Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind

by Mark Pagel

  Dictatorial regimes also remove people’s social ontogeny by reserving the right to direct them into any occupation at any given time—like trying to reprogram a cell—thereby losing the efficiencies that might come from specialization. Mao Zedong’s reeducation camps are but one infamous example. These same regimes also skillfully play segments of society off against each other by encouraging tribal rivalries, and thereby weakening any opposition that might arise from widespread cooperation among people. Having abolished precisely those features of our social lives that have motivated our cooperative societies throughout our history, it should not surprise us that no authoritarian or planned state has ever flourished.

  OTHERNESS AND THE DILUTION OF SOCIAL TIES

  IT CAN be difficult to overestimate the importance of the social group or cultural survival vehicle to our history, evolution, and psychology. It is a powerful, sometimes febrile, and often startlingly fragile force, depending for its success on a sense of togetherness. That sense derives from two sources. One is the genetic relatedness among family members that we and every other animal makes use of; but the other is, as we have seen earlier, the uniquely human sense of social or cultural relatedness that makes our cooperation work. When either of these two sources of information signal to us that we have exceeded some minimum amount, we are prompted to behave well toward each other; but even slight perceived differences in social relatedness can end in xenophobia, racism, and extreme violence.

  And this leaves us with a dilemma. We live at an extraordinary time in the history of humanity, a time in the twenty-first century when there are still people living a Stone Age existence in the depths of the Amazonian rain forest, who have never been contacted by outsiders, and who know nothing about the modern world. And yet the differences between us and them are smaller than the technological comforts of modern life might have us believe. We could pluck a newborn child from one of these uncontacted tribes and happily raise him or her in one of our societies because our social rules have remained the same even as our technology has changed. And it is these social rules that are being put under strain as globalization and ever more culturally differentiated societies mean that humans are increasingly bombarded by outward signals that their average level of cultural relatedness is lower than has been true for much of their evolutionary history, and even perhaps their own personal history.

  We should expect this to bring about changes in the way people behave. Large societies of people will be brought together who have little common cultural identity of the sort that historically has prompted our cultural altruism. If the success of modern society up to this point is anything to go by, new heterogeneous societies will increasingly depend upon clear enforcement of cultural or democratically derived rules to maintain stability, and will creak under the strain of smaller social groupings seeking to disengage from the whole. One early harbinger of a sense of decline in social relatedness might be the increasing tendencies of people to avoid risk, to expect safety, to be vigilant about fairness, to require and to be granted “rights.” These might all be symptoms of a greater sense of self-interest, brought about perhaps by decline in the average amount of “togetherness” we feel. In response, we naturally turn inward, effectively reverting to our earlier evolutionary instincts, to a time when we relied on kin selection or cooperation among families for our needs to be met.

  How is it that words like “race” and “ethnicity” so easily—even if inadvertently and wrongly—find their way into discussions of migration, multiculturalism, and globalization? The answer is clear, and it has nothing to do with racism or ethnicity and everything to do with statistics and our nature. Humans evolved to live in small isolated groups and are finely tuned to seek people of common values and allegiances. Shared markers of what people perceive as race and ethnicity, then, often come to be taken as statistical markers of common values, and that precious oil called “trust” naturally flows. We do this calculation, and our mouths speak it, without thinking. It must be stressed that there is no necessity whatsoever in these connections, and more often than not they will be wrong, and with hurtful and damaging consequences. But they are connections we are all too prone to make.

  We are like this because all that is required for it to have been a successful strategy throughout our history is that markers of common ethnicity were a better-than-chance predictor of common culture, and thus common goals and values. In the long term, individuals playing better-than-chance strategies will outcompete those that don’t, however distasteful we might find those strategies in the modern world. This is not to say that the “ethnic-marker-equals-common-value” strategy is the best one, or even desirable; just that it might have worked at the individual level and not been surpassed in a general way throughout our history. The language of multiculturalism slides into ethnic and racial categories so easily as a result of the all-too-human—even if all-too-fallible—search for common values because, in the end, our success as a species has come from cooperation.

  Does this make us all racists, bigots, or xenophobes deep down? No, we are far too clever for that. The very feature of our social existence that makes us unique—our ability to cooperate with others—makes us uniquely among the animals capable of moving beyond the divisive politics of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. Were we as mindless as apes and ants, this would be impossible: they are racists and xenophobes, and unlike us, this is inflexibly hard-wired into them. Their behavior is based almost exclusively on common genetic ancestry. Ours is not. What our history has demonstrated is that we humans will get along with anyone who wishes to play the cooperative game with us. The returns of cooperation, trade, and exchange that derive from that part of our nature have historically trumped our guesswork based on markers of ethnicity or other features. And they always will.

  It would be glib to suggest that the answers to 200,000 years of our history are this easy; but our nature can point the way. That way is not necessarily to seek to use our incomparable intelligence to rebel against the dictates of our genes. The message of this book is that our genes have created in us a machine capable of greater inventiveness and common good than any other on Earth. The key is to provide or somehow create among people stronger clues of trust and common values than might otherwise be suggested by the highly imprecise markers of ethnicity or cultural differences that we have used throughout our history, and then to encourage the conditions that give people a sense of shared purpose and shared outcomes. That is the recipe that carried us around the world beginning around 60,000 years ago, and it still works. Looking around the great cosmopolitan cities of our world, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is already happening.

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  Part I: Mind Control, Protection, and Prosperity

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  Chapter 4: Religion and Other Cultural “Enhancers”

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