Philosophical essay linking human evolution to evil, with a brief mention of President George W. Bush

but — in the millions of years that encompass their evolutionary history, bonobos have remained virtually unchanged. They are still hairy, quadrupedal, bitsy-brained and barking. They still live in the jungles of Africa. Not a single bonobo, or its close relative the chimpanzee, has ever taken a step out of Africa the way that members of our species did some 60-100,000 years ago. In fact, not a single bonobo or chimpanzee has ever ventured across national borders within the continent to explore new opportunities or develop new cultures. Not a single bonobo or chimpanzee has even moved out of the forests and on to the beaches or deserts or alpine environments of Africa. Not one. When we took our steps out of Africa, we did so with confidence, ready to tackle new environments, create novel tools, engage in rituals to commemorate the dead, build fires to cook food and keep warm, join hands with unrelated strangers in the service of cooperation, and create oral histories that could be passed on to generations of children. What enabled this celebratory migration was a cerebral migration. Not only did our brain get much bigger than the one housed within bonobo and chimpanzee skulls, it evolved into an engine that generates an unlimited combination of thoughts and feelings. We uniquely evolved a promiscuous brain. What does promiscuity buy? In a word: “creativity.” It enables regions of the brain that evolved for highly specialized functions to intermingle with other regions of the brain to create new ways of thinking and new ways of experiencing what we see, hear, touch, taste and feel. A promiscuous brain paved the way for awe-inspiring bursts of creativity in art, music, literature and science. A promiscuous brain enabled Bach and Bono, Picasso and Pollock, Shakespeare and Shaw, and Descartes and Darwin. A promiscuous brain enables us to imagine things we have never directly experienced, to create once unimaginable worlds, including blissful heavens and living hells. My focus in this book has been the infernos we create for other human beings, here on this earth. What I have argued is that we got here by accident. When our brains allowed us to combine familiar thoughts and feelings to create virgin ideas, it enabled us to feel good about doing bad. It enabled us to incur the costs of punishing others while reaping the rewards of marching to the moral high ground. It enabled us to solve the problem of large scale cooperation with unrelated strangers. This was a fundamental breakthrough in mental life, a spectacular benefit, and the target of strong selection. But benefits often carry hidden costs. When punishment triggered a honey hit to the brain, violence and reward formed an eternal bond. We now carry the burden of a brain that engages in denial in order to satisfy our desires. When these concepts couple, the odds of conceiving excessive harms is virtually guaranteed. Sometimes this malicious offspring is intended and at other times it is foreseen. Either way, the world has been populated with evildoers in waiting. Either way, our world hosts a species that has the creative capacity to financially ruin, mutilate, rape, burn, torture, and extinguish millions of lives. Often, this potential is realized. My aim in this book has been to explain evil to better understand its origins, not to justify or promote it. My aim has been to explain evil to clarify its root cause, to alert others to its early warning signs, and to pave the way to a more humane existence. I have suggested that evil, expressed in the form of excessive harms, is caused by two ingredients: desire and denial. These are psychological states. On their own, they are often inert. When combined, they are often explosive. Desires. We all have them, from birth till death, from a desire for perpetual maternal warmth to a desire for eternal life. Some of our desires change over the course of our lives while others stay the same. We all desire good health and happiness. We differ, however, in what counts as good health and happiness. Many of us experience, at least once in our life, the desire to harm another. Our desire to harm ranges from the mundane — uttering a sarcastic comment about someone’s looks or telling a racist joke — to the horrific — creating corrupt corporate schemes or policies of ethnic cleansing. Sometimes what we desire is rather benign, but linked to foreseeable atrocities. Sometimes our desires are toxic, as when we plot to extinguish a culturally distinctive group. On one reading, President George W. Bush may well have initiated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as retaliatory attacks on terrorists, designed to protect American interests and well-being. But he brought much of our nation on board by weaving a web of lies and feeding a cowboy mentality of revenge rather than nurturing compassion and understanding. The consequences, clearly foreseen at the time, have been excessive. As a nation, we did not pursue an eye- for-an-eye revenge. We had a different algorithm in mind, on the order of 30,000 eyes for an eye. Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 145 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012891