Terence's Reviews > The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

An serendipitous sequel to The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, the last nonfiction I read before tackling this one. Where Wrangham focused on humans' decreased reactive aggression compared to other animals, Moffett focuses on humans' ability to create anonymous social networks similar to those of social insects like ants or bees.

My goal is to show that membership in a society is as essential for our well-being as finding a mate or loving a child....

The evidence presented in this book points to societies being a human universal. Human ancestors lived in fission-fusion groups that evolved, by simple steps, from individual recognition societies to societies set apart by markers. The ingroup-outgroup boundaries of society membership would have made it through this transition unaltered. That means that humans have always had societies. There was no original, "authentic" human society, no time when people and families lived in an open social network before deciding to set themselves apart into well-defined groups. Being in a society - indeed, multiple, contrasting societies - is more indispensable and ancient than faith or matrimony, having been the way of things from before we were human. (p. 13, 353)