Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  Over the past 12,000 years we humans have increased the sizes of our social communities from bands to agricultural tribes to chiefdoms to nations, and at all of these levels we have basically succeeded, and succeeded fairly well, in sorting things out so that destructive internal conflict doesn’t rule excessively and bring us all down. When such chaos phases in today, we call the nation in question a state that has failed. But most nations are far from being failed states, for they function quite well with their formal legal systems and their institutional approaches to law and order—institutions that basically are thousands of years old and can be traced back to Hammurabi’s laws in Mesopotamia, inscribed on a black stone tablet, and beyond.

  In several important, functional senses a powerfully centralized nation is still quite similar to the self-regulating, band-type of moral communities we’ve discussed at such length. This is the case even though small bands sharply dislike anything smacking of centralized authority, whereas people in nations know that they need some authority in order to avoid serious internal conflict and possibly civil war.

  Like nations, bands are highly aversive to conflict; indeed, a dislike of angry tensions and social disruption is an important part of being human. However, the means of conflict management vary. Bands, like nations, rely heavily on social pressure and mediation, but ultimately bands can rely on avoidance at a distance—either the band can split up or else one party to the conflict simply moves to a different locale and the conflict’s over. Fini. With nations things are quite different. Conflicting factions within nations obviously cannot move in space, which is why ultimately national stabilities have to be based on centralized coercive power—power sufficient to hold down socially disruptive deviance and, if necessary, step in and crush an incipient internal conflict. Bands, in contrast, can make do quite nicely with persuasion, mediation, and long-distance avoidance.

  When it comes to the entire culturally diverse global society of nations that inhabits this planet, we have yet to find any really effective means of international social control and conflict resolution.1 Indeed, at any given time the number of smaller wars, between and within nations, is shocking. Worse still, there’s always the possibility of a really major war, which by today’s standards means a nuclear conflict that can affect the health and livelihood of every nation and every person in the world. Thus, when it comes to our global community of nations, in this sense we’re hanging in a major political limbo.

  In practical terms, what we’ve done is to carefully design a world government that looks like an effective national government, but then we’ve made sure that it can be sabotaged from within when it comes to being decisive in really important matters of war and peace. I have in mind, obviously, the effective powerlessness of the United Nations General Assembly, and the Great Powers’ absolute vetoes in the Security Council. In an important sense, then, we’ve designed a world moral system that too often, and especially with any serious differences of opinion that involve Great Powers, lacks the teeth to sanction deviant nations or to intervene in conflicts when these become dangerous to our entire planet.

  With this less than potent “world government,” we face profound global political challenges. These range from local genocides and conventional wars to the specter of worsening nuclear proliferation, to the threat of terrorist use of bacteriological or chemical or even nuclear weapons, to future problems we cannot even predict. And we continue to face the distinct possibility that our planet could be sullied radioactively by nuclear accidents still worse than those we’ve now experienced, or be all but destroyed as a usable habitat by outright nuclear warfare between nations so equipped. Those are just the obvious problems.

  Unlike an LPA foraging band, our world of nations is far from being economically egalitarian. No sage prognosticated, as the Cold War ended, that a Medieval-Crusades type of global conflict with potentially nuclear terrorism as its objective would so quickly replace it, even though both sets of tensions seem to have been based importantly on resentments of have-nots toward haves. We must assume that future sources of envy-based conflict could be both equally unexpected and still more insidious. But what we can count on for certain is a future collision of superpowers as China builds its economic and military strength and the United States quite possibly declines. Thus, we may face another simmering “cold war” that could become susceptible to its own unpredictable dynamics in the absence of effective international control, with similarly enormous, overkill nuclear arsenals on both sides.

  The future of global morality—and global social control—will have to be watched with care, for as the means of inflicting grievous damage on others become more sophisticated, more varied, more readily available, and more widespread, and as an ever-divided “community of nations” continues to be far less than potent in containing many of its clearly apparent threats, our world system of law and order seems increasingly precarious. This is the case even though humanity’s statistical rate of killing in warfare has been radically abating since 1945.2 One obvious problem is that—reminiscently of hunter-gatherer bands—this huge world community of nations resolutely resists forming any efficient type of a supergovernment, an empowered one that could do for a world of nations what a single successful nation’s centralized government does for its people.3

  Our world is probably too large, too diverse, and too dangerous to continue to conduct its affairs informally in the hopeful style of a well-united egalitarian band that can readily coalesce as a moral community when needed, do so usually without people taking sides, and resort to avoidance if need be. As basic problems, globally we face the sheer scale and number of the political units involved and the profound cultural differences among some of our nations. And then there’s a basic problem that stems directly from our human political nature: like the individual hunters in a band, these nations are too intent on their sovereignty to allow one big supernation to be built, with a trustworthy central world government strong enough to ensure the rule of international law and guarantee the peace—and if need be, do so invasively.

  The last thing we need is a well-armed world of nations behaving like one big failed state, but the potential at least looms. We do have the 1949 Geneva Convention’s “humane” rules of (conventional) warfare, so fortunately our global community is not entirely without laws—even though it resists creating the all-encompassing, institutionalized centralized command and control needed to back them up. Two things we do have to work with, however, are our evolved and shared sense of morality and the fact that most of us, as nations, agree on certain matters, such as the nature of basic human rights, the undesirability of poverty and disease, and the need for self-determination.

  Another note of hope is that we form a species that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand its own societies and help them to function—by suppressing antisocial deviance, by socially rewarding those who are altruistically generous, and by otherwise “tweaking” our social systems to make them work better for us. The foregoing chapters have made this abundantly clear. In addition, in our bands and also later in our more complex societies, we have created national safety nets that “insure” us against personal disaster, and on occasion, at least, have behaved as unified moral majorities when we felt threatened by lawless, greedy, socially disruptive deviants like Hitler or Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. We’ve also tried hard to manage our internal conflicts and contain their destructiveness, and the nations of this world do try to mediate the conflicts of others.

  All of these important and valuable features of prehistoric and contemporary human life are nascent in a seriously underfunded, deliberately disempowered United Nations that can only be in a position to do these things effectively and consistently if the five Nuclear Great Powers happen to agree—and also are willing to cough up the money. We must hope that somehow, eventually, these well-evolved potentialities will be expressed far more effectively in helping to shape a stable world society of nations,
many of them nuclear, that has to be our future greater moral community.

  Perhaps one past lesson for present and future major powers to consider would be that not only applications of power but also extensions of generosity can be a strategy for social success, and that sometimes a generous approach, in spite of the risks, may pay off handsomely in the long run. After World War II, for instance, America’s popular and massive Marshall Plan was a generous (and politically useful) move that helped to build a successful and nonconflictive Europe, while more or less altruistic foreign aid to other parts of the world was also forthcoming on a substantial basis. The United States was viewed as a rich and generous nation that deserved the goodwill of others, comparable to the unusually productive and also unusually generous Aché individuals we met with, who were helped abundantly in their own time of need. However, in this present century America has had neither the will nor the budget to follow this precedent, and our reputational standing is at low ebb because economic generosity has been so strongly eclipsed by one maladroit political power play—the second invasion of Iraq—which in the world’s eyes violated another nation’s sovereignty and was not based on a consensus by a world moral majority. This was comparable to a bully’s throwing his weight around in an egalitarian hunting band, and America’s global presence changed for the worse.

  In bands, everybody shares the same culture, and in an important sense their generosity-based cooperative systems of indirect reciprocity can be based on a sense of personal trust that underlies any potential actions of the group as a moral community. Furthermore, people are egalitarian, which means that their political and economic pie is divided more or less equally. For a huge, competitive community of ethnocentric and religiously divided nations that includes enormous (and too often growing) differences between haves and have-nots, to accomplish something similar involves far greater challenges.

  If like a foraging band our global community of nations is vehemently unwilling to trust a centralized system of command and control, we must hope that somehow these challenges can be met with the same degree of insight and realistic goodwill exhibited by our Pleistocene hunting forbears, when they realized that if they wanted to live well as hunters they had to merge their competing interests and cooperate, and they proceeded to do just that in the absence of strong chiefs. That is one note of hope. Another basic reason for optimism lies in our evolutionary gifts of sympathy and generosity. Such feelings apply very readily to our children and to other kin, also to our friends and socially familiar neighbors. It is also within our potential for them to apply to others much more distant with whom we feel culturally bonded, and sometimes, at least, to total strangers.

  In a very general and very important way, I’ve suggested that in human forager communities, generosity and the resulting altruistic acts grease the wheels of cooperation. However, in today’s world community the further our potential cooperation extends from home, the more its tenor becomes unpredictable. The world’s nations may be reaching out to unknown victims of a natural disaster one day, and the next day a member of this same “community” may be committing genocide against its neighbor, quietly sponsoring vicious attacks on others by “guerrillas” whom the victims designate as terrorists, or covertly or openly trying to bring down a government it doesn’t like. It’s because our potential for sympathy and altruism is relatively modest, that it can be eclipsed so readily by less prosocial psychological dispositions that have come down to us from Ancestral Pan.

  Where we moderns are similar to our hunter-gatherer forbears is in our vulnerability to conflict. A band is vulnerable because it will not allow sufficient centralized power to develop to make possible some usefully “authoritative” means of conflict resolution to go to work, especially when its more powerful members come into conflict. Exactly the same is true of our global community of nations. In combination, the Security Council veto and a noisy but politically impotent General Assembly see to that. If smaller nations are considered along with large ones, at any given time the number of ongoing wars in our worldwide “community” is still staggering, and if you add in the threat of a serious nuclear miscalculation our planet becomes a truly dangerous place. Unfortunately, after over half a century of this dire threat, we’re getting used to the risk. And familiarity breeds inaction.

  In coping with disruptive behavior a foraging band can be quite active. It readily coalesces into a moral community because it is bioculturally evolved to be moral, and living in moral communities provides a very immediate forum for gossiping individuals to agree on the threats they face and to cope with the deviants in their midst. As their fear of a dangerous deviant mounts, they can increase social distance, and in the case of a really serious general threat, they can agree very privately (and very decisively) to do away with him—if avoidance or ostracism or banishment can’t do the job.

  Our world of nations makes partial attempts in a similar direction, for manipulative formal boycotts and once in a while active blockades are attempted with a rogue nation’s reform as the goal. However, cross-cutting alliances often make effective international ostracism difficult, and sterner steps are very difficult to agree upon. Furthermore, with their vetoes the five nuclear Great Powers are selfishly exempt—and unfortunately they also are prone to back their allies, including ones that are nuclear.

  Bands can solve a really serious social problem by killing the deviant. Anything analogous to capital punishment at the level of a nation is out of the question—unless a dictator can be taken down. But too often one nation’s dictator is another nation’s useful ally, and in any event the United Nations is not in the business of nation building. The basic problem is that any real and universal centralized power with the capacity to punish would be taken as a potential threat to all, and the main sovereign bullies on this political stage (that same Nuclear Club that was formed in the midtwentieth century) have both the most to lose politically and their vetoes to ensure that they don’t lose it. In a number of ways, then, individuals in foraging bands have far more to work with in curbing or stopping deviance, especially serious deviance, than do the culturally and religiously diverse nations of the world community we live in today.

  People in a band have some truly major advantages. They share the same culture. They also speak the same language, and they know one another personally. They gossip together, which builds trust. And they know that often they can leave their band, if necessary in a hurry, if a local situation becomes too conflictive. A world of culturally disparate nations, from which there is no exit, is a different kettle of fish. Nations are fixed in space, so if they can’t settle their differences in any other way, they have to fight wars.

  There does exist something called world public opinion. All of our nations’ foreign ministers understand this well, for they play to it constantly. In that particular sense our community of nations is, in fact, very much like an LPA forager moral community writ large. In the days of the Cold War, some grand theater played out with the United Nations General Assembly as a venue for the “United States versus the Soviet Union Show.” However, there was no way that the rest of the nations—the ones being imperiled by the two alpha superpowers—could use public opinion to seriously rein them in. This international moral stage continues to serve us today from time to time, and it is something that could be built upon. But even in the absence of such a formal international forum, world moral opinion will coalesce simply because, as a species, we are moral—and because television exists.

  A great question for our global future is whether we will rise to the occasion as threats to our entire world community become more complicated, still less predictable, and possibly far more perilous. Very scary at first, the straightforward bilateral nuclear balance of power we lived with for the second half of the twentieth century became simply another fact of life. This was partly because the players on both sides had large populations, and enormous infrastructures to lose, were the tensions to get out of hand. Even so, histo
ry has taught us that the Cuban missile crisis was in fact a true crisis, in which the leaders of two nations, in spite of being moral, were playing a game of chicken that could have brought untold destruction to parties outside the conflict. Today, as a picture in our minds, that outcome remains difficult to conjure up realistically, because of its sheer horror.

  An already dangerous balance of nuclear power became still more dangerous with the entry of India, Pakistan, and North Korea into the nuclear arena. To complicate matters, at this writing Iran seems to be arming against a nuclear Israel. Add all of this up, and it seems that a general situation of potential peril and distrust among nations may become too exacerbated for any more effective world system of governance to be gradually built—unless some event (short of total catastrophe) serves as a warning and galvanizes the world’s nations into action.

  In fact, and grimly, a possible catalyst for progress in world governance, and for world security, might actually be a limited global disaster. Imagine, for instance, a smaller nuclear war that would seriously poison our planetary atmosphere but leave most of our world population and economy intact. If a calamitous World War II taught the Europeans not to fight, perhaps a small (and equally destructive) nuclear war might galvanize our entire world of nations to create a similar and safer union.

  This is indeed a bleak prognostication. But realistically, with national sovereignty being as sacred as it is, it may be the best we may hope for if a safer world community is to be built in the face of nuclear proliferation. Meanwhile, free trade at least makes us more interdependent in the economic sphere, and, as we’ve seen, economic interdependence was a major factor in LPA hunter-gatherers forming efficient moral communities that regulated the use of large game. In this sense, as a social catalyst modern free trade may be functionally analogous to meat-sharing among our forager predecessors. People who depend heavily on one another in the basics of making a living are likely to become more efficient at resolving conflicts—and to learn that a trusting type of generosity can pay off quite handsomely in situations where mutual assistance based on indirect reciprocity is useful to all.