It’s tempting to suggest that Cephu might have been something of a psychopath, and in studies of modern psychopaths this affliction has been found to be a matter of degree. However, this would be very difficult to determine because we lack studies for Mbuti Pygmies like those of Hare and Kiehl. Furthermore, in spite of the sometimes arrogant and facile attempts to defend and justify his behavior, Cephu did appear to be engaged with normal moral emotions even though their expression was combined with playacting.
If manifestations of psychopathy hold across cultures, which seems very likely, Cephu may have had at least a touch of this innately based moral ailment. This is sheer speculation, however, and privately his remorseful feelings afterward could have been deep or shallow or even nonexistent. We’ll never know, unless Dr. Kent Kiehl decides to move his mobile MRI wagon to the forests of central Africa.
MOBILE FORAGERS AND THEIR SOCIAL CONTROL
Let’s consider more broadly the nature of hunter-gatherer social control. To do so, we must move from this pair of African societies to the many scores of anthropologically studied mobile band cultures, which, like the Bushmen but not like the grain-bartering Pygmies, are directly comparable to the independent mobile bands that lived under Late Pleistocene conditions. Before the Holocene Epoch phased in about 10,000 years ago, this prehistoric world was populated mainly or possibly exclusively by politically egalitarian hunter-gatherers, and because an individual lived in a small band of about twenty to thirty or perhaps forty people, she or he certainly didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the group as Cephu did.
Group moral indignation can take a number of forms, most of them quite uniform today among these foragers from one continent to the next. Their reactions range from moderate rebukes and sharp criticism to ostracism, ridicule, shaming, and outright banishment; and at the end of the line is the fearsome specter of capital punishment. Foragers—who morally appreciate the sanctity of human life within the group and do so strongly—use this measure rarely but decisively, as a desperate last resort. Presently, in Chapter 4 we’ll be seeing which crimes bring about this dire type of community reaction.
I’ve already drawn up a short list of proscribed behaviors that seem to be universally condemned and punished. However, the actual strength of these group reactions can vary from culture to culture. For instance, even though close degrees of incest are universally disapproved, in some band-level cultures such behavior is not punished very severely, perhaps by a scolding or by ostracism for a time, whereas in others it brings a death sentence because it is felt to be so monstrously abhorrent or so threatening to group social life or to the lives of other group members.25 When it comes to serious meat cheaters like Cephu, however, they are always likely to be treated roughly because their behavior is seen as threatening everyone else’s welfare, and in some groups they may be killed. Likewise, if a man becomes overbearing in dealing with his peers or, where shamanism prevails, if a person selfishly and maliciously misuses supernatural power, that deviant may be actively rebuked or the rest of the band may simply slip away in the night. But such people may also be killed if there’s no other way to escape their threatening domination.
In fact, if such self-aggrandizers try persistently to intimidate or tyrannize their peers, or if they actually succeed in doing so, they are quite likely to be killed. Indeed, with these egalitarians, to seriously disrespect other hunters in the group and to trample on their precious rights as equals creates really serious anger and disapproval, leading to true moral outrage. That said, however, foragers take little joy in killing a group member, and usually they try to reform deviants rather than eliminating them through banishment or execution.26 This is partly because they feel for them as fellow human beings, and partly because they’re practical people who understand the need to have as many hunters as possible in the band—even if, like Cephu, they have irritating qualities and are occasionally prone to deviance.
As we’ll see in Chapter 4, however, when it comes to the really serious political dominators I just mentioned, and also a few other seriously deviant types, a firm and sometimes ultimate line is drawn in the sand: he who crosses this line must be prepared to sacrifice his genetic future.
OF ALTRUISM AND FREE RIDERS
3
THERE ARE MANY RULES THAT ARE GOLDEN
Religious versions of the Golden Rule are being promulgated and preached widely today,1 and some such stricture is likely to surface in any cooperative human group. These come in the form of secular exhortations that remind people to do good and avoid doing harm because “what goes around, comes around.” For instance, consider the following dicta and their apparent universality:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
—Classical Christian statement of the Golden Rule
Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.
—Muhammad, The Farewell Sermon
Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.
—Confucius, Analects XV.24
The active promotion of reciprocity in everyday social life appears in bands and tribes and also in hierarchical chiefdoms; indeed, every human society has this. These sayings promote generosity, and the underlying intentions are always the same. Obviously, they are pro-social: your parents, friends, and neighbors want you to behave generously and with an eye to future reciprocation. It’s for good reason that cultures so predictably develop such “preaching,” for the underlying assumption is that in society at large generous reciprocation needs badly to be fostered—and that in being human, people will need some serious prodding in this direction.2 The desired result will be more cooperation—and less conflict—because generosity tends to beget more generosity.3 The name of the game is indirect reciprocity.
GOLDEN RULES AND INDIRECT RECIPROCITY
We’ll meet with some exact figures for hunter-gatherers in Chapter 7, but this prosocial preference appears to have been very widespread and possibly universal among the recent human foragers who were evolving our genes for us.4 As we’ll see in the next chapter, in practice these people all share their big-meat carcasses in a reasonably equitable fashion and manage to do so even when some hunters are far more productive than others. This goes on even though families are constantly changing bands, which means that anything like exact reciprocation is out of the question.
If bad luck arrives, band members will, within limits, help others in the band according to need—but even though any person of good or acceptable moral standing is automatically eligible for these indirect reciprocity benefits, a few very large beans will, in fact, be counted. In general, individuals whose track records are unusually generous may receive more help than those who have been stingy. And as for people who have a long record of being outlandishly and immorally selfish or lazy, help from unrelated group members may simply be denied.5 When personal trouble strikes, and with only their close kin likely to support them,6 such individuals may wish they had followed the Golden Rule.
Coming up with admonitory rules calling for generosity within the group is a cultural way of massaging any contingent system of indirect reciprocity.7 Having an efficient conscience makes possible the internalization of such rules, and even though this certainly doesn’t guarantee the conduct, it serves as a constant brake on selfishness and as a spur to being generous. In a hunting band these rules are important to everyone’s physical welfare, for generosity in everyday life is centered on sharing a highly nutritious food. And this routinized meat-sharing goes far beyond satisfying feelings of fairness and a love of meat, for as we’ll see, it enables an entire, interdependent hunting band to maintain vigor and health. Since all large game is shared, this benefits every worthy individual in the group and also the group as a whole.
For foraging nomads who seldom invest in storing food, meat-sharing amounts to a system of insurance,8 and this ancient type of risk reduction was carried forward into the Holocene Epoch and the era of domestication, even as human social forms we
re changing because populations were becoming denser. For instance, in a sizable hierarchical nonliterate chiefdom in which agricultural food storage is practiced, a major portion of a household’s annual produce is given to the privileged chief. The chief will set most of it aside and then, over time, will give it back to those in need.9 This could be called a centralized version of contingent indirect reciprocity,10 and it can lead to still more centralization. Starting with the earliest civilizations, we find formal systems of taxation that are no longer voluntary,11 but even with a coercive centralized government in control, the prosocial pronouncements continue in force—as a means of reinforcing generous behaviors that will help any overall system of governance by fostering cooperation and reducing conflict.12
No matter what size the society, people everywhere seem to realize that by reinforcing and amplifying individuals’ tendencies to extrafamilial generosity,13 they can improve the overall efficiency of cooperation from which everyone profits. At the same time, they understand that failure to reciprocate can cause conflicts that seriously disturb group social or economic life. In human minds everywhere, prosocial generosity is good, inappropriate selfishness is bad, and conflict is to be avoided.
Even among hunter-gatherers such moralizing pronouncements go beyond individuals merely nagging other individuals in a very immediate, self-interested way; in a sense these people may be seen as intuitive applied sociologists who are purposefully trying to shape their society in ways that will help themselves because everyone’s life is helped by better cooperation. Similar social creativity continues today with modern safety nets as we work to create systems of insurance against subsistence shortfalls, illness, or injury, the huge scale of which would have been unimaginable a mere 10,000 years ago.
The general idea behind all of these calls for generosity is to get people to contribute more willingly and more predictably to the shared social and subsistence life of the group as a whole. Of course, modern insurance systems are so formalized and bureaucratized that this voluntary element gets lost in the shuffle, but today we also have major “do-gooding” industries that are, in fact, based on altruistic good intentions. These appear in the form of secular and religious nongovernmental organizations, in which stimulating people through golden-rule-type pronouncements is needed because the contributions are totally voluntary and often anonymous. Goodwill Industries is one American example out of many, in which a small measure of donor effort will result in major benefits for others. And as with the Red Cross, the name is designed to promote such effort.
In short, encouraging people to give generously—and then to receive contingently if in need—has both a venerable past and a solid future, and it serves as a culturally invented antidote to the predictable effects of human “selfishness.” This insight originally came from my mentor, the late Donald T. Campbell, who was fascinated by the social tensions produced by a human genetic nature that is, at the same time, significantly generous and immensely selfish.14 Only a species with a powerful, socially oriented brain and language could come up with such prosocial “propaganda,” for promulgating these idealized rules involves an active “functionalist” view of society, taken as a working system that can be deliberately enhanced to increase the welfare and security of all.15
Such manipulative preaching can work quite well with a species that is genetically evolved to internalize rules, and in this context ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt has spoken of the general “indoctrinability” of humans.16 Golden rule promulgation is a prime instance of group members realizing that others can be swayed by words—for the public good—and at the base of this process lies the evolutionary conscience as a judgmental, trainable cultural sponge that is shaped early in childhood. When we consider the Kalahari Bushmen and the Inuit of Alaska, we’ll see that parents place generosity on the positive side of the ledger when children are quite young. Golden-rule exhortations do the same thing for adults, as people try to shape their social life by campaigning against undue selfishness.17
As we’ll see in Chapter 7, the social encouragement of generous behavior promotes generous reciprocation not only among a band’s different families but also within the family. Among unrelated families in a band, such “tweaking” is needed because human altruism is weak compared to nepotism. Within the family, similar “tweaking” is needed because generally speaking human nepotism seems to be weak compared to the basic egoism that is natural selection’s gift to us. Band members call for generosity in both contexts because both family and nonfamily squabbles interfere with cooperation and disturb everyone else in the band, and the threat of a major conflict’s splitting the group is always on the minds of these foragers.
WHY ARE WE SO EGOCENTRIC?
Today, the scientific selection basis for explaining the strongly egocentric side of human nature seems just as solid as Darwin supposed it to be well over a century ago, when he created his competitively based theory of natural selection. Initially, this remarkable theory was totally “egocentric” in its orientation, but, as we’ve seen, as Darwin pondered certain generous tendencies that failed to fit with this powerful new theory, he came to realize intuitively that kin selection makes it easier for us to be generous toward our closer blood relatives. He also realized that the broader, extrafamilial type of generosity, which these golden rules are so regularly designed to reinforce, required a different explanation.
Darwin’s gene-less but basically heredity-based evolutionary logic had drawn him toward the group selection type of theory that we’ve already touched upon at several points,18 but Darwin had no way of understanding group selection’s mathematically predictable mechanical weakness compared to selection taking place within groups. Nor did he have any way of recognizing the enormity of the free-rider problem,19 which today in most scholars’ minds stands as a serious general obstacle to the evolution of wider generosity in any mammalian species—aside from naked mole rats, who essentially live in great big isolated clans.20 Yet in his own way Darwin did astutely identify very much the same paradox of extrafamilial generosity in 1871 that Edward O. Wilson redefined for us so influentially over a century later.21
Today we know what a gene is and we know how to model mathematically what is likely to be taking place in gene pools. But with all this knowledge, and after almost four decades of diligent and inventive research, there still seems to be no single satisfactory answer for the puzzle of humans being able to behave as generously and cooperatively as we often manage to do. A basic question is, how did natural selection manage to work its way around the powerful degrees of genetic egoism that are built into our nature?22
In this chapter we’ll be considering the major theories that have been put forward over the years as evolutionary scholars have tried to account for extrafamilial generosity in humans. Highlighted will be a special, social selection venue for explanation, a theoretical path that builds on established paradigms but also involves some new elements that, I believe, will make generous human responses to the needs of others much easier to explain. An important new element will be the systematic, punitive suppression of free-riding behavior, which includes not only curbing the predatory actions of cheaters, but also suppressing the selfish exploits of a different type of free rider, an intimidator who is very different, indeed, from those normally considered. In this context, thoroughgoing suppression of the powerful has become prominent in egalitarian humans and among them alone, as will be seen in a later chapter. I believe this to be a main reason for our being as altruistic as we are.
EMPATHY AND GENEROSITY
When evolutionary scholars speak of altruism, even in the strict sense of extrafamilial generosity this can still have a variety of meanings. One is purely a matter of genetics: you give up some of your own fitness to increase the fitness of a nonrelative. That’s basic. However, when emotions and motives enter into the picture, things can become more complicated. For instance, you may give to another because you expect an immediate or eventual return; yo
u may give because you fear gossip and public opinion; you may give because seriously unacceptable nongiving can bring active punishment from your peers; you may give as a social conformist just because that’s what people do in your culture, and this makes for an easy conscience.23 And, of course, you may also give in a heartfelt way because you identify with another’s need or distress and it just feels right to be helpful.24
Obviously, this last kind of giving is based heavily on sympathy, an emotion that leads us to care mainly about those we’re socially and emotionally bonded with. Although “empathy,” as technically defined by psychologists,25 seldom figures in more formal anthropological analyses of hunter-gatherer cooperation, fortunately there’s one study that does indirectly take this aspect of generosity into account, and we’ll be meeting with it later in Chapter 11.
For now, let me say that in today’s small hunting bands, people form substantial social bonds with most group members, be they blood relatives or otherwise, and there can be little doubt that these positive associations invoke the sympathetic kind of feelings that Darwin emphasized,26 which make it possible for one person to emotionally identify with another’s needs and provide help accordingly. Help to close kin is readily compensated genetically by kin selection, but among nonrelatives major donations will involve substantial net fitness costs that somehow need to be compensated—hence, the genetic puzzle we keep speaking of.
Moral Origins Page 6
