early Roman army attacking a city (credit: Juan de la Corte, via 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 interact, struggle, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not a compromise because it is a new, coherent, unified way with a life of its own. Thesis, anti-thesis, and after a while, synthesis. That’s Hegel.

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 they add ideas to the new system till it feels 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 too simple. The Roman ways of thinking 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 us to accept Hegel’s model 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. The Romans weren’t Atheno-Spartans. They were alien to all the Greeks in those times. They were, more accurately, first, a society that contained some elements that looked Athenian and some that looked Spartan, and second, capable of defeating any Greek army that was assembled against them. In short, History is subtler than Hegel's model. 

What makes more sense is to examine each historical society’s worldview, values, morés, and behavior 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 simply 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, events 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 into new habitats 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 attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But both animal life and human cultural life aren’t that neat. Our models of human culture must be grounded 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.