That China continued to rely on slave labor even after it embraced “capitalism” isn’t an indictment of capitalism, properly understood, but of authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes can make profits, but that doesn’t make them free-market systems. The slaveholding rulers of the South got very rich, but everyone else stayed poor—or enslaved—because others were denied the full scope of liberty and rights necessary for capitalism to work. It’s a good thing China has embraced some market principles, because history shows that the development of a strong middle class creates a demand for responsive and accountable government. But China will not be a free country until the Communist Party is laid on the ash heap of history, where it belongs. As for now, it should be understood as a de facto authoritarian aristocracy, as we will see.
Disciples of the noble savage and radical egalitarians aren’t the only constituencies vexed by the reality of human nature. Partisans for the free market often run up against the inconvenient fact that Homo sapiens and Homo economicus are not synonyms.
The phrase Homo economicus, economic man, emerges as a criticism of John Stuart Mill and other thinkers who were seen—usually unfairly, particularly in the case of Adam Smith—as reducing humans to purely rational, profit-maximizing, economic beings. It’s not at all clear to me that Mill actually believed that man was purely a profit maximizer and it is clear to me that Smith did not. In other words, Homo economicus is one of those terms, like “social Darwinism,” that has few if any adherents but is especially useful as an intellectual epithet. Mill was quite clear that his definition of man as a profit maximizer was bound to the study of economics:
Geometry presupposes an arbitrary definition of a line, “that which has length but not breadth.” Just in the same manner does Political Economy presuppose an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who invariably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained in the existing state of knowledge [emphasis mine].42
An expert on football would have a definition of Homo footballis that would ignore what the players did off the field. Is it any scandal that an economist would have a definition of people that was contingent on economic activity?
Still, it is true that, historically, many economists and free-market ideologues have all too often looked at human behavior through a narrow economic lens. And, to be fair, Marxism has a tendency to reduce all questions to economic concerns as well. The old adage “If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” seems apposite. Some free-market ideologues often sound like they believe in Homo economicus.
Regardless, the fact is that humans are not defined by the pursuit of profit, even if they often pursue profit. Many critics of capitalism find the idea of “economic man” a useful straw man in their indictment of capitalism, because bound up in the idea of economic man is the idea that “greed is good,” in the words of Oliver Stone’s straw man Gordon Gekko in 1987’s Wall Street.
Wherever you come down on these issues, it’s fair to say that we tend to think that humans are motivated by financial greed far more than they are. To be sure, greed is a staple of human nature, but greed for money has only been around for as long as money has been around—and, in evolutionary terms, that hasn’t been a very long time. Surely reasonable people can agree that greed predated money. One can easily see why greed for food and other basic resources would evolve. We can imagine countless circumstances in human history where the altruistic man starved to death, while the greedy one lived another day and hence passed on his genes.
But just as greed—or covetousness—is natural, so is altruism. Without altruism, it is unlikely the human race would have made it this long. Altruism can be driven by compassion, another universal human tendency. But it also is closely linked to gift exchange, reciprocity, and cooperation. Long before there were coins, the economy of primitive man was governed by gift exchange and reciprocity: I do this thing for you; you do something for me. I give you a hunk of meat; you help me fend off a bully eager to rob me. (The social economy of prisons—arguably the closest approximations to a state of nature in modern society—works according to these principles.) Richard Leakey and Kurt Lewin have ascribed the essence of the survival of the human species to the concept of reciprocity. Small bands of early humans could only survive if they learned to share resources “in an honored network of obligation.”43 It is a well-established finding in anthropology, psychology, and sociology that people who violate the norms of reciprocity are shunned by the larger group. Even among criminal organizations—prison gangs, the Mafia, etc.—the rules of reciprocity must be honored within the group. People who over-adhere to these norms—the generous, the philanthropic, etc.—are admired and often endowed with authority, political or moral, over others. The “big men” who lead many primitive societies often earned their status by the perceived justness with which they distributed resources to the group.44
Which brings us to admiration. Of course, all other things being equal, people want to be rich rather than poor. But what they want even more is to be admired, respected, and valued. Adam Smith understood this—and so much else about human nature—in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blame-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.45
A desire to be admired is hardwired into us, just as it is in chimpanzees. There’s no debate about this, as far as I can tell, among the diverse range of disciplines that look at such things. The researchers, however, focus less on the concept of admiration and more on the idea of “status.” Status is the essence of chimpanzee politics, as Frans de Waal persuasively argued at book-length in his Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes.46 It would be a strange believer in evolution who thought that something that was central to the life of our nearest genetic cousins is irrelevant to us.
Sociologists distinguish between two kinds of status in all human societies: ascribed status and achieved status. “Ascribed status” refers to what you are born with. Royalty is the quintessential example of ascribed status: the belief that some people are just born better or worse thanks to their lineage or parents. In numerous societies, India arguably the most famous, the whole of the population was divided up into different categories of ascribed status called castes. These castes set the acceptable parameters of virtually every meaningful pursuit in life, including the places one could live, whom one could marry, and even what kind of occupations one could hold. Europe’s caste system was perhaps less austere but no less binding, with categories of serfs, peasants, nobility, and other rankings of humans’ innate worth.
One of the greatest yet among the least appreciated achievements of the American Revolution was the decision to abolish such things. One very good reason it’s so unappreciated is that we maintained another version of applied status: slavery. In the Roman tradition of slavery, slaves were not born, they were made. The child of a slave did not inherit that status. In the American South, defenders of slavery realized that this common tradition of slavery was incompatible with their system, so they adopted the Aristotelian notion that some people are simply slaves by nature, making slavery an ascribed status.47
Though we have abandoned formal, legal, and applied status in America, the desire for status it is still a fact of our lives. If you had a typical grade school or high school experience, you know that status seeking is the very hea
rt of adolescent social life. Adolescents talk not of status but of popularity, though this is not that meaningful a distinction. Cliques are all about status. So are the petty and often cruel contests that define the politics of the locker room and the playground. The same goes for prisons.
More broadly, one need only look at the enduring success of political dynasties to see that inherited status still plays a big role in our culture. Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, Roosevelts, Romneys—we ascribe status to the progeny of famous people whose worth and honor is unearned by their own actions. In marketing terms, certain last names and bloodlines have in effect become a kind of inherited title, though today we would call it a “brand.”
This is even more the case outside of politics. We cavalierly talk about “Hollywood royalty” without really understanding what we mean by that. Out of a concern for my eternal soul, I’ve vowed never to write about the Kardashians, but I think I am not putting it in too much peril to simply note that we treat that ridiculous band of airheads and slatterns as some sort of celebrity gentry.48
This is natural. Every family has within it a spark of dynastic ambition. I’m reminded of Tywin Lannister’s sermon to Jaime Lannister on the importance of family in Game of Thrones: “Your mother’s dead. Before long I’ll be dead, and you and your brother and your sister and all of her children, all of us dead, all of us rotting underground. It’s the family name that lives on. It’s all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor, but family. You understand?”49
Status is closely linked to our natural instinct for authority and hierarchy—an instinct that is found in just about every species of animal that lives in groups. Dogs, chickens, and apes have hierarchies and pecking orders. Jonathan Haidt notes that these impulses are so baked into us they manifest themselves in language. “The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep that many languages encode it directly,” he writes. “In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they’ll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn’t embed status into verb conjugations, embeds it elsewhere. Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones), whereas intimates and subordinates were called by first name. If you’ve ever felt a flash of distaste when a salesperson called you by first name without being invited to do so, or if you felt a pang of awkwardness when an older person you have long revered asked you to call him by first name, then you have experienced the activation of some of the modules that comprise the Authority/subversion foundation.”50
Haidt’s use of the word “foundation” refers to part of the Moral Foundations Theory he and other researchers formulated. He lays it all out in his path-breaking book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. If you can read that book and not come away confident that there is something called “human nature,” you might as well put down this book too.
Moral Foundations Theory holds that there are six components to moral sentiments that form the basis of all forms of moral reasoning. They are: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. How these foundations are applied and interact explain all of the variations in human cultures and societies when it comes to how we define right and wrong.
Indeed, the need for norms of behavior is another universal facet of human nature. As we’ve seen, there is a lot of variability in the kinds of norms we establish, but the need for norms is uniform across all societies. And certain basic rules of conduct or moral behavior seem to be universal—and pre-rational—as well. When someone cuts in line in front of us at the grocery store, there is a chemical reaction in our brains that fills us with anger. Our reaction is often quite disproportionate to the harm actually done to us. That’s because we evolved to see the stakes in norm violations to be much greater than they are at the local Walmart or Kroger. A norm violation on the African savannas could be a matter of life and death.
Paul Bloom recounts how the innate and universal tendency of children to tattle on their siblings and classmates seems to be an early form of norm enforcement. One key indicator of this is that kids rarely make up stuff when they rat out each other. Psychologists Gordon Ingram and Jesse Bering studied tattling by children in an inner-city school in Belfast and found that “the great majority of children’s talk about their peers’ behavior took the form of descriptions of norm violations.”51
Norms matter evolutionarily because they are the sinew of all cooperation. If primitive man lived a solitary life, as Thomas Hobbes believed, norms wouldn’t matter. But we evolved in groups, specifically tribes. Without cooperation, we would still be a mid-tier species, not the planet’s apex predator. And cooperation is impossible without norms, or rules. Think about it for just a moment and this becomes obvious. A hunting party cannot work as a group unless it has agreed upon rules, including lines of authority. What separates an army from a rabble is that the soldiers know their place and their duties, even when they’re not being supervised.
Charles Darwin himself speculated about how cooperativeness—altruism, reciprocity, consensus around norms, and, most of all, unity—was the key to human survival. The tribe that works together survives to pass its genes on. “If…the one tribe included…courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other,” Darwin observed, “this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other.”52 Cooperation explains the evolution of language, religion, warfare, and almost every uniquely human endeavor. But the drive and desire to cooperate isn’t just a society-wide phenomenon. Politics, long before we had the word “politics,” has been about forming coalitions: within the band, the tribe, or any other social unit. Chimpanzees and humans alike form coalitions around all manner of interests. These coalitions are like subtribes, and they are every bit as prone to the logic of us-versus-them as the tribe as a whole is to foreign enemies. As we will see, the dire shape of our politics today is a function of this tendency, as Americans break up into “tribal” coalitions against other Americans they only see as “the other.”
Adherence to norms is impossible without some collective understanding that norms must be enforced. Paul H. Robinson and Sarah M. Robinson’s book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law brilliantly and, to my mind, incontrovertibly demonstrates how notions of punishment and retribution are not merely universal (a relatively uncontroversial point) but absolutely necessary for cooperation. This is much more controversial. A growing number of criminologists and ethicists see punishment itself to be illegitimate and dangerous. David Garland, a professor of sociology and law at New York University, insists: “It is only the mainstream processes of socialization (internalized morality and the sense of duty, the informal inducements and rewards of conformity, the practical and cultural networks of mutual expectation and interdependence, etc.) which are able to promote proper conduct on a consistent and regular basis.”53 Another scholar claims “the institution of criminal punishment is ethically, politically, and legally unjustifiable…[A] society concerned about protecting all of its members from violations of their claims of right should rely on institutions other than criminal punishment.”54
But, as the Robinsons show, with exhaustive citations from both psychological research as well as the historical record, cooperation is unsustainable without some kind of sanction against those who do not cooperate. If you and nine of your friends are tasked with digging a ditch in the hot sun on the promise that you will all be rewarded at the end of the day with a great meal, how long will you tolerate an able-bodied free rider who sits in the shade under a tree as you toil in discomfort? How likely is it that the group will include the slacker in the meal at the end of the day? Countless laboratory and real-life experiments show that the free rider will be punished, certainly with scorn, and usually with exclusion from
the reward.
This instinct to enforce group norms manifests itself everywhere from primitive tribes to sports teams and even, as the Robinsons demonstrate, to utopian hippie communes where everyone is supposed to be free to let their freak flags fly. And whenever the instinct is not enforced by a central authority or the collective itself—or both—the unit disintegrates. Even a young Bernie Sanders was kicked off his commune because he was less interested in doing the work of socialism than he was in talking about the need for socialism.55
Instead, let us move on to a final, crucial facet of human nature: meaning. We are creators of meaning. What do I mean by “meaning”? Simply that we have a natural tendency to imbue things, practices, people, events, ideas, and everything else around us with significance beyond the rational and material. Just consider the meaning we invest in eating food. The family dinner, breaking bread with old friends, Thanksgiving—we invest in these things meaning far beyond the need for sustenance. There’s a vast anthropological and sociological literature dedicated to the role eating plays in every culture. The primary form of what social scientists call “gift exchange” has always been, at least until very recently, the sharing of food.56
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 5