“Ultra Society” by Peter Turchin

Turchin is an academic in the burgeoning field of cultural evolution. In this book he seeks to explain how large scale societies eventually out-competed smaller ones. He sees war as the prime mover of societal change. War and competition for resources explains why our ancestors moved from foragers to farmers, even though fixed agriculture was actually detrimental to any single individual’s health and nutrition level. As a group, agricultural societies could out-compete bands of foragers. Another of Turchin’s themes is that while competition between groups leads to novel improvements and progress, competition within groups leads to gross inequalities, which breeds disfunction. This explains why human societies have ebbed and flowed between relatively egalitarian bands, to chiefdoms with hereditary God-Kings, and, finally, to rule-of-law based governments. Perhaps paradoxically, he posits that it was warfare and the threat of warfare that has led humans to be the greatest of all cooperators in the animal kingdom. It is this large-scale cooperation and trust between strangers that, in fact, make humans so unique.