Camaraderie was a life-or-death issue during the course of our evolution. Back in caveman days (I’m told that we actually didn’t evolve in caves; it was more like savannas), when you broke a bone, solitude could very likely result in your death, because, if nothing else, you would be easy pickings for all sorts of hungry critters. However, if similarly broken—but in the company of other people—the situation changes dramatically, as you now have someone to help you more effectively shoo away danger while you recover.
So, Pleistocene men and women needed the company of others—there was nothing frivolous about spending time with friends those days. This is not to suggest it wasn’t fun at times; indeed, it must have been—it had to be immediately reinforcing one way or another, or it wouldn’t have been so popular! Alternatively—more like simultaneously—extended solitude must have felt repulsive.
Evolution must have selected this arrangement. Over time, those people born with mutations rendering them repulsed by company or satisfied with solitude were much more likely to be devoured when they broke their collarbones because they were more likely to be alone when it happened. And once devoured, they could not mate and pass their I’m-fine-with-solitude genes into future generations.
On the contrary, those people carrying genes lending them to prefer the company of others, or to be repelled by solitude, were much more likely to survive, to live through broken bones and infections, and eventually mate with other similarly social humans. Ergo, the I-need-company genes were spread around a lot more effectively than the I’m-fine-with-solitude genes. And, whoomp, here we are today, endowed with a need to connect with others and to belong to cohesive social groups.
Many people are reluctant to even entertain such dry and technical accounts for the human experiences that we hold so dear, such as camaraderie. I recall myself bristling at such notions when I was still clinging to a more spiritual slant to the nature of existence. But now having experienced the transition to godlessness firsthand, I see the resistance like Ernest Becker, that one reason we reject these explanations is because we’re afraid to mechanize ourselves and identify too closely with beasts, lest it suggest we are less special than we feel.
However, over here on the other side of the spirituality fence—and about as far from that fence as one can get—I’m thrilled to announce that, paradoxically, I feel enriched by the evolutionary perspectives of my behavior and experience. Camaraderie somehow feels more real and legitimate—perhaps even more meaningful—when appreciated as a phenomenon that has been honed through millions of years of natural selection, as opposed to having been instantaneously imposed via a magical finger-snap by Zeus or whomever.
I feel even more connected to others, both my friends and even strangers, in a way that is more tangible than ill-defined spiritual forces that are purported to do the same. My drives become part of my essence, a natural essence that I share with virtually every human being ever, Christian or Muslim, alive or dead. No, I’m not suggesting that every time I eat a burger that Joan of Arc or some al Qaeda terrorist in Qatar can somehow taste it, but it does make me feel less different from people in general. We all have similar desires and fears—especially the fear of mortality.
Nor am I saying that teaching evolution is going to bring world peace, but I think it may have more potential than the effort to reconcile the world’s religions. The latter simply cannot happen entirely; too many religions are mutually exclusive, and there’s too much at stake. That’s the problem with immortality: It’s too inspirational. What I do notice, however, is that my daily life has more peace when I appreciate the similarity between me and everyone else, that we’re all on the same boat to mortality, and on some level, we’re all afraid. It helps me, for example, be mindful of my interactions with others, whether it be my girlfriend or the checkout lady at the Quik-E-Mart.
Evolution doesn’t just connect me to people: It even connects me to lower animals, who have similar—if not exact—versions of the same drives that I do (even though those animals may not be complicated by the ability to contemplate their experiences while having them). But realizing that I’m like the animals hasn’t encouraged me to act like one, as I suspect many religious people fear it should. However, it has helped me feel less guilty for wanting to act like one, and has helped me to forgive myself when I actually do act like one (which isn’t very often). For me, this secular, humanistic forgiveness feels more satisfying than the blind, frivolous forgiveness I used to get from Jesus. Ironically, it was spiritual forgiveness that had become routine after a while, insincere, and easy to abuse.
The evolution of socialization had to involve more than simply keeping company with others. Socialization works best when our company likes us, to some degree. They have to feel devoted to us and perceive us as worthwhile, dependable, valuable, attractive in some way. Otherwise, they’re less motivated to care for us when we break our collarbones, nor will they be interested in having sex with us once we’ve healed.
With this in mind, we can now begin to appreciate how negative emotions, such as guilt and shame could fit in to the picture. (Psychologists do make a distinction: We experience shame when someone catches us doing something we feel is wrong, whereas guilt is relatively private, in that it doesn’t require the publicity.) Pleistocene men and women who carried genes that created ill feelings when they perpetrated behaviors that were not conducive to the camaraderie of the group—such as stealing—would be less likely to commit those antisocial behaviors. As a result, they would be held in higher esteem in the group and treated preferentially, increasing the odds of their survival. Certainly, if I find two of my clan members in a precarious situation and it’s up to me to make a sacrifice to help—but I can only tend to one—I’m gonna help the guy who shared his extra carrot with me last summer and let the guy who flirted with my cave-wife burn. And so, something like that, morality was born. It’s worth mentioning that we’re talking about the average cave-person. Sure, shameless/guiltless folk can survive in a group as well (at least in limited numbers) as long as they also have genes endowing them with the gifts of manipulation and secrecy. Such folks have survived just fine; we call them “sociopaths” or “psychopaths” today.1
Perhaps surprisingly, again, this evolutionary perspective orients me and provides direction—ironically, more so than the Bible ever did. Understanding my guilt and shame as products of millions of years of laborious development, a matter of life-or-death for my ancestors hunting and gathering on the African savannas millions of years ago, I feel like I have a legitimate reference to guide my behavior. All I have to do is learn to pay attention to my feelings, how to identify when I’m feeling guilty or ashamed. Nowadays, this compels me to examine my behavior and scrutinize it carefully, and I can make a decision based on how my options sway those negative feelings. The trickiest part has been working through the defense mechanisms and actually contacting the guilt and shame—just like physical pain, human minds don’t like to feel them, so they reflexively try to push them away. But once you begin to contact them, this system becomes more reliable and less confusing than the Bible, which is ambiguous and will inevitably give you contradictory advice if you read it long enough. Perhaps guilt was a gift from God after all. Administered slowly, over millions of years of evolution on the African savannas.
The overarching mission of the field of Evolutionary Psychology is to better understand modern human behavior by explaining why and how it was naturally selected. A real evolutionary psychologist, Leda Cosmides, along with her anthropologist husband, John Tooby, have formalized a discussion about the role of evolution in modern mental illness.2 The notion they present, profound for me, begins with the fact that evolution is (typically) an extraordinarily slow process. However, one of the products of evolution, modern humans with their abstracting frontal lobes, has discovered technology. Relative to evolution, technology proceeds very quickly. It’s even accelerating, that is, it feeds itself and goes even faster as new advances are re
alized.
So, as the simplest of calculus would predict, technological advances have now greatly outstripped our evolutionary adaptations. Ergo, we now find our current selves housed in bodies and minds that are still optimized for ancient living conditions, that is, hunting and gathering in tribal communities, living outdoors, and being intimately engaged with nature and other humans on tasks directly related to survival. As you can see, there is a glaring mismatch between how we were designed to live and how we are actually living today. Not surprisingly, this can lead to both physical and psychological distress. Surely, people have been discussing the irony of the pitfalls of luxury ever since luxury was invented. Leda and John’s notion of “development-environment mismatch” seems to explain a lot of it.
They open the discussion by exploring non-mental health issues, that is, more medical examples, such as the “trivial” instance of overeating (by “trivial” they probably mean that this is a commonly cited example, as opposed to suggesting it doesn’t matter). Pleistocene men and women were equipped—that is, naturally selected—to crave fat, salt, and sugar because these are particularly nourishing to human bodies and brains. The craving and appreciation for these foods are strong because such valued foods were relatively scarce back when the craving developed. In other words, there was a match between the supply and demand that functioned well. Today, however, at least for many of us in bountiful America, our supply is effectively endless, but we’re still equipped with the same cravings that were suited for a much smaller supply. Ergo, we’re obese and ridden with heart disease and tooth decay—which Leda and John describe as “virtually unknown in populations that [still] hunt and gather.” It’s also no wonder that hunger satiety takes time to set in: Everyone’s quite familiar with how much easier it is to overeat than to under-eat. When Pleistocene women and men were fortunate enough to land some deer, they didn’t stop after they had enough. They kept eating, and didn’t start to feel full until way after they were actually full, because there might not be any more deer for a few days. Stuffing oneself back then could have been a life-or-death issue. Ironically, the tables have turned, huh!
I suspect that experts who really know what they’re talking about could go on forever, but I have just a couple more examples of development-environment mismatch you might find engaging. One I enjoy teaching in my college classes whenever the discussion arises goes as follows. We did not evolve on boats, and therefore boating can be a terrible experience for many. This is because the brain on a boat is receiving conflicted messages, to which some people are particularly sensitive. The motor cortex and feedback from the legs are telling the boater that he’s standing still but his vestibular system is telling him that he’s in motion. For the human Pleistocene brain on land, such confusion was an alarm, the only natural deduction at the time being that the organism had consumed something poisonous. Ergo, the safest thing to do in such a situation would be to vomit. So, here we are today, conquering the planet with our boats—but for many, the earth wins, leaving the vanquished heaving over gunwales, feeding its fish with their vomitus. (By the way, a similar phenomenon happens at some movies—The Blair Witch Project in 1999 was notorious for inducing nausea in patrons, with its bouncy camera simulating movement while we were really just sitting in seats—me on the edge of mine, for sure; that movie worked well for me.)
And for those tough guys who make fun of the vomit-prone for being sissies, the joke’s on you: Given a mass poisoning of our primitive tribe, our sensitive, barfing comrades are actually most likely to survive—and after all the macho guys with the cast-iron stomachs die, the “sissies” get their women!
While the iron is hot, we might as well venture into defecation. Bear with me; we won’t stay long. But yes, I’ve taken up backcountry hiking over the last few years and have been moved by how much more magnificent a bowel movement is when squatting in nature versus sitting on a toilet. I’m serious: If I ranked all of my best dumps ever, the entire top 10 would consist of natural ones, despite comprising such an infinitesimal portion of total dumps taken. The irony is that by creating a situation that makes us more comfortable overall (that is, the toilet), we’re putting our colons in an unnatural position that impedes the crapping process.
Okay, that story was a bit of a set-up (although it is totally true!). I was also interested in arousing icky feelings in you, which I suspect are quite rampant by now. But I’m not trying to be crass—I want to talk about those feelings, and suspect the discussion may proceed best if the feeling in question is fresh on your mind. The point: That feeling of disgust that you are feeling right now is also naturally selected. A genetically endowed repulsion to feces (and rotting food and so on) has self-preservation value—that is, avoidance of infection—while genes endowing any sort of attraction to such infectious things will soon become scarce in a gene pool. That revulsion is strong and deep, not just for hilarious playground jokes, but because it needs to be.
Of course, the repulsion is more complex than this, but that’s likely where it starts, evolutionarily. And of course, our culture has also indoctrinated us to steer away from feces and such, to not even discuss such matters, which complements well our innate revulsion. But as many an evolutionist has noted, the rules of our culture are often simply resonating something that natural selection has already established, in this case “Stay away from doo-doo because it is so gross that it can be dangerous. No matter how hungry you are, don’t eat that, despite the fact it just came out of you. Don’t be near it; don’t even talk about it.” Other naturally selected laws of human nature endorsed well by culture include “You must beget children, but not with your own kin” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Our cultures enforce these rules, but it’s an easy job in most instances because the foundation is already there. I’m not even sure if “enforce” is the right word; it may be more like embrace.
Back to poo, Ernest Becker takes it all to another level, arguing that our revulsion to feces and such, both personal and cultural, is not only about health but also related to our fears of mortality. He talked about “gods with anuses” to describe the duality of humankind, in respect to our narcissistic claims of having conquered the earth—but while we still have to shit, just like the rest of the animals.3 Sure, we wipe our dirty butts, but often ineffectively. We even get it on our hand sometimes!
Becker says that the relatively animalistic behaviors like defecating are taboo because they are potent reminders of our mortality. To acknowledge them puts us on the same playing field as animals, and animals are mortal and don’t have souls, so shitting and humping like them raises doubts that perhaps we don’t have souls either. What kind of god would make us so different from the beasts (that is, immortal), but also so similar (that is, with urine and ejaculate and menses)? In a truly spiritual universe, an immortal being wouldn’t even have an asshole, nor would it breast-feed its children like a dog. So the more we can disguise our animal parts and behaviors—with deodorant, clean underwear, scented toilet paper, feminine products, and nursing blankets—we can distance ourselves from the animals and convince ourselves that we’re different. So different that we can live forever!
Becker goes on and on, culminating in what I am sure is the greatest line from any literature, ever since the beginning of the written word: “No mistake—the turd is mankind’s real threat.”4
It’s true. The rectum and its product really do put us in our place. I’ve had mild bouts of hemorrhoids in the past, managed adequately with over-the-counter preparations for such. I’m not trying to be gross frivolously! I’m dead serious, just like Ernest Becker was: I’ve never felt more beastly than when applying ointment to my sphincter ani externus. The experience puts me in touch with my animality even more than crapping in the woods.
I like to imagine chatting with Ernest Becker about this stuff, sitting in rocking chairs on the porch, drinking cold beer. I can just hear him now: “Yeah, Dave, it’s really hard to believe in God w
ith your finger in your butt.”
I’d laugh. “Yeah, well, I’ll see your anus, Ernest, but I’ll raise you a masturbation. That’s right: gods who beat-off.” It’s easy to understand why masturbation is so shunned by religion, it being arguably more vile than crapping, and hence even more incompatible with immortality. Plus, masturbation has the benefit of being even more private than crapping, which affords people the opportunity to deny that they even do it at all! Privacy is what makes it a sin. Crapping would also be a sin, if we could at least pretend that we don’t do it.
We’d go on and on. We’d rant about “gods who kill their babies,” that is, abortion. Permitting abortion is about as incompatible with spirituality as any human behavior possibly could be. As long as abortion is legal, we’re no better than the lion king when he kills entire litters sired by other lions in order to get their inferior genes out of the pool.
Similarly, we can’t permit voluntary euthanasia of dying, consenting adults because to do so would also make us too beastly. I can’t speak for Ernest, but I might even argue that in a world without spirituality, even suicide would be respected, at least in some cases. Yes, sometimes I think that when survivors of suiciders call the deceased “selfish,” it’s actually the survivors who are being self-centered.
In any event, Leda and John skip the evolutionary (and spiritual) discussion on feces and apply their development-environment mismatch notion to mental distress, such as anxiety. When I’m teaching this stuff to my college classes, I often begin with the example of fear of heights. A fear-of-heights gene would have been very beneficial from the beginning of human existence, as we don’t need to be goofing around up in trees or on rocky precipices. We need to get what food we can and get down, carefully, lest we fall and break our collarbones and—well, you know the rest. A mutated gene that caused one to crave heights and to be frivolous about them would have been less likely to stay in the pool, for reasons that should be obvious. And no, it’s not strange that a minority of modern people are thrill-seekers with relatively less fear of heights. They would have served us normal people well at times when the only food around was in a tree or up on a precipice. And when they did bust their ass fetching it, we healthy scaredy-cats would tend to them, for reasons that should also be obvious.
Optimistic Nihilism Page 18