Nonzero:The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright (Book Review)

Robert Wright’s Nonzero is not a poker book. I picked it up because it claimed to apply game theory to human evolution, both biological and cultural, and to offer a sweeping and prophetic account of humanity’s history and future. Yes, that’s a pretty ambitious goal, and the author acknowledges as much. Wright does indeed provide a fascinating, fast-paced survey of the history of human civilization that, despite occupying only one-third of a not particularly long book, rarely feels rushed. His predictions for the future are spotty, which can be forgiven, but he could at least provide more guidance about what the world’s leaders ought to do to continue to pursue mutually advantageous relationships. As nothing more than an educated layperson, I found Nonzero to be a quite compelling introduction to the continuing evolution of human civilization, with at least a glimpse into what the future might hold as well.

I also found most of the content to be not nearly as controversial as the author seemed to expect it would be. This, I think, is due to the fact that I was not previously familiar with the academic literature that Wright engages. The central thesis of Nonzero is that, at both the cellular level and the cultural level, the possiblity of realizing nonzerosum gains rewards cooperation and complexity and punishes those who go it alone. Though I found it unremarkable to suggest that life on earth is evolving towards ever-greater complexity and that this evolution is not solely motivated by changes in the external environment, Wright exerts a good deal of effort refuting some prominent academics who argue otherwise. In his defense, he does provide a very accessible introduction to these long-standing debates.

The accessibility of Wright’s writing is both its strength and its weakness. On the one hand, Nonzero engages, educates, and entertains those, like myself, who know very little about its subject matter. However, the large part of such a wide audience will have little interest in the most academic details Wright presents. For those few who do have the background to care about these debates, this book is surely too superficial. Wright dismisses a book-length argument by famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, in no more than a few paragraphs.

For all of its academic diversions, Nonzero has disappointingly little to do with game theory, the field from which it derives its name. In fact, I frequently found myself wondering why Wright chose the unwieldy term “nonzerosumness” when it seemed that terms like “cooperation” or “mutually advantageous” might have fared just as well. Apparently I wasn’t the only one: Wright dedicates a lengthy appendix to arguing, rather convincingly, for his choice of terminology.

The key distinction is that a nonzerosum relationship is not, in itself, cooperation. It is only the potential for cooperation, which is not always realized. Wright’s argument is that it is the realization of nonzerosum benefits, moreso than a changing environment or a quirk of human history, that has driven the evolution of ever-more-complex social arrangements. Just as nature selects for plants and animals for their survivability, so it selects for the human societies most adapt at taking advantage of nonzerosum opportunities. A single hunter acting alone can catch a single rabbit. Thirty hunters acting in concert can catch fifty rabbits with a net. The latter, either through violence or cultural assimilation, will eventually drive the former to extinction. And then the rabbit-catching tribes that best maximize trade opportunities with nearby fishing tribes will prosper at the expense of less social tribes, and so on until we have the internet and the World Trade Organization orchestrating the mutually advantageous exchange of goods and information among billions of people.

It is in this sense that Wright’s subtitle speaks of “destiny”. His claim is not that this particular configuration of human societies was inevitable, nor even that human beings themselves were destined to come about, but rather that nonzerosum logic will always drive humans towards higher degrees of organization, and even that organic evolution would eventually have led to some species with particularly human characteristics: tool-making, written and spoken language, political organization, etc.

Wright’s case for these claims is both fascinating and compelling. He is conversant across a wide range of academic disciplines and brings evidence from all of them, as well as from the course of human history and indeed the history of all life on earth, to bear on his subjects. Impressively, despite the breadth of the book, it rarely feels rushed or superficial. The author’s writing is lively, succinct, and targeted. He moves briskly from the birth of hunter-gatherer societies to the dawn of the modern age by focusing on detailed case studies from each era and weaving them all together into a coherent pattern, or an arrow, as he puts it.

When it comes to the question of where that arrow is pointing, Nonzero is somewhat less satisfying. Wright argues that the pressure on a societies to evolve or die has generally come from other societies. The Iroquois nations banded together to fend off the Europeans, the European Union formed to compete with the United States, etc. With humanity now on the brink (according to Wright) of becoming a single society, where will the pressure for such a transformation come from? Extraterrestrial invasion is a possiblity, but Wright argues that transnational problems like climate change and terrorism are already driving the world closer together.

That’s all well and good, but it’s little more than observation. Perhaps Wright can’t be expected to provide the details, and in fact his central argument is that they don’t ultimately matter, but his book is also disappointingly short on policy recommendations. Though he never explicitly advocates for such, the expansion of free trade zones and lowering of trade barriers and protectionist tariffs would seem to hasten the advent of a world government. However, he also barely addresses the common objections to economic globalization: the plight of laborers, the empowerment of unaccountable multinational corporations, and the eradication of diversity in favor of a global monoculture.

This latter is a particularly damning problem, to which Wright does pay some scant attention, since diversity has always been critical to evolution. Diverse species or societies competing for the same resources generates evolutionary pressure and ultimately selects for the best mutation or idea. Part of Wright’s argument for the inevitability of advanced life is that, even if homo sapiens hadn’t achieved it, a different species eventually would have. He repeatedly emphasizes that critical technologies such as irrigation, language, and writing evolved separately among several different civilizations, the implication being that even if one society stumbles, others will eventually generate similarly good ideas and useful technologies.

But is this still possible in a monocultural world? Wright acknowledges the problem but offers little reassurance, save to say that this raises the stakes and humanity will have to be extra-careful to avoid a catastrophe. Nonzero touches on several other potentially interesting implications of its thesis, including the potential role of divinity and the seeming unneccesity of consciousness, but wisely chooses not to engage these tangential issues too deeply.

The result is a fascinating interdisciplinary account of human civilization complete with tantalizing hints about what the future may hold. Though not a truly academic book, and certainly not a game theory book, Nonzero is an eye-opening read for anyone unfamiliar with its subject matter. It doesn’t quite live up to its authors lofty ambitions, but that’s saying only so much given that the book’s subtitle promises “the logic of human destiny.”