The Illusion of Morality Part 2

Why Nietzsche referred to human beings the "sick animal"

Friedrich Nietzsche referred to humans as the “sick animal”. In this post I will defend this claim, with reference to some literature from modern evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution. Why are we sick, according to Nietzsche? What made us that way? We are sick, Nietzsche argues, because of morality. He means something quite specific by this and is probably not using the term morality in the way we would normally use it. He doesn’t mean that we are sick because we sometimes do nice things for people or give money to charity or anything like that. He is, in fact, referring to a phenomenon that only occurred after the advent of agriculture. For Nietzsche, we are sick because we are suffering from what evolutionary psychologists call a “mismatch”. 

Human beings lived for millions of years primarily in small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. Evolutionary psychologists have long argued that we have a set of psychological adaptations (i.e., instincts) that evolved in the context of life in these small-scale hunter-gatherer groups. In this context, we were often living on restricted calories, we were often at war with neighboring groups (there is good archaeological evidence for this), we were often exposed to the elements (i.e., no air-conditioning), and there was no socially enforced monogamy, meaning that polygamy (one man with multiple women) would have been relatively common. Because we evolved in a context that is so different from the one we currently inhabit, our evolved psychological dispositions are often at odds with what is optimal in the current environment. 

For example, obesity-related diseases are one of the main causes of premature death in modern Western countries (especially America). One of the main causes of obesity is a very high sugar intake. We crave sugary foods even though it is usually detrimental to our health. This craving for sugar would have been extremely useful to our ancestors evolving on the African veldt, as it would have motivated them to seek out one of the best sources of calories available to them — honey. Honey (and other sugary food) is great for somebody whose main dietary lack is calories. But for somebody who is already overweight, this craving for sugar is clearly maladaptive. Our sugar-craving instinct is mismatched with our current environment. 

Nietzsche noticed a different kind of mismatch. Many things changed dramatically when we transitioned from life in small-scale hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural civilizations. Before this transition, we may have personally known everyone in our group. Afterwards, we ended up living in groups of tens or hundreds of thousands of people in which many people would be unknown to us. This means that before the transition, we could largely police social transgressors through gossip and reputation management. If somebody was doing something that violated social norms, people would gossip about that person and this could eventually lead to coordinated punishment, including ostracizing or death. Accusations of malicious witchcraft may be used against norm-violators, for example, which would often motivate the community to coordinate their punishment of that person.

While gossip and personal norm-policing would still remain important in large-scale societies, these strategies lose their effectiveness the larger the society gets. One reason they become less effective is because it becomes more difficult to get large numbers of people to share a set of collective norms, which is necessary for coordinating punishment of norm-violators. It is also easier for norm-violators to move around or remain anonymous in large societies in order to skirt their punishment. After scaling up into large civilizations, we needed a new way of making sure people followed the rules. 

The advent of agriculture also increased the intensity of inter-group conflict, thereby increasing the intensity of cultural group selection. As Peter Turchin argued in his recent book Ultrasociety, war between groups has been the primary driver of cultural complexification over the last 10,000 years. Cultures that adopted institutions (including moral systems) that made them better at competing with other groups would have survived and proliferated better than other cultures. The best way to become more competitive is to get bigger. The more soldiers you can put on a battlefield, the more likely you are to win. Group size also encourages technological innovation since there will be more minds available to potentially discover new innovations. The cultural institutions (including religions and moral norms) that promoted group size would therefore be more likely to spread. Other groups tend to copy successful groups, which only exacerbates this process. The advent of agriculture thus created a kind of feedback loop, resulting in the rapid and massive expansion of human group size over the last 10,000 years or so. 

Michael Tomasello, in his 2014 book A Natural History of Human Morality explains how the advent of agriculture led to massive changes in the way we solved collective action problems:

The rise of agriculture and the cities it spawned was of course a monumental event in the history of human sociality. When human groups began coming to the food, people with very different cultural practices—who spoke different languages, ate different foods, wore different clothes, engaged in different forms of hygiene, and so forth—all came to live in close proximity to one another. And because they were sedentary, they had to find ways to get along, despite some different social norms and values. And, of course, agriculture meant that some individuals were able to dominate a surplus of food and use it as capital to wield power over others. Creating cooperative arrangements in these new social circumstances required some new supraindividual regulatory devices. Most important from the point of view of modern human morality were law and organized religion. (pp. 129-130)

Codified laws and organized doctrinal religions: These were the most important changes to human morality that occurred after the advent of agriculture. One of the biggest differences in how we did religion was the rise of “Big Gods” or “moralizing Gods”. The gods and spirits of most hunter-gatherer groups are not particularly moralistic. They usually do not care if you lie, steal, or cheat. They do not tend to punish these kinds of transgressions. There are some exceptions of course, but here we are concerned with general tendencies. After the rise of more large-scale, anonymous civilizations, we also see the rise of widespread belief in Gods who are moralistic and therefore punish moral transgressions. Turchin and colleagues (2022) analyzed historical data and concluded that “… military competition between societies is one of the main factors driving the evolution of [moralizing supernatural punishment] and moralizing religions.” (p. 18)

As Michael Tomasello argued in his 2014 book, before the rise of these new moralizing institutions we construed morality in a quite different way. Instead of construing moral norms as being woven into the fabric of reality (e.g., Karma) or provided to us by a transcendent God, we simply regarded our social norms as the way that “we” do things in our group. We regarded these norms and traditions as sacred simply because they were handed down to us by our venerated ancestors. We didn’t need codified laws or moralistic Gods to enforce these strictures. Our group-mates were perfectly willing to enforce them through gossip, ostracizing, or worse. This was the “natural” state for humans (natural in the sense that our evolved social instincts are adapted to this context). 

The rapid shift to codified laws and moralistic “Big Gods” as a result of cultural competition created a mismatch. Our evolved instincts no longer served us well in this new context. It was this mismatch that Nietzsche was picking up on. We developed an intense inner conflict. On the one hand, our instincts for aggression and sexual behavior were driving us to behave in particular ways, and on the other hand we were being socially punished (and simultaneously disappointing God) for acting instinctually. According to Nietzsche, this inner conflict was the source of the “bad conscience”, which is what he regards as the sickness that plagues modern humans:

I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace. The situation that faced sea animals when they were compelled to become land animals or perish was the same as that which faced these semi-animals, well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling, to adventure: suddenly all their instincts were disvalued and “suspended.” (Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals II. 16)

There is some disconnect here between Nietzsche’s view and the view of Turchin and colleagues, since Nietzsche regards “peace” as an important aspect of this transition, while Turchin and colleagues regard military conflict as the primary driver of the transition. However, to focus too much on this disconnect would be to miss the point. Relatively speaking, life was more peaceful in large-scale civilizations than in small-scale hunter-gatherer groups, even though war (when it did occur) became more of an existential threat. Nietzsche is simply recognizing that the way we organized our social lives changed quite suddenly. This change, Nietzsche argued, made our instincts turn against us.

We still see how this tension between instinct and morality plays out in modern religions, especially Christianity. Consider the words of Paul, who gives voice to the religious command to suppress the bodily instincts (the “flesh”) in favor of life in the “Spirit”:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law. Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you just as I have forewarned you that those who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. (Galatians 5:16-24)

Note that the sins of the flesh are sins that might be good for the individual’s interests (e.g., sensuality, jealousy, anger) but would reduce group cohesion. The characteristics of the “Spirit” are clearly better for group cohesion. The “Spirit” must therefore suppress our natural inclinations for sexuality, envy, anger, etc., in favor of more group-beneficial behaviors.

It is this suppression of instinct and simultaneous elevation of “spirit” or “reason” over the body, that Nietzsche is concerned with. He sees it as a source of great tension and inner conflict that must eventually be overcome. Nietzsche is often accused of wanting to go back to a more Homeric worldview, in which we are able to vent our anger, envy, cruelty, desire for power, and violence at will. In other words, Nietzsche is often read as if he wants us to return to what he calls “master morality” or “knightly-aristocratic” values. This is a simplistic reading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche certainly believes that we lost something of importance with the advent of Christianity (and therefore the rise of “slave morality”) in the Western world. We lost touch with our instincts. We lost touch with our masculinity. We lost touch with the value of strength, etc. Nietzsche definitely wants to re-incorporate “knightly-aristocratic” values, but that doesn’t mean he wants to return to a state of wanton violence. 

It seems clear from my reading that Nietzsche does not want us to go back to anything, but to move forward into a new worldview that does not suppress the instincts but sublimates them in the service of a higher value. Nietzsche criticizes slave morality (i.e., the morality that turns itself against the instincts) because it attempts to cut the human being off from natural inclinations toward aggression and sexuality, which are important sources of human creativity. Nevertheless, Nietzsche also regards slave morality as the reason human beings are so interesting. The tension caused by the rise of slave morality propelled us to turn inwards. To live instinctually is to live unconsciously. The inner conflict created by the tension between group-beneficial social norms and self-serving instincts drove us to understand ourselves. Self-consciousness was therefore the price we paid for civilization (allegorically captured by the story in Genesis of the expulsion from Eden), but it is also the source of many of our greatest cultural innovations. Nietzsche believed that it was only because of the rise of slave morality that we became philosophers, sages, and psychologists.

In his 1996 book Nietzsche’s System, John Richardson argued that Nietzsche regarded the rise of slave morality as a great opportunity. It was the rise of slave morality that eventually gave birth to nihilism, and modern nihilism represents a kind of chaos from which a new and better worldview can emerge. This worldview will not represent a return to “master morality”, which is how Nietzsche is often misread, but will instead be a synthesis of master and slave morality, encapsulated in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul” (Will to Power 983). This worldview will not seek to suppress our aggressive, egoistic instincts, nor will it pit them against an incorporeal “spirit” or the dictates of “reason”. It will instead harness our drive for adventure, conquest, and victory. It will sublimate these instincts in service of the pursuit of knowledge: 

For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it! (The Gay Science, 283)

Nietzsche thought that the suppression of the drives for adventure, conquest, and victory in the modern world (via “slave morality”) would lead to the rise of the most despicable kind of person — the last man. The last man seeks comfort above all else. The last man no longer understands the value of suffering and chaos and so avoids them. This makes him weak and ineffectual, but the last man calls this “happiness”. In Michael Easter’s 2021 book The Comfort Crisis, he outlines how modern people are suffering from an excess of comfort.

Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives. And it’s limiting the degree to which we experience our “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver put it. But a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose. (p. 5)

Nietzsche’s predictions seem to be as prescient as usual. And as Michael Easter suggests, this excess of comfort is also related to the meaning crisis in Western culture. In future posts I’ll discuss in more detail the causal relation between “slave morality” and the comfort crisis, in addition to how we might go about re-incorporating the value of discomfort — even suffering — into our worldview.