I’ll be honest. I didn’t get more than a few chapters into Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Sorry Chris.
It’s not that it wasn’t interesting or insightful. It was both. But it was also 400 pages of dense academic prose and it wasn’t really working out for me as bedtime reading before it came due at the library.
Wright argues that over time, human society trends toward more complexity and more interdependence. As our collective brain expands, life for everyone improves. We play nonzero sum games, over and over and over again, and everyone is better off because of it.
The logic makes sense. If you depend on your neighbor for meat and he depends on you for grain, you’re less likely to attack each other. Fast forward a few thousand years, if we depend on China for iPhones and they depend on us for jobs, we’re less likely to attack each other.
Wright’s LONG term, BIG picture view makes the petty discourse that dominates our politics seem silly.
Are we on a predestined path to global peace and prosperity? I don’t know… I didn’t make it to the end.
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