In this week’s Hub book review, Patrick Luciani examines The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality (Oxford Press, 2025), by Hanno Sauer, which takes on the ambitious task of offering a universal history of morality.
Through hard experience, the world has learned two truths: protecting countries with tariffs leads to poverty, and vaccines have saved humanity more than any other medical breakthrough.
Yet we are stuck in a world where both are under assault. The U.S. now has a vaccine skeptic heading the Department of Health and Human Services, while Donald Trump is moving the American economy back to mercantilism.
Why is there so much willful ignorance?
Some are compelled to believe in such nonsense through lies and threats of violence. Shakespeare understood tyrants like Richard III, who knew how to maintain the loyalty of enablers and supporters through fear: “I’ll make a corpse of him that disobeys.” We observe that kind of intimidation in the current cabinet of our great neighbor to the south.
Another explanation for irrational behaviour is available in a new, well-written, and fascinating moral history of humanity. The central message of The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality by Hanno Sauer, a philosophy teacher at the University of Utrecht, is that our prehistoric ancestors and Homo sapiens didn’t survive over the millennia by learning to reason but by learning to cooperate.
Sauer, who draws heavily on the work of cognitive psychologists, argues that, throughout the long sweep of evolutionary history that began on the savannas of Africa, cooperation required everyone to contribute for the tribe to survive. Those who didn’t were punished, shamed, or killed. This trait of community survival demanded cohesion and obedience. Loyalty to our team was more important than truth.
According to Sauer, we fiercely debate social issues today because we have “unleashed the forces of age-old instincts, once again making us divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’” One researcher noted, “It feels good to stick to our guns even if we are wrong.” Cooperation with our friends or those on “our side” makes us hostile toward those on the outside. This is one reason we are susceptible to “confirmation bias,” the tendency to accept information only when it aligns with our beliefs. Consequently, the old adage is true: it isn’t easy to reason with those who were never reasoned into their beliefs, which pertains to most of us at one time or another. Here we can thank thinkers like the Nobel psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky who taught that “self-delusion helps sustain most people.”
One of Sauer’s more fascinating observations is the idea of “cultural evolution.” Information, knowledge, and technology are handed down from generation to generation, where they are absorbed and built upon. We aren’t required to know how everything around us functions. Few people understand how jet engines, cell phones, or even the principles of a flush toilet work. Our ignorance of how technology or things work does us no harm. We use it and move on.
It’s different when we have opinions about politics. Ignorance can do real harm when misinformation affects public policy. For example, one study shows that people know much less than they think. On the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, respondents were asked two questions: how should the U.S. respond militarily? And second, can you locate Ukraine on a map? Those who were geographically challenged tended to favour stronger military intervention. Sauer states: “When it comes to political issues, we become ideological partisans [rather] than autonomous citizens using our rational skills to find reasonable solutions to concrete problems.”
The Invention of Good and Evil reminds us that individual political choices have consequences for society when the cost of individual irrational behaviour is zero. Sauer quotes the great Harvard economic historian Joseph Schumpeter, who stated 80 years ago that “the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He becomes a primitive again.” There’s a word for this, “ultracrepidarianism.” You can look it up.
Political opinions are intertwined with our identities and group affiliations, making it challenging to confront misinformation with facts. Evidence often provokes even stronger support for misguided ideas. Conspiracy believers typically respond with the five most dangerous words in the internet age: “I did my own research.”
Sauer has deepened our understanding of how cooperation, morality, and reasoning have evolved. The good news is that readers of his book will benefit from reevaluating their political opinions. The bad news is that those who need to read the book are unlikely to do so.
Editor’s note: a previous version of this article misspelled Hanno Sauer’s name. The Hub regrets the error.
Patrick Luciani is a writer and book reviewer for The Hub and former executive director of the Donner Canadian Foundation.
