Concern with morality doesn’t immediately come to mind as a hallmark of the Stone Age (roughly 30,000–3000 BCE), an era when human life was marked by violent struggle for survival. Yet it was during those remote, prehistoric times that our species developed the ability to discern good from evil. This ability ultimately “enabled us to achieve all we have,” claims Dutch philosopher Hanno Sauer in The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality.
To have morality, a species needs to be able to cooperate, and that ability isn’t unique to humans. Fish swim in schools; ants and bees divide and organize their labor to achieve a common goal. But humans are different: by “putting aside the interests of the individual in favour of the greater common good,” we developed a “special form of cooperation,” moral behavior, that set us apart from the rest of creation. Sauer blends philosophical insights with anthropological, psychological, and archaeological research to explore the history of how we’ve determined right from wrong, but also to attempt to explain today’s questions about morality. How did early hominids armed with stone tools and an innate sense of right and wrong become a civilization willing to ignore that hardwired sensibility and commit genocide? Ironically, it was civilization itself that played a major role in our journey there.
As it does for fish, ants, and bees, cooperation enabled us to thrive. The more we learned how to work together, the better we became at hunting for food and protecting ourselves from predators in a dangerous and hardscrabble environment. But this safety-in-numbers approach tends to unravel when selfish individuals in the group (or clan or tribe) reap the rewards of collective effort without pitching in. The behavior of such “freeloaders,” as Sauer labels them, rankles our sense of morality. These moral intuitions can be observed in early childhood. Researchers have found that children under the age of one respond more positively to figures and shapes that appear helpful as opposed to those “that seem to hinder and harm others.”
Figuring out what to do about the laziest, most exploitative members of society, Sauer argues, inspired one of the first steps on our journey from the savannah to the citadel: punishment. “Around 500,000 years ago, we learned to use social sanctions to make uncooperative behaviour relatively unprofitable,” he theorizes. Expulsion from the tribe was one solution. But when freeloading turned violent (tyranny, bullying, physical attacks), the response was equally severe. “[W]e domesticated ourselves by simply killing the most aggressive and violent members of groups,” Sauer writes, offering as one bit of evidence twenty-thousand-year-old rock carvings in Sicily depicting an execution. From “a historical point of view,” he points out, “societies in which there was no ritualised and legally sanctioned murder of undesirables were very much the exception.”
When we existed in small groups, managing the occasional freeloader was relatively easy. But as populations grew in proportion to our increased tendency to cooperate, so, too, did the potential for freeloading on a much bigger scale. While moral arguments for and against the death penalty are still debated, capital punishment nonetheless played a “key role…in the evolution of humankind and, above all, in the evolution of good and evil,” Sauer postulates.
Food systems played another key role. The development of agriculture around ten thousand years ago, following climatic change at the end of the last Ice Age, contributed to population growth. By domesticating plants and animals, humans no longer had to respond to the environment and instead started controlling it. This initiated a huge cultural shift in the way people inhabited the planet and interacted with one another. Where once we existed in small, fairly egalitarian (tool-sharing, women-empowering), nomadic, hunter-gatherer groups connected by close bonds of kinship, our increasing numbers instead tied us to one place, where blood kinship played less of a role and egalitarianism simply wasn’t practical.
Moreover, growing populations needed to be fed, and this required management. Famous lists of dos and don’ts, like Hammurabi’s Code (eighteenth century BCE) and the Ten Commandments (four centuries later) spelled out the role of monarchs, priests, and legal authorities in keeping societies from splitting at the seams. But words etched in stone were nothing more than that without authority behind them. That authority ultimately derived from the concept of an “omniscient and omnipresent punishing” entity “who registers and prosecutes every violation of the rules”—in other words, God.
Once we got our heads around the concept of a deity (or deities), the idea of an immortal soul was a natural by-product. The profound social inequality of early civilizations created “an ideal breeding ground for religions based on salvation and afterlife,” especially if one’s lot in life was brutal oppression, slavery, and misery. Under such circumstances, the promise of a payoff at the end of it all offered some comfort. While it would take another millennium for the ancient Greeks to give the whole business a name—metaphysics—recognizing that we are composed of both flesh and spirit was another significant step in our moral evolution.
Unfortunately, after centuries of being ruled by elite political and religious authorities, Sauer writes, “social inequality became our second nature.” In Europe, the medieval Church offered salvation for all, yet made room at the front of the line for the wealthy through indulgences, paving the way for pushback from the likes of Luther and Calvin. Ironically, it was economics—the development of global markets—that ultimately helped undermine the might of popes and kings by establishing a power base among the emerging middle class on the eve of the Renaissance. Political freedom via modern democracy soon followed.
Yet the flip side of political freedom is that it can be used to create misinformation and propaganda. In Nazi Germany and at today’s MAGA rallies, citizens “use a romanticized vision of the past, discomfort towards sexual transgressions, a desire for law and order, belief in a natural hierarchy of races, peoples or genders, and an anti-intellectual scepticism towards experts to activate our ‘us’ and ‘them’ psychology.”
In the end, Sauer offers hope for humanity in its struggle with itself. Cultural conservatives may be obsessed with “the present decline in values,” but history has shown that liberal reforms typically follow such supposed declines because “socio-cultural evolution generates new forms of cooperation.” And because morality is both prehistoric and universal—every culture and faith has a code of conduct—we know that “moral values…are much less superficial and much less ephemeral” than the politics of the day. Political divisions, no matter how bitter, Sauer concludes, “can be overcome by appealing to the moral values and norms we all share.”
The Invention of Good and Evil
A World History of Morality
Hanno Sauer
Translated by Jo Heinrich
Oxford University Press
$29.99 | 416 pp.
