In his book In Praise of Nepotism, Adam Bellow—himself the son of American novelist Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976—describes outrageous cases of nepotism that have come to the media’s attention around the world.2 You might ask, what has Bellow found to praise about nepotism? Before I address this question, I first explore his assertion that the origins of nepotism lie in nature.
The Nature of Animal and Human Nepotism
To a biologist, nepotism simply means favoritism toward kin, such that kin are preferred as social (but not sexual) partners and helped at the expense of nonkin. For example, a nepotistic squirrel who has saved a couple of nuts for dinner will share one of them with his starving brother but not with the unrelated squirrel next door. Put another way, biologically speaking, nepotism is altruism directed toward family members. This altruism, however, is a bit phony. Since family members share some of their genes, a nepotist is maintaining his or her own DNA in the population by helping a relative. So nepotism is really selfishness in disguise. Many selfish behaviors have evolved by natural selection because they help an individual to survive and reproduce; the genes for selfishness are transmitted to the next generation through the selfish individual’s own children. Similarly, many nepotistic behaviors have evolved through a particular kind of natural selection, called kin selection, because these behaviors help an individual’s relatives to survive and reproduce; the genes for nepotism are transmitted to the next generation through the nepotistic individual’s family members.3
Nepotism is a universal phenomenon. Animal species vary in levels of nepotism, just as human societies do. But there is no animal species or human society in which individuals are biased in favor of nonkin against their kin. What makes animals or humans more or less nepotistic is usually the availability of resources. When everyone has all the food (or water or money) they need or want, they can afford to be generous with others and don’t bother to discriminate as much between kin and nonkin. When belt-tightening becomes necessary, however, family values rise in importance. Now, it’s not very often that people have all the money they want—which may explain why nepotism has been part of human history since Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Since then, humans have had to work hard to earn their bread and butter, and in so doing, they have always helped their family members against nonrelatives. There are so many examples of nepotism in the Bible that you might call it the bible of nepotism.
But animals had been behaving nepotistically long before Adam and Eve. For example, social insects such as ants, bees, and wasps have been practicing this behavior for millions and millions of years. Their societies rely heavily on cooperation within groups of relatives and aggressive competition against groups of nonrelatives. Examples of nepotistic behavior can be found in almost any animal species, from vampire bats, who regurgitate the blood of their victims only to their close relatives, to naked mole rats, burrowing rodents native to East Africa, among which many females give up sex altogether to perform hard labor such as digging tunnels and gathering food for their mother, the queen. Some species of monkeys and apes that are closely related to us have taken nepotism to the next level. They don’t simply help their relatives with food but also help them gain and maintain political power. One of the most political and shamelessly nepotistic creatures on this planet is the rhesus macaque, a monkey species I happen to be extremely familiar with.4
Like humans, rhesus macaques live in a very competitive society, and not surprisingly, rhesus macaques, too, are obsessed with dominance. As discussed in Chapter 2, dominance between two rhesus macaques is established on the basis of asymmetries in their resource holding potential. The rhesus RHP, however, looks more like that of U.S. congressmen, for example, than that of an animal species such as deer, among which a male with larger antlers becomes dominant over a male with small ones. A Washington politician’s RHP has nothing to do with how large his antlers are, but everything to do with how much political support he has from his party and how powerful the party is. The same goes for rhesus macaques. When it comes to dominance, the only asymmetries that matter are those of political support. Adult females and juveniles receive support mainly from their family members, and this support takes the form of agonistic aid. When the daughter of the alpha female picks a fight with another adolescent female from another family, the alpha female and her sisters immediately join the fight and help their young relative defeat the other adolescent and her relatives. Similarly, what happens when Tony Soprano’s nephew wants to gain control of the drug-dealing in his neighborhood? His uncle sends a couple of hit men to whack the competition. Clearly, human nepotism has its origins in nature. In fact, rhesus nepotism and human nepotism seem exactly the same. But are they really?
Let’s take a closer look at the nepotistic monkey business. Rhesus macaques live in a matriarchal society. In a rhesus group, there are several families, but these families do not consist of a mother, a father, and their children. The main contribution rhesus males make to their descendants is the sperm with which they impregnate the mothers of their children. They try to be as generous as possible with their sperm donations; when a dozen infants are born six months later, fathers simply disappear from the scene to go hang out with their buddies at the casino. Because of this father absenteeism, rhesus families consist of multigenerational groups of female relatives, called matrilines, with their young offspring. For example, a typical matriline may include a ten-year-old adult female with her mother, grandmother, sisters, aunts, cousins, offspring and grand-offspring, and nieces and nephews. The males are part of the family until they reach puberty at around five years of age; then they wave good-bye to everyone and emigrate to another group. The females stay attached to their mother’s apron strings forever.
The matrilines within a rhesus group have power in the same way that political parties or the Corleone and Soprano families do. The more numerous the members of a matriline, the greater the power. To give an example, in a rhesus group there could be three matrilines ranked in a hierarchy of power. The largest matriline is at the top, the smallest at the bottom, and the third one in the middle. The power of the matrilines is transferred from the older to the younger monkeys through nepotistic intervention in agonistic confrontations. Since juveniles pick fights all the time with other juveniles, as well as with adults, and their mothers continue to intervene on their behalf, the sons and daughters of high-ranking mothers become more and more powerful and eventually acquire a dominance rank just below that of their mothers. The sons and daughters of low-ranking mothers also end up with a rank similar to that of their mothers, which means that, unfortunately for them, they become losers like their family members.
In the rhesus society, destiny is set at birth, at least for females. The females that are born into monkey aristocracy grow up to be more and more aristocratic thanks to the nepotism of their mothers and other relatives. Those that are born with low status prepare themselves for a life of misery. But there are females who are even worse off than those belonging to the lowest-ranking matriline. If a female is abandoned at birth by her mother, rescued and raised by a compassionate researcher, and then reintroduced into the group a few years later, this female will be a Cinderella without a family. Cinderellas don’t fare well in nepotistic systems. If a rhesus Cinderella somehow manages to survive in this hostile environment, she might get lucky and be impregnated by a male of low rank. Certainly no Prince Charming will ever take her to the ball and turn her into a princess. But she will have a chance to start a family of her own, and a few generations down the line, if she and her relatives can survive the burden of doing chores all the time without having any fun, the family may become large enough to be able to claim a better place in society.
We’ve seen that in rhesus macaques nepotism transmits social status and strong bonds between family members across generations the way it happens in many human societies. But again, are monkey nepotism and human nepotism exactly the same t
hing?
Animal nepotism and human nepotism differ in several important respects. For the sake of consistency (and because I really like these monkeys), let’s continue using rhesus macaques as an example. Nepotism in macaques is mostly a female business, and especially a maternal business. Males don’t recognize their offspring, don’t give them milk bottles or change their diapers (or their monkey equivalent), and don’t help them realize their dreams of wealth and world domination the way human fathers try to do with their children. So the first important difference between humans and rhesus macaques (and other animal species as well) is that in humans nepotism is very much a male business. Traditionally, in human societies, men have always held most of the wealth and political power, so it’s not surprising that men’s behavior can be highly nepotistic. Matriarchal societies are not infrequent in mammals; for example, elephants behave very much like rhesus macaques. Humans are unique among animals for the prominence of the patriarchal family and the strength of paternal nepotism. In my personal experience in the Italian military and in academia, it was always fathers, and rarely mothers, who pulled strings on behalf of their children.
Another important difference between rhesus and human nepotism is that while in the monkeys nepotism is limited to biological relatives, in humans it isn’t. Humans have extended the boundaries of the biological family to include nonkin in two ways: through marriage and through patronage.5 When we marry, we agree to treat our spouse and our spouse’s relatives as if they were genetic relatives. Throughout human history, marriages and exchanges of wives have also allowed men to form nepotistic alliances with men from other villages or tribes. In humans, just as in rhesus macaques, political strength lies in numbers. For men and women with strong political ambitions, even an extended family may not be enough. Nonrelatives, then, must be brought into the family and given kin status. The Mafia provides a good example of this phenomenon. The Mafiosi maintain strong bonds with their relatives but increase the size and power of their families by providing patronage to a large number of associates. The head of the family cements this patronage by serving as a godfather to the children of these associates.
All human societies have developed means of incorporating strangers by according them the status of relatives. In the Italian academic system, the barone offers patronage to the students and researchers who have made it into his feudal castle through appropriate raccomandazioni. In exchange, he expects subordination, loyalty, and in some cases even bribes or sexual favors. A few years ago, Ezio Capizzano, a sixty-six-year-old law professor at the University of Camerino, made the national headlines in Italy because it turned out that for years he had been having sex with his female students on a couch in his office and making videotapes with a camera hidden under the table.6 The students in his tapes always passed his course exam with flying colors. The professor even negotiated good grades for his young lovers with other baroni, when the students had to take courses with them. When he was caught, Professor Capizzano claimed in his defense that his sexual relations with the students were all fully consensual. Judging from the photos in the newspapers, I didn’t get the sense that he was particularly attractive, and it’s likely that his female students had sex with him for business purposes: they exchanged sex for good grades and raccomandazioni.
The Mafia families are really no different from the dynastic families that ruled various countries around the world for centuries. In his book, Bellow nicely illustrates that much of human history is the history of the rise and fall of dynastic families. He also notes that humans even extend kinship status to the gods. All primitive religions involve the formation of kinship relations with the gods in hopes that they will treat their followers favorably, and the leaders of these religions typically consider themselves to be direct descendants of these same gods. By offering food and making sacrifices, people attempt to establish a patronage relationship with the gods to make them feel obliged to reciprocate these gifts with favors or support.
Another difference between rhesus and human nepotism is that while the monkeys transfer only their social status to their relatives—some other animals transfer nests or territories to their offspring—humans transfer not only their power and privileges but also their property, money, knowledge, and values to their descendants. Therefore, human nepotism is also a cultural phenomenon, since the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, norms, and values within families makes an important contribution to human cultures. The trouble with human nepotism, however, is not that relatives are educated or that they are helped, but how they are helped. This is the source of the most important difference between the nepotism of rhesus macaques and our own. It has to do with a thing called morality.
Like everything in nature, rhesus macaque nepotism—and all animal nepotism—is neither good nor bad. Sure, there are winners and losers: in the rhesus world, high-ranking females are winners and low-ranking ones are losers; in the African savanna, the lion that captures the gazelle is the winner, and the gazelle that ends up in its stomach the loser. But the lion is not a bad animal, nor is eating the gazelle wrong.
Humans started out their evolutionary journey similarly amoral. Then Moses gave people the Ten Commandments and told them what was good and bad, and right and wrong, according to God. Or maybe a bunch of people just sat around a table and signed a social contract establishing some rules for peaceful coexistence in human societies. The day the contract was signed, human nepotism diverged from animal nepotism. High-ranking rhesus macaques torment and torture unrelated monkeys of lower rank, but in doing so they don’t break any rules. Moses never spoke to the monkeys about commandments, and the monkeys can’t write a social contract—or they haven’t had time yet to do so.
Allow me a brief digression. If the “infinite monkey” theorem were correct, given enough time rhesus macaques would produce some sort of social contract with norms and rules for their society. The theorem states that monkeys hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time should be able to produce the entire works of William Shakespeare. However, this theorem, or at least a simplified version of it, was disproved by an ingenious experiment conducted at the Paignton Zoo in England. Zookeepers left a computer keyboard in the cage of six macaques for a month.7 Contrary to the theorem, the monkeys produced only a five-page document, consisting mostly of the letter S, until the alpha male bashed the keyboard with a stone and all the other monkeys urinated and defecated on it. So no contract and no morality for the monkeys.
When people behave nepotistically in public life, they almost invariably break moral, social, and legal rules. If everybody played by the rules, nepotism would be useless. Moral inclinations are strong—in some individuals more than in others—but the instinct to favor relatives is even stronger. In the end, rules are broken all the time, and nepotism has ended up being associated with fraud, corruption, and a host of other crimes. The popes in Rome, instead of playing by the rules and appointing people to office based on merit and qualifications, hired their illegitimate sons, whom they described as “nephews”—hence the term nepotism. In doing so, they had to fregare more qualified individuals, just as Prof. Paolo Rizzon did to give his son an undeserved professorship. If being fregato was the only consequence of being a victim of nepotism, things wouldn’t be so bad (although being sent to an army base at the border between Italy and the former Yugoslavia or not getting a job can destroy a person’s life). The problem is that fraud is the least of the crimes that have been associated with nepotism throughout human history. Millions of people have been killed as a result of the nepotistic behavior of ruthless dictators bent on advancing the interests of their family members at all costs. Uday and Qusay Hussein—the two sons of Saddam Hussein, who were killed in a gun battle with U.S. forces in 2003—would not have acquired their immense power and wealth without their father’s ruthless support and the shedding of hundreds of Iraqi citizens’ blood. Criminal nepotism is still rampant in many human societies, and
particularly in dictatorships in Africa, Asia, and South America. According to Bellow, Europeans, too, have a relatively positive and tolerant view of nepotism. American society, by contrast, was founded on the criteria of merit, fairness, and equal opportunity, and Americans have historically shown resistance to and rejection of nepotism.
Just as America has seemed to succeed in producing the best meritocratic society in the world, however, nepotism has reemerged stronger than ever. Throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day, we have seen the success of family dynasties in politics, business, arts, music, and literature. These families have employed the nepotistic strategies used by European elites to transfer their wealth and power to successive generations. Capitalism is supposed to be the great engine of individual liberation from the confines of the family. Yet family interests continue to predominate in American economic life. In fact, in a new book titled A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity, Luigi Zingales—an economist at the University of Chicago Business School and a colleague of mine—makes the case that American capitalism, once unique in the world for being based on fair competition, equal opportunity, and meritocracy, has been gradually changing and increasingly resembles Italian capitalism, in which cronyism and nepotism rule.8
Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships Page 9
