ABSTRACT
It is important for clarifying one of this book’s main distinctions – that between moral and dispositional guilt – to know what human society was like in the beginning. We need to have some picture of human life that is not under the sway of dispositional guilt. Furthermore, the theory of cultural evolution to be developed in Part II will require a base point.
This chapter will focus on two contrasting examples of superficial guilt, or naive cultures, cultures in which there appears to have been no inherited or dispositional guilt. The culture of the Australian Aborigines was impressively stable before British settlement, both in terms of reproducing itself (biologically and culturally) and maintaining itself with relatively high levels of individual wellbeing, and pretty much free from serious internal conflict. The culture of the early European Middle Ages was diabolically unstable, with the human experience that of Hobbesean anarchy – lived in continual fear, and the danger of violent death, with life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
