by Mark Pagel
MORALITY, SHAME, HONOR KILLINGS,
AND SELF-SACRIFICE
A MEASURE of the value of cooperation is contained in what we are willing to give up to keep the system working. Norms of behavior effectively ask us to give up the right to act as we please, and some might require effort to master. Maybe it is customs in matters of dress and appearance or even some rules about how to behave or what you can and cannot eat. Following such norms becomes a signal of your commitment to the group. This is especially true when those norms are arbitrary and have little obvious value, like holding your knife and fork a certain way, or removing your hat upon meeting someone. The more arbitrary they are, the more your adherence to them reveals your commitment because of the time you have had to spend to learn them. Their arbitrariness also makes them useful for identifying outsiders. I was once at a formal dinner at an institution that followed a particular rule about how to arrange your knife and fork across the dinner plate to signal that you had finished that course of the meal. A guest to the institution that evening didn’t know the rule and no one had told him, perhaps because he did not speak English—the language of the rest of the diners. The waiters, obedient to the rule, would not remove his plate and bring everyone their next course until he had done so. He and the rest of us sat there for some time until eventually someone discreetly showed him what to do.
A conformity to arbitrary norms, like the commitment to an unknowable religious proposition, demonstrates that you are the kind of person who can be counted on to make a commitment, and the more so the more mysterious or arbitrary is the norm that you follow. But it might be in our adherence to some so-called morals that we see the true value of our societies, at least to the cooperators. Morals are accorded a special status that exceeds that of mere norms. They are seen as offenses against reason, truth, and good conscience, and usually include such things as adultery, stealing, and murder. But there is nothing special about morals—they don’t exist “out there” in some Platonic heaven—except that they are often things on which there is widespread and vigorous agreement, and then only perhaps because we would not like the behaviors they prohibit to happen to us. Most people would agree that stealing and killing are wrong, and even morally wrong, but it is never very clear what we mean by morally wrong: humans beings kill each other regularly. We do so in brutal and violent ways, often in large numbers, sometimes sadistically, and we even heap praise on people who kill when it is done against someone we deem to be an enemy.
So, morals must confront the charge that they are rules that society merely makes up to serve its interests. But what or whose interests? Stealing and killing, far more than most acts, imperil the altruism that flows from mutual trust and good reputation. Societies need to banish them from people’s minds so that trust can develop and then flow. Elevating these actions to the level of morals is a way a society overtly advertises that the loss of reputation and freedoms from being ostracized, punished, jailed, or even executed will be great. The ease with which most of us can be persuaded to give up the potential benefits that might come from violating them—from stealing or killing—is a measure of just how valuable our societies can be to us. It behooves our parents to transmit this valuable information to us. The proof that morals are of local value and not some deeper metaphysical entity is that as soon as we move outside that cultural wall of our own particular survival vehicles, the “morality” often comes crashing down.
Shaming people is just a way of taking their reputations away, and once again shows us how powerfully motivating the desire to cling to a good reputation can be. During World War I, some older women in English villages used a threatened loss of reputation to shame young men to go to the deadly trenches of that war. What these reluctant young men feared nearly as much as going to war was the white feather of cowardice these women dispensed when they encountered young men in their villages. This was a form of moralistic aggression, a rebuke for a perceived shirking of a young man’s cooperative duties. And it shows that our societies are perched on a shaky pillar of conflicting interests. What was best for these women—being protected by vulnerable young men—was less attractive to the men asked to provide the protection. Or, as the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon put it in his poem “Suicide in the Trenches”:
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
A disturbing measure of the value of a good reputation is revealed in its ability to motivate some of our most extreme and repugnant behaviors as a species. Human parents rarely kill their own children. When they do, it is often the result of some sort of provocation, or maybe temporary insanity sometimes brought on by divorce, separation, or depression. But one form of killing our own children arises with such predictability as to call for a different explanation. So-called honor killings are common in several societies around the world. Young women are especially vulnerable if it is deemed that they have done something to dishonor their family. Here is a profoundly uncomfortable illustration of both the power of (perceived) reputation in human society, the value of our societies to us, and our tendency to treat reputation as if it is heritable and runs in families: we are willing to kill our offspring to pay off the reputation debt of their perceived transgressions and therefore keep our own reputations intact. Killing their own offspring is the most costly and direct thing parents can do to harm their own reproductive success, and therefore the most informative act they can undertake to regain their loss of reputation. A reputation is worth a human life. Here is the marketplace of reputation again, but now printed onto a bank note of grotesquely high denomination.
Self-sacrifice is the most costly and therefore most believable signal of one’s commitment to a cause—be it family, nation, tribe, religion, or some abstract political idea. Self-sacrifice can therefore send large benefits toward one’s relatives. This means that once a system of reputation has evolved and established itself in our psychology, the thought that thousands or even millions of people are watching or listening must be enough to drive some people to extreme acts. This could be the same psychology that when it slips just a little bit shades into suicidal terrorism. Or into self-sacrifce in war: no higher honor could be bestowed on a Japanese Kamikaze pilot in World War II than to give his life, and equally no greater shame could be had than by failing to do so. In the mind of the terrorist or pilot, either action would get broadcast to an entire nation, and then the transferability of reputation would ensure that its effects would flow back to his family. Or, imagine you have been selected to be sacrificed to some god, a great honor in your society. Thousands have gathered to watch this great event that can bring better luck to your people. Could you refuse, knowing what the repercussions would be for you and your family? Societies seem to have appreciated this psychology instinctively and have often used it to their advantage with great and awful effects. Similarly, why do we honor our war dead so highly, especially as it is too late for them to benefit? They deserve our highest respect for their sacrifice, but somehow in doing so we acknowledge that some form of payback—reputation enhancement—is needed to keep families willing to send their sons off to battle. No ant, bee, or wasp would make such a request.
COMMON AND PUBLIC GOODS: COMPETING TO COOPERATE
ECONOMISTS DEFINE a “common good” as something like common land for grazing. Everyone is allowed to use it, but use by one person reduces the amount left for others. Public goods are the same but don’t get used up. Air to breathe is a public good, or very nearly so, as are radio and television signals, or streetlights at night. But so are police forces and fire brigades, and things such as lighthouses and foghorns. All of these can be used and in most instances have only negligible effect on what is available to others. Getting people to contribute to public or common goods poses the problem of how to get people to behave selflessly or altruistically. If I choose to
use our common grazing land less than you, my benevolence is to your advantage. When I pay my taxes but you don’t, I am helping to create a common or public good that you might benefit from as much as or more than me. You are cheating or free-riding on our social contract.
Economics also identifies something called a “second-order” public goods problem. Sometimes people will punish others they suspect of being free riders, as in the case of the Englishwomen who dispensed white feathers to young men. But we also mete out this moralistic aggression ourselves every day when we honk our horns at people or shout at those who might jump a line. What interests economists is that punishing free riders, like contribution to a public good, is an act of altruism. When I punish a free rider, everyone else enjoys any benefits that might flow from my actions. Maybe the person becomes less likely to free-ride, or maybe others witnessing my actions will decide not to step out of line themselves. Either way, everyone benefits.
So, why should anyone ever contribute to commons and public goods, and why do we punish free riders, especially as punishing someone can be a risky business—they might retaliate. In fact, cheating on public goods is rife, and many of us cannot be bothered to punish free riders. The phrase “the tragedy of the commons” refers to the all too frequent tendency for people to overuse their share of common or public goods. When we exceed the speed limit in our cars, allow our flock of sheep to overgraze the common land, or don’t recycle as much of our rubbish as we might, or we cheat on our taxes, eat more than our share of food, lie about how much food we found from a day’s foraging, or jump lines, we are part of the problem of controlling and maintaining commons and public goods. The problem of global warming is looming as our most daunting exploitation of a vital commons, and one that most of us cheat on extensively by using far more resources than are sustainable.
These examples are just another way of saying that people seek to use the benefits of the cooperative society for their own gain, rather than putting themselves second to the good of the group. But we must also acknowledge that cheating and free-riding are not nearly as widespread as they might be. We do maintain common land, and most people generally obey speed limits and pay taxes, and some of us (as we saw in Chapter 5) even return wallets. Much of this of course can be attributed to laws and police forces; but as we said, these are public goods themselves and so someone has to contribute to them—someone has to contribute enough taxes to pay for the police forces. So, we return to the problem that even if we allow that there is an incentive to cheat, and many of us do or have done at some time in our lives, we are to some extent self-policing. Put this way we can see that there is a measure of altruism to be explained.
But public goods and second-order public goods do not raise any new questions about why people can behave altruistically. We can expect the same motivations that get people to cooperate in general will spill over into these public goods. So long as the public goods pay their way by producing something individuals on their own could not achieve, people in general should be content to maintain them. Contributing to public goods might also in some circumstances be a way to buy reputation points—another way of lengthening your altruistic tail—because these are acts that cannot be interpreted by others as ones done for your own gain. If contributing to a public good enhances your reputation, that particular public good need not even benefit you directly; it is the reputation points you earn that are your reward. If reputation really is the currency we use to buy others’ trust, then we might even be expected to compete to cooperate on public goods as a way of demonstrating our commitment to the group. The problem of explaining at least some public goods and second-order public goods problems is then turned on its head. What seems like a cost or burden becomes a virtue, something we wish to parade in front of others.
Among human hunter-gatherers certain kinds of food are almost universally shared out between all members of the tribe, independently of who has acquired them. This is especially true of meat acquired as a result of men going out on a hunt. There is often little relationship between who actually kills the animal and how much food they get from it, or even how much their immediate family gets. Instead, meat is often carried back to the camp or village, where it is shared out among members of the tribe. The exact extent to which this sharing occurs varies from tribe to tribe and even depending upon the particular kind of food to be shared; but it is a reasonably safe generalization to say that hunter-gatherers everywhere they have been studied practice some form of food sharing.
The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes points out that when food is shared this way, it becomes something like a common or public good because people can benefit from it without having to contribute to the shared pot. So, what maintains the public good? We intuitively grasp that what makes the practice of food sharing fascinating and even somewhat incredible is that it seems to fly in the face of what we expect from Darwinian natural selection. Why, for example, do hunters or foragers not just keep what they find? And why should someone bother to engage in the risky and arduous practice of hunting when they know the spoils will have to be shared out among many people? Some anthropologists even go so far as to call the practice of allowing the meat to be shared out “tolerated scrounging” or “tolerated theft.” These questions pose the fundamental problem of living in a cooperative group. There will always be a conflict of interest between doing what is best for you and your kin and doing what is best for your group. The more you do for yourself, the worse your group might perform; but the more you do for your group, the worse off you and your family might be.
Careful anthropological fieldwork supports the idea that food resources, especially meat, really are shared, so we can dispense with the idea that somehow hunters are stashing food on the side and returning to it later for themselves and their families. This isn’t to say the practice doesn’t occur, or that people don’t try, just that it is hard to get away with because everyone is watching. Among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, honey is a much-valued resource, and when it is found it is shared out like meat. The anthropologist Frank Marlowe, who spent years living among the Hadza, realized that because honey is easy to hide and does not need to be cooked, those who find it will often try to keep it for themselves or give it preferentially to their family members. He says, “I have seen a man sneak honey into his house, where he shared it with his wife and child plus two young single women he discreetly signaled. Still, it can be difficult to hide. Once a man slipped into camp and put his honey under my Land Rover to wait for an opportune time to fetch it and give to his children. But when he finally retrieved it, others saw it, and he had to share it with everyone present.”
This leaves people in a quandary. If you have to share your resources, and you really can’t get away with cheating, or at least not very often, there is very little incentive to get up off the ground and do much. In the modern world, we might recognize this problem in the controversy surrounding public benefits. Do they maintain people at a reasonable level until they can find a job, or do they act to remove people’s incentives for working? Hawkes, who has also lived among the Hadza, as well as among the Aché of Paraguay, suggests that, at least among the hunter-gatherers,
the incentive for providing widely shared goods is favorable attention from other group members. If those who provide public goods are listened to and watched more closely than others and favored as neighbors and associates, they have a larger, readier pool of potential allies and mates. When this is so, foragers face a trade-off between increasing their families’ food consumption and increasing the attention they will get from other members of their group. Public goods will be provided when, for some individuals, the fitness value of the latter outweighs that of the former. This solution to the public goods problem relies on identifying a fitness benefit that depends directly on the consumption value of the public good, but is distinct from it. [italics added]
The message is that if you can get more out of being an altruist than you can out
of looking after your own well-being, you will choose the former. You are willing to contribute to the public good because the benefits you derive from doing so are distinct from and thereby in addition to any “good” you might get from the public good: you gain reputation points and attention in amounts related to the meat’s value and how hard or risky it was for you to get it.
Here, then, is another example of acquiring a long tail of altruism, and it is one that fulfills the Zahavian ideal of sending a message that is directly relevant to something you are trying to say about yourself. A hunter-gatherer giving away meat is like a gazelle stotting, a skylark whistling while being pursued by a merlin, or you giving away your hard-earned cash: it directly reduces your chances for survival and therefore says you have energy and skills to spare. Having said this, it also helps that meat is perishable. If you kill a large animal, it is likely to go bad before you or your family can consume it all anyway. In the circumstances, the best thing you can do is saunter back to the village and play the role of the community-minded do-gooder. The loss to you in meat you could have consumed is small, but the rewards can be great.
