Thus in Western history, the next important worldview is the Roman one. Operating under it, people became even more practical, more focused on physical effectiveness and power, and less interested in, or even aware of, ideas for their own sake. Among many of the early Romans, this feeling expressed itself in a hatred of all things Greek; the truth was that, though they did not like to admit it, the early Romans borrowed heavily from the Greeks, especially in theoretical knowledge.

In their heyday, the Romans no longer feared the gods in the way the ancient Greeks and the Romans’ own ancestors once had. As the Republic faded and the Empire took over, the Romans turned so far from earlier thinking that they lost much of the Greek, especially the Athenian, capacity for abstract things—wonder, idealism, pure geometry, pure philosophical speculation, and flights of imagination and of their own sense of duty to one’s nation. The Romans built their state on Athenian-style, democratic principles, values, and behaviours, but like the Spartans, they loved results and power, not speculation.

                           

   

        Pont du Gard: Roman aqueduct in present-day France (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It is tempting to see in the Romans’ culture a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and those of the Spartans. This is an example of Hegel’s 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, coherent, unified way with a life of its own.

The people born into the new way are not aware they are using some elements from one philosophy and some from another. The new way is simply their way, and ideas that are added to the new system make it feel like a seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system spiralling upward to greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

It is tempting. It is a fairly simple model, and with a little stretching it can be made to seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is simply too simple. The Roman ways of thinking of life did contain some ideals similar to those of both the Athenians and the Spartans, but we know there was too much else going on in the thinking and living style of the Romans for Hegel’s model to be seen as satisfactory today. The Romans also came into power in the ancient world by a culture that was their own, evolved over generations of farmers who banded together to protect their farms and their families and built a city as a central fortress that would facilitate their realizing this goal. Human societies are subtler than Hegel's model. 

What makes more sense is to examine each historical society‘s worldview, values, morés, and behaviour patterns and observe how they coordinated to produce a whole culture and way of life that met the citizens’ survival needs at the time. Under that humbler view, we can learn much more about how human societies really work.

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 process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit Hegel’s model. Rather, the 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 like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down, or opened up, reams of opportunities. Then, usually, life forms moved in opportunistically. Life spreads across time and space not like a chain or road, but like a bush branching and bifurcating from that primal trunk started from a few cells eons ago.

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 our models of human culture must be placed in the realm of the living. The model explored 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, for us to be able to build a rational moral code. One that maximizes our odds of survival. And that is all we need.