Jimoh, the current alpha male of the Yerkes Field Station group, once detected a secret mating between Socko, an adolescent male, and one of Jimoh’s favorite females. Socko and the female had wisely disappeared from view, but Jimoh had gone looking for them. Normally, the old male would merely chase off the culprit, but for some reason—perhaps because the female had repeatedly refused to mate with Jimoh himself that day—he this time went full speed after Socko and did not give up. He chased him all around the enclosure—Socko screaming and defecating in fear, Jimoh intent on catching him.
Before he could accomplish his aim, several females close to the scene began to “woaow” bark. This indignant sound is used in protest against aggressors and intruders. At first the callers looked around to see how the rest of the group was reacting; but when others joined in, particularly the top-ranking female, the intensity of their calls quickly increased until literally everyone’s voice was part of a deafening chorus. The scattered beginning almost gave the impression that the group was taking a vote. Once the protest had swelled to a chorus, Jimoh broke off his attack with a nervous grin on his face: he got the message. Had he failed to respond, there would no doubt have been concerted female action to end the disturbance.45
As with a small human band that has its hackles up and is bent on social control when an important social rule has been broken, the chimpanzees’ escalating hostile vocalizations may be seen as public opinion heating up as the group watches to see if a serious deviant is going to change his behavior. The female chimpanzees cease only when the alpha male stops the unwanted behavior, and this tells us something else: that great apes are not intent on totally eliminating dominant individuals whose behavior they strongly disapprove of. They are willing to give them a chance to cease and desist—in human terms, to reform. Later, I’ll be producing some statistics on LPA human social control, which show that we, too, prefer to reform deviants rather than kill them.
What, then, was the CA’s capacity for collective social control? We must go to the least common denominator, which is the gorilla. We can conclude that this ancestor’s hierarchical behaviors included at least the potential to gang up aggressively and inflict wounds, with aroused coalitions coalescing to control the behavior of powerful individuals whose actions were a source of serious and shared irritation and hostility. And if we look to Ancestral Pan, then the least common denominator becomes bonobos and chimpanzees, whose counterdominant behaviors are much more frequent than with gorillas. As we’ll be seeing in the next chapter, this potential for rebellion was very important, for it was new developments in the practice of group social control against dominant individuals that set humans on the course to evolve a conscience.
THE EVOLUTIONARY CONSCIENCE
To summarize, we now have before us a group-living, decidedly hierarchical Ancestral Pan, an ape that had a sizable prefrontal cortex and at least a fairly complex social self. It had a matricentric family that permitted the young to learn from the old, and part of what was learned were rules of behavior—rules that pertained to social competition and, politically, to the dominance, submission, and coalition-formation moves that such competition engendered. This ape had quite a sophisticated capacity to understand the manipulative intentions of others, whether they were acting as forceful, high-ranking individuals or as hostile, dominant groups, and in certain restricted situations it obviously was capable of exerting some social control on a collective basis. But do these capacities add up to anything like what we might call a conscience, with a moralistic sense of right and wrong?
Having a conscience is all about personally identifying with community values, which means internalizing your group’s rules. You must not only be able to learn rules and predict the reactions of those who enforce them, but you also must connect with these rules emotionally. You must do this in a positive way that makes you identify with them, feel ashamed when you break them, and feel self-satisfied and moralistically proud when you live up to them. This last can be considered a modern definition of virtue.
For a number of reasons, individuals who better internalize their groups’ rules are more likely to succeed socially in life and thus be more successful in propagating their genes. On the opposite side of the moral-conformist coin, serious inabilities to identify emotionally with group rules are likely to reduce personal fitness, as is the case for the many sociopaths who are liable to be incarcerated today, unless they are unusually adept at avoiding detection, and who in the past would have quickly run afoul of their vigilant band’s moral system since all band members act as moral detectives. For humans, fitting in with your moral community has a high fitness payoff because being punished is costly to fitness, whereas having a good reputation can help fitness.
By definition, moral communities are groups whose members have a sense of right and wrong based on rules being internalized, and the result is collective preferences that affect people’s reputations and hence their moral standing. When groups of individuals have internalized the same set of rules, they can implement passionately judgmental social control against serious deviants if all agree that the antisocial actions in question are shameful or monstrous or very threatening. It’s the conscience, as a moral compass, that orients personal behavior in the context of this group life, which involves both punishment and rewards.
I’ve already suggested that group rules should not be internalized so strongly that you’d be free of any temptation to break them, for many of the prohibitions that human groups arrive at are designed to curtail the same selfish behaviors that—in smaller doses—can help individuals to advance their reproductive success. What’s biologically optimal, I’ve suggested, is to identify with rules to the degree that, when you’re about to seriously transgress, you’ll experience a sharp feeling of psychological malaise and possibly a burning in your cheeks. This reminds you that a major social covenant would be broken and that there could be serious social consequences.
Thus, as socially well-adapted people, we are not totally ruled by our consciences. Far from it. Rather, we are informed by them, and we are effectively inhibited but in a flexible way. That’s how most of us manage to make some minor moral compromises in order to get ahead in a competitive world, yet basically maintain a decent reputation and stay out of really serious social trouble.
DO APES HAVE MORALS?
As our conscience helps us in sorting out life’s moral dilemmas, a fair portion of its operation can become conscious. For instance, many of us can actually hear ourselves talking to ourselves as we face a moral dilemma and weigh the consequences, as Darwin apparently did. Is anything even remotely similar to this Darwinian “inner voice” making itself known in the mind of an ape? This question isn’t as outlandish as it may seem, for we’ll be seeing soon that captive apes, when alone, do at least talk to themselves in sign language about certain kinds of things.
In leading up to this question, we’ve already reconstructed a “rule-oriented” ancestral capacity to exert punitive social control and to respond efficiently to such control in terms of fear and also a fairly sophisticated ancestral sense of self-awareness. The next question is, were our distant ancestors inhibited by anything like “moralized” feelings of shameful inappropriateness, based on an internalization of values and rules that results in an inner sense of right and wrong? If chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos were capable of such feelings today, even at a rudimentary level, and if they were capable of internalizing rules as we do, with self-inhibition resulting, then we would have to conclude that our Common Ancestor was already a moral creature of sorts. In that case, in all fairness, humans would not be the only moral beings in the world—and theories of moral origins would have to reach back over millions of years.
How can this hypothesis be tested? If as an experiment a few gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos were raised by moralistic humans, and if as a result all three species unanimously showed some definitive evidence of internalizing rules and harboring a sense of shame as w
e do, then we could say that in its potential our Common Ancestor was already well along the way to evolve a modern conscience. If they showed signs of being privately concerned about their own behavior when they were breaking rules, and nobody else knew about it, this evolutionary head start would be stronger still. To explore these important questions, our journey in search of a scientific Eden will now take us into a most unusual type of laboratory.
CAN AN APE BE “GUILT-TRIPPED”?
Since 1959, a small number of captive chimpanzees, along with a few bonobos and gorillas, have been raised by humans and trained to use American Sign Language (ASL) or, more rarely, to become fluent in using other manual communication systems devised by humans. Mainly, these highly sociable animals are taught to use symbols that will manipulate their masters, as in asking for food, but because discipline is needed to maintain order in the lab, a few items in their limited vocabularies are designed to help in keeping them under control.46 When apes are taught to use social interaction signs such as GOOD and BAD or SORRY, at least in the minds of their masters these signs designate morally loaded ideas and feelings.
The apes in question are not merely “domesticated” in the sense of being dependent captives who are denied a natural freedom of movement. Many of them are also cross-fostered, which means that basically they have been raised by humans much as people raise their own children. This is feasible because small apes are innately very similar to human children, being intelligent, curious, affectionate, sociable, and, initially, extremely dependent. They are also compulsively playful, and it is in their nature to be communicative.
The majority of these laboratory animals have been chimpanzees, and their scientist trainers have to take a special care in this unusual enterprise because their subjects are equipped with serious and mercurial tempers. They also have powerful jaws, with large canine teeth to match. Furthermore, even as relative youngsters they will have become several times as strong as humans. Fortunately, their volatile aggressiveness and the accompanying tendency to willfully make mischief are combined with a disposition to submit to domination. But with their physical power and aggressiveness, their social tractability can never be taken for granted.
For obvious reasons, in both homes and laboratories these cross-fostered apes experience toilet training, which involves either positive or negative reinforcement. They also experience praise or blame with respect to other behaviors that please or displease their moralistic masters. Here’s the question: Does this special, humanized kind of socialization have any unusual effects in bringing out a captive ape’s behavioral potential—effects that might provide some hints about a much earlier, ancestral potential for moral behavior?
We should begin by first asking how ape mothers control their impetuous offspring under natural circumstances. Year after year, at Gombe National Park, I watched carefully to see how wild chimpanzee mothers socialized their infants, and, as this was Jane Goodall’s special research focus, I was privileged to spend hundreds of hours observing mother-infant interactions while I, a cultural anthropologist by training, was learning how to be an ethologist. As Jane has written,47 a good chimpanzee mother seems patient almost to the point of martyrdom, and basically she responds to her offspring’s cues in ways that appear to be hostility-free or, in human terms, “nonjudgmental.” The mother protects and controls, but she does not appear to angrily condemn or blame her infant. Tolerant guidance is the name of her game.
For instance, when the infant attempts to nurse, the mother’s nipple is readily made available. As the infant grows larger, its begging gestures may divert food from its mother’s mouth. If two youngsters are roughhousing and one begins to inflict some pain, the mother tends to intervene impartially, protecting the victim but punishing neither party. Perhaps once in a long while the mother’s ire may appear to rise a bit if a youngster becomes pesky, but basically the manner in which she treats her offspring is calmly protective and quite far from being hostile or “disciplinary.” Of course, if another adult chimpanzee or some predator threatens her precious charge, at risk to herself she will defend it forcefully and with real hostility. But when she controls her offspring, anything reminiscent of moralistic judgment—or even simple anger or resentment—seems to be absent.
In our own species, moral socialization by parents can involve severe disapproval and shaming and sometimes physical punishment or possibly restriction of freedom. We’ll see this in later chapters when I quote at length from the autobiography of a voluble female member of a Kalahari foraging band. With chimpanzees it seems to be simply a matter of firm, friendly, dominant guidance. And after six years of annual visits to Africa, my conclusion had to be that no parental behavior existed that seemed likely to stimulate a “moral self” in an immature wild chimpanzee. Inspired by Darwin, I was looking for any sign of an incipient ape conscience—and I didn’t see it. I was left, however, with the possibility that perhaps such a behavioral potential does exist, but under natural wild conditions its development simply is not stimulated.
To explore this, we must turn to these captive subjects, whose human “parents” just naturally are morally judgmental. Apes make creative use of the limited “languages” we devise for them, and they use them to hold meaningful, two-way conversations with humans and even with other apes. Indeed, presently I shall relate how a willful gorilla and I got into an acerbic argument that is quite easy to follow, and I was insulted in a way I will never forget.
Great apes readily learn ASL,48 while another system, used for decades in a laboratory in Atlanta with chimpanzees and later with bonobos, has been facilitated by a computer console that has totally arbitrary symbols on the keys.49 In both of these “manual” systems, the potential vocabularies are quite similar in size and content. The lexicons in question are curtailed by the cognitive limitations of African great apes and also by the restricted life circumstances of apes in captivity, yet they usually include at least one hundred different “signs.” Younger apes make the best experimental subjects, for they have predictable social and physical needs just as human children do. The vocabularies that psychologists devise for them take this into account, and a fair number of the signs or symbols signify things that little apes enjoy enormously, for instance, different types of food and drink or attractive concepts like play, and specific activities such as hug, or tickle, or chase. Because these animals have self-concepts, they can also be taught their own names as well as the names of significant others, ape or human.
There are also signs for asking questions, for these animals are just naturally curious. For instance, in the 1970s psychologist Maurice Temerlin and his wife raised the chimpanzee Lucy from infancy with their own son, treating her as much as possible like a human child. Temerlin writes of Lucy, “As she sees something new she often asks ‘WHAT’S THAT?’ by moving a forefinger rapidly left and right (WHAT) and then pointing the same forefinger at the object to be identified (THAT). She asks this question of us, and at times of herself, as she leafs through a magazine and sees something she has not seen before. We are sure she is talking to herself or asking rhetorical questions when Jane or I are too far away for her to be talking to us, or even out of sight.”50
Unfortunately, however, none of this ape communication is powerful enough to allow us to conduct ethnographic interviews—to directly query apes about whatever “moral” feelings they might have. We must rely instead on inference, and there is one telling gap in the ape repertoire that is wholly unambiguous. Apes don’t blush for reasons that are social, whereas as Darwin demonstrated, humans everywhere do this. We blush with embarrassment, and we also blush with shame. No other species does it; even a cross-fostered ape like Lucy lacks this response.
Let’s say a chimpanzee infant is being raised by people; no matter what their disciplinary strategy may be, they’ll naturally tend to treat it as they would a human child, giving signs of approval or disapproval as they toilet train it and otherwise regulate its exuberant behavior. The huma
ns’ moralistic cues may be obvious or subtle, but they’ll be there. As it masters its vocabulary, eventually the small ape will have been exposed to judgmental signs like GOOD, BAD, and SORRY with respect to its own behavior. In an important sense, we can say that it is being socialized to be a moral being—so it’s of interest to see how much potential the chimpanzee may have to respond in kind.
Unfortunately, the vocabularies used with chimpanzees are not designed to differentiate between just plain GOOD, as in good tasting or fun to play with, and GOOD in the sense of something that is morally appropriate, as in “It’s good for you to be generous.” Thus, it’s hard to imagine how an ape will interpret the command “GO POTTY GOOD.” The same goes for moral BAD, as in a trainer’s signing that defecating on the floor is BAD. How do we know whether the ape is thinking in terms of “practical BAD,” meaning you get scolded or punished if you do it, as opposed to “moral BAD,” meaning that intrinsically the act is antisocial and therefore the actor is doing something naughty or shameful? The distinction is rather subtle, but very important.
The same goes for SORRY. For humans, “sorry” can indicate deeply felt remorse tinged with self-blame and shame or merely simple, nonmoral regret.51 The problem, again, is that these talented apes are given only one SORRY sign to work with. With respect to SORRY, during my research in the African forest the apes never appeared to me as though they were upset over their own behavior, let alone ashamed of it or remorseful. I did notice that between individuals there were postures and gestures that seemed to ask for or grant forgiveness, and in fact chimpanzees often make up after conflicts.52 Basically, one ape simply touches the other’s hand or body—sometimes unilaterally, sometimes mutually, and sometimes, as observed in captivity by de Waal,53 with the useful assistance of a third party. However, this seems to be aimed merely at reducing tension or restoring positive relations, so reading a morally based element of remorse into such behavior would be patently anthropocentric. Nothing I observed ever convinced me that there was something like morally based self-recrimination in the wild, for aggressors never appeared to be troubled by their actions afterward. But what about these captive apes?
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