"We approve and we disapprove because we cannot do otherwise. Can we help feeling pain when the fire bums us? Can we help sympathizing with our friends? Are these phenomena less necessary or less powerful in their consequences, because they fall within the subjective sphere of experience?"
Edward Westermarck, 1912
dward Westermarck's writings, including those about his journeys to Morocco, kept me busy as I leaned back in a cushy seat on a jet from Tokyo to Helsinki. More comfortable than a camel, I bet! I was on my way to an international conference in honor of the Swedish-Finn, who lived from 1862 until 1939, and who was the first to bring Darwinism to the social sciences.
His books are a curious blend of dry theorizing, detailed anthropology, and secondhand animal stories. He gives the example of a vengeful camel that had been excessively beaten on multiple occasions by a fourteen-year-old "lad" for loitering or turning the wrong way. The camel passively took the punishment, but a few days later, finding itself unladen and alone on the road with the same conductor, "seized the unlucky boy's head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground."247
I don't know much about camels, but stories of delayed revenge abound in the zoo world, especially about apes and elephants. We now have systematic data on how chimpanzees punish negative actions with other negative actions-a pattern called a "revenge system"-and how if a macaque is attacked by a dominant member of its troop it will turn around to redirect aggression against a vulnerable, younger relative of its attacker.248 Such behavior falls under what Westermarck called the "retributive emotions," but for him "retributive" went beyond its usual connotation of getting even. It included positive tendencies, such as gratitude and the repayment of services. Depicting the retributive emotions as the cornerstone of human morality, Westermarck weighed in on the question of its origin while antedating modern discussions of evolutionary ethics, which often take the related concept of reciprocal altruism as their starting point.249
That Westermarck goes unmentioned in the latest books on evolutionary ethics, or serves only as a historic footnote, is not because he paid attention to the wrong phenomena or held untenable views about ethics, but because his writing conveyed a belief in human goodness. He felt that morality comes naturally to people. Contemporary biologists have managed to banish this view to the scientific fringes under the influence of the two Terrible Toms-Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Henry Huxley-who both preached that the original state of humankind, and of nature in general, is one in which selfish goals are pursued without regard for others. Compromise, symbiosis, and mutualism were not terms the Toms considered particularly useful, even though these outcomes are not hard to come by in both nature and human society.
Are we naturally good? And if not, whence does human goodness come? Is it one of our many marvelous inventions, like the wheel and toilet training, or could it be a mere illusion? Perhaps we are naturally bad, and just pretend to be good?
Every possible answer to these questions has been seriously advocated by one school of thought or another. I myself have struggled with the question of human nature, contrasting the views of present-day biologists-from whom an admission of human virtue is about as hard to extract as a rotten toothwith the belief of many philosophers and scientists, including Charles Darwin, that our species moderates its selfishness with a healthy dose of fellow-feeling and kindness. Anyone who explores this debate will notice how old it is- including, as it does, explicit Chinese sources, such as Mencius, from before the Western calendar-so that we can justifiably speak of a perennial controversy.
Westermarck Beats Freud
In a stately building on a wintry, dark Helsinki day, not far from his childhood home, we discussed Westermarck's brave Darwinism, which was initially applauded but soon opposed by contemporary big shots such as Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss. Their resistance was so effective that the Finn has been largely forgotten.
His most controversial position concerned incest. Both Freud and many anthropologists were convinced that there would be rampant sex within the human family if it were not for the incest taboo. Freud believed that the earliest sexual excitations and fantasies of children are invariably directed at close family members, while Levi-Strauss declared the incest taboo the ultimate cultural blow against nature-it was what permitted humanity to make the passage from nature to culture.
These were high-flown notions, which carried the stunning implication that our species was somehow predestined to free itself of its biological shackles. Westermarck didn't share the belief that our ancestors started out with rampant, promiscuous sex over which they gained control only with great diffi culty. He instead saw the nuclear family as humanity's age-old reproductive unit, and proposed that early association within this unit (such as normally found between parent and offspring and among siblings) kills sexual desire. Hence, the desire isn't there to begin with. On the contrary, individuals who grow up together from an early age develop an actual sexual aversion for each other. Westermarck proposed this as an evolved mechanism with an obvious adaptive value: it prevents the deleterious effects of inbreeding.
In the largest-scale study on this issue to date, Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University, spent a lifetime examining the marital histories of 14,402 Taiwanese women in a "natural experiment" dependent on a peculiar Chinese marriage custom. Families used to adopt and raise little girls as future daughters-in-law. This meant that they grew up since early childhood with the family's son, their intended husband. Wolf compared the resulting marriages with those arranged between men and women who did not meet until their wedding day. Fortunately for science, official household registers were kept during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. These registers provide detailed information on divorce rates and number of children, which Wolf took as measures of, respectively, marital happiness and sexual activity. His data supported the Westermarck effect: association in the first years of life appears to compromise marital compatihility.25°
These findings are especially damaging to Freud, because if Westermarck is right then Oedipal theory is wrong. Freud's thinking was premised on a supposed sexual attraction between members of the same family that needs to be suppressed and sublimated. His theory would predict that unrelated boys and girls who have grown up together will marry in absolute bliss, as there is no taboo standing in the way of their primal sexual desires. In reality, however, the signs are that such marriages often end in misery. Co-reared boys and girls resist being wed, arguing that they are too much like brother and sister. The father of the bride sometimes needs to stand with a stick by the door during the wedding night to prevent the two from escaping the situation. In these marriages, sexual indifference seems to be the rule, and adultery a common outlet. As Wolf exclaimed at the conference, Westermarck may have been less flamboyant, less self-assured, and less famous than any of his mighty opponents; the fundamental difference was that he was the only one who was right!
A second victim is Levi-Stauss, who built his position entirely on the assumption that animals lead disorderly lives in which they do whatever they please, including committing incest. We now believe, however, that monkeys and apes are subject to exactly the same inhibitory mechanism as proposed by Westermarck. Many primates prevent inbreeding through migration of one sex or the other. The migratory sex meets new, unrelated mates, while the resident sex gains genetic diversity by breeding with immigrants. In addition, close kin who stay together avoid sexual intercourse. This was first observed in the 1950s by Kisaburo Tokuda in a group of Japanese macaques at the Kyoto Zoo. A young adult male who had risen to the top rank made full use of his sexual privileges, mating frequently with all of the females except for one: his mother.251 This was not an isolated case; mother-son matings are strongly suppressed in all primates. Even in the sexy bonobos, this is the one partner combination in which intercourse is rare or abse
nt. Observation of thousands of matings in a host of primates, both captive and wild, has demonstrated the suppression of incest.
The Westermarck effect serves as a showcase for Darwinian approaches to human behavior because it so clearly rests on a combination of nature and nurture: it has a developmental side (learned sexual aversion), an innate side (the way early familiarity affects sexual preference), a cultural side (some cultures raise unrelated children together and others raise siblings of the opposite sex apart, but most have family arrangements that automatically lead to sexual aversion among relatives), a likely evolutionary reason (suppression of inbreeding), and direct parallels with animal behavior. On top of this comes the cultural taboo, which is unique for our species. An unresolved issue is whether the taboo merely serves to formalize and reinforce the Westermarck effect or adds a substantially new dimension.
That Westermarck's integrated view was underappreciated at the time is understandable, as it flew in the face of the Western dualistic tradition. What is less understandable is why these dualisms remain popular today. Westermarck was more Darwinian than some contemporary evolutionary biologists, who are best described as Huxleyan.
Bulldog Bites Master
In 1893, before a large audience in Oxford, Huxley publicly tried to reconcile his dim view of the nasty natural world with the kindness occasionally encountered in human society. Huxley realized that the laws of the physical world are unalterable. He felt, however, that their impact on human existence could be softened and modified if people kept nature under control. Comparing us with the gardener who has a hard time keeping weeds out of his garden, he proposed ethics as humanity's cultural victory over the evolutionary process.252
This was an astounding position for two reasons. First, it deliberately curbed the explanatory power of evolution. Since many people consider morality the essence of our species, Huxley was in effect saying that what makes us human is too big for the evolutionary framework. This was a puzzling retreat by someone who had gained a reputation as "Darwin's Bulldog" owing to his fierce advocacy of evolutionary theory. The solution that Huxley proposed was quintessentially Hobbesian in that it stated that people are fit for society only by education, not nature.
Second, Huxley offered no hint whatsoever where humanity could possibly have unearthed the will and strength to go against its own nature. If we are indeed born competitors who don't care one bit about the feelings of others, how in the world did we decide to transform ourselves into model citizens? Can people for generations maintain behavior that is out of character, like a bunch of piranhas who decide to become vegetarians? How deep does such a change go? Are we the proverbial wolves in sheep's clothing: nice on the outside, nasty on the inside? What a contorted scheme!
It was the only time Huxley visibly broke with Darwin. As aptly summarized by Huxley's biographer, Adrian Desmond: "[He] was forcing his ethical Ark against the Darwinian current which had brought him so far."253 Two decades earlier, in The Descent of Man, Darwin had stated the continuity between human nature and morality in no uncertain terms. The reason for Huxley's departure has been sought in his suffering at the cruel hand of nature, which had just taken his beloved daughter's life, and in his need to make the ruthlessness of the Darwinian cosmos palatable to the general public. He could do so, he felt, only by dislodging human ethics, declaring it a cultural innovation.
This dualistic outlook was to get an enormous respectability boost from Freud's writings, which throve on contrasts between the conscious and subconscious, the ego and superego, Eros and Death, and so on. As with Huxley's gardener and garden, Freud was not just dividing the world in symmetrical halves: he saw struggle everywhere! He explained the incest taboo and other moral restrictions as the result of a violent break with the freewheeling sexual life of the primal horde, culminating in the collective slaughter of an overbearing father by his sons. And he let civilization arise out of a renunciation of instinct, the gaining of control over the forces of nature, and the building of a cultural superego. Not only did he keep animals at a distance, his view also excluded women. It was the men who reached the highest peaks of civilization, carrying out tortuous sublimations "of which women are little capable."254
Humanity's heroic combat against forces that try to drag us down remains a dominant theme within biology today. Because of its continuity with the doctrine of original sin, I have characterized this viewpoint as "Calvinist sociobiology."255 Let me offer a few illustrative quotations from today's two most outspoken Huxleyans.
Declaring ethics a radical break with biology, and feeling that Huxley had not gone far enough, George Williams has written extensively about the wretchedness of Mother Nature. His stance culminates in the claim that human morality is an inexplicable accident of the evolutionary process: "I account for morality as an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability" (my italics). In a similar vein, Richard Dawkins has declared us "nicer than is good for our selfish genes," and warns that "we are never allowed to forget the narrow tightrope on which we balance above the Darwinian abyss." In a recent interview, Dawkins explicitly endorsed Huxley: "What I am saying, along with many other people, among them T. H. Huxley, is that in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don't want to live in a Darwinian world."256
Poor Darwin must be turning in his grave, because the world implied here is totally unlike what he himself envisioned. Again, what is lacking is an indication of how we can possibly negate our genes, which the same authors at other times don't hesitate to depict as all-powerful. Thus, first we are told that our genes know what is best for us, that they control our lives, programming every little wheel in the human survival machine. But then the same authors let us know that we have the option to rebel, that we are free to act differently. The obvious implication is that the first position should be taken with a grain of salt.
Like Huxley, these authors want to have it both ways: human behavior is an evolutionary product except when it is hard to explain. And like Hobbes and Freud, they think in dichotomies: we are part nature, part culture, rather than a wellintegrated whole. Their position has been echoed by popularizers such as Robert Wright and Matt Ridley, who say that virtue is absent from people's hearts and souls, and that our species is potentially but not naturally moral.257 But what about the many people who occasionally experience in themselves and others a degree of sympathy, goodness, and generosity? Wright's answer is that the "moral animal" is a fraud: "[T]he pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence. We dress ourselves up in tony moral language, denying base motives and stressing our at least minimal consideration for the greater good; and we fiercely and self-righteously decry selfishness in others."258
To explain how we manage to live with ourselves despite this travesty, theorists have called upon self-deception and denial. If people think they are at times unselfish, so the argument goes, they must be hiding the selfish motives from themselves. In other words, all of us have two agendas: one hidden in the recesses of our minds, and one that we sell to ourselves and others. Or, as philosopher Michael Ghiselin concludes, "Scratch an `altruist,' and watch a `hypocrite' bleed." In the ultimate twist of irony, anyone who doesn't believe that we are fooling ourselves, who feels that we may be genuinely kind, is called a wishful thinker and thus stands accused of fooling himself!259
This entire double-agenda idea is another obvious Freudian scheme. And like a UFO sighting, it is unverifiable: hidden motives are indistinguishable from absent ones. The quasi-scientific concept of the subconscious conveniently leaves the fundamental selfishness of the human species intact despite daily experiences to the contrary.260 I blame much of this intellectual twisting and turning on the unfortunate legacy of Huxley, about whom evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr didn't mince any words: "Huxley, who believed in final causes, rejected natural selection and did n
ot represent genuine Darwinian thought in any way.... It is unfortunate, considering how confused Huxley was, that his essay [on evo lutionary ethics] is often referred to even today as if it were authoritative."261
Moral Emotions
Westermarck is part of a long lineage, going back to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, which firmly anchors morality in the natural inclinations and desires of our species. Compared to Huxley's, his is a view uncompounded by any need for invisible agendas and discrepancies between how we are and how we wish to be: morality has been there from the start. It is part and parcel of human nature.
Emotions occupy a central role in that, as Aristotle said, "Thought by itself moves nothing." Modern cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists confirm that emotions, rather than being the antithesis of rationality, greatly aid thinking. They speak of emotional intelligence. People can reason and deliberate as much as they want, but if there are no emotions attached to the various options in front of them, they will never reach a decision or conviction.262 This is critical for moral choice, because if anything, morality involves strong convictions. These don't-or rather can't-come about through a cool Kantian rationality; they require caring about others and powerful gut feelings about right and wrong.
Westermarck discusses, one by one, a whole range of what philosophers before him used to call the "moral sentiments." He classifies the retributive emotions into those derived from resentment and anger, which seek revenge and punishment, and those that are more positive and prosocial. Whereas in his time there were few good animal examples of the moral emotions-hence his occasional reliance on Moroccan camel stories-we know now that there are many parallels in primate behavior. Thus, he discusses "forgiveness," and how the turning of the other cheek is a universally appreciated gesture: we now know from our studies that chimpanzees kiss and embrace and that monkeys groom each other after fights.263 Westermarck sees protection of others against offenders resulting from "sympathetic resentment"; again, this is a common pattern in monkeys and apes, and in many other animals, who stick up for their friends, defending them against attackers. Similarly, the retributive kindly emotions ("desire to give pleasure in return for pleasure") have an obvious parallel in what biologists now label reciprocal altruism, such as providing assistance to those who assist in return.264
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 26