Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  The need to share large game is one reason that people cluster together to live in bands. But there are others. Humans are naturally sociable, so these nomads also congregate simply because they enjoy the company; that way there’s also better protection against predators. Furthermore, bands link people with resources: when two bands recognize each other’s collective claims to specific, highly familiar natural resources, this aids subsistence efficiency on both sides. All of these factors militate for a minimum band size of twenty to thirty people and for a certain unity of purpose.

  Because bands cooperate so strikingly, we tend to think of their members living in great harmony. However, even though in general these several dozen people will camp together and live in close physical proximity, and even though they have a shared subsistence fate as large-game hunters, some of a band’s families will choose to live closer to certain families than to others. I’m referring to physical space, but they also have a variety of ways of “distancing” themselves socially.

  Social distancing theory began with the study of modern ethnic groups and their views of one another as “outsiders,” but I will be expanding this theory to include insiders treating other insiders as outsiders.5 With respect to factions within groups, Cephu contentiously referred to his little cluster of intimates as being separate from the rest of the Pygmy band, and in fact they built their shelters accordingly. The Kalahari Bushmen orient the openings of their huts according to feelings of social closeness or distance,6 and Briggs7 tells of an Utku family that was spatially distanced from the rest of the small band largely because one family member, a female named Niqi, had a seriously problematic personality. This included a free-riding lack of generosity, poor social skills, and a general emotional volatility that was distasteful to other Utku, and although Niqi’s whole family merely camped at a distance, Niqi herself was subject to some moderate ostracism.

  Active social distancing by entire bands is aimed at individuals whose deviant behavior annoys, outrages, or threatens other group members, and most of the predictable reactions have already been described. It all begins with a social aloofness that reduces normal communication, as in curtailed everyday greetings by group members. Such reticence pertains also to conflicts just between pairs of individuals, and one way to keep a dyadic conflict from escalating is simply for the two to stop speaking bilaterally. When everyone in the band starts to restrict greetings and verbal intercourse, this curtails the deviant’s opportunities to enter into cooperation, while the social deprivation will be a major source of stress—unless the person chooses to move to a different band, which may or may not be feasible.

  Although ostracism is fairly frequent and surely is universal among LPA foragers, the details are seldom reported in any detail. We are fortunate, therefore, to have the account from Jean Briggs of her own ostracism in an isolated Inuit camp of less than two dozen people. It’s hard to say just where it all began, for basically the Utku were upset with Jean’s emotional style long before the defining incident took place. For instance, if the igloo’s roof melted and a hunk of slush fell into her typewriter, she was prone to throw something (in one instance, a knife) simply to express her anger—a behavior that was frightening to the Utku because in their minds killing someone came next.8 In Jean’s New England culture of origin, this would, of course, be a mere fit of pique.

  Here, greatly abbreviated, is the account I wrote in Hierarchy in the Forest of Jean’s unfortunate but illuminating ordeal. Inuttiaq, the man who has the problems with an overly assertive personality, is the band’s informal headman.

  Several sportsmen who had flown in by seaplane were borrowing the Utku’s two rather fragile, irreplaceable canoes for fishing. The Utku approach to such exploitation, which they resented in spite of some trading with the whites, was to acquiesce to every request. Having been told in private about their resentment, Briggs made the mistake of actively intervening after the whites ruined one of the Utku canoes and still wanted to use the last one. She explained heatedly that the Utku depended on the canoes, and the guide replied that if the canoe’s owner did not choose to lend the boat they would do without it. Inuttiaq, put on the spot by Briggs, agreed to let the sportsmen use the last boat for fishing. Briggs could not hide her anger at both parties. She strode away from the scene to weep in her tent, unaware that her behavior had been the last straw. . . .

  After the incident people continued to behave cordially and generously toward the turbulent visitor when she approached them—but she noticed that they were coming to visit her far less often, and stayed only briefly. Before long they began in subtle ways to discourage her own visits. It became evident that she was being ostracized like Niqi—but during the period of estrangement it also emerged that the Utku were willing to let her rehabilitate herself. Indeed, whenever she was able to control her feelings and avoid emotionalized negativity for a time, they began to respond positively. The problem was that Briggs could not maintain the flawless equanimity that the situation seemed to demand. She was being distanced, it hurt, and when she broke down and showed her frustration, she was distanced even more.

  The kind of overt hostility that had triggered the ostracism was scrupulously avoided by the Utku in applying their sanction. Briggs was basically alone in her tent with very few callers, and even their visits became perfunctory compared to her earlier rich social life. People were not impolite, they simply set up a great deal of social distance. By good luck, after months of this treatment a third party provided the Utku with some insight into why Briggs had tried to deny the canoe to the whites. Once they understood that her anger had been on their behalf and against unscrupulous men who cared nothing for their welfare, they eventually relaxed the social barriers they had so carefully erected and maintained.9

  Jean was not shunned in the sense of an overtly hostile cutoff of all social intercourse such as takes place in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with the Amish.10 But it’s difficult to imagine being thousands of miles from your own culture and being socially rejected in this low-key but hostile way. People who engage in social ostracism know they’re inflicting emotional pain, and they tend to do so manipulatively—for generally they’re willing to permit rehabilitation. That’s the beauty of ostracism and also of all-out shunning, for neither is necessarily forever. It’s banishment that is forever.

  In Never in Anger Jean interprets this act of social distancing in terms of the Utku fear of potentially violent emotions, which they themselves are so careful to control. However, there may have been another element that I might add. In going against the group’s decision, she may have been perceived as a person who was trying to make a decision individually for an entire egalitarian band, a consensus group that allowed none of its own to do this. Jean definitely was far too free in letting out her anger, but in Utku eyes she also may have been acting something like a big shot when she unilaterally presumed to speak for the entire group and thereby went against its wishes. The price she paid was that she was politely but firmly denied normal social contact for a matter of months.

  Social scientists usually categorize such distancing in escalating terms of ostracism, shunning, temporary group ejection, and permanent banishment, but in fact capital punishment can be seen as the truly ultimate means of social distancing.11 Of course, taking a life unnecessarily within the group is a strong moral prohibition, but group-ordained capital punishment isn’t. And even though the ethnographic coverage is so incomplete, I believe that such punishment is all but certain to be potentially present in any band society, as a desperate final resort. Thus, social distancing usually is manipulative in the direction of reform, but as we’ve seen it also can become ultimate.

  ACTS OF “SOCIAL MONSTROSITY”

  Unlike flagrant meat-cheating, some morally deviant acts seem not to directly threaten the interests of all group members, yet they, too, may elicit a collective response of lethal violence because they are, to use a nontechnical term, socially monstrous. Close incest is of
ten viewed that way, although cultures vary considerably in how they define this social crime. This variation may be driven in part by the degree to which in the society’s past inbreeding’s consequences were consciously recognized.

  Evolutionary anthropologist William Durham studied incest using a sample of five dozen societies, most of them tribal but with a few foragers, and in nearly half of this sample there was evidence to suggest that somehow incest taboos had been created because at some point in the past birth anomalies were noticed and associated with close inbreeding.12 In addition, a general human capacity for disgust could be hooking up with these strong moralistic reactions.13 However, I certainly would hesitate to suggest that there could be a very specific innate horror of, say, mother-son incest, even though this prohibition appears to be the strongest.

  Sibling incest usually elicits abhorrence, but there are rare documented instances of socially approved brother-sister marriage among royalty (and others) in early civilizations. Especially in tribal societies, often marrying a true first cousin is heartily approved of, sought after, and strongly institutionalized. Thus, if we look at all world societies, the application of close-incest taboos is somewhat flexible even though mating between parents and children is always “against the law.”

  To complicate matters, there’s the Westermarck Effect,14 which predicts that when children are raised in siblinglike relationships, whether they are very closely related or not, they will develop a mutual sexual inhibition that kills attraction and therefore radically reduces their breeding possibilities. This effect has been measured statistically,15 and similar effects are seen in promiscuously breeding great apes with respect to socially familiar relationships between mothers and sons or between siblings, both of which are naturally inhibited.16 However, if such an evolved inhibition is at work in humans, it doesn’t seem to be extremely strong with respect to the father-daughter incest relationship, for the rates in modern American society would seem to be noteworthy, with Appalachia as everyone’s favorite example.17 On the other hand, modern society provides far more privacy than does band life.

  Durham found that active sanctions like ostracism, physical attacks, and even execution were measures taken against close incest as locally defined. Less often supernatural sanctions were an agency of social control. For example, there might be fear of being born with birth anomalies inflicted by imaginary entities. In some cultures, because these scary imaginary entities are thought to punish the entire group for the incestuous sins of individuals, band members will feel incest to be a serious threat to everybody and therefore punish it very severely.

  Whatever the puzzles about incest, there appear to be two bases for punishment of monstrous acts by outraged moral majorities. One is that the deviance creates a clear and present danger to every other member of the group, either realistically or supernaturally. The other is that somehow the behavior is found to be so far beyond the pale that it simply becomes morally repugnant. In that sense, close incest and serious meat-cheating may be fairly similar, for they can fulfill both of these criteria.

  KILLING UNBALANCED DEVIANTS

  Group opinion can come into play actively and lethally in the absence of moral malfeasance. There are rare cases where individuals who are patently unable to understand the damage their behavior is doing to others must be dealt with by their groups, and usually this is because group members feel seriously threatened for their lives—as with a psychotic person whose violent nature can turn to homicide. There are both Eskimo and Bushman examples. Here’s an Inuit case history from Balikci:

  Shortly after, Arnaktark must have returned to his igloo and that same night he stabbed his wife Kakortingnerk in her stomach. She fled on foot with her child on her shoulders, and after arriving at the main camp she told what had happened.

  They started to fear that he might stab again at someone they loved, and they discussed what should be done. The discussion was held among family, and it was felt that Arnaktark, because he had become a danger to them, should be killed. Kokonwatsiark [a brother] said that he would carry out the verdict himself and the others agreed. Old father Aolajut was not supposed to do it, because Arnaktark was his own son; but if Kokonwatsiark for some reason would not have done it, the next oldest, Abloserdjuark, would have offered himself to do it. After the decision was taken, Kokonwatsiark notified the non-relatives, because they also were afraid. All agreed that there was no alternative.

  Then the entire camp broke up: Aolajut, Kokonwatsiark, Abloserdjuark, Nerlongajok and Igiukrak traveled to Arnaktark’s igloo, and Krimitsiark led the others and the women and children along another route to the new camp at the coast. Upon arrival at Arnaktark’s place, the latter was standing outside, and Kokonwatsiark said to him: “Because you do not know very well any more (have lost control of your mind), I am going to ‘have’ you.” Then he aimed at his heart and shot him through the chest. Then they moved on to join the others at the coast. His grave is yonder, towards the end of Willerstedt Lake.18

  This provides a sad example of a Netsilik delegated killing in that there was group agreement and a kinsman was the agent. However, the execution was expedient, rather than moral, because the deviant didn’t understand his own actions. There’s a !Kung Bushman case history, also with exceptional ethnographic detail, that I shall bring in later in the chapter. However, in that case it’s a bit less clear as to whether the killer was considered to be “psychotic,” and to say that the manner of execution was far less orderly is an understatement.

  Given enough time, any band society is likely to experience a problem with a homicide-prone unbalanced individual. And predictably band members will have to solve the problem by means of execution even though all of these societies are strongly against killing within the group. As with infanticide or the frequent killing of twins, this is not capital punishment because moral malfeasance is not the issue. But there seems to be a similarity to capital punishment in that the Inuit act of execution was delegated to a family member, and in that a serious threat to everyone in the band begot community-sponsored action.

  When a rational but incorrigible, selfish bully is taken out by his peers, the social and political dynamics are the same—but a moral element is added. In Table I, we saw that such executions seemed to be far more numerous than the killing of psychotics, so they, too, may be assumed to be universal in LPA societies. Give any of these groups a few hundred years to work with, and a reckless male, intent on domination, will all but certainly turn up and have to be coped with. And sometimes killing him is the only way out.

  PEACEMAKING AS A DIFFICULT MISSION

  Scientists have often tended to view hunter-gatherer levels of violence as a window into our genetic nature, and of course the less violent our favorite forager example happens to be, the more we’re in luck with respect to thinking we must have a nice, as opposed to a nasty, human nature. Earlier studies of the Bushmen culminated in a book called The Harmless People, and even though the author, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, was aware that the contentious !Kung were always worried about having poisoned arrows around, she wrote that homicides were rare19—even though back then they’d been killing one another at the same rate as New Yorkers or Los Angelenos.

  Thomas did accurately characterize the !Kung as people who are sensitive to group opinion and eager to resolve conflicts; indeed, when it came to lower levels of conflict, these people were likely to hold an all-night trance dance, which meant that the entire band would dance and sing together and restore the social harmony they valued. As we’ve seen, however, in the matter of serious conflicts and murder rates, Thomas’s information, like that of many others who practice the scientific art of ethnography, was seriously incomplete.20

  It was only later, after Richard Lee finally persuaded a few !Kung informants to talk to him openly about homicide, that the facts of Bushman killing came spilling out, and it became apparent that these people, who are deeply against conflict in their values, have quite high homicide ra
tes because they lose their tempers easily and are experts at killing sizable mammals. The Marshall expeditions began just as Bushman conflict was beginning to be greatly inhibited by state control, but later, by turning to ethnohistory, Lee was able to write about these guarded but well-remembered earlier conflicts as a prominent part of the Bushmen’s traditional social fabric.21

  As with all forager societies, there’s a local cultural style for expressing personal differences among the !Kung. This begins with minor but potentially serious arguments that are confined to hostile joking, with merriment relieving the tensions. At the next level, angrier disputants drop the pretense of humor and the potential for violent conflict increases as arguments become more heated. Next comes za, or sexual-insult exchange, which means that violence is precariously near. For males the ultimate sexual insult is “May death pull back your foreskin,” whereas for females it is “Death on your vagina.”22 Because physical exposure of the body parts is shameful for the !Kung, such “verbal exposure” involves implications of shame, and such insults can lead in contrary directions. One, perhaps rather surprisingly, is suicide—presumably with the anger turned inward. More expectably, the other is retaliatory, violent, and potentially very harmful to the person who did the taunting.

  Because the males are always packing poisoned arrows, a sudden and potentially lethal assault can be in the offing whenever a verbal conflict reaches the za level. When this happens, the band tends to quickly split up because everyone knows that a homicide is coming next, and as with the Netsilik, and as with all hunter-gatherers, apparently,23 further killing will be likely on a retaliatory basis. Avoidance is a prime method of conflict resolution among all LPA foragers, precisely because their nomadic lifestyle, along with their flexible approach to who can reside in which band, makes this use of physical separation such a practical strategy.24