Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  Also on the positive side, we all share a basic, prosocially-oriented moral capacity, which is inherent in being human. This at least enables us to reach out to distant others when safety nets are needed, and, we can hope, it helps world political leaders—those with normal consciences—to think twice before they start brutally hurtful wars. The underlying sense of sympathy for other human beings will always serve as a counterweight to conflict, and in a community that feels itself to be “one,” as we’ve seen these prosocial feelings can be systematically and effectively amplified for the greater good, precisely because people do have consciences.

  That’s how we worked things in the bands that basically got us through the Pleistocene, and these dynamics have continued in force as we’ve moved on to live in farming tribes, then chiefdoms and kingdoms, early civilizations, and modern nations. Now, finally, we live in a world community of nations that is at best a work in progress—and at worst could become a failed state writ very large. From bands to nations all people develop similarly moral communities in several important respects. For instance, judgmental public opinion exists at all of these sociopolitical levels; attempts are made to manage conflicts; informal rules or laws are agreed upon; and criminal behavior is deemed to be punishable.

  From the viewpoint of an evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker suggests that our rates of killing people in warfare have been declining quite drastically for some time, even as the use of nuclear weapons has become morally taboo.4 Some of this peace-bonus effect surely comes from a simple fear that wars with nuclear weapons will be unwinnable for either side, but the moral component is very important, and it does exist prominently in a world moral community that remains only tentatively structured to do its job.

  Attempts to build a (totally powerless) League of Nations almost a century ago tell us that even in the 1920s the need for some kind of morally based command and control at a global center was obvious enough. Today, with a somewhat more potent United Nations, we seem to have exchanged the reality of recurrent and very costly but survivable large-scale conventional warfare for the risk of total catastrophe. Thus, at least in an actuarial sense, today the stakes are even higher.

  What, then, are our global possibilities insofar as they may be “predictable” in certain ways from our evolutionary past? One guess would be that a benign and generous superpower might dominate the entire world and impose political order without dominating too strongly. America enjoyed this possibility after the Soviet Union collapsed. However, the second invasion of Iraq, as just one of many sovereign nations ruled by seriously offensive dictators, didn’t help us to stay in this morally acceptable, altruistic role. By this act, an aggressive Bush conservative elite, with the compliance of a sheeplike Democratic Congress, spent not only our treasure but also our political and moral capital for many years to come.

  Interestingly, one reason this ongoing political enterprise was so costly financially was that America, once the idea of permanent (anti-Iranian) military bases was eschewed, felt a moral obligation to create a stable nation in Iraq before it would be conscionable to withdraw. Thus, as a nation we’ve been condemned for an invasion that basically went against the global community’s mores with respect to national sovereignty, but we have received little credit for at least staying an expensive course with respect to nation building once Iraq was seriously “broken.”

  If the United States for a time did have a flourishing benign role right after World War II, soon the Cold War saw the generosity image fade away as the sponsoring of military alliances and warfare by proxy became global preoccupations, and major conventional warfare returned with an ugly vengeance not only on the Korean Peninsula but also in Vietnam. With respect to being helpful to other nations, American foreign policy continues to be dominated by a highly self-interested political emphasis as we dedicate the great bulk of our foreign aid to shoring up internationally controversial regimes that are prone to keep major world conflicts alive. Too often, this dilutes our idealistic messages in promoting democracy and makes us widely unpopular. In terms of world public opinion, most likely we have politically disfigured ourselves by failing to look at the big picture with its important moral intangibles, and we may well have relied too much on our power and far little on our generosity as a nation.

  As an evolutionary anthropologist who tries to view things from a distance, I keep noticing a fundamental political problem. The LPA bands that evolved our genes for us were fiercely egalitarian, and the price they paid for this political equality was having to do without the benefits of centralized command and control that could have kept their bands from occasionally splitting asunder when a social problem or conflict did get out of hand. In a hunting band, it’s the militant sovereignty of the individual hunters that decentralizes politics and keeps things that way. In a global community, it’s love of national sovereignty that does exactly the same thing. However, people in a band are basically economic equals, whereas our world of nations is very far from being egalitarian in this way. This economic inequality can be seen as a special engine that helps to drive international conflict, and it stands in the way of creating a more effective international order.

  The frightening balance of power among competing, economically unequal nuclear nations at least may have ended very large wars of a conventional type. But probable dangers inherent in this morally reinforced balance of terror, which is subject to both technological and human error, must be multiplied by the number of nations with nuclear arsenals, and our world order is susceptible to coming seriously unglued if ethnocentric hatreds get out of hand. Both India and Pakistan and, in the near future, Iran and Israel, come to mind, and in some cases the combined nuclear arsenals, if employed, would be large enough to very seriously threaten our entire planetary environment. With such heated conflicts, the “taboo” on nuclear attacks could be set aside, just as it could have been in the Cuban missile crisis.

  In this very political world of ours, continued nuclear proliferation seems likely not only because the nation in question’s military potential will be enhanced, but also because basic political “respect” on the world stage all but skyrockets with a nuclear capability. It’s worth noting the major hypocrisy when five nuclear nations that are already enjoying such respect preach against proliferation, and thereby try to deny to lesser nations the right to improve their international status.

  Power balancing is another ancestral trait, as described for chimpanzees by Richard Wrangham.5 In this context, any really serious world domination by any one nation does seem unlikely. This is because the would-be dominator would still be vulnerable to devastating attack—as long as antinuclear defense systems remain as fallible as they seem to be. Thus, among the major nuclear powers the political dynamics are similar to those in a politically and economically egalitarian band of well-armed hunters, who are obliged to respect one another’s lethal fighting weapons—and the possibility of ambush—even though some of the hunters may be much stronger than others.6 In a real sense, nuclear weapons have created a kind of modern political egalitarianism that is similar, but this applies just to the nations in an erratically expanding Nuclear Club.

  If the world were inflicted with a mercifully limited nuclear disaster, expectably the shocked surviving nations might fearfully set aside their differences, compromise their respective autonomies, and at least take some further steps in the direction of creating a safer world order. Logically they would use an orderly, politically centralized, multiethnic nation as their model, and already in place is a United Nations General Assembly that can be likened to the U.S. Senate—aside from the UN’s lack of power. There is also a Security Council, which, if stripped of its absolute power, could function like the U.S. House of Representatives to give the powerhouse nations some special representation. We must hope that such a dreadful catalyst never comes, but at least we’ll have a general model to think about if it does.

  Another possibility would be that some very immediate exter
nal threat could unite our dissident nations, but such a threat is difficult to imagine unless a predictably wayward comet might do the trick. In this improbable fantasy, all the nuclear nations would be impelled to expend their arsenals in order to save the planet. In another, the threat that might best unite our world of nations would lie purely in the realm of science fiction in the form of an imaginary alien political empire intent on interplanetary domination. Just as rivalrous male chimpanzees set aside their differences on patrol when attacking a stranger, it is quite predictable that our world of nations would unite under such putative conditions, and that it might do so if a real political threat of sufficient gravity were to arise.

  Much closer to reality, climate changes leading to global starvation might unite us for a time. However, when such chips were really down, we might follow the path of a hunting band that is up against the wall and socially “atomize,” with every nation looking out for itself and fearing its hungrier neighbors. Perhaps new epidemic diseases might galvanize cooperation, depending on the nature of the disease, and do so in a way that would induce enemies to become friends, so there’s yet another “external threat” that might tend to unite us. But I believe that the most potent threat of all is that of nuclear annihilation, and so far, in my opinion, we’ve been willing to rely on a cross between an acephalous egalitarian hunter-gatherer political system and a despotic but essentially uncentralized chimpanzee system to contain this threat—without forming a really effective global moral community.

  Perhaps our greatest hope should be placed in a world economic system that flourishes because of free trade, for as I’ve said this creates interdependencies that make serious conflicts costly in ways that are new. Another potentially positive factor, well worth mentioning, is global communication media. Eventually, global television and particularly the Internet may have some effect in significantly homogenizing our world culture and in thereby breaking down some of the cultural and religious diversities that work against trust among nations and can easily foster conflict. At the same time, certain shared aspects of world religions, including the Golden Rule, provide the potential for developing a greater moral community of interest. However, both modern communications and organized religion obviously can set us apart as well as help us to grow together, because either can tie in to ethnocentrism and foster xenophobia.

  Still another major factor in at least trying to predict our future as a global community is simply the human political mind, which provides exactly the same potential that shaped earlier efficient moral communities in the form of egalitarian hunting bands—with an insistence on no centralized power, which made sense because to resolve serious conflicts avoidance was possible. In our later political evolution these same political and moral minds have created and accepted command and control as needed to make possible the centralized functions required to run much larger, sedentary societies as these develop. Again, our famous social and political flexibility has been at work, and up to the level of nations it has done its job well.

  Flexibility means we are not by evolutionary design just lovers of equality. Indeed, in terms of human nature we seem to be just as capable of following leaders as we once were of getting rid of them generically. The basic political tendencies were present in Ancestral Pan, who had hierarchies with aggressively greedy alpha males that helped to keep down conflict with their forceful interventions—and therefore were at the same time resented and appreciated. Our very nature sets us up to be ambivalent about the exercise of power from above, and we’re quite good both at holding down leaders and at appreciating command and control where we see this as being worthwhile or necessary to avert chaos, or where its image is one of generosity. This flexibility could be useful in the future, just as it was useful 45,000 years ago, and more, in often dangerous Late Pleistocene settings that because of large-game hunting generally favored a rampant version of egalitarianism at the expense of centralized governance.

  Fearing undue domination, democratic nations resolve this ambivalence constitutionally, by keeping governmental powers checked and balanced. The global problem is that trustworthy checks and balances remain to be invented. Furthermore, the world seems to be simply too big—and perhaps too diversified—to ever agree upon a single leader unless the right and truly trusted “charismat” were to come along and gain the confidence of all. Even the hideously conflicted Balkans were united for decades by a charismatic Tito, while a highly respected George Washington managed to get a handful of quite disparate former British colonies off to the right start—even though as with the Balkans a civil war ensued. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to visualize a formal world governmental structure, which at least in theory might work, than it is to create trust among competing and quite disparate nations with histories of rivalry and conflict.

  I’ve said that the international system we actually live by looks like a cross between a band society—in which nobody wants to be bossed around—and a chimpanzee community, in which the big guys forcefully run the show and hog the resources but also serve usefully as effective and impartial peacemakers. I emphasize that globally, whoever fills the role of chief dominator is also expected to intervene impartially in conflicts and pacify them. For over half a century a major and perpetual problem faced by Superpower America has been its chosen role as a committed partisan supporter of an embattled but territorially aggrandizing Israel, which continues to make any really effective US role in mediation between Israelis and Palestinians extremely problematic. Unfortunately, this conflict provides the political engine that drives much of today’s world conflict, as we begin to struggle through the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  That’s where we find ourselves, with our world of nations. Our ambivalent natures do provide us at least with an altruistic sense of empathy for others, which in the right contexts seems to be extendable to all of humanity. And we do have a sense of morality that helps us significantly in building very large national communities of interest which (as with our American political union) may with difficulty endure—but which (as with the Soviet Union) also may fall apart. Morally, we do behave in many contexts as a world community that judges individual nations in terms of right and wrong; we even have functioning international courts, though their jurisdiction is not accepted universally. These are significant signs of some limited unification for the common good—if not some kind of a serious and binding political confederation.

  At the same time, we’re faced with hundreds of sizable, often well-armed national sovereignties, which can become heavily involved with ethnocentrism—and sometimes with raw xenophobia—to create global situations of sharply competing alliances and mistrust. We’re also susceptible to morally based ideologies, some of them destructive to world cooperation and some, like the ongoing nuclear taboo, highly benign. Fortunately, ideologies that promote generosity are grounded deeply in our nature, and in our cultures as well. The Golden Rule has been a human universal for at least 45,000 years, and this continues today. Such ideologies may help significantly in facilitating a world order that could be made to be more trusting and interdependent—and hence at least somewhat less competitive and dangerous.

  In its specifics our future history is unpredictable at the global level, even though supposedly the past can predict the future. What the recent historical past tells us, in statistical terms, is that death and destruction owing to warfare may well be declining. But does that mean that ultimate risks are declining as well? Our much deeper evolutionary past provides a different means of prediction, and what it seems to be telling us, here, is that human nature gives us a great deal to build upon, but also a great deal to fear. In solving future problems, I believe that it’s important to know about the basics of what we have to work with. I also believe that as time takes us forward, the great similarities between the world community of nations and an LPA band can provide us with some important food for thought, as do the several signal differences I’ve just discussed.


  In searching for our moral origins in the preceding chapters, we’ve taken an enormous journey. And perhaps what we’ve learned about the Late Pleistocene can teach us a bit more about the global problems we’ll be facing as this journey continues. Our moral capacity is part of the potential we carry into this future, and one thing we’ll have to work with, whenever we’re ready to move in the direction of creating a less risky global moral community, is the same moral nature that archaic and then culturally modern humans evolved for us in the Late Pleistocene. Combine this with our rather remarkable political inventiveness, and humanity may have some major reason for hope.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book consolidates a variety of research interests pursued over the past three decades. The groundwork for this analysis was done under fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and the National Endowment for Humanities, and under grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation.

  I am grateful to the Gombe Stream Research Centre for support of relevant fieldwork on primates in Tanzania, while for help in past work that figured importantly in the writing of this book I thank Jane Ayers, Nigel Barradale, Donald Black; Deborah Boehm, Michael Boehm, Sam Bowles, Sarah Brosnan, Rose Ann Caiola, James Francis Doyle, Carol Ember, Dean Falk, Jay Feierman, Jessica Flack, Roger Fouts, Doug Fry, Herb Gintis, Michael Gurven, Jonathan Haidt, Kristin Howard, Hilly Kaplan, Raymond C. Kelly, Bruce Knauft, David Krakauer, Don Lamm, Frank Marlowe, Michael Mcguire, Steven Morrissey, Martin Muller, Lluis Oviedo, John Price, Karl Recktenwald, Pete Richerson, Alice Schlegel, Jeffrey Schloss, Doron Schultziner, Craig Stanford, Mary Stiner, Jonathan Turner, Frans de Waal, Nicholas Wade, Paul Wason, Mary Jane West-Eberhard; Andy Whiten, Polly Wiessner, David S. Wilson, Michael L. Wilson, and Richard Wrangham.