Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  Becoming moral did not mean that our typical temptations were about to go away as facts of human life. Rather, they became entwined with feelings of anticipatory shame that had the effect of automatically inhibiting antisocial behavior from the inside. Nor did becoming moral mean that ancestral-type fear motivations were going away. We still behave ourselves in part because we dread the moral outrage of our peers—or, today, police intervention as well.

  What happened was that the nature of self-control was transformed in ways that no scientist could have predicted—even though in hindsight some useful preadaptations are fairly obvious. And once people were becoming moral, their consciences did more than guide and inhibit them. We moved from being a “dominance-obsessed” species that paid a lot of attention to the power of high-ranking others, to one that talked incessantly about the moral reputations of other group members, began to consciously define its more obvious social problems in terms of right and wrong, and as a routine matter began to deal collectively with the deviants in its bands. In important ways the dominance of the group was superseding the dominance of individuals; indeed, the well-known social tyranny of small groups has been well appreciated (and resented) by potential or actual deviants for at least tens of thousands of years.

  As we began to create the kind of gossipy, socially conformist moral communities that Durkheim described so well, the sense of right and wrong afforded by a conscience was able to transform group social control. It was by achieving a moral consensus that people who were threatened by serious social predation could connect with others, and do this so strongly that they could reach a point of shared moral outrage that simply by its threat could deter many a potential deviant. In their actual expression, the resultant punitive actions led to effective and usually safe elimination of those whose conduct seriously threatened or injured the common good.

  As our gene pools changed as a result, an increasingly moral social life offered new evolutionary possibilities, which have been experienced by no other species. And one of these possibilities was the rise of altruistic tendencies as hunter-gatherers began to deliberately harness the good they saw in human nature. The result was social selection of a very different type, that contributed significantly to our becoming a species noted for its altruism.

  THE POSITIVE SIDE

  OF SOCIAL SELECTION

  7

  ALEXANDER’S BRILLIANT IDEA

  I’ve just hypothesized that moral origins began with the appearance of a self-regulating conscience, but this would only have started the process of moral evolution. Once we had something like a conscience, this opened the way for a very different type of social selection, one that affected our capacity as moral beings in a sphere very different from self-control. To understand its power, we must look, again, to Darwin.

  When Charles Darwin came up with sexual selection theory, he considered this to be a special type of selection process, guided by the mating choices of females, that could support otherwise very costly maladaptive traits. Human altruism can also be viewed as a maladaptive trait; it is similarly kept in place because patterns of decisionmaking compensate the altruists and enable the trait to be selected.

  We’ve already met with the idea of indirect reciprocity, which was first introduced by Richard D. Alexander in 1979.1 Alexander had taken note of two ethnographic patterns. One was that human foragers’ band-level cooperation was long term, not short term. The other was that these people weren’t acting as careful bean counters when it came to being generous to others who were in need, which ruled out anything like reciprocal altruism. Indeed, even though the most intensive aid was reserved for close kin, just as Trivers said,2 these foragers were also prone to help nonrelatives, and they did so substantially in the absence of any social contract that bound their unrelated beneficiaries to pay them back in kind. This fits our definition of altruism. According to Alexander, whoever had the means to help nonkin did so without very carefully adding up any past history of giving or taking, knowing that in the future whoever then happened to be in a position to give help would also do so.

  This brings us again to the Golden Rule, which seems to be expounded in all human cultures be they recent and complex or ancient and “Paleolithic.” Some form of this prosocial dictum is found in the ideology of every institutionalized religion,3 and as a generalization it has found its way into certain formal philosophies of ethics, as with Kant.4 The essence of this dictum seems to combine elements of altruism and personal self-interest because in part it’s a way to convince others to behave more generously.5 Practically speaking, this rule also might be seen as an implicit invitation for free riders to “take advantage,” but it’s a universal idea, nonetheless, and universal ideas are likely to be there because at some level natural selection, combined with persistent aspects of human cultural lifestyles, has favored them in shaping our species prehistorically.

  Even though most people are quite unlikely to have read Kant, they intuitively appreciate the Golden Rule. Alexander recounts a conversation he overheard in which truckers were discussing stopping to give aid to colleagues who had trouble on the road.6 The idea the truckers articulated was that you help me when I’m in need, and I’ll help someone else when he’s in need, and he’ll help still another. Thus, you’re contributing to an ongoing system that sees to it that people get help when they need it—but the payback is merely probabilistic. Essentially, you have to trust the overall system to work.

  Alexander’s overheard conversation jibes with the dinner-table and drinking practices of Montenegrin truck drivers in the former Yugoslavia when I was doing research there in the mid-1960s. At a local truck stop and inn, I used to watch over-the-road Montenegrin šofirs (chauffeurs) as they enjoyed hearty peasant meals supplemented with liberal shots of plum brandy. They’d be sitting at large tables of six to eight people, and when it was time to pay, every last Serb always got out his wallet with a small flourish—with the certain knowledge that one person would be paying for all. I’d be holding my breath, but each time, by some subtle dynamic, the ritualized decision was made. When I followed up with an ethnographic query in other quarters, I was told that this was an ingrained custom; indeed, these tribal Serbs considered northern European tourists, who they’d seen dividing up the tabs when they dined together, to be hideously “selfish.” Their informal philosophy seemed to be “what goes around, comes around,” a philosophy that Americans sometimes apply—and sometimes don’t—when it’s time to pay for dinner with friends.

  The isolated mountain tribe where I was doing two years’ field research at the time was almost five hours by foot or horseback from the main highway, with neither electricity nor running water, let alone a wheeled vehicle or a restaurant.7 And there I discovered that this truck drivers’ ritual had ancient roots. When people were gathering in social groups, it was always just one man who passed around his bag of contraband tobacco so that each person could empty out enough for one cigarette into his newsprint “rolling paper.” As with the truckers, the donations were made in a spontaneous fashion with no hint of repayment, except for the assumption that next time someone in a position to do so would surely be coming forward because that was the custom.

  To me as a foreign observer, this ritualistic act of tobacco-sharing always seemed to be deeply enjoyable to the parties involved, and in the tribe a similarly prosocial pattern of indirect reciprocity also was followed in several more practical and economically important areas. These mountain Serbs were pastoralists, and their modest flocks of sheep were subject to two types of catastrophe. One was from wolves, who for reasons known mainly to wolves sometimes enter a corral at night and then go on killing sprees that end with the annihilation of the entire herd. The other was lightning, which can easily take out a clustered herd up on the treeless mountain pastures used all summer. When either of these rare calamities took place, up to thirty or more households would each donate a sheep to the unfortunate, who was thereby made fortunate again because his h
erd was restored.

  My entire tribe of just over 1,800 souls was made up of somewhere around 300 households and just over 50 different clans, so these donations were coming partly from close blood kin but mostly from people who were unrelated—neighbors or godfathers or in-laws from other settlements. This meant that much of the generosity had to be extrafamilial and therefore altruistic. These local tribal networks are sized similarly to small foraging bands, whose “insurance” systems follow similar principles of sharing, and cooperation with nonkin as well as kin.

  In fact, these continuing practices of traditional Serbian pastoralists—and of modernizing Serbian truck drivers—may have evolved culturally from similar customs in much earlier times, when these people were nomadic foragers who shared their large game. However, it’s equally likely that they were invented later, simply because humans are inclined to come up with systems based on indirect reciprocity whenever they need “insurance” against bad luck. Meat-sharing is just one in a long line of mutual-aid inventions of humans in groups, and one way to keep the system working is to remind others to do their part when it is time to reciprocate.

  Another tribal instance of indirect reciprocity that involved nonkin arose in the form of a moba, which was called when a Montenegrin family was building a house and for some legitimate reason found itself short-handed, or when it had too much hay to safely harvest before rain came. The moba was a volunteer work group, and again a mix of relatives and nonrelatives did the giving. Again, the social network from which the volunteers were drawn would be about the same size as a twenty-to-thirty-person hunting band, and in the case I observed of house building, the moba spanned two days and involved almost two dozen helpers. The host family put on a big feed each day, but the donated labor amounted to far more than the value of the cheese, bread, meat, milk, tobacco, and plum brandy supplied by the hosts, and fewer than half of the helpers were blood kin. I emphasize that precise individual repayment in kind was not envisioned, even though in general future help was anticipated as a response to future special need. As with the response to herds getting wiped out, this fits perfectly with Alexander’s description of indirect reciprocity in hunting bands.

  I must add that there was a palpable air of good feeling during a moba. The helpers appeared to be happy in their generous role, and there was an atmosphere of jolly camaraderie as people working together joked, drank their host’s plum brandy, and ate as one big group there to help. And as with hunter-gatherers’ indirect reciprocity, these various services were provided without any thought of carefully counting the immediate beans: you helped out others in need because you could, and in general you expected them to help you in your hour of need. That ideology supported a system that served people’s special shortfall problems, and they trusted the system to work.

  The analogy to modern insurance systems may be striking, but with these indigenous systems of indirect reciprocity there were no fixed payments: the donations were basically voluntary even though social reputations were at stake. Furthermore, it was a face-to-face social community, rather than an impersonal insurance company acting on advice from actuaries, that decided who was eligible. Even though I participated in only two mobas, it was clear from the way people talked about this practice that the selo (the village, in Serbian) would know if, by custom, someone was genuinely qualified as a recipient. In my particular Montenegrin tribe, the “village” was actually a widely scattered localized settlement, but it was clear what people meant. They were speaking about the gossiping kind of morally based “collective consciousness” that Durkheim characterized so aptly,8 and I can guarantee that if someone tried to get help when this was inappropriate, tongues would wag, social reputations would suffer, and some or all of the people in the hoped-for network might well fail to participate.

  The same sense of what is appropriate goes for hunter-gatherers; when a vigorous and dedicated hunter is injured, there’s little doubt that the rest of the band will help him and his family because his need is all too apparent—and the help will be all the more generous because this productive citizen obviously isn’t trying to take a free ride. This is well understood by everyone, as is the fact that helping him to recover will be useful because there’ll be more meat for everyone. In the case of a conspicuously lazy man, he’ll be seen as a freeloader and the band is likely to help much less. By the same token, a generous person will be helped more in an hour of need than one who is stingy.9 But the basic system applies to anyone with a decent social standing.

  Thus, because of what might be called “macro bean-counting,” in which general past patterns are taken into account and factored into a system of indirect reciprocity, such systems, even though somewhat vulnerable to free riders who are moderately lazy, are resistant to really flagrant opportunism because people won’t put up with it. However, there remains the ultimate evolutionary question of how such “unbalanced” systems can stay in existence. The models tell us that the altruists who are helping nonkin more than they are receiving help must be “compensated” in some way, or else they—meaning their genes—will go out of business. What we can be sure of is that somehow natural selection has managed to work its way around these problems, for surely humans have been sharing meat and otherwise helping others in an unbalanced fashion for at least 45,000 years.

  EMPATHY AND ITS LIMITS

  As Frans de Waal argues so eloquently, empathy is an important and too often underestimated element in the social mix that makes us human.10 I’ve been using Darwin’s term—sympathy—because it is less technical, but to me such feelings, which include an appreciation of how others are feeling and what their needs are, become apparent in descriptions of the pleasure hunter-gatherers take in sharing meat, even though sometimes there’s some simultaneous grousing about the appropriateness of the shares. Similarly, the pleasure that Montenegrin Serbs took in helping out their neighbors was obvious enough, even though some of the moba participants surely were thinking some about their undone work at home. More generally, I believe that humans are innately prone to respond positively to engaging in helpful cooperation—as long as they feel a social bond with those they are helping, as long as the costs aren’t too high, and as long as they feel that, long term, the system will be insuring them against really bad luck.

  Altruism, sympathy, and empathy aside, I believe that nonliterate foragers in their bands also have good intuitive understandings of their systems of indirect reciprocity and how they work. My overall impression is that even though these systems seem to be free of any compulsive long-term bean-counting, in the distribution of large game some specific types of reckoning do occur, in several special contexts. For instance, larger families are routinely given larger shares because their needs are greater, and, as we’ve seen, when generously participating individuals fall on temporary hard times (be this through injuries such as broken bones or snakebite, or illness), reasonable adjustments will be made for them even though generally their close kin will be the primary source of aid. In addition, rather often the hunter who made the kill gets a somewhat larger share,11 perhaps as an incentive to keep him at this arduous task.

  Although hunter-gatherer generosity is sometimes depicted as being all but boundless, the generous feelings that help to motivate band-level systems of indirect reciprocity in response to individual needs are not without limits, and the same is true within families. For instance, considerable bean-counting takes place with respect to the tradeoffs that attend supporting the elderly. Old people may at times be quite useful, in providing wisdom or helping with childcare, but at other times they become a serious liability to the immediate family members who primarily support them. Hunter-gatherers set limits as to how much they’ll invest in family members who are becoming so infirm they can no longer walk effectively, as this is a serious problem for nomads who must carry small children and needed paraphernalia with them when they frequently change campsites. Most readers will be familiar with Inuit family practices of putting old
people out on the ice and letting them painlessly freeze to death,12 and the logistics are obvious enough. An adult who cannot keep up will be a substantial or impossible burden trekking across snow and ice, and when it’s time for triage, everyone in the band understands the situation, which is faced with sorrow.

  I remember very well asking Kim Hill, an anthropologist who has spent years in the field working with South American nomadic foragers, about whether such practices also exist in tropical situations. He said they do, but in this case what happens is that someone will come quietly up behind them with a stone axe and all but painlessly “brain” them. My obvious shock faded when he added that if they were left alive, to “die peacefully” Eskimo-style, predators might eat them alive—while scavenging birds would first go for their eyes. They preferred a quick death and sometimes chose to suffocate by being buried alive.

  Here’s a final note on altruism and its limits that comes, again, from my own fieldwork with a modernizing “tribal” people who still basically had a subsistence economy. In my highland Serbian tribe one day an eighty-year-old woman I’d never seen before passed the front of my house walking quite briskly, complaining to herself out loud as she propelled herself along with two stout canes. I was told she’d been left with no kin at all (nema nikoga, “she has no one”) and that she had to walk from one house to the next every single day because, although by (altruistic) custom people felt obliged to give her food and a night’s lodging when she showed up, no one was willing to let her stay a second night for fear she’d become their dependent. Thus, under certain conditions the quality of mercy outside the family can be strained and strained severely—even as a system of indirect reciprocity in fact is working.