Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  For tribal people who are tied to agricultural land use, it’s much more costly to pick up and move, and such sedentary egalitarians are more likely to invest some limited authority in their headmen so that preemptive conflict resolution can become more effective. The !Kung are so zealously egalitarian that this doesn’t take place, and when a respected, peace-loving man with no authority tries to step in and stop a za-level conflict once it has become physical, Lee tells us that he’s likely to be killed himself.25

  Unlike many LPA foragers, the !Kung seem to squabble about meat all the time, and this might make us wonder about all the claims I’ve made about sympathetic generosity, “equalized” meat distribution, joy in sharing, and avoidance of conflict. However, this is what happens with the !Kung. A large animal carcass is initially shared out to key people in the band, who then share it further, within large or small family groups, and by then the meat has been transformed by custom from what amounts to group property to personal property.26 The further sharing that takes place is optional, even though there are expectations and hopes, and along the way there are requests for meat and more requests for meat, and also some accusations of stinginess. But basically the entire band is getting meat, and the overall system is understood and appreciated.

  There are very few serious disputes over meat.27 Lee does provide one case history of a homicidal conflict that was caused by adultery but was triggered by a disagreement over meat, but outright forager conflicts about meat are not that frequent, even though the bickering, in certain societies like the !Kung, can be constant. Pat Draper clarifies the Bushmen’s sometimes-contentious sharing style as follows:

  Verbal aggression is commonplace among !Kung. In fact, the reason that goods are shared equitably and more or less continuously is that the have-nots are so vociferous in pressing their demands. Are these a people who live in communal harmony, happily sharing among all? Not exactly, but the interpretation of meaning in any culture inevitably founders on these kinds of ambiguities. At one level of analysis, one can show that goods circulate, that there are no inequalities of wealth and that peaceable relations characterize dealings within and between bands. At another level, however, . . . one sees that social action is an ongoing scrimmage—often amicable but sometimes carried on in bitter earnest.28

  Inuit conflict has been studied almost as intensively as with the Bushmen. By interviewing willing older informants as Lee did, and by making use of reports by early explorers, Geert van den Steenhoven managed to create a reliable account of past homicidal patterns in central Canada.29 Asen Balikci has drawn on these materials to good effect. Balikci details how the Inuit deal with angry conflicts, and even though their style is quite different from what takes place out on the Kalahari, there are similarly escalating social mechanisms to resolve smoldering or overt conflict.

  In a small band, conflict is both stressful and, in its potential, economically costly. In both of these societies, conflicts easily become lethal because neither permits the development of leaders who have enough authority to step in and readily stop a serious quarrel between angry males. (Keep in mind that as killers of large mammals, male hunter-gatherers are armed with very effective hunting weapons.) Balikci writes:

  The Netsilik knew of a number of rather formalized techniques for peacemaking that were positive in the sense that usually they brought conflict into the open and resolved it in a definitive manner. These techniques were fist fights, drum duels, and approved execution.

  Any man could challenge another to a fist fight for any reason. Usually they stripped to the waist and the challenger received the first blow. Only one blow was given at a time, directed against temple or shoulder. Opponents stood without guard and took turns, the contest continuing until one of the fighters had had enough and gave up. This seemed to settle the quarrel, for, as one informant put it: “After the fight, it is all over; it was as if they had never fought before.”

  . . . The song duel was a ritualized means of resolving any grudge two men might hold against each other. The songs were composed secretly and learned by the wives of the opponents. When ready, the whole group assembled in the ceremonial igloo, with a messenger finally inviting the duelists. As was the case with all drum dancing, each wife sang her husband’s song in turn, while the latter danced and beat the drum in the middle of the floor, watched by the community. The audience took great interest in the performance, heartily joking and laughing at the drummers’ efforts to crush each other by various accusations of incest, bestiality, murder, avarice, adultery, failure at hunting, being henpecked, lack of manly strength, etc. The opponents used all their wits and talent to win the approval of the assembly. . . .

  Song duels thus undoubtedly had a cathartic value for the individual opponents, and in this particular sense conflicts became “resolved.” Sometimes one or both of the opponents at the end of a song duel continued to feel enmity. When this was the case, they often decided to resume fighting, this time with their fists. This definitely settled the matter.30

  In both cultures homicide is frequent, and such patterns of conflict and conflict resolution may well have been fairly widespread among LPA foragers before contact. In this connection, some of the best Inuit data were collected by early explorers soon after contact, when the people were not yet reticent about such matters. In the rest of the fifty-society database, we’ve already seen that often ethnographic reports of capital punishment were seriously underrepresented, or sometimes even absent in many of the ethnographies—just as they would have been for the Bushmen had Lee not made his retrospective breakthrough.

  My assumption is that prehistorically, lethal conflict would have been a serious potential problem in this type of society, even though local conditions and differing cultural traditions surely impinged on the rates of killing. For instance, the Netsilik had such a high rate of female infanticide (it’s a son as hunter who’ll support a parent in old age) that some men had difficulty finding wives and therefore were prone to kill another man and take his.31 This upped the murder rate, but other male killings took place just because personalities clashed and assertive hunters were prone to quarrel. With the Bushmen, women as wives were not so scarce, yet quarrels over courtship or, more often, over adultery provided a regular source of conflict that could result in homicide.32

  THE COMPLICATED CASE OF MURDER

  Murder is conceived of indigenously as a monstrous act. Nevertheless, when an Inuit man slaughters another man in the same band just to take his wife, more often than not his morally outraged band is likely to do nothing about it collectively. Band members know that the victim’s close male relatives are likely to take revenge and that usually the killer and his family will quickly get out of town because if he’s brazen enough to stay in the band, he may well pay with his life.33

  Thus, it’s revenge slaying by relatives, not capital punishment by the whole band, that he must fear as a first-time offender. This seems to be true of LPA foragers generally, even though our data will never be complete. This retaliatory pattern and the social avoidance it engenders are widespread,34 and I believe it’s the combination of acute loss and grief, combined with deep-seated revenge tendencies,35 that makes killing for a lost close kinsman (rarely, a kinswoman) so predictable.

  Even though murder certainly is not condoned, most initial killings seem not to be felt as a generalized threat by all band members. However, if an individual becomes a serial killer, meaning killing two victims or more, then all members of the band are likely to feel threatened on an immediate if probabilistic basis, and they’re likely to be galvanized into collective action.

  We’ve seen in Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 that active executions accomplished simultaneously by entire groups are rather rarely reported. They’re still more rarely described in any detail, but fortunately we have Richard Lee’s specialized study of !Kung Bushman homicides to work with.36 The !Kung hunt with arrows tipped with poison taken from one of several Kalahari beetles, which can bring down an a
nimal as large as a giraffe after a few days, and which can kill a human much more quickly—unless the wound is shallow and can be quickly lanced to suck out the poison. These foragers are careful to keep their arrows out of the reach of children, lest a heated childish quarrel become lethal, and bystanders will act quickly to try to head off serious quarrels involving two or more adult males because in the heat of the moment one man may grab his bow to shoot another—or may simply stab his adversary lethally with a hand-held poisoned arrow.

  Lee’s thorough interviews give a degree of ethnographic richness to the statistical patterns we’ve been describing, and they also help to make clear why delegating a kinsman as executioner is usually preferred over a collective attack by the group—even though either strategy will obviate retaliation by male kin. Keep in mind, here, that we’re talking about taking out an intimidating repeat killer who is an expert at killing large mammals as a hunter, who is already experienced at taking human life, and who, because in this case the group poisons its arrows, can still do damage to others while he is dying.

  Lee’s systematic research encompasses four different regions inhabited by nomadic !Kung from the 1920s through the 1950s, and his case histories include original killings, revenge killings by relatives, group-sponsored executions of repeat killers, and several inadvertent killings of good Samaritans who tried to stop fights that had already become za-intense. In this forty-year period, for a region with not a great a number of bands, there were twenty-two killings in all, and in several cases they came in a flurry because chains of retaliation were involved. I emphasize, again, that Lee had the advantage of gaining the trust of informants who had participated in either killings or executions of killers in the period before the government of Botswana began to punish all killing with jail time.

  Once the government became very active in this way, in small nomadic camps the !Kung’s homicide rates actually dropped out of sight. This supports what I said earlier about hunter-gatherers becoming reticent about their capital punishment practices after contact: knowledge of such organized authority can have a profound effect on these egalitarians, even though they share power equally within their bands and normally make their own decisions about deviants.

  The following account is based upon cross-checked interviews with participants who were interviewed by Lee after people became willing to trust him with such information. What we have here is a poorly executed group execution that begins with the use of a poisoned arrow. Lee points out that, even though Bushmen are excellent archers when out hunting, when they get into fights their aiming of poisoned arrows is mediocre at best. In this one uniquely detailed description of what seems to begin as a delegated execution and eventually becomes a fully communal killing, things are so chaotic that it’s easy to understand why with hunter-gatherers the usual mode of execution is to efficiently delegate a kinsman to quickly kill the deviant by ambush. (As with the exclamation point in front of !Kung, the various diacritical symbols represent several different phonemic “clicks” in the Bushman dialect.)

  The most dramatic account of a collective killing concerns the death of /Twi, a notorious killer who had been responsible for the deaths of two men . . . in the 1940s. A number of people decided that he must be killed. The informant is =Toma, the younger brother of /Twi.

  My brother was killed southwest of N//o!kau (in the /Du/da area). . . . People said that /Twi was one who had killed too many people so they killed him with spears and arrows. He had killed two people already, and on the day he died he stabbed a woman and killed a man.

  It was Xashe who attacked /Twi first. He ambushed him near the camp and shot a poisoned arrow into his hip. They grappled hand to hand, and /Twi had him down and was reaching for his knife when /Xashe’s wife’s mother grabbed /Twi from behind and yelled to /Xashe, “Run away! This man will kill everyone!” And /Xashe ran away.

  /Twi pulled the arrow out of his hip and went back to his hut, where he sat down. Then some people gathered and tried to help him by cutting and sucking out poison. /Twi said, “This poison is killing me. I want to piss.” But instead of pissing, he deceived the people, grabbed a spear, and flailed out with it, stabbing a woman named //Kushe in the mouth, ripping open her cheek. When //Kushe’s husband N!eishi came to her aid, /Twi deceived him too and shot him with a poisoned arrow in the back as he dodged. And N!eishi fell down.

  Now everyone took cover, and others shot at /Twi, and no one came to his aid because all those people had decided he had to die. But he still chased after some, firing arrows, but he didn’t hit any more.

  Then he returned to the village and sat in the middle. The others crept back to the edge of the village and kept under cover. /Twi called out, “Hey are you all still afraid of me? Well I am finished, I have no more breath. Come here and kill me. Do you fear my weapons? Here I am putting them out of reach. I won’t touch them. Come kill me.”

  Then they all fired on him with poisoned arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then he lay flat. All approached him, men and women, and stabbed his body with spears even after he was dead.

  Then he was buried, and everyone split up and went their separate ways because they feared more fights breaking out.

  Commentary. This exceptionally graphic account brings out some of the drama of the action. The killer shot so full of arrows that he looked like a porcupine is a remarkable image of the capacity for collective action and collective responsibility in a noncorporate and nonhierarchical society. I interviewed the mother, father, and sister of the dead /Twi and the relatives of his victims. All agreed he was a dangerous man. Possibly he was psychotic.37

  Interestingly, it was not the man who actively led things off who was killed by /Twi, but a bystander after his bystanding wife was wounded.

  If ever there were a flawed “communal” execution, this was it. That’s why a delegated close kinsman usually does the job. Close male kin execute oppressive bullies, including maliciously wayward shamans, if such exist, along with the occasional thief, cheater, or nonpsychotic deviant, as seen in previous chapters. In Chapter 7, Table IV showed that out of a sample of ten LPA foragers, six of these societies reported a single group member’s stepping forward to fulfill the executioner’s role, so we may assume this strategy to be predominant among contemporary hunter-gatherers and also to have been very widespread 45,000 years ago.

  This ultimate type of social distancing is matched with a social problem-solving ability that is astute, for these hunter-gatherer societies engage in such ultimate social distancing only under special circumstances that make killing someone seem necessary. With relatively tractable deviants like Cephu, people take a chance on personal reform. But in their minds today’s serial killers are likely to be tomorrow’s serial killers, and there’s only one sure way to deal with them.

  In this context it’s generally males who have to be socially eliminated, and these men are hunters whose contributions usually are beneficial to all. The obvious practical disadvantages inherent in losing hunters help to motivate band members to stop conflicts before they become homicidal and to refrain from using capital punishment if any other method will solve the problem at hand.

  The possibility of reforming a deviant whose behavior is seriously perturbing group functions is helped by the fact that sympathetic feelings can play an important part in how such dilemmas are resolved. Feeling for the person makes it difficult to methodically execute any normal human being with whom social bonds exist. Thus, sympathy feeds into the universal prescriptions against murder that are found in all foraging societies and in human societies more generally—however “murder” may be locally defined. And feelings of sympathy also inform the reluctance of most moral majorities to use capital punishment at all, unless this is the only way out.

  As they do their work in hunting societies, these small moral majorities are quite consistent in the ways they deal with social problems. Many deviants are treated as human beings who happen to be erring right now but are capable
of reform, which is why with deviants like Cephu ostracism and shaming are used. It’s the incorrigible bullies, serial killers, aggressively selfish or malicious shamans gone bad, and others who seriously threaten the lives or welfare or moral sensibilities of most or all group members, who are killed or expelled.

  As we’ve seen, capital punishment affects a deviant’s reproductive success profoundly, and the capital punishers have been kept in business in terms of natural selection because they are coming out ahead reproductively. Kill a major bully, and in an egalitarian group every member will, on average, share in the resources so gained. The same applies to a recidivist meat-cheater or an effective thief. Because the contest between good citizens and deviants is so often a zero-sum game, execution can pay off handsomely as far as the community is concerned—but so can reforming a lesser deviant who is contributing to the group economy.

  In the preceding chapters, capital punishment of free-riding bullies or cheats has played an important part in our moral origins scenarios. The first scenario involved the appearance of a conscientious sense of right and wrong coupled with internalization of values, which explains moral origins without any Garden of Eden. It seems likely that the acquisition of a conscience as an effect of harsh social control involved not only physical elimination of individuals whose problems with lack of self-control were severe, but also lesser sanctions taking their toll on the fitness of lesser social deviants.

  Once an effective conscience had evolved, the threat of severe group punishment had a major role in suppressing the potential predatory behaviors of free riders, and this brought quite a different effect. This development opened the way for modest yet socially significant human degrees of altruism to evolve genetically, bringing a greater degree of generosity to the operation of our consciences and to the overall tenor of our social lives.