Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  Later, when my father came back from the bush, she said, “Do you see what kind of mind your daughter has? Go, hit her! Hit her after you hear what she’s done. Your daughter almost killed Kumsa! This tiny little baby, this tiny little thing, she took from beside me and dropped somewhere else. I was lying down, holding him, and fell asleep. That’s when she took him from me and left him by himself. She came back, lay down, and started to nurse. Now, hit your daughter!”

  I lied, “What? She’s lying! Me . . . Daddy, I didn’t nurse. I didn’t take Kumsa and leave him by himself. Truly, I didn’t. She’s tricking you. She’s lying. I didn’t nurse. I don’t even want her milk anymore.” My father said, “If I ever hear of this again, I’ll beat you! Don’t ever do something like that again!” I said, “Yes, he’s my little brother, isn’t he? My brother, my little baby brother, and I love him. I won’t do that again. He can nurse all by himself. Daddy, even if you’re not here, I won’t steal mommy’s breasts. They belong to my brother.” He said, “Yes, daughter. But if you ever try to nurse your mother’s breasts again, I’ll hit you so that it really hurts.” I said, “Eh, from now on, I’m going to go wherever you go. When you go to the bush, I’ll go with you. The two of us will kill springhare together and you’ll trap guinea fowl and you’ll give them all to me.”

  Subsequently, Nisa turns into a childish thief whose anxious orientation to feeding continues to get her in trouble in terms of a local sharing ethic that, as my survey showed, emphasizes being generous both within the family and without. And within the family, her own childishly “deviant” patterns are treated sternly by her mother in particular:

  This was also when I used to steal food, although it only happened once in a while. Some days I wouldn’t steal anything and would just stay around playing, without doing any mischief. But other times, when they left me in the village, I’d steal and ruin their things. That’s what they said when they yelled at me and hit me. They said I had no sense.

  It happened over all types of food: sweet nin berries or klaru bulbs, other times it was mongongo nuts. I’d think, “Uhn, uhn, they won’t give me any of that. But if I steal it, they’ll hit me.” Sometimes, before my mother went gathering, she’d leave food inside a leather pouch and hang it high on one of the branches inside the hut. If it was klaru, she’d peel off the skins before putting them inside.

  But as soon as she left, I’d steal whatever was left in the bag. I’d find the biggest bulbs and take them. I’d hang the bag back on the branch and go sit somewhere to eat. When my mother came back, she’d say, “Oh! Nisa was in here and stole all the bulbs!” She’d hit me and yell, “Don’t steal! What’s the matter with you that inside you there is so much stealing? Stop taking things! Why are you so full of something like that?”

  One day, right after they left, I climbed the tree where she had hung the pouch, took out some bulbs, put the pouch back, and mashed them with water in a mortar. I put the paste in a pot and cooked it. When it was ready, I ate and finished everything I had stolen.

  Another time, I took some klaru and kept the bulbs beside me, eating them very slowly. That’s when mother came back and caught me. She grabbed me and hit me, “Nisa, stop stealing! Are you the only one who wants to eat klaru? Now, let me take what’s left and cook them for all of us to eat. Did you really think you were the only one who was going to eat them all?” I didn’t answer and started to cry. She roasted the rest of the klaru and the whole family ate. I sat there, crying. She said, “Oh, this one has no sense, finishing all those klaru like that. Those are the ones I had peeled and had left in the pouch. Has she no sense at all?” I cried, “Mommy, don’t talk like that.” She wanted to hit me, but my father wouldn’t let her.

  Another time, I was out gathering with my mother, my father, and my older brother. After a while, I said, “Mommy, give me some klaru.” She said, “I still have to peel these. As soon as I do, we’ll go back to the village and eat them.” I had also been digging klaru to take back to the village, but I ate all I could dig. . . . Later, I sat down in the shade of a tree while they gathered nearby. As soon as they had moved far enough away, I climbed the tree where they had left a pouch hanging, full of klaru, and stole the bulbs.

  This childishly antisocial eating spree brings on physical punishment:

  “Nisa, you ate the klaru! What do you have to say for yourself?” I said, “Uhn, uhn, I didn’t take them.” My mother said, “So, you’re afraid of your skin hurting, afraid of being hit?” I said, “Uhn, uhn, I didn’t eat those klaru.” She said, “You ate them. You certainly did. Now, don’t do that again! What’s making you keep on stealing?”

  My older brother said, “Mother, don’t punish her today. You’ve already hit her too many times. Just leave her alone.”

  “We can see. She says she didn’t steal the klaru. Well then, what did eat them? Who else was here?”

  I started to cry. Mother broke off a branch and hit me, “Don’t steal! Can’t you understand! I tell you, but you don’t listen. Don’t your ears hear when I talk to you?” I said, “Uhn, uhn. Mommy’s been making me feel bad for too long now. I’m going to go stay with Grandma. . . . I’m going to go stay with Grandma. I’ll go where she goes and sleep beside her wherever she sleeps. And when she goes out digging klaru, I’ll eat what she brings back.”

  Nisa proves to be too much for her grandmother, who is too old to do much gathering. And her obviously intense problems with food envy or delay of gratification seem to have persisted into adulthood a bit more, perhaps, than is typical of her !Kung Bushman peers. But to the large extent that she seems to be typical, her behavior reflects quite nicely the underlying food anxieties of the Bushmen and the expressive manner in which mature Bushmen, who in fact do encounter periodic food scarcity, vociferously resent any anticipated lack of sharing on the parts of others.

  Curiously, in the interviews Nisa never chooses to emphasize her own generosity. As an adult, Nisa’s style of narration suggests that these childish patterns continued, but it’s difficult to determine the degree to which her constant complaints, voiced in these very private recorded sessions with Shostak, fairly represent what was really going on in Nisa’s social life. For instance, we have the adult Nisa actually receiving complaints from her husband that she herself is much too generous. This generous side appears in passing, almost like the tip of an iceberg, while Marjorie and Nisa are discussing Bo, Nisa’s husband. Marjorie starts things off:

  I asked, “And your hearts, do they go out toward each other?” She said, “Yes, our hearts love each other and go out toward each other.” What about fights? “We rarely fight. When we do, it’s usually about food, when I serve too many people. That’s when he asks, ‘What are you doing, serving everyone? When do others ever serve us? When we have food, we should be the only ones to eat.’ But I say, ‘You just like to yell about things.’ Then he says, ‘It’s because you are bad, a bad one that sees a person and gives him food, then sees another and gives him food. Don’t you know that when you have food, it is for you and your child, that she can eat and be full? You’ll wind up just like a woman with nothing this way.’” Was this an important fight? “No, it’s very small. We fight a little, then leave it and love each other again.”33

  Can a somewhat idiosyncratic indigenous autobiography be useful to evolutionary analysis? A flattering presentation of self would be one predictable distortion, but in fact Nisa doesn’t seem to be doing much of this, perhaps because Marjorie is her trusted confidante. It would be useful to have dozens of these personal accounts so that central tendencies in Bushman personality patterns would be easy to identify, and it would be very interesting to have for comparison another dozen from an LPA society where people are seldom hungry or are less prone to nag others about meat-sharing. But we’re lucky that Marjorie Shostak went to the trouble of eliciting and transcribing Nisa’s personal account, for the hints it provides are important.

  ADAPTATION

  In fact, Nisa’s ambivalences se
em to reflect generalized Bushman ambivalences that are quite predictable. First, consider the fact that these people often experience extensive routine privation in the lengthy dry season and that sometimes because of localized minidroughts they must travel long distances to keep from starving.34 Then consider the fundamental underlying conflicts discussed previously, which stem from having a genetic nature that is only moderately altruistic and a conscience that is morally flexible. The social solutions that these and other LPA foragers like the Netsilik have come up with tell us a great deal about how culturally modern humans made it through the Late Pleistocene, with its radical ups and downs, and into a Holocene land of plenty, where even many “marginalized” environments were at least fairly steady.

  We may assume that even after childhood learning experiences are complete, the internalization of nepotistic values that favor generosity within the family will not begin to wholly neutralize strong egoistic drives when they combine with extreme hunger. The biological dispositions that help people learn to be generous to nonkin are weaker still, which is why when famine begins to approach, and in spite of the band-wide sharing system’s being well reinforced by moral beliefs when times are normal, this system as a whole will begin to fall apart.

  Another way of saying this is flexibility. These foragers have built social edifices that are influenced by a hierarchy of competing motivations and also by a range of different environmental conditions. And institutions like meat-sharing reflect practical concerns about when profit is to be had in engaging in a system of band level indirect reciprocity and when such participation should be set aside. Given the relatively limited motivations that natural selection has given us to work with for being generous outside of the family, it sometimes strikes me as remarkable that we share as well as we do. The cultural amplification of these modest but very important altruistic tendencies provides much of the answer to the question as to how such institutions can be maintained, and we must give credit to the socially sophisticated minds that helped these language-assisted systems of cultural reinforcement to develop in the first place.

  On a day-to-day basis these same minds understand established indigenous sharing systems, and when they are profitable, people strive to make them work well on a continuing basis because in normal times this significantly raises their standard of living. Of course, the same minds shape quite different adaptive responses in times of unusual abundance, when band-level systems of sharing simply become superfluous. Finally, when dire scarcity strikes, people’s decisions can become downright cruel, as opposed to generous, even though they may still experience pangs of sympathy and acutely feel the moral compromises they must make.

  SMART ENOUGH TO BE FLEXIBLE

  This chapter has explored the day-to-day expression of cooperative generosity between families and the potentially formidable obstacles to it that exist in the form of egoism and nepotism. In the Late Pleistocene, it was being moral that enabled relatively weak dispositions to altruism to make humans as cooperative as they often were able to be. Conscience-based internalization was important—the same internalization of values that made the adult Nisa a person who apparently was capable of overgenerosity even though in a situation of privacy and trust she resentfully complained all the time to Marjorie Shostak. Also important was the deliberate social reinforcement of extrafamilial generosity that I’ve mentioned so often. This type of giving was praised by moralistic band members who looked down on stinginess—and were prepared to punish bullies or cheaters, if these really serious free riders sought outsized shares of scarce desirables when the usual system of indirect reciprocity was operative.

  Cognitive capacity was important, for our culturally modern forbears were likely to have known exactly what they were doing socially when they reinforced people’s generosity and curtailed major free riders. In coping with the special exigencies they faced in partially pursuing a social carnivore’s subsistence strategy, this culturally based capacity for “social engineering” enabled them to develop efficient systems of meat-sharing that worked extremely well in times of adequacy, and also, I believe, worked reasonably well when they faced times of marginal but not dire dietary inadequacy.

  This same capacity to make strategic decisions also enabled people like the hungry Netsilik to reject their own customary sharing practices when food became so scarce that trusting in a long-term system of indirect reciprocity became life threatening. At that point, the group social control that kept such systems going would simply fade away, while cooperation within the family became still more important—unless a really dire famine presented itself. In that case, social acts that otherwise would have been punishably monstrous were apparently “understood” by fellow moralists.

  Our “parliament” of competing instincts35 was being mediated by an evolutionary conscience, which did permit a total cessation of sharing when this made sense. Like individual consciences, group moral beliefs also were flexible: for instance, they did not call for the punishment of unfortunate cannibals who in dire straits were obliged to either eat their fellows—or die. Thus, for Late Pleistocene humans, doing unto unrelated others worked quite well when times were decent for subsistence, as they have been in so many places during most of the Holocene. But over and over again in the capricious Pleistocene, a profound degree of flexibility was needed as culturally modern humans like ourselves scrambled to survive as they faced critical shortages of meat, plant foods, or water.

  Today, the scope of human generosity is still highly adjustable—precisely because if we had not been able to evolve in that direction, we might well not have survived earlier on. To Americans who go to supermarkets for their food, Nisa’s gastronomic anxieties may seem obsessive. But they are a manifestation of a culture that has become responsive to periodic privation.

  In the Pleistocene, people everywhere faced far worse and surely quite frequent crises as their capricious environments changed for the better and then for the worse and often became outright untenable. Today’s LPA foragers rarely have to cope with repeatedly abrupt and lasting ups and downs like those faced by foragers who had to cope with the Pleistocene Epoch, but the mix of human capabilities that enabled those earlier human beings to stay in business was evolved by them, not by us. The adjustable capabilities we still have for being generous to, respectively, ourselves, our kin, and socially bonded nonkin provided a mix that got those earlier humans through the Late Pleistocene, and because of continuity in gene pools, we experience very much the same mix of motivations today.

  TESTING THE SELECTION-

  BY-REPUTATION HYPOTHESIS

  11

  REPUTATIONAL SELECTION

  To understand why the best hunters expend great energy and take daily risks to help provision an entire band of mostly nonrelatives, Alexander’s selection-by-reputation theory appears to offer considerable explanatory power. First, as Alexander suggests, the cooperative sharers are making large reputational gains as good citizens because of their beneficence, whereas the opposite holds for selfish bullies and equally selfish cheaters and thieves. Second, as I’ve added, free-rider suppression functions as a major selection agency. This means that seriously problematic bad guys will suffer additional fitness losses owing to potentially brutal group punishment. Keep in mind that often such active punishment comes as a reaction to a longstanding pattern of rule breaking, which means that negative reputational choices are involved as well.

  Basically, the selection-by-reputation model is keyed to how people’s viscera—and also their conscious calculations—respond to unusually attractive or unattractive social characteristics of others, and this can be a complicated matter when altruistic generosity is at issue. We saw with Nisa that she was actually criticized by her husband for being too generous, and when I asked my colleague Polly Wiessner about this, she told me that in general Bushmen who are overly generous in distributing food are considered to be poor partners because they are “wasting” resources. (A close analog in our own cultur
e would be a compulsively generous big shot who squanders the family budget by repeatedly buying drinks for everyone in the bar.) On the other hand, people with really stingy social reputations are cordially disliked by the Bushmen. Thus, as far as Bushman reputations go, there can be too much altruism, which bothers partners, as well as way too little, which seriously bothers the entire group.

  In analyzing the interpersonal attractions that lead to superior cooperative partnerships, we must also consider emotions like sympathy that lead to generosity, as opposed to “altruism,” which as the term is being used here merely involves a measure of beneficence as this affects gene frequencies. The problem is that direct evidence for generous feelings that underlie giving is seldom provided in ethnographies. This is the case even though hunter-gatherers universally think in terms of golden rules that are designed to reinforce people’s tendencies to be sympathetically responsive to the needs of others. The sympathy variable definitely is ethnographically elusive. But in my opinion it is extremely important,1 and fortunately we have one systematic field study in which it has, in effect, been measured with its reputational effects, and also another study of marriage choices in which the social benefits of being an empathetic partner are strongly implied.