Review: Moral y civilización

Moral y civilización. Una historia by Juan Antonio Rivera

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book was given to me as a birthday present by my friend, Carlos Gómez, who went to university with the author. Not long thereafter, Juan Antonio Rivera passed away unexpectedly, leaving this book as his final work. Carlos, naturally, was distraught at the news. The last time we spoke, I asked Carlos about Juan’s life. Juan was a highly independent man, who lived surrounded by books—thousands and thousands of books, on every subject and in every genre. Carlos recalls entering his home and being unable to sit down for the sheer quantity of reading material.

Naturally, I can only respect someone so singularly dedicated to the life of the mind. I read this work, therefore, as a kind of homage to this thinker whom I never had the opportunity to meet.

As it happens, I was well-prepared to tackle this work. With the exception of Friedrich Hayek, I was familiar with all the thinkers most often cited: Charles Darwin, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, David Graeber, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Kahneman, and Jared Diamond, among others. If you are familiar with these writers, you may notice that none of them are philosophers. And, indeed, this book is not really a work of moral philosophy in the strict sense. Rivera is not concerned with the old question of ethics—how an individual might make a moral choice. He is concerned, rather, with how morality evolved over time, and how it operates now.

In a book that begins with the evolution of altruistic behaviors and ends with a defense of classical liberalism, a lot of intellectual ground is covered. It is not easy to summarize it all. The pithiest way that I can encapsulate Rivera’s view is that he is extremely suspicious of rationality. By this, I mean that he distrusts individual decision-making, even—or especially—when it is guided by conscious, logical thought. He thinks it is impossible for one person to have it all figured out.

This will be clearer if I give examples. People are moral, he thinks, when they are guided by a combination of biology and custom—that is, when they act as programmed. But when they strive to create an explicit morality, they create ideologically extreme systems like communism or religious fundamentalism, and seek to subject everyone to their vision. To give another example, he thinks that societies are pushed forward, not by individual geniuses, but by collective intelligence—the ability to subdivide work, to find inspiration in others’ ideas, to find new uses for other’ inventions. Both in natural selection and the free market, he sees the operation of an intelligence that far exceeds any given person’s, and he trusts these processes for their very impersonality.

Perhaps I am making this sound unreasonable, but there is a strong logic to his argument. After all, it is true that evolution has given rise to miracles of engineering that far exceed what humanity has accomplished, and that even our own engineering marvels are often a result of a slow accumulation of collective insight. Arguably, most people act reasonably moral without ever pausing to reflect on the basis of their ethical system. Even AI works, not through high-powered logic, but by being trained with masses of data. You might say his philosophy is trial and error elevated to a principle.

For about the first three-quarters of the book, Rivera examines how different sorts of trial-and-error processes gave rise to the modern concept of morality. He begins with Darwinian selection, using the oft-cited prisoner’s dilemma to show how altruistic behavior can evolve. Then he shows how the human brain, shaped by evolution and then culture, subconsciously guides our actions. He discusses how the rise of agriculture led to a kind of self-domestication by the human species, how the Catholic church led to a rise in individualism in Europe, and finally how a rise in material prosperity led to a decline in violence.

In short, Rivera marshals principles of psychology, sociology, and history in order to demonstrate that morality is the by-product of non-rational, evolutionary processes. And all of this leads up, somewhat unexpectedly, to an endorsement of liberalism. Rivera sees a society that strongly emphasizes individual rights as the one most likely to be morally advanced—partly, because it benefits from a diversity of skills and insights, and partly because it forces its members to develop an ethic of tolerance and respect.

Indeed, this last point is captured by one of Rivera’s coinages: “cold morality” vs. “warm morality.” A warm morality is one based on familial ties—in other words, an ethic of collectivism. While such an ethic might work very well for a small group of hunter-gatherers, Rivera says, the familial ethic cannot be scaled up to work on a societal scale. It is simply impossible for me to care about a stranger on the street the way I care about my brother. This is why he endorses a “cold morality,” which involves little more than leaving people alone to do what they think best. As he says, it is the negative version of the golden rule—don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have them do unto you—rather than the positive version.

Both in his politics, then, and in his philosophical views, he is extremely skeptical of others—their conclusions, their reasoning, and their values. His defense of liberalism is thus rooted in the idea that nobody can have it all figured out, so we ought to just leave each other alone.

Certainly, there is a great deal to recommend this view. Believe me: I am not going to argue in this review that we ought not to have individual rights. Nevertheless, I was not fully satisfied by the way that Rivera set about arguing his conclusions. His rejection of utopian thinking and embrace of liberalism largely rests on his perception that the former has failed and the latter has succeeded in practice. That may be true, though there are many factors which influence the success or failure of a political system. Further, in the earlier sections of the book, I felt as if he were taking concepts from works of popular science and combining them rather too freely—like the puzzle-pieces of a foregone conclusion.

I should also mention the unacknowledged irony of an tome such as this arguing against the preeminence of the intellect. It seems self-defeating to spend a great deal of intellectual energy arguing that thinkers ought not to try to find a universal set of morals. Morality may be a product of natural and social evolution, and moral reasoning may be subconscious most of the time, but I still think the question of what is right or wrong cannot be entirely sidestepped. Virtually everyone is confronted, from time to time, with a moral conundrum, when it seems entirely unclear what the right thing to do is. Rivera admits that these situations exist, though his book doesn’t provide any guideposts for navigating difficult terrain.

Nevertheless, I think this is an impressive book. Rivera is obscenely well-read and combines insights from many different fields. More than that, he is able to make his philosophy readable. Going back to José Ortega y Gasset, Spain has a strong tradition of popular philosophy—of original philosophical works written in a charming and accessible style. Rivera’s book is a worthy contribution to this tradition, as it is learned without being pedantic. It is a shame that we cannot look forward to more works by this thinker.



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