Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  Learning to follow rules is something else that we readily learn when our development reaches a certain point, and this, too, was true of Ancestral Pan. Then there are the aforementioned human stages of moral readiness that prepare infants and small children to color with embarrassment and blush with shame and later help them to learn complex rules of conduct through playing children’s games. Mel Konner believes that very significant rule learning comes through these children’s games, as studied by Piaget,46 and such games appear to be universal. In fact, young apes I’ve watched spend a lot of their time play-fighting, which teaches them how to express and control their aggressions. And their mothers impose “rules” on them such as not playing too roughly.

  The games of human children all have rules, even though the specific games and rules vary greatly from culture to culture. And from our own earlier experiences on the playground, we know that as games are learned, children make newcomers aware of rules and deliberately instruct novices or those who inadvertently break them.

  I remember as a lightly built first-grader being taken by my mother (who knew nothing about the game) to the grassy Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to join a regular Sunday morning tackle football game that was presided over by one of the boy’s fathers. Having never heard of football, and being completely untutored in its rules, I took one look and assumed that the point of the game was to enter a chaotic rough and tumble competition and gain possession of the ball. I proceeded to compete in this way, and at the end of the first play I illegally wrestled the ball away from the downed ball carrier. I was removed from the game diplomatically, but nonetheless I had the distinct sense that I was being treated as a social pariah. And I was, in fact, being excluded, if not aggressively ostracized. The feeling of suddenly discovering that I was a social deviant who flagrantly went against the rules that everyone else was following haunts me to this day, even though a few years later I did learn the rules and came to love the game of football.

  In their play, children learn a great deal about things like how to apply their dominance and submission tendencies and how to form political alliances. Sometimes they behave this way to enhance their own power, but sometimes they form coalitions to punish deviance in the form of cheating or bullying. Thus, games turn children’s groups into minimoral communities that provide learning experiences in dealing with adult rules of conduct. The internalization of rules appears not to end with childhood. Adults’ active and universal verbal amplification of altruism, which we have discussed at some length, works off of very much the same innate tendencies. It reinforces earlier teachings in favor of being generous, and participation in the punishment of behaviors like stealing, cheating, and bullying has a reinforcing effect.

  When Cephu was being confronted and went to sit down as usual by the fire, the Mbuti hunters who faced him down knew exactly what they were doing when they denied this cheater his customary place. They were acting as contributing members of a punishing group, and their feelings about having been cheated were especially strong because the rules for fair meat-sharing were embedded so deeply in people’s psyches. Cephu’s meat-cheating went against a well-learned and strongly believed in sharing ethic that was held by all band members, and the result was systematic collective shaming and a real threat of banishment.

  In this type of experience it is quite difficult to separate out the genetic preparations and the cultural input, for the two are closely intertwined. But because the cultural glove fits the genetic hand so well, social selection was able to have consistent effects on both group social life and gene pools over many generations and, in fact, over scores of millennia.

  WORK OF THE MORAL MAJORITY

  9

  GOSSIP’S TYRANNY

  Morality’s a group affair, but often individuals take the lead in exerting social pressure, and, when that doesn’t work, in initiating more assertive sanctions against deviants. Critical to this process is talking, and gossip’s a special kind of talking. We’re going to talk a lot about gossip here, for it’s because of language and gossiping that foraging bands are so likely to exhibit the universal, well-developed, and highly negative expressions of “public opinion” that are mentioned so regularly by anthropologists who live with small groups of nonliterates.

  Gossiping tends to have a bad name with ourselves and hunter-gatherers alike, even though public opinion can also be focused on the positive qualities of “gossipees” as well as their faults. Most of this “talking” is in fact negative in its thrust—as is demonstrated anthropologically by John Haviland’s linguistic study of colorfully obscene gossiping in a Mayan peasant village.1 Whether they like it or not, this shapes people’s social reputations in Yucatan—and they’d better watch out, for gossip functions as a court of public opinion. It’s a special kind of court, however: the defendants don’t get to face the charges against them—and often there’s simply no way to defend themselves.

  The same predominant negativity is true of hunting bands. The critical court of public opinion isn’t interested in holding balanced and fair hearings but rather in knowing about what people will try to hide. Anthropologist Polly Wiessner has made a detailed study of what Kalahari Bushmen talk about in the context of individual culpability, as a possible prelude to group social pressure or punishment.2 It appears that forager gossip is similar to Haviland’s peasant gossip and to the Serbian tribal gossip I listened to daily with such great interest—and, I admit it, great enjoyment—in Montenegro.

  The !Kung people that Wiessner has studied for over three decades gossip intensively when trouble is shaping up and collective action may have to be taken. Her uniquely long-term data show what is talked about, and the leading social problem has, of course, been twenty-nine cases she counted of “big-shot” behavior—a pattern that creates a major social challenge in any egalitarian society. As we’ve seen in Chapter 4, when excessively dominant behavior seriously threatens the personal autonomy of others, this can result in capital punishment. And even moderate signs of big-shot behavior are certain to be of keen interest in egalitarian hunter-gatherer gossiping circles everywhere, for such behavior is best headed off at the pass.

  Other !Kung problems that stimulated group “talking” and then possible collective action were, in order of incidence, (1) patterns of stinginess, greed, or laziness; (2) an individual acting as a troublemaker; (3) political or land-use disputes; and (4) someone being reclusively antisocial. Other problems included inappropriate sexual behavior. The two most frequent—big-shot behavior and patterns of stinginess, greed or laziness—can both be seen as free-riding attempts in that generous good citizens will be taken advantage of. Thus, Wiessner’s study provides excellent corroboration for what I’ve said earlier about the LPA focus on reduction of free-riding behavior.

  It’s by adding up information that social deviants are identified and people can unite to cope with them. Without safe, private gossiping, free-rider suppression would not be likely to work very effectively in the case of scary bullies, because only a united group is a confident and safe group, and such political unity comes out of finding a consensus. Furthermore, a constantly communicating group is one that can quickly figure out diagnostically who is a thief or a lying cheater. Thus, effective punitive social selection is possible because a band’s better citizens can communicate in private, in a situation of trust.

  Polly Wiessner has been visiting the !Kung Bushmen now for three decades, so on average this means that about once a year there’s a serious incident in which big-shot behavior is sufficiently worrisome that talking might lead to collective action. With respect to free-rider suppression, this means two things. First, the bullying free riders can be confronted by the group; this gives them a chance to reform and stop the behavior before it brings on dire consequences. And second, others harboring the same antisocial tendencies can learn by example and simply desist from the pushy or arrogant behaviors that come all too naturally to certain male hunters. Having an evolutionary consc
ience makes it easy to make the necessary calculations.

  In this way groups often can prevent individuals who are unusually disposed to take a bullying free ride from carrying things to the point that their reproductive losses will become severe owing to capital punishment or other decisive and injurious sanctioning. However, even if collective action by the group leads to reform, the reformed deviants will have paid some costs because they’ve been temporarily excluded from cooperation, and there may be reputational costs to be paid in the future. The potential bullying free riders whose genes suffer no adverse consequences are those whose evolutionary consciences are so effective that they can efficiently inhibit themselves in the first place, keep people from feeling threatened, and maintain a decent reputation.

  As we’ve seen, Jean Briggs’s intimidating adoptive Inuit father, Inuttiaq, had some decided difficulties in this area, but he was able to keep his potentially self-aggrandizing volatility in check. To stay out of political trouble, such an unusually assertive person must be aware that the rest of the group will be watching him carefully and will be privately comparing notes to make sure they can trust him to keep his aggressive tendencies under control.

  Thus, there are a variety of outcomes for individuals disposed to bullying behavior. Some must be killed, and many others must be ridiculed or admonished and thereby reformed. But many have consciences that are up to the task of staying in line and can do this so well that group sanctions never come into play. Awareness of gossip and fear of it are part of this picture, for other people’s talking privately can have significant social consequences for deviants, be they bullies, cheaters, or whatever. And because everyone in a band is privy to gossip, all band members appreciate their own personal vulnerability to this type of private discourse.

  Gossiping in private is not necessarily safe. The gossipers must still be careful about what they say, for if negative pronouncements are repeated, or overheard, this can spell real trouble both for themselves and for the entire group. (It was such a breach of confidentiality that triggered the infamous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.) Gossip can seriously damage a person’s reputation—and everyone knows that bad news, once started, travels rapidly. In my survey of hunter-gatherer societies, I actually found one case in the Arctic of an inveterate gossip’s being killed by her group, presumably because her malicious talk stirred serious and unnecessary conflicts.3

  I could write a book about gossip. Any cultural anthropologist knows that until you begin to access the gossip networks in the group you’re studying, you’ll have little chance of understanding what’s really going on socially. Eliciting gossip was one aspect of the mid-1960s fieldwork with Montenegrin Serbs that both my wife and I enjoyed immensely once we were plugged in, not only because we were finally getting the “real story” about tribal affairs and people’s moral reputations, but also because reaching the point of having such intimate and trusting conversations made us feel we were gaining some real acceptance from the people we had chosen to work with. We were making friends, and friends who trust one another just naturally gossip.

  In the tightly networked settlement where we were living, it was all too apparent that the preponderance of this “talking” was focused negatively on individuals suspected of deviant behavior.4 It also seemed, shades of Durkheim, that virtually all the settlement’s inhabitants felt they had something to hide and feared the social effect of others talking about them and jumping to wrong—or right—conclusions. This fear was realistic, for all this private talking involved zealous social “detective work” that could bring down reputations. As a result, people not only loved to gossip because of the insights they gained, but they also fiercely resented the fact that at the same time others surely were talking privately about them.

  In the tribe we studied, one man whose proper name I shall not divulge was known as a prepritzalitza, which literally means “one who tells things over and over again,” or perhaps better, a “serial gossiper.” This man of fifty deviated from the local standard not because he so obviously enjoyed prying into other people’s affairs and spreading bad news, but because in doing so, he didn’t confine his gossip to small, careful, private networks of trusted and discreet close friends. Rather, at a sizable evening social gathering in front of a whole roomful of people, he’d start broadcasting information about individuals who were absent just as though he were in a tête-à-tête situation. There was never talk of taking action against him, but he was cordially disliked, and he himself was talked about for being a reckless gossip who openly endangered the reputations of others. Even though this lifelong behavior had seriously damaged his reputation, “Svetozar” was never actually confronted, probably because his loose talk wasn’t seriously disruptive to the settlement he lived in. Indeed, it seemed to be driven more by naïveté about how things worked socially than by any extraordinary degree of malice.

  Normal gossiping serves as an agency of indirect social control. And aside from scaring many people sufficiently to deter them from discoverable acts of deviance, gossiping has other social benefits, as well. Over time, highly useful social information can be disseminated widely until a group consensus forms. Thus, for instance, a case can be built gradually against a main suspected thief where several other candidates were also under suspicion initially. I watched this happen in the remote Serbian tribal settlement we studied, and the process went on for months, all but obsessively.

  Let’s return to bands. If a serious problem arises, it’s the combination of the group’s shared rules and a consensus about the actual facts of a particular case that enables a band to come down unanimously on a deviant like Cephu—or at least to come down on him as a largely united moral majority while the deviant’s close kinsmen may choose to stand to one side. This singularity of purpose is important because if a consensus is not built before action is taken, what might otherwise have been an instance of efficient group sanctioning can turn into sheer factional conflict, with both sides claiming moral rectitude. And this has the obvious effect of damaging the social fabric of the group, whereas putting an end to a seriously deviant pattern of behavior, doing so in the name of the group, will greatly improve that fabric.

  Being tied in to intimate gossip networks surely has been individually adaptive ever since humans with some kind of symbolic language began to systematically identify and deal with intimidating or hard-to-detect deviants by privately comparing notes, thereby making them easier to avoid and more likely to pay for their depredations. Furthermore, when children overhear their parents gossiping, this provides their developing consciences with accurate information about values, rules, and proper behavior. This means that language has had an important role in moral evolution and values internalization, if perhaps not an absolutely necessary one: in resisting alpha domination, a nonmoral Ancestral Pan at least had the potential to find a political consensus through use of body language, nonsymbolic vocalizing, and astute reading of social contexts.

  This capacity was evident in the group-sanctioning episode Frans de Waal interpreted for us when he told how the protesting voices of the female chimpanzees in his captive group reached unanimity and the alpha male knew that a physical attack was coming if he continued his bullying behavior. This was not close to being gossip, for the emotional outcry that resulted from “opinion sharing” was totally public and it lacked any symbolic expression—but the overall social context did give the communication obvious meaning in terms of a shared social diagnosis and shared hostility, with a successful past history of rebellious action against bullies providing part of the shared meaning. I believe that these collectivized angry communication functions in great apes at least have some basic similarities to what humans do in gossiping, where a moral consensus, based on explicit shared values and rules, leads similarly to social control.

  Had earlier humans been totally unable to communicate privately through symbols, it’s unlikely that anything very similar to moral communities as we know the
m today could have evolved. The fact that a solid public opinion can be quietly formed without personal risk or conflict and through highly specific symbols provides a formidable social tool, especially against dangerous bullies, and when it’s time for action, the findings can be used surgically.

  I’ve mentioned, in passing, gossip’s staying power as society modernizes. This appears to involve more than the purely habitual perseveration of a hunter-gatherer cultural habit. Indeed, it’s likely, after at least 45,000 years of individuals gaining fitness by whispering back and forth about other people’s behavior behind their backs, that discreet and intimate socially evaluative “talking” is part of our evolved capacity to behave morally—just as the internalization of rules surely is. Thus, gossiping serves us today as it served our ancestors in the past.

  I’m not suggesting that there’s anything like a single gene for gossiping or that there’s a specific brain area—a “module,” as it’s sometimes called—that’s dedicated to informative backbiting. What I do propose is that such behavior is likely to be both ancient and innately fairly well prepared, precisely because individuals whose gossip networks are superior can gain a certain edge—both in staying out of serious trouble themselves and in better learning which social predators to watch out for. Gossiping creates fascinating information that is useful in everyday life and also helps fitness. That’s why it’s so prevalent and persistent. That’s also why millions of modern females (and many more males than you might think) watch soap operas—without quite understanding why they lock in so readily.

  KEEPING DEVIANTS AT A DISTANCE