As another example of costs and benefits evening out over time, consider more specifically hunter-gatherers’ use of capital punishment, as this was discussed in Chapter 4. We’ve seen that once in a long while the entire group may simultaneously mob a deviant,41 usually a bully who goes around intimidating group members, and takes him out through collective action. This equalized sharing of effort and risk does happen to neatly preclude the second-order genetic free-rider problem, but the immediate motivation is something else entirely. What foragers are worried about is, in fact, revenge.42 They know that if one of them were to kill a serious deviant, even if he was a truly bad guy his angry and grieving close relatives might well love him enough to engage in lethal retaliation. However, if most of the group participates simultaneously in his killing, there’s no way for his relatives to target and revenge-slay the person who killed him.
More often, however, execution by forager groups involves “delegation” (see Table IV, “Group member selected to assassinate culprit”), and this second pattern seems to be very widespread and may well be universal. First, the group arrives at a consensus that the deviant must be eliminated, and then usually a close relative is asked to do him in. The cultural logic is impeccable. When a family has just lost one of its hunters, it would be unthinkable for them to double their loss by revenge-killing another family member—especially an upright citizen who was willing to kill his own kinsman for the good of everybody. Here, too, revenge is averted, but in this case one person is generously and responsibly assuming the risks of playing executioner. Again, it’s a matter of structural position when the rest of the group delegates a kinsman to kill his own kin, so from the standpoint of gene selection, those who delegate him to do the dirty work are not acting as genetic free riders.
There remains the fact that often lesser degrees of social sanctioning are actively initiated by a few, with the general support of others, and that a cornered deviant might be dangerous. For instance, initially just one man took the lead in lashing out against the arrogant Cephu. However, this initial shamer had already learned that he had the rest of the band’s strong backing, for Turnbull’s psychologically rich description makes it clear that the others with him were equally incensed. He also knew that his guilty adversary, Cephu, understood that he was being criticized on behalf of the band, and that Cephu would be sufficiently intimidated that he would be unlikely to attack the lead criticizer. This group backing also was obvious when subsequently a mere boy insulted this arrogant cheater by not relinquishing his seat, which might have been quite risky under different circumstances.
Such group dynamics explain why the individual risks for those who lead a well-unified group majority in sanctioning are minimal—as long as the deviant’s close allies are standing aside. In turn, these same political dynamics also help to explain why second-order free riding appears not to have been a serious obstacle to the earlier evolution of group punishment—and why, in real life, “defectors” from group punishment don’t require punishment because things will even out in the evolutionary long run.
My conclusion is that no matter what takes place in experimental laboratories, evolutionary assumptions about the need to punish nonpunishers require further and critical consideration, for in everyday forager life the “group dynamics” are likely to be different from small-group game-playing contexts, as these have been scientifically contrived so far. Perhaps more of these group dynamics could be built into future experiments, taking into better account what hunter-gatherers actually do and were likely to have been doing in their culturally modern past. Meanwhile, we are left with the fact that classical LPA hunting-and-gathering communities do regularly punish deviance, that with them desisting from punishment is not viewed as a punishable deviant act, and that this version of social control has been in effect, and successful and powerful, for thousands of generations.
This conclusion brings in a further fact about these small foraging societies, namely, their political dynamics. These groups do not always stay united, for a morally ambiguous act of aggression can split a group, with the aggressor’s kinsmen and allies siding strongly with him while the rest of the group proclaims his deviance. In such cases, the group is straightforwardly divided to a point that the two factions are likely simply to fission and go their separate ways. But this was not quite the case with Cephu’s deviance, or with many other cases in which relatives merely stand aside and let the rest of the band do the active sanctioning. We must be careful to distinguish between some-what-less-than-unanimous moral sanctioning—and outright conflict.
A PREHISTORIC DOUBLE WHAMMY
Building on the discussion in Chapter 3, I have radically broadened the scope of what is normally referred to as social selection as this is practiced by a variety of species.43 For humans, I’ve now included Alexander’s positive social selection through reputational payoffs, and I’ve added group punishment, which I began to think about as long ago as in 1982 as a selection mechanism.44 Group punishment also leads to subsequent reputational disadvantages, so punishment and reputations are intertwined.
It was the combination of selection by reputation and active free-rider suppression that provided a “double whammy.” By considering these two basic human types of social selection in combination, I’m proposing what amounts to a far more comprehensive version of social selection theory than is found in costly signaling explanations of mating advantages, which recently have been of great interest to evolutionary scholars who study other animals like birds and who study hunter-gatherers.45 The comprehensive, “moralistic” social selection theory of altruism that I’m proposing here can now compete with theories based on group selection, reciprocal altruism, mutualism, and costly signaling, along with any new theories that others may come up with, as we continue to seek better ultimate explanations for the widespread human practice of extrafamilial generosity.
Obviously, this moral approach applies just to our own highly cultural species. Other animals can’t build a consensus by gossiping about favorable reputations, even though costly signaling mechanisms may function analogically. And only a very few species gang up socially in coalitions to punish individuals in the same group who rub them the wrong way. If Ancestral Pan hadn’t provided us with a modest but significant preadaptation in this direction, it’s difficult to see how our species could have either developed a conscience, or substantially neutralized the bullying free riders in its midst to become as altruistic as we are today.
The solution for the altruism paradox I’ve offered here looks mainly to this comprehensive, human version of social selection for ultimate causation. This has involved ongoing suppression of free-rider behavior and also some significant past modification of the underlying genes—especially where the free-riding tendencies involved a bully’s approach and could easily result in capital or other severe punishment. It also takes into account some hard to gauge but probably rather limited contributions from genetic group selection and also, phenotypically, some very potent contributions from a variety of cultural amplifiers that encourage extrafamilial generosity. I hope this combination of models will help to further explain the altruistic aspect of our common humanity, which contributes so profoundly to our quality of social life and its overall cooperative efficiency.
LATER MORAL EVOLUTION
Altruism is important to moral evolution for several reasons. One is that the sympathetic feelings that so often underlie altruistic acts are built into the conscience; this enables us to connect emotionally with the problems and needs of others as we act on the prosocial values we have automatically internalized at an early age in growing up.46 Another is that so much of the content of our moral codes is oriented to amplifying the human potential for behaving prosocially, and it is sympathetic feelings that provide the potential in the first place.
I’ve argued that we do in fact possess innately altruistic traits (“scratch me—or scratch yourself—or scratch anyone but a serious psychopath—and see an alt
ruist, not a hypocrite, bleed!”), and without such traits conscience functions would be quite different. Indeed, our moral life would be based mostly in shame feelings and fear of dire punishment, whereas the prosocial preaching that leads to the effective and often sympathetically based cooperation we’ve seen with hunter-gatherers would be absent because it couldn’t work.47
A shameful conscience gives us a sense of right and wrong, but there’s much more to moral life as we know it. The key ingredient of sympathetic feelings provides a motivational basis for much of our altruism, and this is an important element in systems of indirect reciprocity, for the participants are emotionally responsive to the needs of other individuals. Sensing the needs of others can lead us to spontaneously respond with generosity, and this, along with counting on future benefits from the generosity of others, makes the system work. Altruism, in short, is important.
Once people had become culturally (and morally) modern, the state of human affairs was basically that of the LPA hunter-gatherers I’ve described in their contemporary incarnations. To judge from today’s behavior, our recent forbears were mainly egoists and secondarily nepotists, but as I’ve argued, they also were significantly altruistic in their genetic nature. The resulting extrafamilial generosity gave them something important to build upon culturally when they needed to cooperate with a specific vision of the common good in mind—as when a large carcass was there to be shared and serious conflict was to be avoided. These more recent hunter-gatherers had consciences just like ours, and in many ways their virtues, crimes, and punishments surely were very much like ours, as were their personal sense of what was shameful and their sense of good or bad reputations in others.
Large social brains enabled these people to see that the limited altruistic tendencies of group members could be socially reinforced for the common good. And basically it’s because of these powerful brains that people invented and maintained the systems of indirect reciprocity that have served them so handsomely and so flexibly over the ages. This socially constructive aspect of human brainpower has helped to make our evolutionary career fully as distinctive as Darwin thought it to be, and we will be exploring this flexibility further in its social and ecological aspects. But without a significant degree of innate altruism and extrafamilially generous feelings to work with, I suspect that this remarkable evolutionary career would have gone in a very different direction, indeed.
LEARNING MORALS
ACROSS THE GENERATIONS
8
A CLOSER LOOK AT MORAL COMMUNITIES
Aside from the vivid but brief qualitative introduction to people from two African forager societies in Chapter 2, I’ve been trying to identify patterns of moral behavior through representative statistics wherever possible. To provide now a richer and more culturally distinct impression of what moral life is like in several of today’s LPA moral communities, I’ll be turning in the next several chapters to the words of some of the individuals concerned as I develop additional ideas about their moral communities and about how our capacities for social conformity and self-sacrificial generosity could have evolved in the Late Pleistocene.
We’ve already met with Colin Turnbull’s vivid account of the meat-cheater Cephu’s shaming by his group,1 but the Mbuti Pygmies can’t really qualify as an LPA foraging society because they have Bantu partners who are tribal farmers—obviously a Pleistocene impossibility—and they regularly trade wild meat for domesticated grain. I chose to quote from Turnbull because his description of a Pygmy moral community in action was truly exceptional.
As a major founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim himself2 never did any fieldwork at all, and he made little reference to indigenous people as individuals. However, he certainly captured the collective side of social life and social control in these small moral communities when he described the tyranny of public opinion, which produces an often-fearful social conformity that goes with living in an intimate and potentially aggressive band of hunter-gatherers. Durkheim gained his insights vicariously from reading classical early ethnographies that described Australian Aborigines,3 and he read them well. Most critiques of Durkheim’s work have suggested that his “functionalist” image of small societies and their integration was seriously “beautified”—which surely it was in the absence of any serious emphasis on conflict4—but not that his reading of the ethnography and these social dynamics was incorrect.
Basically, my own hunter-gatherer insights, like Durkheim’s, are vicarious. The only pure foragers I’ve studied personally are wild chimpanzees, which are of great help in doing evolutionary analysis but obviously lack a moral life. However, in the 1960s the isolated nonliterate Navajos I studied in the field had moved only a few generations from their foraging roots. They continued their egalitarian worldview very strongly,5 with an emphasis on generosity and a condemnation of stinginess that were striking. The more traditional pastoralist Navajos I worked with were at least seminomadic and egalitarian, even if they were not “pure” foragers.
The quasi-tribal Serbian pastoralist-agriculturalists I lived with in an isolated mountain valley in Montenegro for several years were obviously of quite a different ethnographic type,6 yet as we’ve seen, their systems of indirect reciprocity bore some signal similarities to those of hunter-gatherers, and even after a century and a half of living mostly under a despotic tribal “state,” their egalitarian ethos was still quite evident. Spending two years in one small settlement of Upper Morača Tribe also allowed me the experience of living long term in a minuscule “Durkheimian” moral community as a speaker of the native language, and this background, too, was invaluable.
TWO SUPERB EXEMPLARS
If I were obliged to single out just one LPA foraging society to exemplify the moral life of all such societies, I’d simply have to go with the one that was best described ethnographically. That said, I’d be hard pressed to choose between the Kalahari-dwelling Bushmen, including the !Kung, the !Ko, and the G/wi, and a pair of Inuit-speaking groups from central Canada called the Netsilik and the Utku.7 These two sets of cultures have ethnographies that are exceptional in their portrayal of moral life, and fortunately I don’t have to make a choice. We’ll use them both in this chapter.
This rich ethnography needs some introduction. The loquacious !Kung have been vividly described by author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and by professional anthropologists Richard Lee, Polly Wiessner, Pat Draper,8 and by many others, one of whom, anthropologist Marjorie Shostak, recorded the life history of Nisa—a !Kung woman whose story is somewhat atypical because Nisa has an unusually non-monogamous love life.9 She also seems quite concerned with issues of generosity and sharing for, as Nisa presents herself to Shostak, Nisa often appears to be not only quite stingy, but also equally demanding of generosity on the part of others.
As we’ll see, these feelings of jealousy over food may have been exacerbated when Nisa was, with great resistance, being weaned. That possibility noted, the scrappy Nisa is far from being an immoralist in her own !Kung culture, and even though her autobiography may be somewhat atypical, it provides a special and even unique window into Bushman life that will augment our qualitative analysis well, here and in Chapter 10.
In central Canada, the Netsilik Eskimos had the major advantage of being studied not long after the time of contact by an anthropologically sophisticated Danish explorer named Knud Rasmussen, and of being restudied just as they were giving up their traditional nomadic way of life by Asen Balikci,10 an ethnographer who also made a very fine and now classic series of films on these seal hunters. In addition, the Utku Inuit-speakers, who live in Back River and are regional neighbors of the Netsilik, were studied by my old friend Jean Briggs,11 who left Massachusetts for the Arctic in the 1960s just as I was beginning my graduate studies. She was adopted into an Utku family, the family of the carefully aggressive Inuttiaq, and her intimate description of Utku emotions and morals is remarkable. So is the fact that eventually she found herself at the center of a moral crisis. In N
ever in Anger Briggs recounts how she was ostracized for months by members of her host culture, and later this will provide us with a unique glimpse into indigenous social control—from the perspective of a sensitive “deviant” from an alien culture who had seriously violated the Utku code with respect to emotional self-control.
Briggs’s scientific interest was not in ostracism, and certainly not her own ostracism, but in how children were socialized. Her studies of the Utku and later another Inuit-speaking group,12 far to the northeast in Cumberland Sound, provide an excellent idea of how Inuit societies lovingly nurture their young offspring while they are internalizing the group’s rules and values, even as they also use hypothetical-situation moral dilemmas to pose cruel and stressful choices for these same small children.
Another reason I have chosen to treat the quite disparate Kalahari Bushmen and Arctic Inuit speakers in tandem is that these rich ethnographies usefully showcase commonalities in hunter-gatherer moral life that prevail in spite of obvious and enormous environmental differences. Specifically, the Bushmen live in a hot and seasonally quite arid environment, with the bulk of their calories coming from plant foods even though nutritionally (and culturally) hunting is very important to them, whereas the Inuit are obliged to eat mostly seal blubber and caribou meat (they prefer the blubber) along with seasonal fish, even though a few plant foods are available in the stomachs of herbivorous prey. These differences are profound. Yet, as we’ll see, the moral feelings, styles of group sanctioning, and efforts to control conflicts are in many ways very similar. It all begins with having an evolved conscience, which facilitates the internalization of values and makes people think about both themselves and others in terms of virtuous right—and shameful wrong.
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