Inventing Behavior After the Neolithic: Michel Serres and the Moral Problem of Auto-Evolution
How to get on in a world that is accelerating beyond our ability to control it.
In recent essays, I have been searching for a way to think about moral orientation in a world shaped by rapidly accelerating computational power. Much of our inherited moral vocabulary, however, belongs to a far older world. What I will call Neolithic moralities prize withdrawal, clarity, full reckoning of consequences, and stable moral laws. They aim to shrink the world to manageable scale: bounded communities, clear identities, controllable surroundings, and a self securely oriented toward the center of a shared moral order.
Even Socrates exemplifies this posture. His philosophical life remained deliberately confined to Athens. When Crito offered him a chance to escape prison, Socrates refused—not out of passivity, but out of fidelity to a moral order rooted in place, law, and civic belonging.
There is nothing wrong with these practices. It helps, though, to distinguish them from something else. Let us call them ethics rather than morality. Ethics are disciplines of self-formation: practices we adopt to become certain kinds of persons, sometimes even to loosen our attachment to the self altogether. Many such practices involve retreat, slowness, and deliberate askesis. Pierre Hadot famously described them in Philosophy as a Way of Life.
Morality, as I am using the term here, answers to a different pressure. Moral orientation responds to violence. It attends not primarily to the self, but to collective energy as it moves through time. It asks how destructive force gathers, accelerates, mutates, and erupts. Morality is not about purity of intention or clarity of conscience. It is about deliverance from evil—which means attentiveness to motion, scale, and timing rather than to stable identities or settled norms.
This distinction becomes crucial for understanding the later work of Michel Serres, especially the books gathered under the name le Grand Récit. These works are often read through the lenses of chaos theory, complexity, or information science. But at their core they are moral investigations—efforts to rethink good and evil after the collapse of the Neolithic world that once stabilized them.
To see this clearly, it helps to linger over a passage from L’Incandescent, near the end of a section titled ‘The end of blood ties’. The paragraph serves as a gateway into Serres’ moral vision:
Clearly expressed, this infinitude is essential today as the operation we are in need of in order to invent our behavior in the face of the end of the old agriculture, the demographic explosion and the biotechnologies, in short, in order to assume our responsibilities towards the aut0-evolution that’s advancing and will characterize us. Reciprocally, the unforeseen arrival of this auto-evolution could only come about under these conditions of becoming unstuck. To return to the soil and to blood, in history or even in an autobiography, would be to return to paganism, before modern science. Persistent therefore, religious truths sometimes anticipate reason, prophetically.
To grasp what is at stake here, we need to understand Serres’ claim that Homo sapiens left the Neolithic age sometime in the twentieth century. The Neolithic—roughly ten thousand years of settled agriculture—gave us villages and cities, domesticated animals and crops, private property, surplus, and unprecedented productivity. It also gave rise to concentrated disease, massive wealth inequalities, as well as new forms of violence and the moral systems designed to contain them.
Those moral systems relied on belonging rooted in soil and blood. Sacrifice—human and animal—scapegoating, boundary-drawing, and exclusion were not accidents. They were techniques for stabilizing collective energy, for preventing violence from tearing fragile communities apart. None of this was biologically inevitable. It took hundreds of thousands of years for Homo sapiens to enter the Neolithic world—and in the scale of le Grand Récit, that entire epoch appears as a brief episode rather than a permanent human condition.
The problem Serres identifies is that we are now leaving that world behind. Demographic explosion, biotechnology, and computational systems have ushered in what he calls auto-evolution or exo-Darwinism: humanity’s capacity to make evolution itself a technical, deliberate, and increasingly computable process. This power is unprecedented. Moral frameworks designed for small, slow, soil-bound communities are stretched to the breaking point in our new Axial Age.
The temptation, in moments of disorientation, is to retreat—to revive blood ties, native soils, and exclusionary identities as default forms of belonging. Serres’ warning is uncompromising: this return would not be a recovery of moral depth but a regression into sacrificial violence. It would be a refusal to assume responsibility for the powers we now wield.
Auto-evolution does not eliminate violence. On the contrary, it risks amplifying it—accelerating its spread, increasing its scale, and extending its consequences across time and space. To “invent our behavior” under these conditions is to develop a morality in motion, one capable of tracking violence as it forms rather than sanctifying the boundaries that generate it.
This is why Serres returns repeatedly to the figure of the scapegoat. Drawing explicitly on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, he locates the origin of evil not in metaphysical deficiency but in boundary-making:
So, yes, I understand the origin of evil such as Leibniz conceived it: it most certainly comes from the violence produced, in the vicinity of boundaries, by the exclusion of the third . . . it comes down to the invention of the scapegoat, therefore again to violence and evil. (144)
Good intentions curdle when identities harden. Communities become engines of aggression when they mistake belonging for purity. This is the tragic structure Serres wants us to recognize—and to interrupt.
The Tragic Reversed
Serres re-engages Friedrich Nietzsche, but not in the familiar heroic register. Nietzsche—and later Henri Bergson—imagined a figure who breaks open closed societies, carrying humanity toward a more open moral horizon (143). Serres reads The Birth of Tragedy differently. What he finds is not the emergence of the hero, but the expulsion of the scapegoat.
The birth of tragedy is not the triumph of the exceptional individual. It is the moment when collective violence crystallizes around a single figure and calls itself justice. To attend to the tragic is to recognize this pattern as it unfolds, without pretending it can be eradicated once and for all.
Serres describes this dynamic as “two-valued”: energy oscillates between constructive and destructive outcomes. ‘The birth of tragedy, wine turns into blood; the reversal of the tragic and good news; blood turns into wine’ (148). The task of morality is not to deny this oscillation, but to reverse and divert vital energy away from aggression before it hardens into sacrificial logic.
This yields the central moral question of L’Incandescent:
How can we free vital energy from aggression without allowing the former to fall back into the latter? This is the foundation of morality filtering life from death.’ (149)
How can we escape the cost of this force? How can we negotiate its negative component? (151)
The tragic names our capacity to recognize when good intentions turn violent, when identities become fundamentalisms, when moral clarity becomes an instrument of harm.
Steering More Than We Used To
The urgency of le Grand Récit lies in a simple fact: humanity now shapes the world—biological, technological, ecological—at scales once attributed only to gods. We decipher the genetic code. We engineer life. We project consequences across centuries.
Neolithic moralities were never designed for this.
For Serres, this means that theodicy becomes anthropodicy. The old question—how a good God could permit suffering—returns in a new key. If the power once attributed to God is now exercised by humanity, the question becomes brutally concrete: why would we allow ourselves, and the world we inhabit, to suffer?
This is another reversal of the tragic. Rather than discarding theological moral concepts, Serres reactivates them. Responsibility, guilt, sin, and deliverance from evil are not obsolete ideas. They are to be re-invented for an age in which the speed and scale of human action operates at planetary and evolutionary scale.
The wager of le Grand Récit is that morality did not end with the Neolithic world—but neither can it survive unchanged. To ‘invent our behavior’ after native soils and blood ties is to learn how to steer more than we once did, without imagining we can steer everything.
In subsequent essays, I will trace how Serres develops this renewed moral vocabulary across le Grand Récit—not as a metaphysical system, but as a practical art of living with power, speed, and uncertainty, without returning to the old altars.
Read more of my essays on the work of Michel Serres: