The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  When I watch primates, measuring how they share food in return for grooming, comfort victims of aggression, or wait for the right opportunity to get even with a rival, I see very much the same emotional impulses that Westermarck analyzed. A group of chimpanzees, for example, may whip up an outraged chorus of barks when the dominant male overdoes his punishment of an underling, and in the wild they form cooperative hunting parties that share the spoils of their efforts. Although I shy away from calling chimpanzees "moral beings," their psychology contains many of the ingredients that, if also present in the progenitor of humans and apes, must have allowed our ancestors to develop a moral sense. Instead of seeing morality as a radically new invention, I tend to view it as a natural outgrowth of ancient social tendencies.

  Westermarck was far from naive about how morality is maintained; he knew it required both approval and negative sanctions. For example, reflecting on an issue that today we might relate to developments taking place in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he explains how forgiveness prohibits revenge but not punishment. Punishment is a necessary component of justice, whereas revenge - if let loose - only destroys. Like Adam Smith before him, Westermarck recognized the moderating role of sympathy: "The more the moral consciousness is influenced by sympathy, the more severely it condemns any retributive infliction of pain which it regards as undeserved."265

  The most insightful part of his writing is perhaps where Westermarck tries to come to grips with what defines a moral emotion as moral. Here he shows that there is much more to these emotions than raw gut feeling. In analyzing these feelings he introduces the notion of "disinterestedness." Emotions, such as gratitude and resentment, directly concern one's own interests-how one has been treated or how one wishes to be treated-and hence are too egocentric to be moral. Moral emotions, in contrast, are disconnected from one's immediate situation: they deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level. It is only when we make general judgments of how anyone ought to be treated that we can begin to speak of moral approval and disapproval. This is an area in which humans go radically farther than other primates.266

  Westermarck was ahead of his time, and he went well beyond Darwin's thinking on these matters. In spirit, however, the two were on the same line. Darwin believed that there was plenty of room within his theory to accommodate the origins of morality, and he attached great importance to the capacity for sympathy. He by no means excluded animals from this view: "Many animals certainly sympathize with each other's distress or danger."267 He has been proven right; laboratory experiments on monkeys and even rats have shown powerful vicarious distress responses. The sight of a conspecific in pain or trouble often calls forth a reaction to ameliorate the situation. These reactions undoubtedly derive from parental care, in which vulnerable individuals are tended with great care, but in many animals they stretch well beyond this situation, including relations among unrelated adults.268

  Darwin did not see any conflict between the harshness of the evolutionary process and the gentleness of some of its products. As discussed in the previous chapter with regard to the distinction between motive and function, all one needs to do is make a distinction between how evolution operates and the actual psychologies it has produced. Darwin knew this better than anyone, expressing his views most clearly when he emphasized continuity with animals even in the moral do main. In The Descent of Man, he takes exactly the opposite position of those who, like Huxley, view morality as a violation of evolutionary principles: "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in

  The Ke Willow

  There is never much new under the sun. Westermarck's emphasis on the retributive emotions, whether friendly or vengeful, reminds one of Confucius' reply to the question whether there is any single word that may serve as prescription for all of one's life. Confucius proposed "reciprocity" as such a word. Reciprocity is also, of course, the crux of the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), which remains unsurpassed as a summary of human morality.

  A follower of the Chinese sage, Mencius, wrote extensively about human goodness during his life, from 372 to 289 B.C.270 Mencius lost his father when he was only three, and his mother made sure he received the best possible education. The mother is at least as well known as her son, and still serves as a maternal model to the Chinese for her absolute devotion.

  Called the "second sage" because of his great influence, Mencius had a revolutionary bent in that he stressed the obli gation of rulers to provide for the common people. Recorded on bamboo clappers and handed down to his descendants and their students, his writings show that the debate about whether we are naturally moral, or not, is ancient indeed. In one exchange, Mencius reacts against Kaou Tsze's views, which are strikingly similar to Huxley's gardener and garden metaphor: "Man's nature is like the ke willow, and righteousness is like a cup or a bowl. The fashioning of benevolence and righteousness out of man's nature is like the making of cups and bowls from the ke willow."271

  Mencius replied:

  Can you, leaving untouched the nature of the willow, make with it cups and bowls? You must do violence and injury to the willow, before you can make cups and bowls with it. If you must do violence and injury to the willow, before you can make cups and bowls with it, on your principles you must in the same way do violence and injury to humanity in order to fashion from it benevolence and righteousness! Your words alas! would certainly lead all men on to reckon benevolence and righteousness to be calamities.

  Evidently, the origins of human kindness and ethics were a point of debate in the China of two millenia ago. Mencius believed that humans tend toward the good as naturally as water flows downhill. This is also evident from the following remark, in which he seeks to exclude the possibility of a double agenda on the grounds that the moral emotions, such as sympathy, leave little room for this:

  When I say that all men have a mind which cannot bear to see the suffering of others, my meaning may be illustrated thus: even nowadays, if men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress. They will feel so, not as a ground on which they may gain the favor of the child's parents, nor as a ground on which they may seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, nor from a dislike to the reputation of having been unmoved by such a thing. From this case we may perceive that the feeling of commiseration is essential to man.

  Mencius' example is strikingly similar to both the one by Westermarck ("Can we help sympathize with our friends?") and Smith's famous definition of sympathy ("How selfish soever man may be supposed to be ... "). The central idea underlying all three statements is that distress at the sight of another's pain is an impulse over which we exert no control: it grabs us instantaneously, like a reflex, leaving us without the time to weigh the pros and cons. Remarkably, all of the alternative motives that Mencius considers occur in the modern literature, usually under the heading of reputation building. The big difference is, of course, that Mencius rejects these ex planations as too contrived given the immediacy and force of the sympathetic response. Manipulation of public opinion is entirely possible at other times, he says, but not at the moment a child falls into a well.

  I couldn't agree more. Evolution has produced species that follow genuinely cooperative impulses. I don't know whether people are, deep down, good or evil, but I do know that to believe that each and every move is selfishly calculated overestimates human mental powers, let alone those of other animals."'

  Interesting additional evidence comes from child research. Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Jean Piaget all believed that the child learns its first moral distinctions through fear of punishment and a desire for praise. Like Huxleyan biologists who see morality as culturally imposed upon a nasty human nature,
they conceived morality as coming from the outside, imposed by adults upon a passive, naturally selfish child. Children were thought to adopt parental values to construct a superego, the moral agency of the self. Left to their own devices, like the children in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, they would never arrive at anything even close to morality.

  Already at an early age, however, children know the difference between moral principles ("Do not steal") and cultural conventions ("No pajamas at school"). They apparently appreciate that the breaking of certain rules distresses and harms others, whereas the breaking of other rules merely violates expectations about what is appropriate. Their attitudes don't seem to be based purely on reward and punishment. Whereas pediatric handbooks still depict young children as self-centered monsters, we know now that by one year of age they spontaneously comfort people in distress, and that soon thereafter they begin to develop a moral perspective through interactions with other members of their species.271

  Rather than being nicer than is good for our genes, we may be just nice enough. Thus, the child is not going against its own nature by developing a caring, moral attitude, and civil society is not like an out-of-control garden subdued by a sweating gardener. We are merely following evolved tendencies.

  How refreshingly simple!

  ill we ever manage to fit both the ape and the sushi master in the same family picture? The ape represents our natural, primitive side, which we sometimes use as a caricature of ourselves just to show how far we have come. The sushi master epitomizes human sophistication, artistry, and know-how. We eat the fugu (blowfish sushi) trusting the chef's skills, which he learned from other chefs, and they in turn from those before them.274 How can these two different versions of ourselves-unvarnished nature and cultural refinement- ever be reconciled?

  There is a long lineage of thinkers that has never had a problem with it. They carry their talismans, derived from a sense of kinship with animals, proudly around their necks, and rarely bother to emphasize what separates us. Not that they are oblivious to the differences, but their first goal is to understand huinanity in the wider context of nature. This is the Darwistotelian view, according to which humans have both of their feet firmly planted on this earth, which brought them forth in every imaginable sense. No area of human behavior is exempted: we arrived as a single package produced by exactly the same forces that produced all slightly different looking packages around us.

  Then there is the equally ancient school that assigns us a special spot in the universe while sternly warning against attempts, whether expressed in anthropomorphism or general assumptions, to blur the line between ourselves and other creatures. In this view, the sushi master and the ape are fully decoupled, if not in body then at least in mind. Actually, humans are the only ones considered as having a mind. Whereas the surrounding world is brutish, mechanical, and amoral, we are blessed with a free will and the ability to direct our societies any way we want. The fact that we share characteristics with animals is no problem, because we have the ability to kick our own nature into shape until it fits civilized society.

  When divine sparks fell out of fashion, the widely accepted key to our special success became culture. It was culture that let us push the envelope, break out of it, and start a new life totally unlike the ape's. Culture became a magic, reified concept disconnected from and even antithetical to nature. Culture was seen as something that we produce at will, yet that at the same time produces us. No matter the monumental circularity of this argument, it soon permeated all of the social sciences and humanities. It even won over an occasional biologist. Culture became the escape clause whenever the contract with nature seemed too constraining.

  No wonder there is so much animosity behind the culture wars ignited by recent animal behavior discoveries. If culture can't be claimed as uniquely human, where does this leave the second school of thought? It is plain which side I am on, and even if I have covered a great variety of topics in this book-from painting apes to puritanism, and from the role of theory in science to potato-washing monkeys-I have kept my eyes on the question of how knowledge about animal culture influences our self-perception and how whether we grant animals culture is ultimately a human cultural question. It can hardly be coincidental that the push for cultural studies on animals initially came from outside of the intellectual war zone just described-that is, from primatologists untrained in the sharp dualisms of the West.

  Now, let me make clear that the issue at hand is not merely a matter of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. It is not that some scholars emphasize continuity whereas others ernphasize difference, and that all we need is to appreciate each other's positions. The implications of one position or the other are far too fundamental. It boils down to the choice between whether we are naturally or artificially moral, or whether or not we are the only "self-made" species on earth. If a growing number of scientists argue that animals rely for their survival on socially transmitted habits and knowledge, and that their strategies vary from group to group, the whole idea of a recent transition from nature to culture is put into question. Not only that: the term "transition" requires reconsideration.

  Human uniqueness claims are a bit like advertisements for squirrel-proof bird feeders. I have yet to find a single feeder that stands up to the American gray squirrels in my backyard without being so convoluted that it scares off the birds. Similarly, any claim about human uniqueness is eventually assaulted by an army of scientists who gnaw little holes in it, climb a pole everyone considered too slippery, or make the one impossible jump. The claim that animals have culture may come across to some scholars as precisely such a jump, but it has been made. We can yell at the squirrel as much as we want; we know it will be back.

  Where does all this leave us? I see little life left in the position that we humans fall outside of nature, and that it is culture that sets us apart. A retreat to "symbolic culture" as the hallmark of humanity may provide some relief, but in the long run I see a much more fruitful challenge for scholars in search of typically human accomplishments. The time has come to define the human species against the backdrop of the vast common ground we share with other life forms. Instead of being tied to how we are unlike any animal, human identity should be built around how we are animals that have taken certain capacities a significant step farther. We and other animals are both similar and different, and the former is the only sensible framework within which to flesh out the latter.

  And so the ape and the sushi master do fit in the same picture, both having learned from others how to process food, and what to eat or not to eat. Even though the ape has none of the symbols surrounding the chef's job, he has come to depend to such a degree on handed-down knowledge that we can safely call both of them cultured. And not only them: the world is chock-full of feathered and furry animals that learn their life's lessons, habits, and songs from one another. With so many cultural creatures surrounding us it is indeed time to carry a few familiar dichotomies to their grave.

  Prologue

  1. Austin (1974).

  2. Morris and Morris (1966, p. 102).

  3. Kummer (1971).

  4. Julien-Joseph Virey (1817), from before the divide between nature and culture, put it as follows: "Nothing falls outside of nature, nothing can escape it. Civil and moral laws, history, the actions of men are merely actions of an animal species subject to the laws of nature" [my translation from French]. In contrast, most of the twentieth century has seen a concept of culture as something with a life of its own: culture creates more culture without any connection with the biological substrate that forms our bodies and minds. Wilson (1998) compared this view of humanity -human on the outside, alien on the inside-to the protagonists in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  5. In line with a theory explained in "The Last Rubicon" (Chapter 6), according to which social learning rests on identification with and the desire to be like a role model, it has been shown that young kittens copy the actions of their mothers m
ore readily than those of unfamiliar female cats (Chelser, 1969).

  6. Cheney and Seyfarth (1990).

  7. Mineka et al. (1984).

  8. Curio (1978) conducted experiments in which one bird mobbed a stuffed owl at the same time that a second bird in a nearby cage was shown another, nonpredatory bird model. Hearing the first bird's mobbing calls, the second bird would react by mobbing the nonpredator. After one such experience, this bird would treat the nonpredator as an enemy whenever it saw it, and pass its alarm on to other birds. With this ingenious method, "cultural prejudices" could also be created for inanimate objects, such as a bottle of laundry detergent. It shows that the predator image is not inborn but socially learned, making for a flexible way of transmitting knowledge about new dangers in the environment.

  9. Galef(1982).

  10. Kellogg and Kellogg (1933, p. 141).

  11. Custance et al. (1995).