In 1590, after Norway’s most famous witch trial, Anne Pedersdotter was burned alive. Resource scarcity and religious competition transformed an old superstition into a witch craze to which Anne fell victim. Her story became a play in 1908 and a film in 1943. The two adaptations attempt to give Anne’s persecution more modern explanations. In the play Anne Pedersdotter, Anne has psychic powers that make her neighbors think she is a Satanic collaborator. In the film Day of Wrath, Anne embodies (...) humanistic aspirations that would have been delusional in her own era and that are perhaps also poorly adapted to human nature in general. The trial and the two fictional versions of the trial all illustrate how thought patterns that evolved for small groups of foragers can be overstimulated in post-agricultural environments. This article identifies cognitive dispositions that, in periods of crisis, can trigger persecution of outsiders, discusses how those universal mechanisms man­ifest themselves in different cultural contexts, and examines the historically specific beliefs and values that animate the two fictional versions of Anne’s story. The article concludes with reflections on how the evolved cognitive mechanisms that led to beliefs in witchcraft often manifest themselves, in the present, as conspiracy beliefs directed at minorities. (shrink)

The rural-migrant protagonist in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger fails to adapt to the urban environment because the moral algorithm that informs his collaborative choices is unfit for the city. He often responds poorly when overwhelmed by pride, shame, or other sensations that he struggles to make sense of. Such emotions are hypothesized to be neuro­computational adaptations crafted by natural selection to help us get ahead as collabora­tors. But with societal transformation, these feelings can become a poor match for a new reality. (...) Reprogramming oneself can be challenging; Hunger’s protagonist must suffer months of emotional and physical pain before he adapts. His journey, and Hamsun’s mod­ernist project, can be illuminated by recent research on status management and morality as cooperation. As literature, Hunger could fulfill several adaptive functions by mapping mor­als for urban pro-sociality at a time of great disruption. Similar moral adaptation could become necessary in our present era, too. (shrink)

In the contest between the three major modern political ideologies—liberalism, socialism, and fascism—the Nordic countries found a middle way with social democracy. For over four decades, Finland r...

Paradigm transitions come with tremendous risk, as societies can come undone when people stop believing in the imaginary constructs that unite us. The Black Plague’s devastation resulted not only f...

The Tristan legend is the quintessential love story of the Middle Ages. From the formative period of its courtly branch, the only extant complete version is Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (1226). King Hákon of Norway commissioned this and other romances to convince his aristocratic warriors to give up the kinship society ethos of heroic love that directed them to rape their enemies’ women. Courtly love sacralized female consent, yet critics have struggled to make sense of which purposes courtliness served. This (...) evolutionary reading of Tristrams saga reveals how courtly love not only functioned as an ideological bridge be­tween mating regimes, but also embodied proto-WEIRD psychology, the impersonal pro­sociality of the new mobile, educated, and transculturally inclusive European individual-as described by Henrich (2020). This ethos would evolve to become the morality of modernity. How it was disseminated exemplifies how fiction can help communities find provisional solutions to problems that cannot be solved definitely. (shrink)

Positive psychology is a thriving field with increasing political influence, yet there are few evolutionary studies that have had a tangible impact on rethinking mechanisms of well-being. This Element reviews existing literature and proposes synthesizing insights into human flourishing under an umbrella of multilevel selection (MLS). Conceptualizing quality of life as 'Happiness + Meaning = Well-being' draws attention to how people navigate between individual and group needs, and how they reconcile selfish pursuits with altruism and cooperation. We define happiness as (...) the cluster of affects that reward individuals for solving adaptive challenges. We approach meaning as a reward that individuals experience when contributing to their community. By way of examples, we critically examine the Nordic well-being societies whose ethos and education advance prosocial values and practices and strike a balance between individualist and communitarian ideals. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

The Tristan legend is the quintessential love story of the Middle Ages. From the formative period of its courtly branch, the only extant complete version is Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (1226). King Hákon of Norway commissioned this and other romances to convince his aristocratic warriors to give up the kinship society ethos of heroic love that directed them to rape their enemies’ women. Courtly love sacralized female consent, yet critics have struggled to make sense of which purposes courtliness served. This (...) evolutionary reading of Tristrams saga reveals how courtly love not only functioned as an ideological bridge be­tween mating regimes, but also embodied proto-WEIRD psychology, the impersonal pro­sociality of the new mobile, educated, and transculturally inclusive European individual-as described by Henrich (2020). This ethos would evolve to become the morality of modernity. How it was disseminated exemplifies how fiction can help communities find provisional solutions to problems that cannot be solved definitely. (shrink)

To sell a novel as socially relevant, the book cover, prefaces, and other paratext can help convey why readers should care and how the story should be read. But relevance can expire as society moves on. Reprints of groundbreaking classics that no longer engage contemporary concerns adapt their paratext to reach new readers, often by emphasizing the book’s historical and/or literary position. This article examines paratextual strategies across time and space for three Scandinavian novels with exceptional influence. Enlightenment-promoting Niels Klim’s (...) Underground Travels was the region’s first novel; Hunger is praised by many as the world’s first modernist novel; and The Man on the Balcony became the progenitor of Nordic Noir. Early paratext used anonymity, false veracity, or documentary elements to sell relevance. But with commercial success, and temporal and geographical distance, paratext became increasingly author focused and self-referential, at times all but ignoring the author’s intent for the story. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is likely to undermine the anthropocentrism of humanism, the master narrative that undergirds the modern world. Humanity will need a new story to structure our beliefs and cooperation around. As different regions explore posthumanist alternatives through fiction, they bring with them distinct traditions of thought. The Swedish TV series _Real Humans_ (2012–2014) and its British remake, _Humans_ (2015–2018), dramatize the challenge of freeing oneself from cultural presumptions. When negotiating personhood with humanoid robots, the Swedish protagonist family presupposes a (...) social-democratic ethos, which is a trace of Scandinavian humanism that carries into the family’s posthumanist beliefs. Using Heideggerian and related perspectives, I analyze these series to make a case for a _dataist_ ontology with potential to re-enchant the modern world and bring forth a new epoch of being. Such a master narrative of _algorithmic universality_ could be facilitated by a new level of interconnectedness made possible by AI. This ontology fulfills the requirements of Robbins and Horta (Introduction, Cosmopolitanisms. New York University Press, New York, pp 1–17, 2017) who call for a cosmopolitanism of inclusivity with room for overlapping conceptions to remedy our present era’s international dysfunction. The Swedish and British TV series suggest that even if humanity’s uniting around a dataist master narrative were to be driven by intercultural competition, the decisive choice might be out of human hands. Paradoxically, such disempowering in terms of agency is portrayed as necessary for human _re-enchantment_. (shrink)

The myth of true, lifelong love promoted low divorce rates among farmers who depended on each other for survival. In the urban ecology after industrialization, it became increas­ingly clear that long-term monogamy goes against human nature. In the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-1800s literary movement, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and others clashed in a battle over modern mating morality. Each interpreted Darwin to fit their own agenda, suggesting naturalistic understandings of “free love” and “true mar­riage,” some of which were laughable (...) while others landed authors in prison. Evolutionary theory from our present era suggests that human mate choice is guided by three brain systems: erotic lust, romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment; our species thus evolved for serial pair-bonding with extra-pair copulation. Using these and other evolutionary insights, this article evaluates narratives from the Modern Breakthrough, which laid the foundation for today’s gender-equal and sexually liberal Nordic societies. (shrink)