So, hooray, just like social bacteria, we can evolve cooperation. But one thing that a cooperative bacterium lacks is a psyche. Ashworth thoughtfully explored the psychology of how Live and Let Live participants began to view the enemy.
He described a sequence of steps. First, once any mutual restraint emerged, the enemy had established that they were rational, with incentives to hold fire. This prompted a sense of responsibility in dealing with them; this was initially purely self-serving—don’t violate an agreement because they’ll violate back. With time, the responsibility developed a moral tinge, tapping into most people’s resistance to betraying someone who deals reliably with them. The specific motivations for truces generated insights—“Hey, they don’t want dinner disturbed any more than we do; they don’t want to fight in this rain either; they also deal with officers who screw up everything.” There’d be a creeping sense of camaraderie.
This produced something striking. The war machines in combatant countries spewed the usual pseudospeciating propaganda. But in studying soldiers’ diaries and letters, Ashworth observed minimal hostility toward the enemy expressed by trench soldiers; the further from the front, the more hostility. In the words of one frontline soldier, quoted by Ashworth, “At home one abuses the enemy, and draws insulting caricatures. How tired I am of grotesque Kaisers. Out here, one can respect a brave, skillful, and resourceful enemy. They have people they love at home, they too have to endure mud, rain and steel.”
Us and Them would be in flux. If someone is shooting at you or your band of brothers, they are certainly a Them. But otherwise Them was more likely to be the rats and lice, the mold in the food, the cold. As well as any comfortable officer at headquarters who would be—in the words of another trench soldier—“[an] abstract tactician who from far away disposes of us.”
American and German propaganda posters
These truces could not persist; the final phases of the war obliterated them, as the British High Command adopted a nightmarish strategy of war by attrition.
In thinking of the Christmas Truce and the Live and Let Live system, I always have the same fantasy, a very different one from the fantasy that began this book. What would have happened if there had been two additional inventions during World War I? The first is modern mass communications—texting, Twitter, Facebook. The second is a mind-set that emerged only among World War I’s shattered survivors—the cynicism of modernity. Men up and down hundreds of miles of trenches repeatedly reinvented Live and Let Live, unaware that they were not alone. Imagine texts bouncing along and across the trenches, a million soldiers at death’s door saying, “This is bullshit. None of us here want to fight anymore, and we’ve figured out a way to stop.” They could have ended it, tossed down their guns, could have ignored or ridiculed or killed any objecting officer spouting obscenities about God and country, could have gone home to kiss their loved ones and then face the real enemy, the bloated aristocracy who would sacrifice them for their own power.
—
It is easy to have this fantasy about the Great War, a distant museum piece festooned with twirly mustaches and silly plumed officers’ helmets. It behooves us to step back from the grainy black-and-white photos and to consider a hugely difficult thought experiment. Our contemporary adversaries kidnap girls and sell them into slavery, commit atrocities and, instead of concealing them, display the evidence online. When I read the news of the things they’ve done, I hate them passionately. It’s impossible to imagine kicking back, having a group sing-along of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and exchanging Christmas tchotchkes with Al-Qaeda grunts.
Yet time does interesting things. The hatred between Americans and Japanese during World War II was boundless. American recruiting posters advertised “Jap Hunting Licenses”; one veteran of the Pacific theater described a common event, writing in the Atlantic in 1946: [American soldiers] “boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”59 And there’s the bestial treatment of American POWs by the Japanese. If Richard Fiske had wound up a POW, Zenji Abe might have helped march him to death; if the former had killed the latter in battle, he might have made a souvenir of his skull. And instead, more than fifty years later, one would write a letter of condolence to the other’s grandchildren upon the death of Grandpa.
—
A key point of the previous chapter was that those in the future will look back on us and be appalled at what we did amid our scientific ignorance. A key challenge in this chapter is to recognize how likely we are to eventually look back at our current hatreds and find them mysterious.
Daniel Dennett has pondered a scenario of someone undergoing surgery without anesthesia but with absolute knowledge that afterward they’d receive a drug that would erase all memory of the event. Would pain be less painful if you knew that it would be forgotten? Would the same happen to hatred, if you knew that with time it would fade and the similarities between Us and Them would outweigh the differences? And that a hundred years ago, in a place that was hell on earth, those with the most temptation to hate often didn’t even need the passage of time for that to happen?
The philosopher George Santayana provided us with an aphorism so wise that it has suffered the fate of becoming a cliché—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In the context of this final chapter, we must turn Santayana on his head—those who do not remember the extraordinary truces of the World War I trenches, or who do not learn of Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta, or of the reconciliative distances traveled by Abe and Fiske, Mandela and Viljoen, Hussein and Rabin, or of the stumbling, familiar moral frailties that Newton vanquished, or who do not recognize that science can teach us how to make events like these more likely—those who do not remember these are condemned to be less likely to repeat these reasons to hope.
Epilogue
We’ve covered lots of ground, and some themes have arisen repeatedly. It’s worth reviewing them before considering two final points.
As the single most important of them, virtually every scientific fact presented in this book concerns the average of what’s being measured. There is always variation, and it’s often the most interesting thing about a fact. Not every person activates the amygdala when seeing the face of a Them; not every yeast adheres to another one bearing the same surface protein marker. Instead, on the average, both do. Reflecting this, I’ve just discovered that this book contains variations on “average,” “typically,” “usually,” “often,” “tend to,” and “generally” more than five hundred times. And I probably should have inserted them even more as reminders. There are individual differences and interesting exceptions everywhere you look in science.
Now, in no particular order:
It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do the harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. And it’s often easiest to avoid temptation with distraction and reappraisal rather than willpower.
While it’s cool that there’s so much plasticity in the brain, it’s no surprise—it has to work that way.
Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong, even multigenerational. However, more adverse consequences can be reversed than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.
Brains and cultures coevolve.
Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
Repeatedly, biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.
Cognition and affect always interact. What’s interesting is when one dominates.
Genes have different effects in different env
ironments; a hormone can make you nicer or crummier, depending on your values; we haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else—we’ve evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context.
Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren’t opposites. The opposite of each is indifference.
Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn—context, context, context.
Arbitrary boundaries on continua can be helpful. But never forget that they are arbitrary.
Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.
You can’t understand aggression without understanding fear (and what the amygdala has to do with both).
Genes aren’t about inevitabilities; they’re about potentials and vulnerabilities. And they don’t determine anything on their own. Gene/environment interactions are everywhere. Evolution is most consequential when altering regulation of genes, rather than genes themselves.
We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer the former. We are easily manipulated, even subliminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.
We aren’t chimps, and we aren’t bonobos. We’re not a classic pair-bonding species or a tournament species. We’ve evolved to be somewhere in between in these and other categories that are clear-cut in other animals. It makes us a much more malleable and resilient species. It also makes our social lives much more confusing and messy, filled with imperfection and wrong turns.
The homunculus has no clothes.
While traditional nomadic hunter-gatherer life over hundreds of thousands of years might have been a little on the boring side, it certainly wasn’t ceaselessly bloody. In the years since most humans abandoned a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we’ve obviously invented many things. One of the most interesting and challenging is social systems where we can be surrounded by strangers and can act anonymously.
Saying a biological system works “well” is a value-free assessment; it can take discipline, hard work, and willpower to accomplish either something wondrous or something appalling. “Doing the right thing” is always context dependent.
Many of our best moments of morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization.
Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like little crawly, infectious things.
When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had ever seen before.
“Me” versus “us” (being prosocial within your group) is easier than “us” versus “them” (prosociality between groups).
It’s not great if someone believes it’s okay for people to do some horrible, damaging act. But more of the world’s misery arises from people who, of course, oppose that horrible act . . . but cite some particular circumstances that should make them exceptions. The road to hell is paved with rationalization.
The certainty with which we act now might seem ghastly not only to future generations but to our future selves as well.
Neither the capacity for fancy, rarefied moral reasoning nor for feeling great empathy necessarily translates into actually doing something difficult, brave, and compassionate.
People kill and are willing to be killed for symbolic sacred values. Negotiations can make peace with Them; understanding and respecting the intensity of their sacred values can make lasting peace.
We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.
Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don’t forget that the same applies to our best behaviors.
Individuals no more exceptional than the rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans.
Two Last Thoughts
If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.
Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.
Acknowledgments
The naturalist Edward O. Wilson, one of the most influential thinkers of our time, has found himself at the center of fiery controversies related to the evolution of human social behavior (discussed in chapter 10). An elegant and graceful man, he has written about those disputes and those who have most strongly opposed him—“Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.”
When it comes to this book, I count myself even luckier than Wilson, in that I’ve had the good fortune of brilliant friends, ones who have been enormously helpful and generous with their time in vetting the chapters of this book. They’ve flagged my errors of omission and commission and my under-, over-, and misinterpretations, and tactfully let me know areas where I was twenty years out of date in my knowledge, or just plain woefully wrong. This book has benefited enormously from their collegial kindness, and I thank them all deeply (while taking credit for any errors remaining). They are:
Ara Norenzayan, University of British Columbia, Canada
Carsten de Dreu, Leiden University/University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Daniel Weinberger, Johns Hopkins University
David Barash, University of Washington
David Moore, Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University
Douglas Fry, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Gerd Kempermann, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
James Gross, Stanford University
James Rilling, Emory University
Jeanne Tsai, Stanford University
John Crabbe, Oregon Health and Science University
John Jost, New York University
John Wingfield, University of California at Davis
Joshua Greene, Harvard University
Kenneth Kendler, Virginia Commonwealth University
Lawrence Steinberg, Temple University
Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University
Paul Whalen, Dartmouth College
Randy Nelson, Ohio State University
Robert Seyfarth, University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Hrdy, University of California at Davis
Stephen Manuck, University of Pittsburgh
Steven Cole, University of California at Los Angeles
Susan Fiske, Princeton University
I have also had the fortune to interact with the spectacular students at Stanford University, and a number of them have directly contributed to this book. This has taken the form of their being library assistants, helping out with specific topics, or being members of a small seminar that I taught a few times that focused on the content of this book. They’ve been wonderful to work with and learn from. They are:
Adam Widman, Alexander Morgan, Ali Maggioncalda, Alice Spurgin, Allison Waters, Anna Chan, Arielle Lasky, Ben Wyler, Bethany Michel, Bilal Mahmood, Carl Cummings, Catherine Le, Christopher Schulze, Davie Yoon, Dawn Maxey, Dylan Alegria, Elena Bridgers, Elizabeth Levey, Ellen Edenberg, Ellora Karmarkar, Erik Lehnert, Ethan Lipka, Felicity Grisham, Gabe Ben-Dor, Gene Lowry, George Capps, Helen McLendon, Helen Shen, Jeffrey Woods, Jonathan Lu, Kaitlin Greene, Katharine Tomalty, Katrina Hui, Kian Eftekhari, Kirsten Hornbeak, Lara Rangel, Lauren Finzer, Lindsay Louie, Lisa Diver, Maisy Samuelson, Morgan Freret, Nick Hollon, Patrick Wong, Pilar Abascal, Robert Schafer, Sam Bremmer, Sandy Kory, Scott Huckaby, Sean Bruich, Sonia Singh, Stacie Nishimoto, Tom McFadden, Vineet Singhal, Will Peterson, Wyatt Hong, Yun Chu.
I also thank Lisa Pereira of Stanford University, Christopher Richards of Penguin Books, Thea Traff of the New Yorker, and Ethan Lipka of the Nueva School for helping tremendously in getting this book into shape during the final stretch. Thanks to Kevin Berger for thinking of the title to chapter 6. Warm, heartfelt thanks to Katinka Matson and Steven Barclay, my publishing and speaking agents, sounding boards, and friends—you both know how long and difficult the gestation of this book was, and thank you for sticking with me throughout. I thank Scott Moyers of Penguin with huge gratitude—you have been a dream of an editor. And I apologize to anyone whose support I have missed noting here, as I rush frantically to meet the deadline for this book. . . .
Finally, above all else, I thank and madly love those who have given the most support, and who have withstood the most interruptions of board games, while I worked on the book—my family.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst Page 68