When Bushmen travel, they walk in single file, with a man in the lead who watches out for fresh predator tracks, snakes, and other dangers. Women and children occupy safer positions. This, too, is reminiscent of chimpanzees, who at dangerous moments—such as when they cross a human dirt road—have adult males in the lead and rear, with females and juveniles in between. Sometimes the alpha male stands guard at the road until everyone has crossed it.
Our ancestors may have been higher on the food chain than most primates, but they definitely were not at the apex. They had to watch their backs. This brings me to the first false myth about our state of nature, which is that our ancestors ruled the savanna. How could this be true for bipedal apes that stood only four feet tall? They must have lived in terror of the bear-sized hyenas of those days, and the saber-toothed cats that were twice the size of our lions. As a result, they had to content themselves with second-rate hunting time. Darkness is the best cover, but like the Bushmen today, early human hunters likely opted for the heat of the day, when their prey could see them coming from miles away, because they had to leave the night to the “professional” hunters.
Lions are the supreme rulers of the savanna, as reflected in our “lion king” stories and the Bushmen’s high regard for lions. Significantly, Bushmen never use their deadly poison arrows on these animals, knowing that this may start a battle they can’t win. The lions leave them alone most of the time, but when for some reason the lions in some places become man-eaters, people have had no choice but to leave. Danger is so much on the Bushmen’s mind that at night, while the others sleep, they keep their fire going, which means getting up to stoke it. If the glow-in-the-dark eyes of nightly predators are spotted, appropriate action will be taken, such as picking up a burning branch from the fire and waving it over one’s head (making one look larger-than-life) while urging the predator in a calm but steady voice to go find something better to do. Bushmen do have courage, but pleading with predators hardly fits the idea of humans as the dominant species.
The old way must have been quite successful, though, for even in the modern world we still show the same tendency to come together for safety. At times of danger, we forget what divides us. This was visible, for example, after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, an unbelievably traumatic experience for those who lived through it. Nine months afterward, when asked how they saw relations between the races, New Yorkers of all races called those relations mostly good, whereas in foregoing years, they had called them mostly bad. The postattack feeling of “we’re in this together” had fostered unity in the city.
These reflexes go back to the deepest, most ancient layers of our brain, layers that we share with many animals, not just mammals. Look at how fish, such as herring, swim in schools that tighten instantly when a shark or porpoise approaches. Or how schools turn abruptly in one silvery flash, making it impossible for the predator to target any single fish. Schooling fish keep very precise individual distances, seek out companions of the same size, and perfectly match their speed and direction, often in a fraction of a second. Thousands of individuals thus act almost like a single organism. Or look at how birds, such as starlings, swarm in dense flocks that in an instant evade an approaching hawk. Biologists speak of “selfish herds,” in which each individual hides among a mass of others for its own security. The presence of other prey dilutes the risk for each one among them, not unlike the old joke about two men being chased by a bear: There’s no need to run faster than the bear so long as you outrun your pal.
Even bitter rivals seek companionship at times of danger. Birds that in the breeding season fight one another to death over territory may end up in the same flock during migration. I know this tendency firsthand from my fish, each time I redo one of my large tropical aquariums. Many fish, such as cichlids, are quite territorial, displaying with spread fins and chasing one another to keep their corner free of intruders. I clean my tanks out every couple of years, during which time I keep the fish in a barrel. After a few days they are released back into the tank, which by then looks quite different from before. I am always amused at how they suddenly seek out the company of their own kind. Like best buddies, the biggest fighters now swim side by side, exploring their new environment together. Until, of course, they start to feel confident again, and claim a piece of real estate.
Fish band together in tight schools that confuse predators, such as these fish evading a shark.
Security is the first and foremost reason for social life. This brings me to the second false origin myth: that human society is the voluntary creation of autonomous men. The illusion here is that our ancestors had no need for anybody else. They led uncommitted lives. Their only problem was that they were so competitive that the cost of strife became unbearable. Being intelligent animals, they decided to give up a few liberties in return for community life. This origin story, proposed by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the social contract, inspired America’s founding fathers to create the “land of the free.” It is a myth that remains immensely popular in political science departments and law schools, since it presents society as a negotiated compromise rather than something that came naturally to us.
Granted, it can be instructive to look at human relations as if they resulted from an agreement among equal parties. It helps us think about how we treat, or ought to treat, one another. It’s good to realize, though, that this way of framing the issue is a leftover from pre-Darwinian days, based on a totally erroneous image of our species. As is true for many mammals, every human life cycle includes stages at which we either depend on others (when we are young, old, or sick) or others depend on us (when we care for the young, old, or sick). We very much rely on one another for survival. It is this reality that ought to be taken as a starting point for any discussion about human society, not the reveries of centuries past, which depicted our ancestors as being as free as birds and lacking any social obligations.
We descend from a long line of group-living primates with a high degree of interdependence. How the need for security shapes social life became clear when primatologists counted long-tailed macaques on different islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Some islands have cats (such as tigers and clouded leopards), whereas others don’t. The same monkeys were found traveling in large groups on islands with cats, but in small groups on islands without. Predation thus forces individuals together. Generally, the more vulnerable a species is, the larger its aggregations. Ground-dwelling monkeys, like baboons, travel in larger groups than tree dwellers, which enjoy better escape opportunities. And chimpanzees, which because of their size have little to fear in the daytime, typically forage alone or in small groups.
Few animals lack a herd instinct. When former U.S. Senate majority leader Trent Lott titled his memoir Herding Cats, he was referring to the impossibility of reaching consensus. This may be frustrating when it comes to politicians, but for cats it’s entirely logical. Domestic cats are solitary hunters, so don’t need to pay much attention to one another. But all animals that either rely on one another for the hunt, such as members of the dog family, or are prey themselves, such as wildebeests, have a need to coordinate movements. They tend to follow leaders and conform to the majority. When our ancestors left the forest and entered an open, dangerous environment, they became prey and evolved a herd instinct that beats that of many animals. We excel at bodily synchrony and actually derive pleasure from it. Walking next to someone, for example, we automatically fall into the same stride. We coordinate chants and “waves” during sporting events, oscillate together during pop concerts, and take aerobics classes where we all jump up and down to the same beat. As an exercise, try to clap after a lecture when no one else is clapping, or try not to clap when everyone else is. We are group animals to a terrifying degree. Since political leaders are masters at crowd psychology, history is replete with people following them en masse into insane adventures. All that a leader has to do is create an outside threat, whip up fear, an
d voilà: The human herd instinct takes over.
Here we arrive at the third false origin myth, which is that our species has been waging war for as long as it has been around. In the 1960s, following the devastations of World War II, humans were routinely depicted as “killer apes”—as opposed to real apes, which were considered pacifists. Aggression was seen as the hallmark of humanity. While it’s far from my intention to claim humans are angels of peace, we do need to draw a line between homicide and warfare. Warfare rests on a tight hierarchical structure of many parties, not all of which are driven by aggression. In fact, most are just following orders. Napoleon’s soldiers didn’t march into freezing Russia in an aggressive mood, nor did American soldiers fly to Iraq because they wanted to kill somebody. The decision to go to war is typically made by older men in the capital. When I look at a marching army, I don’t necessarily see aggression in action. I see the herd instinct: thousands of men in lockstep, willing to obey superiors.
In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, and that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill, “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state of nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage? Although archeological signs of individual murder go back hundreds of thousands of years, we lack similar evidence for warfare (such as graveyards with weapons embedded in a large number of skeletons) from before the agricultural revolution. Even the walls of Jericho, considered one of the first pieces of evidence of warfare and famous for having come tumbling down in the Old Testament, may have served mainly as protection against mudflows.
Long before this, our ancestors lived on a thinly populated planet, with altogether only a couple of million people. Their density may have resembled that of the Bushmen, who live on ten square miles per capita. There are even suggestions that before this, about seventy thousand years ago, our lineage was at the edge of extinction, living in scattered small bands with a global population of just a couple of thousand. These are hardly the sort of conditions that promote continuous warfare. Furthermore, our ancestors probably had little worth fighting over, again like the Bushmen, for whom the only such exceptions are water and women. But Bushmen share water with thirsty visitors, and regularly marry off their children to neighboring groups. The latter practice ties groups together and means that the men in one group are often related to those in the other. In the long run, killing one’s kin is not a successful trait.
Marshall Thomas witnessed no warfare among Bushmen and takes the absence of shields as evidence that they rarely fight with strangers. Shields, which are easily made out of strong hides, offer effective protection against arrows. Their nonexistence suggests that Bushmen are not too worried about intergroup hostilities. This is not to say that war is totally absent in preliterate societies: We know many tribes that engage in it occasionally, and some that do so regularly. My guess is that for our ancestors war was always a possibility, but that they followed the pattern of present-day hunter-gatherers, who do exactly the opposite of what Churchill surmised: They alternate long stretches of peace and harmony with brief interludes of violent confrontation.
Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and brutally take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a sort of picnic. It ends with adults from different groups grooming each other while their children play. Thus far, lethal aggression among bonobos is unheard of.
The only certainty is that our species has a potential for warfare, which under certain circumstances will rear its ugly head. Skirmishes do sometimes get out of control and result in death, and young men everywhere have a tendency to show off their physical prowess by battling outsiders with little regard for the consequences. But at the same time, our species is unique in that we maintain ties with kin long after they have dispersed. As a result there exist entire networks between groups, which promote economic exchange and make warfare counterproductive. Ties with outsiders provide survival insurance in unpredictable environments, allowing the risk of food or water shortages to be spread across groups.
Polly Wiessner, an American anthropologist, studied “risk pooling” among the Bushmen and offers the following description of the delicate negotiations to obtain access to resources outside their territory. The reason these negotiations are done so carefully and indirectly is that competition is never absent from human relations:
In the 1970s, the average Bushman spent over three months a year away from home. Visitors and hosts engaged in a greeting ritual to show respect and seek permission to stay. The visiting party sat down under a shade tree at the periphery of the camp. After a few hours, the hosts would come to greet them. The visitors would tell about people and conditions at home in a rhythmic form of speech. The hosts would confirm each statement by repeating the last words followed by “eh he.” The host typically complained of food shortage, but the visitors could read how serious this was. If it was serious, they would say that they only had come for a few days. If the host did not stress shortages or problems, they knew they could stay longer. After the exchange, visitors were invited into camp where they often brought gifts, though they’d give them very subtly with great modesty so as not to arouse jealousy.
Because of interdependencies between groups with scarce resources, our ancestors probably never waged war on a grand scale until they settled down and began to accumulate wealth by means of agriculture. This made attacks on other groups more profitable. Instead of being the product of an aggressive drive, it seems that war is more about power and profit. This also implies, of course, that it’s hardly inevitable.
So much for Western origin stories, which depict our forebears as ferocious, fearless, and free. Unbound by social commitments and merciless toward their enemies, they seem to have stepped straight out of your typical action movie. Present-day political thought keeps clinging to these macho myths, such as the belief that we can treat the planet any way we want, that humanity will be waging war forever, and that individual freedom takes precedence over community.
None of this is in keeping with the old way, which is one of reliance on one another, of connection, of suppressing both internal and external disputes, because the hold on subsistence is so tenuous that food and safety are the top priorities. The women gather fruits and roots, the men hunt, and together they raise small families that survive only because of their embeddedness in a larger social fabric. The community is there for them and they are there for the community. Bushmen devote much time and attention to the exchange of small gifts in networks that cover many miles and multiple generations. They work hard to reach decisions by consensus, and fear ostracism and isolation more than death itself. Tellingly, one woman confided, “It is bad to die, because when you die you are alone.”
We can’t return to this preindustrial way of life. We live in societies of a mind-boggling scale and complexity that demand quite a different organization than humans ever enjoyed in their state of nature. Yet, even though we live in cities and are surrounded by cars and computers, we remain essentially the same animals with the same psychological wants and needs.
The Other Darwinism
I have received in a Manchester Newspaper a rather good squib,
showing that I have proved “might is right,” & therefore that
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Napoleon is right & every cheating Tradesman is also right.
—CHARLES DARWIN, 1860
Long ago, American society embraced competition as its chief organizing principle even though everywhere one looks—at work, in the street, in people’s homes—one finds the same appreciation of family, companionship, collegiality, and civic responsibility as everywhere else in the world. This tension between economic freedom and community values is fascinating to watch, which I do both as an outsider and an insider, being a European who has lived and worked in the United States for more than twenty-five years. The pendulum swings that occur at regular intervals between the main political parties of this nation show that the tension is alive and well, and that a hands-down winner shouldn’t be expected anytime soon.
This bipolar state of American society isn’t hard to understand. It’s not that different from the situation in Europe, except that all political ideologies on this side of the Atlantic seem shifted to the right. What makes American politics baffling is the way it draws upon biology and religion.
Evolutionary theory is remarkably popular among those on the conservative end of the spectrum, but not in the way biologists would like it to be. The theory figures like a secret mistress. Passionately embraced in its obscure persona of “Social Darwinism,” it is rejected as soon as the daylight shines on real Darwinism. In a 2008 Republican presidential debate, no less than three candidates raised their hand in response to the question “Who doesn’t believe in evolution?” No wonder that schools are hesitant to teach evolutionary theory, and that zoos and natural history museums avoid the e-word. Its hate-love relation with biology is the first great paradox of the American political landscape.
The Age of Empathy Page 3