Canadian psychologist Joseph Henrich coined the term WEIRD for the people who came to most represent this cohort – Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. The WEIRD perspective has dominated western morality ever since. And counterintuitively, studies have shown that WEIRD people are comparatively less loyal to family and community, but more altruistic and cooperative towards strangers [presumably of their own race] than the global average.

Moving into the last century, horrific examples of war, genocide, discrimination and exploitation led to a call for greater equality. However this highlighted the tension between two ideals – individual freedom and equality - and it seems almost impossible to achieve both at the same time.

In the final chapters of his book, Sauer discusses some the hot issues of the current moral climate.
He describes the “woke” movement as an understandable reaction to the slow progress toward equality and removal of social injustices. The frustration from not being able to achieve fair conditions straight away has instead led to linguistic changes, for example use of pronouns, which are easier and faster to achieve. He predicts that wokeness will remain but in a weaker, tamer form and become endemic. The process, already in progress, will involve wokeness being watered down and absorbed by capitalism and meritocracy where it will survive but be stripped of its most radical manifestations. The West’s downfall from “woke” will fail to materialise.

He also discusses “fake news”. He points out that since we became social learners we have been reliant on second-order evidence – information provided by people we trust rather than on direct evidence. The modern problem is that our affiliations have become more politically polarised.
But, he argues, our political beliefs are superficial, unstable and uninformed; polarisation is largely an emotional phenomenon; we distrust other people if we cannot identify with them; we begin to hate them if they do not belong to ‘us’.

However, in reality there are more things that we share with each other than divide us. The moral values that unite us run deeper than we believe, and the political divides that separate us run less deep than we think.

The Invention of Good and Evil is a fascinating look at the history of humanity, not just morality. It offers plenty of insights into the human condition. And in itself provides a welcome antidote to the tsunami of disinformation.

[Steve]

Read the first two chapters, about 50 pages. I didn’t care for the writing, perhaps it’s a translation problem, I think the book was originally in Dutch or German. The author is a philosopher and made several statements about science that seemed off to me. Maybe generally correct but phrased in a clumsy way? Anyway, not my kind of book.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Invention of Good and Evil” is a world history of how mankind developed morality as our societies grew from hunter gatherers to farmers and city dwellers, to living in a “Global Village” (my quote).

Human beings soon found that their lives and success relied on cooperating with others. After our ancestors discovered fire, and literally came down from the trees, we develop morality – codes of conduct – to help ensure our cooperation.

Some of these means of cooperation can be seen in the vanishing hunter gatherers today, but others were deduced through evidence from archaeology, paleontology, genetic analysis, anthropology, philosophy, literature and other sciences. The author assembled a study of morality the way we’d assemble a jigsaw puzzle.

Generally speaking, the author told a very coherent story about how our morality developed, starting from a very long term perspective – 5 million years – and gradually working down to finer and finer sieves including the past 500 years when Joseph Henrich’s WEIRD (Western, Education, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) views of morality developed – up until the past 5 years with the emergence of “Woke” thinking.

For most of the book I felt that the author was balanced and presented various points of view leading up to a coherent story about how people invented stories to keep society working cooperatively together.

I enjoyed many of his explanations including how punishment is necessary to ensure conformity with norms, and our apparent fascination with objects of horror in maintaining this adherence to norms.

Most of his arguments seem plausible.

There were two areas where I felt the author was not even handed and the first was how he defended the Jewish people throughout the book. They have suffered but not the only ones who have been persecuted in the world, yet he referred them repeatedly. I think the author should refer to this example but also used more current examples of human atrocities such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and especially Sudan. After all this is a book about all people.

The author also did not present the Woke movement in an even-handed way, treating it as the only way forward. This can be seen in his statement that “Woke is here to stay”. Clearly the author could not predict how Woke is being rolled back and will continue to do so in especially America, after Donald Trump won the past election in the United States - not more than one month ago.

Specifically the author talked more about classic oppressor-oppressed arguments used by the left side of the conversation without presenting a solid case for the right side of the conversation. I think he showed bias is doing this. It’s one thing to have a point of view but woke is also oppressive to white males. And the author gave no hint that he had considered the moral downsides of woke. For it largely does not help those it claims to help and is often a movement for the wealthy to gain status or “virtue signal” as the author did explain.

It's a good book, and without those biases could have been a great book.

[Alex Mesman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soms leest het prettig weg en komt de boodschap bij mij over. Op andere momenten werd het voor mij een woordenbrij, waarbij het intellect van de schrijver belangrijker leek te zijn dan hoe en of de boodschap bij de lezer overkomt. Maar al met al door de goede momenten zeker de moeite waard met mooie voorbeelden.

[JW · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth reading and re-reading.

[Wandaviolett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Von den Dinosauriern bis zu den Wokeisten.

Kurzmeinung: Am Anfang mehr als zäh, dann wird es immer besser.

Wie ist die Moral entstanden? fragt sich Hanno Sauer und gibt sich und der Leserschaft Antwort darauf. So wie ich es verstanden habe, wird der Begriff niemals extra definiert, sondern mit Kooperationsbereitschaft oder Kooperationsvermögen innerhalb einer Gruppe gleichgesetzt. Die erste Hälfte der Erläuterungen beschäftigt sich unter anderem damit, ob Kooperation für das Individuum sinnvoll ist oder nicht.

Hochkomplexe gesellschaftlich-soziale Strukturen wie unsere modernen Staatsgebilde funktionieren aber nur mit einer qualifizierten und quantitativ hohen Quote an Kooperationsbereitschaft. Wie die Bereitschaft dazu entstehen konnte, - man kann diese Eigenschaft(en) auch Loyalität nennen oder die Bereitschaft, sich an Gesetze und Verhaltungsvorgaben zu halten, gepaart mit einem Quantum Empathievermögen, - damit beschäftigt sich das Buch eine schier endlose Zeit. Diese Betrachtungen hätte man sich wesentlich kürzer gewünscht und mit weniger Evolutionstheorien ausgestattet, die zudem nicht wie Arbeitshypothesen, sondern wie gefestigte Fakten dargestellt werden, was sie definitiv zum Teil nicht sind. Eine Rezensentin spricht sogar von überholten Thesen; ich bin nicht so firm auf dem Gebiet "Evolution" - schaut also selber.

Aber da der Autor in seiner Einleitung explizit darauf hinweist, wie sein Buch zu lesen ist, „wer sich für die biologische Evolution interessiert, kann sich auf die ersten Kapitel konzentrieren, wer etwas über die frühe Kulturgeschichte erfahren möchte, wird am meisten von den mittleren Kapiteln profitieren, wer den moralischen Zeitgeist verstehen möchte, lese die letzten drei Kapitel“ (Auszug), kann man ihm seine Ausführlichkeit, seinen Ausgangspunkt bei Adam und Eva und/oder bei den Dinosauriern nicht übel nehmen, auch wenn man gerne möchte.

Im Fortgang des Buches wird es interessant. Der Begriff „Moral“ wird zwar weiterhin nicht definiert, ein großer Schwachpunkt des Ganzen, man kann ihn aber hier wohl mit so etwas wie „Sinn fürs Gemeinwohl“ übersetzen; aber es werden einige Probleme gesellschaftlicher Normen, unterschiedlicher Moralvorstellungen beleuchtet. Gibt es universell gültige Werte? Was ist mit den die Gesellschaft spaltenden Themen, mit den Wokeisten, mit den Klimaaktivisten, mit den Rassisten, Sexisten, etc. etc. Was ist mit der vielbeklagten Polarisierung in der Gesellschaft. Hier legt der Autor eine interessante These dar, Polarisierung würde überbewertet, eigentlich wären die Menschen gar nicht so sehr unterschiedlicher Meinung, das Problem liege lediglich darin, dass sie sich hassen. Prost Gemeinde! Ist Hass ein kleineres Problem als unterschiedliche Ansichten zu haben?

Culture war macht keinen Spaß. Denn er ist eben genau das: Krieg! Aber so negativ meint der Autor das nicht. Oder doch? Immerhin schreibt er in der Einleitung: „Es ist eine pessimistische Fortschrittsgeschichte. Sie ist pessimistisch, denn innerhalb jeder Generation gibt es zu viel des Bösen“. Aber er meint auch „Moralischer Fortschritt ist immer möglich und oft wirklich. Aber er ist nicht selbstverständlich“. Wohl wahr.

Selbstverständlich gibt es auch Erhellung neuer sozio-kultureller Begriffe, Dogwhistles, Gaslighting, Mansplaining, kulturelle Aneignung, cancel culture, accountability culture, virtue signalling, moral grandstanding, piling on, ramping up, tramping up, etc. etc. Auffallend oft sind es Begriffe aus dem Amerikanischen, von dort schwappt der gesamte intellektuelle Überbau nach Europa. Good old europe. Kann es nicht selber denken? Am exotischsten ist der Terminus der Baumwollgrenze, eigentlich: Schlüpfergrenze. Hier zeigt sich, wie tolerant die allumfassende Toleranz fordernde queere Szene selber ist: wenn eine Transfrau Sex mit einer Lesbe möchte (die im Prinzip vielleicht ja geneigt wäre), dann stelle sich an der Schlüpfergrenze (meistens) heraus, dass die lesbischen Frauen eine Transfrau eben doch nicht gerne als Sexual-Partnerin hätten. Tscha, Leute, alles ist relativ.

Fazit: Letztlich habe ich mich, vor allem ab der Mitte des Buches, wenn wir in die Nähe der Moderne kommen, wohl mit dem Gelesenen gefühlt und einige interessante Informationen erhalten, über die nachzusinnen sich lohnt. Was gut und böse ist, und wer dies jeweils bestimmt, wird allerdings rudimentär behandelt. "Moral" von Hanno Sauer ist dennoch ein Sachbuch, wovon ich einzelne Kapitel noch einmal lesen werde. Das spricht dann doch für die Lektüre, auch wenn sie nicht ganz einfach zu lesen gewesen ist.

Kategorie: Sachbuch.
Verlag: Piper, 2023

[Dannial · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book is a great primer on moral and evolutionary psychology and directly addresses the invention and development of morality. Unfortunately, in attempting a complete "Big History" of morality, Sauer becomes overly ambitious by discussing every single contemporary moral issue from colonialism to environmentalism. This analysis of contemporary issues was not as in depth and didn't seem to address as much of the philosophical literature.

[Andrea Samorini · Rating 5 out of 5]

___________________________________
WANT TO READ BOOK:
- WEIRD. La mentalità occidentale e il futuro del mondo (Joseph Henrich)
- La propaganda. Cos'è e come funziona (Jason F. Stanley)

[Jayasankar Thayyil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Except the book cover, nothing is good. It’s simply illegible, I even questioned my own English reading skills while reading it. It’s only later I realised that it’s a translation, well, the author should not give any more work to the translator because he/she is pretty bad at his/her job. Frustrated.

[Vlad · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.75)

[Manuel Del Río Rodríguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Before reading: what were my expectations?*

Anyone who follows this substack or has chatted a bit with me is probably aware that in ethics, I have strong inclinations towards some sort of anti-realistic, contractualist view of morality, with strong whiffs of Hobbes and Gauthier as the closest approximation to any possible truth in the matter. For this reason, it stands to reason I would feel intellectually curious and aroused by a book with a title like ‘The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality’, so I proceeded to get my hands on it.

Before engaging, I did take a glance at some reviews, and got very conflicting input: I found a lot of critical ones, but they were usually criticizing very opposite things. The impression I got is some people really disliked the book because the strongly reject any genealogy of morality that might undermine what they perceive as moral truths; others, on the contrary, disliked what they perceived as the author interrupting said genealogy by subjective asides and by mixing his own moral values and views into the narrative. Some highlighted that the last chapters were pretty apologetic of woke discourse and politics, which didn’t quite seem to map with my expectations. But you have to talk all reviews with a pinch of salt, including this one: de te fabula narratur.

*Summary*

The Invention of Good and Evil is, indeed, a naturalistic genealogy of how human morality emerged, evolved, and mutated from prehistoric cooperation to today’s current trends. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and history, Sauer tells the story of morality as an adaptive social technology, a way to manage cooperation, punishment, trust, and hierarchy across ever-larger groups. Each moral “advance” carries its own pathology: altruism breeds hostility to outsiders, punishment enables order but also cruelty, inequality generates resentment, and modern universalism collapses into online moral warfare. The book traces these transformations over seven great epochs (and chapters), from the savannah to social media, arguing that moral progress is real but precarious, always balanced between our cooperative instincts and our capacity for division, and concluding that understanding morality’s natural origins may be the only way to preserve it.

A brief summary of each of the chapters is as follows:

1) 5,000,000 Years: “Genealogy 2.0”

Morality begins in the natural realm, as a fragile solutions to cooperation problems under evolutionary pressure. Cooperation is valuable but costly and (game-theoretically) unstable. Sauer treats early moralization as group-bounded altruism, following in this the discoveries of evolutionary biology: it starts with strategies of back-scratching and gene-preservation through relatives (the stuff that gets treated in more detail in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene). He frames the move to larger groups as the question this sets up: how do we make cooperation scale?

2) 500,000 Years: “Crime and Punishment”

The next step in ensuring we can collaborate with a wider circle is by the (mostly cultural) evolution of punishment and execution. This works as self-domestication (by eliminating the most violent and non-collaborative members from the gene pool) and to balance against the self-serving parasitic strategies of cheats and freeloaders. It even works better when it becomes internalized, so that we monitor ourselves. And boy have we internalized a hate for cheaters and a thirst for retribution…

3) 50,000 Years: “Deficient Beings”

We are biologically “deficient” in ways that force cultural dependence (dual inheritance). Moral codes become trust technologies for deciding whom to learn from and cooperate with. Sauer links cumulative cultural evolution to moral learning and filters for credible models (prestige, shared values). The chapter’s index and notes stress culture as the driver and the opacity of complex know-how once it exceeds any individual’s grasp. In this he is summarized the same Chestertonian-fence argument that is developed at length in Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success.

4) 5,000 Years: “The Origins of Inequality”

We jump to the Neolithic. Sedentarism and agriculture produce surpluses, hierarchy, and stark inequality; all early states are wildly inegalitarian by design (monuments, tomb goods, elites…), as opposed to hunter-gatherers, who were comparatively egalitarian, before complex division of labor. Sauer seems to present this as the great moral rupture that still haunts us, which is something I somewhat disagree with (more on this later). Anyway, he also makes the case that in pre-Modern, Malthusian societies, the law in which resources are mostly gobbled up by population growth means only a small group can reap the full benefits of civilization.

5) 500 Years: “The Discovery of WEIRDness”

Modernity reconfigures morality around the individual: autonomy, voluntary association, scientific rationalization, and a huge jump in lifespan and choice. Sauer uses the arguments of Joseph Henrich’s WEIRD to show how the West became an extreme outlier that, in a long, drawn-out process, was able to create a more expansive collaborative society (as opposed to clannic and tribal ones of other empires and civilizations ) cemented on a WEIRD psychology that starts from the Catholic Church’s marriage/kinship rules.

6) 50 Years: “The Moral of the Story”

The 20th century’s “harsh lessons” serve as a background for a deepening push in WEIRD societies for universalist humanism: emphasize what all humans share; try to purge partiality; build peace through global institutions. The chapter also presents and problematizes the notion of moral progress and its limitations, but ultimately, it sticks quite closely by it, with morality as progress toward universal equality.

Chapter 7 – 5 Years : Nonpolitical Reflections

Sauer turns to the recent past and the Culture Wars, where the same moral emotions that built liberal modernity are now destabilising it. Our evolved punitive psychology, which once enforced cooperation, has migrated into politics and social media. Instead of binding us together, it rewards public denunciation, purity policing, and moral absolutism. Online outrage and cancel culture become secular rituals of penance; identity movements, left and right, mirror each other in their certainty of virtue and persecution. He portrays both “woke” and “reactionary” moralities as expressions of the same ancient mechanism: tribal enforcement of group norms under conditions of abundance and visibility. This moral arms race, he warns, is adolescent in tone, yet he also insists it is transient: moral intensity eventually burns itself out as coordination costs rise and fatigue sets in. The deeper continuity of our shared moral instincts still operates beneath the noise.

Conclusion

Sauer opens with the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks to show how contingent shocks, and not policy or reason, can swing politics (and uses it as a pivot to argue that our stances are steered primarily by values and identity rather than cool deliberation). He recaps the book’s arc from the East African plains to a globally networked species, framing morality as the evolving grammar of coexistence that both enables cooperation and continually generates new tensions. He closes by asking what to fear and hope for next, urging sober recognition of our psychological and historical constraints as the only realistic basis for navigating the future, but also by putting a lot of optimistic emphasis on what we share in common as greater than what separates us, and with a strong statement of ethical universalism.

*Impressions*

First of all, I found the book very readable. Some have complained that it is rambling and goes on tangents, but I didn’t find that to be the case for most of it. Perhaps this was a falling of the last chapters. The author’s style is also entertaining and accessible: he knows how to introduce major topics and ideas with mind-catching examples and interesting stories and anecdotes.

One thing I found disconcerting is that the book didn’t quite turn out quite as I’d imagined. On the one hand, it is (particularly from chapters 1 to 5) a genealogy of morality which matches well with an anti-realist view of the topic: morality as a series of evolved biological and cultural technologies that allow the creation and collaboration of ever bigger human groups, proceeding by chance and in the dark, and orthogonal to any ‘true’ content for those moral principles. In this respect, it feels like an anti-realist framing with which I find myself uncontroversially agreeing. What is more: the books that inspire him for this are my favorite reads of the last couple or so years: The Selfish Gene, Why Nations Fail, The Strategy of Conflict, The Secret of Our Success, Guns, Germs and Steel and The WEIRDest People in the World. While he’s treading this path, I mostly find myself nodding in agreement. But even here, from time to time, the author keeps smuggling contemporary, liberal (in the US sense) ethical beliefs which he frames realistically (as in ‘xxxx is, of course, obvious’) and in a way that seems at odds with the book’s content and apparent purpose. In this respect, from chapter 6 onwards, one experiences a bit of a shift, as if a new and different type of book had been grafted on the previous moral genealogy: there’s a shift from how morality evolved to what morality ought to become. The switch is subtle but unmistakable: the rhetoric of “universal dignity,” “peace through global institutions,” “finally realising the promise of equality” assumes an independent standard of moral betterment. And this doesn’t read like a genealogy anymore, but rather as the Enlightenment redemption history. The idea of moral progress and the expanding moral circle is presented and extensively debated, with pros and cons, in this chapter, but ultimately, I just got the feeling that, after presenting all the intellectual objections it brings up, the author just shrugs his shoulders and moves on with statements that just unproblematically assuming it. The same thing goes on in the next chapters and the conclusion: the author tries to present a balanced moral stance on current issues (and he does a decent enough job at trying to be fair, even if one gets a distinct impression as well as to which side he goes with), but ultimately keeps pushing for a moral narrative which seems to have been pulled out of nowhere as to its epistemic solidity and truthfulness. The genealogy of the book has been explaining us how humans get to collaborate more and more, but not on if the tools and principles that it latched to upon the way are in any way true, objective or binding. Assuming, for example, that morality is just a useful invention for coordination, it begs questions like: if better but extremely illiberal tools develop that further coordination but are deeply at odds with liberal-democratic moral principles, should they be accepted? If moral systems are historical software, then updates, forks, and regressions are always on the table; liberal humanism is a version, not a destination. And such scenarios are not as fictional as one might think: the future could include augmented humans and/or AGI which would have little or no reason to abide to and constrain themselves with conventional, Western morality.

I see most of the aspects I perceive as failures and disagreements with the book’s content precisely in those cases were the author seems to be pushing his own moral and ideological agenda, i.e.:

-Ethical universalism: Perhaps Jonathan Haidt is absent from the list of books I liked and read reclently; beyond Moral Foundations theory though, I don’t think Sauer makes a convincing case for agreed-upon universal values (it feels like wishful thinking with a dash of telescoping: depending on how much you zoom in or out, you can always find evidence to justify or refute such an argument. An alternative story would say the West’s success (economic, political, military) has led to a partial adoption of these values in other places, but still we seem to have cultures that have backtracked in this, as in the Middle East, India and even in the West, with the recent resurgence of counternarratives. And of course, China is the elephant in the room for these Fukuyama-Acemoglu whig views of history: the fastest growing powerhouse and potential new hegemon of the 21st century is a deeply illiberal and prosperous state, and doesn’t seem to be converging at all with Western Values.

-Relatedly, the narrative of some changes being consolidated, good and unstoppable in the moral arc of progress feels again in need of deeper problematizing than the author would warrant: Trumpism, Orbánism, Brexit populism, nativist Japan, the erosion of liberal proceduralism, the backlash and reversal on trans issues show that even inside the “WEIRD” sphere, the equilibrium is reversible. oral paradigms persist only while the cost–benefit structure favors them. If liberalism’s coordination advantages wane -because automation weakens labor leverage, or global interdependence breeds fragility, or demographic change fuels tribal stress- then its underlying fictions will likely lose their adaptive edge, and cooperation and prosperity will seek new stabilizers: techno-authoritarian meritocracy, new forms of nationalism, corporate paternalism, or something as yet unnamed.

-The optimism that differences are resolvable is something I am no convinced either. Perhaps the tension between freedom and equality is irresolvable unless we either drastically reengineer humankind (culturally and genetically) or we create such a society of universal abundance as to make any conflicts moot. Neither seems in the near horizon to me. Humans have proven to be very pliant and malleable, but that doesn’t mean they are eternally so: even if all conservatives always cry for ‘let’s stop right here’, it is not implausible that in issues like impersonal prosociality we might have reached close to the top of what is pragmatically feasible. And on a related note, I feel the author’s argument is too liberal and woke-friendly; perhaps this is a consequence of my preferences being strongly in favor of liberty, truth-seeking and absolute free speech, and of having only an instrumental positive assessment of equality of outcomes. Still, I think a case can be made (and the author partially makes it himself) that a culture of resentment and group entrenchment is more likely to be counterproductive than anything else.

Despite these disagreements, The Invention of Good and Evil remains, in my view, a remarkable intellectual achievement. Even when I find Sauer’s normative leaps unpersuasive, I respect the ambition of his synthesis and the honesty with which he lays out the evidence before drawing his conclusions. The book succeeds as both genealogy and provocation, as it forces readers of every persuasion to test their own assumptions about morality’s origins and future. Its occasional liberal optimism does not negate its value as a tour de force of integrative thinking, one that manages to be erudite, readable, and impressively even-handed given the ideological minefield it traverses. My disagreements do not detract from my appreciation of the work or from the author’s evident commitment to clarity, fairness, and intellectual seriousness.

[Benjamin Rubenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second book I've listened to on morality, following Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind." It's interesting, though perhaps not memorable, though it does remind me to think critically about "right" and "wrong" rather than jumping to my initial instinct.

[Tom Evison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history book. Enjoyed! Similar in structure to “history of everything” titles. Some of the conclusions, especially at the modern chapters, felt a little simple though and possibly could be developed further in a follow up book.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a wonderful narrative in Anthropology.
Who are we? How did we get there? Where are we going….

[Eduardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recopilatorio de ideas de otros libros sobre el mismo tema. Quién haya leído el Gen Egoísta, the WEIRDest people in the world y Armas, gérmenes y acero no encontrará prácticamente ninguna idea original.

[Con · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much in this book! I took heaps of snapshots.

Starts with evolution, like Sapiens, but focussed more on the social aspects of human evolution, ideas like punishment, social learning, cumulative cultural evolution.

We're ridiculously social beings - everything we learn, our personalities, our culture - all come out of the continual buzz of social interactions since we are born. Walk past a school in the morning and you hear the buzz - we're chatting away the whole time, learning, exchanging, building and rebuilding the culture.

We can no longer exist as independent organisms, since we've outsourced most of our survival to society. It's like the thought experiment about going back in time and trying to explain to most basic technology - not possible, nobody knows it completely, we completely rely on societal knowledge.

Most of our thinking also comes from society, including our political and moral positions.

One of cultural evolution's key lessons has been that a society's complexity almost never depends on the characteristics of the individuals living in it, but on the framework of cultural customs and institutions a society has inherited.

Maybe this is a continuation of the series of the loss of our position in the world:
1) Copernicus said we're not the centre of the universe
2) Darwin said we evolved just like everything else on the planet
3) Freud said most of our feelings and behaviours are subconscious

...and maybe our morality and politics are also not our own, but come from society.

...our moral values - and even more so our moral actions - are much more greatly influenced by the power of external circumstances than by a person's inner personality. We are - mostly, at any rate - products of external forces.

On cultural evolution, conservatism and progressivism both have a point.

It remains true that proven knowledge and tried and tested forms of social cooperation should only be eliminated with caution and not without compelling reasons. At the same time, cumulative evolution's track record promotes openness to experimentation, constantly renegotiating our inherited cultural reservoir with the potential for innovation and change.

The WEIRD thing was interesting...the idea that accepted social science experiments are biased because the subjects (often Uni students) have a background that is Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic - and that this background leads to identifiable behaviours, such as a tendency for abstract rules over family ties, different to more traditional non-western societies.

Our politics are tribal. If you are against abortion, you likely don't believe in man-made climate change, even though these things have nothing to do with each other. We sign up to a package of beliefs.

Our political affiliations seem to depend on which ideological positions we accept. But that is not the case. It is actually the other way around: the substantive positions we accept are determined by which political identity we feel we belong to. Social existence determines ideological consciousness.

Our morality is also dependent on the situation - who we're with, who's asking for help, etc.

There is something almost comforting about the banality of evil. The world is not split into radically evil and radically good people constantly fighting out the same battle on the stage of history but never winning it outright. It is made up of people, simply people, who, like the rest of nature, are shaped by their circumstances. They have to deal with these circumstances, and they can come to grief as a result of them. That is not to say there are no bad people who do appalling things, but it does mean that we humans are – at least in principle – able to reform, and that there is no mass of diabolical villains ‘in our midst’ whose intrinsic depravity the rest of society somehow has to simply deal with.

Punishment. A very effective invention to get people to behave in a group even when they're not being observed. But fuck me didn't people take this one to extremes? There are some horrid examples of torture and creative executions.

Propaganda. It's mostly laughable - but don't let this trap you into dismissing it and the people that 'believe' it. This was also pointed out in the Propoganda book by Pomerantsev - it's used as a signal of commitment to the group and the ideology.

Stalin is supposed to have once said that the death of one person is a tragedy and the death of millions is a statistic, and this seems to be the maxim of our compassion: we care only about a few people, and only about those we know and love. We are indifferent to most people.

But do we have to accept this?

There are a number of proposals as to what constituted the essence of moral progress in the twentieth century or what might be the defining moral transformation of late modernity, but a central theme is a universal dignity that is due and inherent to all human beings and that remains inviolable regardless of religion, colour or origin.

John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance - set up the social institutions as if you didn't know what your place in society would be.

'elite overproduction' happens when too many people go to uni and society doesn't have enough jobs for all these qualified people.

An entire cohort of highly educated people intellectually armed to the hilt and overwhelmed by high parental expectations enters adulthood with high hopes and brilliant university degrees...and the implicit assurance that illustrious university degrees seamlessly convert into six-figure salaries turns out to be a gross exaggeration. The number of good, high-prestige jobs is limited, and the majority inevitably come away empty-handed.

The author suggests this is creating kind of a psychodrama - elites pissed off at their situation but turning it into rage about social injustices that don't affect them directly.

The conservative mainstream has always had its own forms of political correctness, from the US 'support our troops' to the British remembrance poppy and the German obsession with not having speed limits on the autobahn.

Incels: They began to sense a conspiracy, with a few sexually active men - known as Chads - monopolising the few sexually desirable women, the Stacys. It seemed to them that most men were betas condemned to permanent sexlessness. "Chads and Stacys" loool...

Talking about terms that are over-used so that they've lost their original potency - trauma, violence - and gaslighting!!

Gaslighting refers to a subtle technique whereby someone can convince another person through manipulative signals that they are irrational, hysterical, unsound or even mentally disturbed. In the 1940 film Gaslight (refilmed in 1944), a man tries to make his wife believe she is losing her mind. .... Political capital can also be made from this technique, for example if representatives of social movements can be persuaded that they are merely exaggerating, or that they are seeing problems where there are none, behaving like oversensitive wimps who need to do their ‘homework’ or have lost their grip on reality.

[Rudi · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5 afgerond naar 5 omdat er wel inzichten in stonden die me soms wat deden lachen en andere wat nadenken , het boek volgt de weg van een soort evolutionaire psychologie, aangevuld met verschillende historische weetjes en laat behoorlijk wat ruimte aan de lezer om zelf na te denken ( en eventueel te beslissen) over goed dan wel slecht ( dat waarschijnlijk meer gemengd is dan we zouden willen ) het boek eindigt met de toegenomen (?) polarisatie , wat mij doet afvragen het verschillen van mening … zou dat ook kunnen met wat minder lawaai en wat minder stigmatisering,
Meningsverschillen zullen er waarschijnlijk altijd geweest zijn waarschijnlijk nog meer bij grotere veranderingen, wat ook logisch lijkt , en mss een beetje noodzakelijk, maar hoe daarmee wordt omgegaan bepaalt dan mede ook wat dat morele kompas
5 sterren , bepaal zelf wat jou morele meningen en probeer ze op een goede (?) manier te verdedigen en/ of uit te dragen ( voor te tonen)
Het boek is niet zo klein maar slaagt erin interessant te blijven ,

[Mark Bertram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unterhaltsames Buch, aber wohl eher als Populärwissenschaftlich und von Meinung geprägtem Buch zu betrachten und von sehr begrenzter wissenschaftlichen Wert. Es erweckte zumindest den Anschein mehr sein zu wollen.

[Xaver Dettling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mit «Moral. Die Erfindung von Gut und Böse» hat der Philosoph Hanno Sauer eine überzeugende, dennoch auch verkürzte Abhandlung zur Geschichte der Moral dargelegt. Er verfolgt eine genealogische-evolutionäre Sichtweise wie sich die Moral vor allem in der westlichen Welt herausgebildet hat. Gerade inhaltlich lassen sich viele seiner angerissenen Themen weiterdiskutieren oder verarbeiten: Über die Tatsache der zwischenmenschlichen Kooperation zur Erreichung gemeinsamer Ziele als ersten Transformationsphase der Moral vor tausenden von Jahren, die Bereitschaft von anderen Menschen zu lernen, dem Aufkommen von Ungleichheit und deren Management, bis zum Aufkommen des Individualismus oder im 20. Jahrhundert die Thematik der «Banalität des Bösen» und in der Gegenwart die Behandlung von «Wokeness» usw. Diese Sachverhalte gliedert Sauer jeweils in Zeitabschnitte nach genealogischer Attitüde: 5'000'000, 500'000, 50'000 Jahre usw. Die kulturevolutionäre Entwicklung der Moral unterlegt Sauer immer wieder mit überzeugenden Theorien oder Beispielen: Hamiltons Regel (vereinfacht: «Der Empfänger einer Handlung [einer Handlung] muss aus der altruistischen Handlung einen grösseren Vorteil beziehen als der «Spender»». Sauer, Moral, S. 50) oder den Prozess der Demoralisierung (tradierte moralische Normen, «die obsolet geworden sind, also zum Beispiel die zunehmende Akzeptanz ehemals hochgradig stigmatisierten vorehelichen Geschlechtsverkehrs.» Ebd., S. 266f).

Sauer zeigt auf, wie menschliche Eigenschaften, Tugenden oder Einstellungen sich durch die Menschheitsgeschichte wandeln, anpassen oder sich auch Risse oder Widersprüche in der Geschichte der Moral auftun: Kurz es ist auch eine kleine Geschichte der Menschheit. Mit Verweisen auf unterschiedliche, fachliche Perspektiven aus Psychologie, Anthropologie, Geschichtswissenschaften, Philosophie etc. gewinnt das Buch an interdisziplinärem Gehalt.
Gleichzeitig besitzt der genealogisch-kulturevolutionäre Ansatz in der Struktur des Buches auch seine Schwächen. Obwohl die Struktur des Buches Moral impliziert, kann nicht immer in überzeugender Weise die Verbindung zur Moral in den einzelnen Kapiteln gewährleistet werden.

Während Sauer dann eher mit zeitgenössischen, aber auch nicht per se aktuellen Theorien einzelne historische Sachverhalte der Moral erläutert, werden jeweilige aus der Zeit stammende philosophisch-wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Perspektiven zur Moraltheorie vermisst: z.B. Bedeutung der christlichen Dogmen für die Moralgeschichte, Aussagen von zentralen Philosophen wie Immanuel Kant oder John Locke, sowie zeitgenössische Positionen von Jürgen Habermas. Das liegt natürlich auch in der Sache: «Die» Geschichte der Moral darzustellen ist nicht möglich.

Auch einige inhaltliche Passagen können nicht vollends überzeugen: z.B. spricht Sauer über mehrere Seiten von «Wokeness» nur um am Schluss darauf zu kommen, dass Menschen diesen Forderungen zuhören, aber nicht blind vertrauen sollte (Sauer, Moral, S. 309). Obwohl hier Komplexitätsreduktion – auch aufgrund des riesigen Themas - vorgenommen werden muss, ist - diese Aussage eher banal und insofern nichts Neues. Ähnliches wird bei der Thematik zur Fake News deutlich: Es sei notwendig die jeweiligen politischen Gruppenzugehörigkeiten oder -identitäten nicht zu betonen (z.B. bei der Erläuterung des Corona-Virus’ auf konkrete Ärzt:innen aufmerksam zu machen), weil es die Informationsverarbeitung unterminiere. Menschen seien ja von Wissen anderer abhängig und solle diesen vertrauen. Diese Aussage ist zwar zuzustimmen, in der Realität aber sehr idealistisch. Vertrauen in die Fähigkeiten anderer, vor allem auch Expert:innen aus unterschiedlichen Disziplinen zu haben, ist in der heutigen Zeit leider vielfach nicht anzutreffen. Dies konnte gerade auch bei der Corona-Pandemie beobachtet werden: Nichtwissende konnten schnell Inhalte verbreiten, behaupten und die Expertise anerkannter Spezialist:innen einfach infrage stellen.

Obwohl Sauer auch zum Schluss in meinem Geschmack zu idealistisch argumentiert, empfand ich die Grundlinien seiner Darstellung überzeugend. Die klare Sprache hilft die verschiedenen Perspektiven und Theorien mit der Moral zu verbinden und am Ende erhielten die Leser:innen einen kurzen Abriss unserer sich stets wandelnden, sozial konstruierten Struktur der Moral.

Quelle: Sauer, Hanno: Moral. Die Erfindung von Gut und Böse, München 2023.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book isn’t so much a history of morality as it is a synthesis of historical perspectives on the development of morality and its juxtaposition with cooperative behavior. It then culminates in several opinions on political and moral implications resulting from the paradoxical complex of our cooperative-divisive inclinations.

Human survival depends on our ability to cooperate in groups and such cooperation would not be possible without morality. As I read him, Sauer identifies at least four primary evolutionary developments that contribute to cooperation and the invention of morality:
1. Humans are hyper-imitators, resulting in instinctive behavioral and cultural replication.
2. The maintenance of morality requires the punishment of those who deviate from cooperative norms. Since consistent enforcement is difficult, the invention of an omniscient and omnipresent punishing god was conducive to maintaining moral adherence.
3. Fair and equitable redistribution of resources also promoted cooperation. To make this happen, a Hobbesian social contract emerged, facilitated by a central authority or some form of government.
4. Over time, the more prosperous and secure cultural regions experienced a lower marginal utility of economic resources. This allowed the marginal utility of emancipatory values to grow.

This is all fine and dandy. But Sauer then addresses something new happening in today’s modern society. He sees morality boiling over "with indignation, resentment, and fighting over how our present-day should be interpreted, how our past should be understood, and how our future should be shaped." Sauer identifies, interprets, and opines on four battlefields in a culture war:
1. Wokeism. Some see wokeness as a means of achieving a just society, others see it as the end of Western Civilization. Sauer says there is an enormous but unrealized potential for reconciliation among reasonable people on either side of center, but this has been undermined by the extremists on both sides.
2. Pathology in Political Discourse. Parties and social movements do not focus on the issues that are important to the whole, but instead on wedge issues of little practical consequence. Every social/political group has to struggle with the problem of extremism inflation, whereby the group's ideology inevitably ends up being dominated by the people who represent the most extreme version of their ideology. Beyond a certain point, this extreme version eventually becomes the new normal.
3. Epistemic Pollution. Since we all generally lack detailed knowledge of evidence and the expertise to evaluate complex issues of political concern, we place our trust in other people to evaluate first-order evidence. It is usually shared values and belonging to the same social group that makes us believe in some people and not in others. The susceptibility to fake news is explained by this kind of network of trust. The fault is not that people are idiots; it���s a damaged environment of knowledge transmission that enables widespread disinformation.
4. Political Affiliation. Our political affiliations do not depend on which ideological positions we accept. Instead, our ideological positions are determined by which political identity we feel we belong to. Social existence determines ideological consciousness. To further stabilize our group’s cohesion, we safeguard and punitively enforce the group’s particular, and sometimes peculiar, group-oriented moral norms.

Sauer concludes that the evolution of our moral development originally had the function of establishing rules for social cooperation in small groups. But now we face an environment of large-group geopolitical problems beyond our evolved moral adaptations. Sauer holds out hope that maybe “a feast of calm and community will once again take its place, unleashed and conquered by reason.” One can question whether there ever was "a feast of calm and community" and whether such a hope is not diminished by an earlier observation: “We don’t just disagree, we hate each other.”