In the modern age Kant thought that what makes us moral is reason (understood in a particular way). An act is right if we can prescribe it as a universal rule. We should not tell lies because if everyone else did, no one would trust us and the practice of communication on which lying depends would be undermined. Immorality is a kind of self-contradiction. Reason allows us to think our way through to virtue.
David Hume and Adam Smith thought that reason alone cannot provide our fundamental motives for action. Feelings or emotions (what Hume called ‘the passions’) do that. What make us moral are the feelings we have with and for others. As Adam Smith put it in the opening sentence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’ Whether through neuroscience or biochemistry, mirror neurons or oxytocin, we have a moral sense.
The obvious question, though, on all these theories is this: if being moral is so straightforward – if knowledge, habit, character, reason and emotion all point the way to the right and the good – how is it that people have, throughout the ages, lied, cheated, robbed, stolen, insulted, offended, oppressed, exploited and killed? This is Darwin’s question from the opposite direction. If we are so good, why are we so bad?
The third starting point, a religious one, is the one with which this book began. How is it that people kill in the name of the God of life, wage war in the name of the God of peace, hate in the name of the God of love and practise cruelty in the name of the God of compassion? How, if we are the image of God, do we so often harm the work of God, especially our fellow humans?
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The answer in its essentials was given by Darwin himself. In The Descent of Man he wrote, ‘There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.’
We are social animals. We hand on our genes as individuals, but we survive only in groups. Nor is this unique to humans. Ants, bees and most mammals scout, feed and live in groups. In the wild the individual separated from the group is essentially dead. The lone individual is the one that gets eaten by the lion.
Supremely, this is the evolutionary advantage of Homo sapiens. We are the most effective of all life forms in creating and sustaining groups. We are the most social of animals. Indeed, according to many biologists it was for the sake of enhancing this ability that we developed language. It is also the reason for our prodigious brain size, a full 300 per cent larger than our evolutionary ancestors.
We co-operate and we compete. We co-operate in order to compete. One man will not survive against a lion. But ten or a hundred might, if they formed an effective team. Their greatest danger would then be posed not by a predator but by another human group in pursuit of the same scarce resources: food, shelter and territory. The stronger the group, the more chance it has against rivals. In the Darwinian struggle to survive, the most cohesive team, adept at co-ordinating its various talents and tasks, will live to fight another day.
It follows that we have two sets of instincts, honed and refined by many centuries of evolutionary history. One set – Darwin’s ‘patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy’ – inclines us in the direction of altruism. We work for the good of the group because our very viability depends on it. The stronger the group, the greater our chances of surviving to beget further generations. As Darwin said, this would be natural selection.
The other set – our most basic reactions of aggression, fear, anger and combativeness, our willingness to fight and inflict injuries on others – shapes our relationship with rival groups competing with us for scarce resources. The speed and force of these reactions are vital to our success in the competitive arena of natural selection.
So we are angels and demons, angels to those on our side, demons to those on the other side. This follows from the human – and wider than human – instinct to form groups. Groups unite and divide. They divide as they unite. Every group involves the coming together of multiple individuals to form a collective Us. But every Us is defined against a Them, the ones not like us. The one without the other is impossible. Inclusion and exclusion go hand in hand.
Here then is the source of both violence and altruism. Darwin’s question is answered. Altruism plays a major role in survival of the group. Whether natural selection operates at the level of the individual or whether there is such a thing as group selection has been and remains a hotly debated topic within biology. But there is no doubt that the survival of individuals depends on the willingness of members of the group to take risks and make sacrifices for the good of the group as a whole. That is the biological function of the better angels of our nature.
The same applies in the reverse direction, explaining why, when reason or emotion inclines us to morality, human evil exists. Our inclination to act well towards others, whatever its source, tends to be confined to those with whom we share a common identity. The Greeks, the world’s first philosophers and scientists, regarded anyone who was not Greek as a barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating. Our radius of moral concern has limits. The group may be small or large, but in practice as opposed to theory, we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.
The same is true of religion. The world’s great faiths have said sublime things about love, compassion, sacrifice and charity. But these noble sentiments have often been confined to fellow believers, or at least potential fellow believers. Against non-believers – members of another faith or of none, and those of our own faith we deem to be heretics – religions can be brutal and pitiless.
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We are potentially violent because, as social animals, we form groups to compete for resources and survive against other groups. Unlike non-human social animals, we can choose non-violent ways of interacting with other groups, but sadly all too often we do not. There is such a thing as in-group violence, but for the most part it is contained (what counts as in-group and out-group depends on context: groups may fracture into schisms, sects, denominations, parties and factions that sometimes come together and at other times see each other as completely separate groups). The violence that leads to war and terror is between groups, and it is precisely this that leads to in-group solidarity and cohesion, and fear, suspicion and aggression towards out-groups. It is neither secularism nor religious belief that makes us what we are, the curious mixture of good and bad that can lead us to the moral heights or the savage depths. It is our groupishness.
What, though, allows us to form groups in the first place if we are genetically conditioned to seek our own survival before that of others? How could altruism emerge? The answer comes at three levels, very different from one another.
The first was indicated graphically by J.B.S. Haldane when he was asked whether he would jump into a river to save his brother. He replied, ‘No, but I would do so to save two brothers or eight cousins.’ On the face of it, it would never make sense to risk our own life to save someone in danger of drowning. Why endanger your posterity for the sake of others? Haldane’s point, elaborated in the 1960s by William Hamilton and others, is that it would make sense if the people you are trying to save are closely related to you. We share 50 per cent of our genes with our siblings, an eighth with our cousins, and so on. So by saving the lives of close relatives we would still be handing on our genes to the future. This is the logic of kin selection and it is determined by genetic similarity.
This makes intuitive sense. We know that the matrix of altruism is within the family. It is there that we hand on our genes to the next generation, there that we have our greatest chance of defeating mortality this side of heaven. It was Edmund
Burke who said that ‘we begin our public affections in our families’, and Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote that ‘as long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone’. Biology, morality and society coincide. Morality begins with kin.
How groups became wider – from kin to kith, from relatives to friends – was a major problem in evolutionary biology until the late 1970s. How would any animal, let alone a human being, come to form an association with non-related others if self-interest always defeats the common good? This was the starting point of Hobbes’s famous account of life in a state of nature, in which there was ‘continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. What stops people fighting one another for long enough to create an association?
Some brilliant work in the late 1970s and 1980s provided the answer. It used a scenario drawn from Game Theory called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This exercise imagines two criminals, suspected of a crime for which the police lack adequate evidence to secure a conviction. Their best chance of doing so is to interrogate the two men separately, giving each an incentive to inform on the other. This they both do, with the result that they end up in prison with a longer sentence than they would have received had they both stayed silent. This sounds like a minor curiosity, but it upset the major assumption on which economics had been based since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, namely that division of labour combined with individual self-interest would result in collective gain. The Prisoner’s Dilemma shows that this is so only if we add one other ingredient: trust. What stops the two accused men from staying silent is that neither can trust the other to do likewise.
What mathematicians discovered was that the Prisoner’s Dilemma yields a negative outcome if played only once. If played many times, the two men eventually learn to trust each other because they learn that they gain if they do and lose if they don’t. A competition to find the most effective computer programme for survival in multiple encounters with strangers was won in 1979 by a simple programme, designed by Anatol Rapoport, a political scientist with an interest in nuclear confrontation who had once been a concert pianist. He called it Tit-for-Tat. It said: on the first encounter be nice, and on subsequent encounters repeat the other person’s last move. If he is nice, so should you be, and if not, then respond in kind. This was the first moral principle whose survival value was shown by computer simulation. What it did was to show the gold in the Golden Rule. It said, in a world where people will probably do to you what you did to them, it pays to act to others as you would wish them to act to you – a basic principle of most cultures.
This solves the Darwinian dilemma of how non-genetically related individuals can co-operate to form groups. If you do to others what you expect them to do for you – share food, give warning of impending danger and the like – then the group will function effectively and survive. If not, you will be punished by reprisals and possible exclusion from the group. Biologists call this reciprocal altruism. Some deny that this is altruism at all. It is ‘self-interest rightly understood’, or what Bishop Butler called ‘cool self-love’. But the terminology is neither here nor there. This is the simplest basis of the moral life. If you start with benevolence, then apply the rules of reciprocity, you create a basis of trust on which groups can form. For this you do not need religion. All social animals work this out, because those who do not, do not survive.
It depends, though, on repeated face-to-face encounters. I have to be able to remember what you did to me last time if I am to trust you now. This requires a fair amount of memory, which explains why animal groups like chimpanzees and bonobos are small. Some biologists think that humans developed language so that they could better co-ordinate their activities. It also allowed them to gossip, sharing information about which individuals were trustworthy and which were not. It even allowed them to ‘stroke’ one another verbally rather than physically, thus strengthening the emotional bonding between them.
One ingenious biologist, Robin Dunbar, worked out that there is a correlation among species between brain size and the average size of groups. On this basis he calculated that for humans, the optimal size is 150. That is why the first human groups, even after the domestication of animals and the invention of agriculture, were quite small: the tribe, the village, the clan. Associations larger than this were federations of smaller groups.
How then did humans develop much larger concentrations of population? How did they create cities and civilisation? Reciprocal altruism creates trust between neighbours, people who meet repeatedly and know about one another’s character. The birth of the city posed a different and much greater problem: how do you establish trust between strangers?
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This was the point at which culture took over from nature, and religion was born – that is, religion in the sense of an organised social structure with myths, rituals, sacred times and places, temples and a priesthood. Recall that we are speaking in evolutionary not theological terms. Regardless of whether we regard religion as true or false, it clearly has adaptive value because it appeared at the dawn of civilisation and has been a central feature of almost every society since.
The early religions created moral communities, thus solving the problem of trust between strangers. They sanctified the social order. They taught people that society is as it is because this is the will of the gods and the basic structure of the universe. The fundamental theme of the early religions in Mesopotamia and Egypt was the tension between cosmos and chaos, order and anarchy, structure and disarray. The universe began in chaos, a formless ocean or unformed matter, and if the rules are not followed, it will become chaos again. As Shakespeare put it in Ulysses’ speech in Act 1, scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida, the finest-ever account of the cosmological mind:
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.
There is an order in heaven and earth, and if its rules are broken, ‘hark, what discord follows!’ The sea will flood the earth. Social distinctions will dissolve. Law will be replaced by anarchy. Children will no longer obey their parents. All that will be left is violence:
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
There is no biological mechanism capable of yielding order on such a scale. Ants manage it because, within groups and roles, they are clones of one another. They operate by kin selection. Humans are different from one another. That is what makes co-operation between them so difficult, and so powerful when it happens. This is when something new and distinctively human emerges. Learned habits of behaviour take over from evolved instinctual drives. Rituals make their appearance. Socialisation becomes a fundamental part of the education of the young. There are roles, rules, codes of conduct. The habits necessary to the maintenance of the group become internalised. We are the culture-creating, meaning-seeking animal. Homo sapiens became Homo religiosus.
Such, at any rate, is the argument put forward by a group of evolutionary scholars, among them David Sloan Wilson, Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan. They point, among other things, to the research of Richard Sosis into 200 communes founded in the nineteenth century. Communes are good examples of co-operation without kinship. Sosis found that 6 per cent of secular communes were still in existence twenty years after their founding, as compared with 39 per cent of religious ones. In a follow-up study he found the more demanding the religious group, the longer its lifespan.2 Religion creates and sustains communities.
It also creates trust. Nicholas Rauh studied social life in Delos, the centre of Roman maritime trade in pre-Christian times. What allowed merchants to de
velop the mutual trust that made long-distance trade possible? They created religious fraternities and invoked the watchful gods as witnesses to their agreements. ‘This divine function more than anything else provides the common denominator for the features encountered in both Greek and Roman marketplaces.’3
In the run-up to the 2008 American presidential election, a Gallup poll in 2007 showed that over 90 per cent would vote for a candidate who was Catholic or Jewish as opposed to 45 per cent who would vote for an atheist.4 Nor was this unique to America. In a worldwide survey of 81 countries conducted between 1999 and 2002, two-thirds of participants said they trusted religion, a half trusted their government and a third trusted political parties.5
Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: ‘Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.’6 This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.
Others like Richard Schweder and Jonathan Haidt have shown how the rich repertoire of religious ethics, with its dimensions of respect for authority, loyalty and a sense of the sacred, furnish a more comprehensive or ‘thick’ morality than the relatively pared-down features of secular ethics, based on fairness and the avoidance of harm. It is not that religious people are more moral than their secular counterparts, but rather that their moralities tend to have a thicker and richer texture, binding groups together, not merely regulating the encounters of randomly interacting individuals. As Haidt puts it: ‘Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.’7 Many believe that the word ‘religion’ comes from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind’.
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