Chapter 11.                                    Part B 

         Therefore, in Western history, the next important world view is the Roman one. Operating under it, people in general became even more practical, more focused on physical effectiveness and power, and less interested in, or even aware of, ideas considered for their own sake. This feeling expressed itself among many of the early Romans simply and directly in an out-and-out hatred for all things Greek; the truth was that the Romans borrowed much from the Greeks, especially in theoretical knowledge, but many Romans loathed having to admit it. 

           The Romans in their heyday no longer feared the gods in the way that the ancient Greeks and the Romans’ own ancestors once had. As the Roman Republic faded and the Roman Empire took over, the Romans went so far from that way of thinking that they lost much of the Greek, especially the Athenian, capacity for the things called “abstract” – wonder, idealism, pure geometry, philosophical speculation, and flights of imagination. The Romans built their state on Athenian-style, democratic principles, values, and behaviors, but they also, more like the Spartans, loved practical results and power, not abstract speculation.

                     

                                      Pont du Gard: Roman aqueduct (in present day France) 

            It is tempting here to see in Roman culture a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and those of the Spartans/Macedonians. This would be an example of Hegel’s famous dialectic. One way of thinking, along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows, and then an opposite way of thinking rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way.  The two struggle, interact, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not like a compromise because it is a new way with a life and identity of its own. 

            The people who are born into the new way are not aware of using some elements from one philosophy and some from the other. The new way is simply their way, and the supporting ideas that are added to the new system make it seem like a neat, smooth, seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system always spiraling up toward greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

               

            It is tempting. It’s a fairly simple model and with a little stretching it can be made to at least seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is simply too simple. The Roman way of thinking and way of life did contain some ideals similar to those of the Athenians and some like those of the Spartan ones, but there was too much else going on in the thinking and living styles of the Romans for us to be satisfied with Hegel’s model. Human societies are subtler than that. What makes more sense is to look at each society and see what its world view, values, morés, and behavior patterns were like and how they coordinated in the lives of the people who operated under them to produce a whole culture and way of life that met the survival demands of the time. Using that humbler, but subtler and more nuanced, model, we can learn about how human societies really work.

               

            The point is that the model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as all-encompassing as Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model because the real process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit that model. Rather, the real process of human cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution in the rest of nature, by genetic variation and natural selection and accident and disaster.

             Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the mechanism that Hegel describes. In the past, conditions in the non-living world like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down, or opened up, reams of opportunities in the living world. Then, usually, life forms moved in opportunistically. Life spreads across time and space not like a chain or a road or a ladder, but like a stream branching and bifurcating over and over onward from that primal source started from a few cells long ago. And it is also important to emphasize that the direction of growth, in the living world, is against the flow of entropy. Life flows "uphill". The direction of living flow is from the source into the branches, not the other way round. 

             The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for cognitive attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But life isn’t that neat, and it is in the realm of the living that our models of human culture must be placed. The model that we are going to explore here can do what we need it to do. It can give us enough insights into how human cultures work, and what right and wrong are, both apparently and really, for us to then be able to build a rational moral code. And that is all we need.