by Mark Pagel
Stephen Mithen reminds us that “if music is about anything it is about inducing emotions,” and, as we might expect of something processed by an ancient part of our brain, the emotional message of most songs can often be understood without even knowing their words. This helps us to understand how it is that singing seems so naturally to enhance the cohesion of groups: when people sing the same song, they recognize that they are feeling the same emotions. This shared feeling will enhance the sense of cultural relatedness that we have seen can drive our cooperation within groups. Layered on top of the pure emotion of music, the words to hymns often have a military quality to them, as in “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,” or extol the benefits of cooperation, as in “Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, / We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.” A national anthem is an emotive and historically charged symbol of an entire nation’s collective cultural nepotism. Music reminds us of our shared destinies and our common histories—how else could we all know the same songs?
At the same time we should not grant special status to music as a means to enhance the emotions and dispositions that encourage group cohesion. Forming into a circle and praying, or listening to a rousing speech, can have the same effect. Listen to Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech spoken by Henry V just before the Battle of Agincourt:
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Not only does Shakespeare evoke the emotional power of “relatedness” to get the men to throw themselves into battle as they might if battling alongside their actual brothers; he hints at the potential reproductive benefits of victory. In a different arena of battle, the New Zealand rugby team chants the haka before their matches, and no one would accuse them of breaking into song. It is an intimidating display of harmony and unity performed in full view of the opposing side. Players slap their thighs, stick out their tongues, and grimace together while reciting the words of the haka. It sends the unmistakable message that the All Blacks are a unified team that has spent hours and hours practicing together. It also tells us that the All Blacks are so good they can afford to waste time practicing their exuberant ritual and still be ready for the opposing side—it is also a peacock’s tail of an advertisement if there ever was one, and opposing sides find it unsettling to watch.
Dispositions toward art and music can grant individual benefits outside of a religious or group setting. Both can enhance our memories. We all know that it is easier to learn the words of a song than merely to learn a set of words. For the same reason, long messages or oral traditions, such as Homer’s Iliad, were often written in verse and sung rather than merely recited. Music and language might even draw on similar capabilities in our brains, as there is a suggestion that the intervals between the sounds we make in speech match those of the musical scale. Early in our evolution as we were developing our language abilities, musical ability might then have been of great value as a means of promoting communication and remembering, and genes for musical ability might have spread. Just think of all the time you have wasted trying to follow a sequence of instructions for how to get to someone’s house, and then think how dangerous this might have been 40,000 or more years ago when you lost your way trying to navigate through hostile territory—you might have lost your life. Now that we have writing, we take for granted that we can know and benefit from the thoughts of our ancestors. But for our ancestors to know the thoughts of their ancestors—or even just some directions—might have meant singing a long story. In fact, this is just what Australia’s Aboriginal people did when they told their “dreamtime” stories of the creation of their world.
The invention of writing would gradually remove the need for this link between music and memory. The earliest known writing and literature was not used for comedy or pure entertainment, as we might expect if it was taking over for a cultural form that was devoted to hedonism, but rather to keep track of things. By 8000 BC, early Mesopotamian civilizations were producing clay tablets that seem to have been used for some form of accounting or for keeping records. The cuneiform tablets of the Sumerians are regarded as the first documented writing system and they also were used for keeping track of transactions and amounts. Homer’s Iliad, although perhaps not originally written down, is often regarded as the earliest surviving literature, and it tells a great historical story. These examples show, perhaps not surprisingly, that writing seems to have been used to enhance memory, and its invention would have been revolutionary in offloading a burden on our minds. At the same time it would have democratized information by casting it in a stable form and making it available to everyone.
Indeed, in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates voices his suspicion of writing as an invention that will harm thinking and memory. Socrates is speaking to Phaedrus about the art of rhetoric. They are standing under a plane tree by the banks of the Ilissus River that ran just outside the defensive wall of ancient Athens. Socrates is agitated because he believes that writing things down means that speakers need no longer understand what they are reading. He says to Phaedrus:
this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific [thing] which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
If writing might have interfered with rhetoric, visual art might have been an even earlier form of written communication with the same function of being a way of storing and transmitting information, acting as an external memory, or aide-mémoire. The artist Orde Levinson suggests that just as an ability to read written work is important in modern society, a capacity to read visual art for its information and emotions might have been so in our ancestors. Three forms dominate painting: religious scenes, portraits, and landscapes. The information these images carry and its relevance to our lives should not be underestimated, especially in the context of prehistorical people who lacked writing. Depictions of scenes and landscapes could improve cooperation, understanding, planning, route finding, and teaching. Australian Aboriginal paintings tell stories of the dreamtime and of everyday life. They are now popular among tourists as art, but the paintings are a modern invention, barely more than a few decades old. The images we see on canvas were originally scratched into the ground, in caves or on rock walls. They might have been used in religious or other ways to teach or instruct. They might have been left as descriptions to others of what went on at a particular place and how many were involved. They could also have been like medieval fingerposts, giving directions not to the next village but to oases, or meeting points, or sources of food.
The early cave art from the South of France consists predominantly of depictions of the game animals that would have been important in the diets of the early hunter-gatherer modern humans, or of predatory animals whose dispositions one might benefit from understanding. Visual images painted on walls might have been used for teaching or in parallel with religious ceremonies. These images would have made their effects available to a wide audience, and simultaneously. They could be consulted and re-consulted. We only have to ask ourselves why we still keep images in the form of photo albums, and remember how they make us fe
el. They motivate our behaviors by reminding us of our attachments to friends and family, calling up and making more salient and vivid our emotional memories. Emotions are of course instruments of motivation, and so here is another enhancing role for art. Stand and look at a statue of Caesar or Athena in a museum, and the person becomes at once more real, more intimidating, and more formidable.
In his great Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke makes the case for visual imagery as a means to enhance our memories, saying,
Thus the ideas, as well as the children, of our youth often die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs which we are fast approaching; where though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colors; and, if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear.
Indeed, so powerfully can images enhance our perception and memory, they can do so even when the image resides in our mind. The great Russian psychologist Alexander Luria showed how mnemonic devices for remembering events or lists could be remarkably effective when based around simple concrete imagery. Luria would get people to imagine scenes they knew well, such as taking a walk from their house and then along the adjacent street. He would get them to place objects from lists of things to be remembered at familiar landmarks along the route. For example, if it is a shopping list, you might place an apple on your car and then a bag of sugar at the end of your drive, some flour further down the street, and so on. Then Luria would get people to replay their walk in their minds, looking for the objects. Try this yourself. It is a surprisingly effective way to remember long lists. Imagery and visual art help us to think and remember more clearly.
Part II
COOPERATION AND
OUR CULTURAL
NATURE
* * *
Prologue
THE CHAPTERS OF PART I show us just how much the cooperative enterprise of human society can achieve, and how much it can influence our lives. Culture has produced riches beyond the imagination of any other species, and it has propelled us around the world in mobile survival vehicles in which individuals cooperate to defend each other and their jointly held assets—their technology and know-how, and their lands. And yet, it is one of the oldest themes of literature that the availability of riches, either actual or potential, is a source of treachery and betrayal. So, it is not enough to say that culture is a success because it has given us riches. We need to understand how we have contained our appetites to exploit these riches for our own personal gain, how we have avoided spiraling down a vortex of treachery matched by further and more ingenious countertreachery.
“Ingenious” is in fact closer to the truth than we might expect. It is a melancholy fact that natural selection will favor in me certain kinds of devious tendencies for acquiring more than my share of the wealth from a cooperative venture. I might deceive you as to how much there is, I might quietly steal some of your share and blame someone else, I might not work as hard as you, especially when your back is turned. My actions will in turn favor yet more nefarious and devious tendencies in you. Over long periods of time, a kind of arms race develops in which a shrewd, devious, and wily intelligence evolves, only to be matched by even more wily and shrewd intelligences that arise in response. But it is an arms race that is ultimately destructive. We all lose out as we get better and better at taking advantage of each other and spend an increasing amount of our time and energy defending ourselves against each other. In a televised debate on ABC’s Nightline program in 1983, the cosmologist Carl Sagan described the arms race in nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s by saying, “Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches, the other seven thousand matches.”
We’ve avoided this explosive outcome by developing a set of rules and dispositions that allow us to cooperate with people who are otherwise our competitors. This kind of cooperation is a puzzle to evolutionists because a disposition to help someone else who doesn’t share that disposition means they might prosper at your expense. So, how does cooperation ever win out against people who would take advantage of your kindhearted help, with no intention of ever returning the favor? Why, for example, when you offer assistance to me, do I not simply take it and run? Why when I walk past you on the street, late at night, do I not knock you over the head and steal your wallet? If cooperative systems can evolve in spite of these temptations—and they manifestly have in us—why haven’t they evolved in the other animals?
Our style of cooperation is made all the more remarkable because it violates the rules that govern nearly all cooperation seen in the rest of the animal kingdom. That cooperation is explained by one of the great insights of evolutionary thinking: that by helping a relative, we help a little bit of ourselves, because our relatives are more likely to share copies of our genes. As we saw in Chapter 2, this is known as the theory of kin selection and it helps us to understand some of the most poignant of our behaviors, including risking our health and well-being, our opportunity to have children, or even our lives. A remarkable photograph from the December 26 tsunami of 2004 that struck Indonesia shows a group of people fleeing up the beach as the terrifying wave rises behind them. But one person is recklessly heading down the beach toward the wave. She was the mother of three of the children in the fleeing group, desperately trying to save her offspring.
If we greet this image with a mixture of wonder and horror, it may be because natural selection has not really prepared us for such selfless live-or-die decisions. Or it might be that—emotions aside—a parent sacrificing itself for its children only sometimes makes sense in the unsentimental arithmetic of kin selection: a very young parent with years of potential reproduction ahead might do better to let her children die and try to start over, an option that might not be available to an older parent. We know kin selection has created emotions to be discriminating because the success of kin selection rests on our degree of genetic relatedness. Parents and children share about one half of their genes on average. So do siblings. Cousins share about one eighth. We are more likely to help our own offspring or a brother or sister because doing so promotes copies of our genes more effectively than providing the same help to a cousin. Or, as J. B. S. Haldane is purported to have remarked, “I would jump into a river to save two brothers or eight cousins.”
Who amongst us has escaped the Kamikaze charge of a bee defending its hive? These drones are only too willing to give their lives to protect the nest because it houses their brothers and sisters, and their mother the queen. Warfare and self-sacrifice is also common among the ants, which deploy sophisticated and well-drilled armies to intercept intruders or to invade other nests, giving up all hope of ever reproducing on their own. E. O. Wilson describes the soldier caste of one species of African termite (Globitermes sulfureus) as “walking bombs.” The soldiers, in an act reminiscent of human soldiers carrying flamethrowers, have on their backs two glands full of a yellow corrosive liquid that when sprayed out entangles them and their enemy combatants. Sometimes the termite’s body simply explodes, spraying the deadly fluid in all directions in an act chillingly equivalent to that of a suicide bomber. The ultimate expression of kin selection is the behavior of the cells in large multicellular bodies such as our own. These cells are genetic copies of one another, sharing all of their genes, and this makes them only too happy to exchange their lives for the good of the rest of the body. Our skin cells do this when they good-naturedly allow themselves to be burnt alive on our behalf protecting us from the sun. Some of our immune system cells do this when they find and attach themselves to a foreign invader. They then put up little chemical flags that summon others of our immune cells to come and eat them, thereby giving their lives to have the invader destroyed.
But human cooperation is not limited to helping relatives, and this makes it a risky proposition, not being bound by
the usual constraints of family ties. Some anthropologists think our apparently helpful and altruistic nature is an error of judgment, a leftover from an earlier time in our history when we lived in small groups of closely related kin. Natural selection would have quite routinely favored high levels of altruism among these kin or extended kin groupings, and the argument is that now in our wider groupings we simply carry on behaving cooperatively because it is what we do. Humans probably did evolve in small groups around many of their kin, but so too do many animal species, and none of these shows the range of altruistic tendencies toward unrelated others that we do. We cannot easily imagine a chimpanzee or a fox giving its life for an unrelated member of its group, or even helping an elderly member. Animals do help each other—as in fabled stories of elephants assisting injured members of their groups—but this help is normally directed at kin.
Given all of the risks and complexities of cooperating with people outside of our immediate families, how did such behavior ever get off the ground, and what keeps it going? One answer is that we simply use our large brains to work out how and when to cooperate; but as we have seen, that can only be part of the answer because our large brains also grant us the ability to take advantage of others by being able to think up devious new ways of cheating, manipulating, or otherwise exploiting them. It is common for economists to appeal to trust and norms, but this is to replace one problem with another: where do norms and trust come from? In the absence of evidence to the contrary, far from being trustworthy, humans would seem to have an exquisitely evolved sense of when they can and cannot act in their own naked self-interest.
