Were we the Nile Perch for the Neanderthals? What was special about us that they couldn’t compete with? In an editorial in Astounding Science Fact and Fiction, John Campbell Jr proposed that we have been selecting ourselves – in very elvish ways – from earliest times. Campbell credited his idea to the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Morgan, but in truth Campbell contributed most of the story.
It runs: we select ourselves, through puberty rituals and other tribal rites. To some extent these interact with our religious stories, but as a socialising technique the puberty ritual may have preceded all but the most basic of animistic beliefs. It certainly sits at the base of our Make-a-Homo-sapiens kit. But the Neanderthals may not have possessed such a cultural kit, at least not in the same effective form. If they didn’t, they would probably have been much like Rincewind’s edge people, indeed like all the other great apes: settled and (mostly) contented in their Garden of Eden, but not going anywhere.
What is so special about puberty rituals? What story makes them a necessary part of how we evolved ourselves into the storytelling animal? Just this, said Campbell: puberty rituals select the breeders. This is the standard mechanism of ‘unnatural selection’ used to breed new varieties of dahlias or dogs, only here it bred new varieties of humans or stabilised existing varieties. The wizards have always known about unnatural selection, and it is reified on Discworld as the God of Evolution in The Last Continent. Unnatural selection is not just a matter of genetics, either. If you don’t get to breed, then you don’t have the opportunity to pass on your cultural prejudices to your children. At best you can try to pass them on to other people’s children.
Here’s how it works. Over there, we see a group of half a dozen lads, perhaps aged 11 to 14. The older men have prepared an ordeal, and the kids must endure this to become accepted as full members of the tribe: that is, breeders. Perhaps they will be circumcised or otherwise wounded, and the wounds will be ‘dressed’ with painful herbs; perhaps they will be whipped with scorpions or biting insects; perhaps their faces will be seared with red-hot metal brands; perhaps (indeed, usually) the older men will violate them sexually. They will be starved, purged, beaten … oh yes, we are a very inventive species in this regard.
Those who ran away were not accepted into the group,5 and so were not breeders. So, in particular, they were not our ancestors, because they weren’t anyone’s ancestors. In contrast, those who submitted to the humiliation were rewarded by acceptance into the tribe. Campbell’s insight was that these puberty rituals selected against the immediate animal avoidance-of-pain response, and selected for both imagination and heroism: ‘If I bear this pain now I will be rewarded by getting the privileges these old men get, and I can imagine that they went through exactly this, and survived.’
Later on it was the priests who administered the pain. That is how they became the priests, and how successive generations came to ‘respect’ them and their teachings. By then, humiliation had become its own reward, at both ends of the instrument of torture (see Small Gods), and humans had been selected for obedience to authority.
Indeed, Stanley Milgram’s book Obedience to Authority shows just how obedient we are, by using the authority of a white laboratory coat to force people to torture other people, remotely. The other people were actually actors, responding to ‘mild’, ‘strong’ and ‘excruciating’ pain – or so the experimental subject was led to believe – with the appropriate actions. Milgram’s book shows how human beings invented authority and obedience, both very elvish sentiments. That ingredient in the story of our evolution explains Adolf Eichmann as well as Einstein: we won’t go any deeper into that issue here, because we’ve already covered it in The Privileged Ape and Figments of Reality.
A few people refused Milgram’s instructions, though, and these mavericks have always been generated either by experience (some of the refusers had survived concentration camps, or had been otherwise tortured themselves) or by the Make-a-Human kit itself. Many of these kits generate a few mavericks, and we are optimistic about the Western one that uses Hollywood films to laud resistance to authority. But perhaps that comes only by working through the right genetics and the right home background.
Many of these ancient rituals have become empty now. Jews use circumcision to test the parents’ commitment, rather than that of the baby, who has no choice. Jack was the Boston foreskin collector in the early 1960s; it was a very good source of the living human skin samples that he needed for his research on pigment cells in the skin. He saw a lot of parents, many of whom went very pale and a few of whom fainted: more men did that than women. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah is very daunting to the child, in prospect, though, as with circumcision, nobody fails it – not any more. But people did fail in the past, with serious consequences. For example in the ghettos, where only a third of the population married, the mothers of the ‘best’ girls chose only the boys who performed their Bar Mitzvah best. This would account for the kind of verbal success that the Jewish faction of many Western populations has achieved. Another explanation, that Jews were permitted verbal abilities only because land- or property-owning was denied them, is a contextual constraint within which they had to live. Why they were good enough verbally to succeed despite that constraint is the interesting question, and Bar Mitzvah competition and selection of breeders is a persuasive answer.
Gypsy populations provide a possible counterexample, though, with very little testing of young men before marriage, which frequently takes place at ages that other cultures consider to be pre-pubertal. The few gypsies who have been successful in Western cultures have not been primarily verbally successful. Music provides a good contrast, with gypsies excelling in dance while classical composers and instrumental soloists are often Jewish. Of course, gypsies also share our common selective ancestry, if we’re right about puberty rites being ancestral and effectively universal.
The other great apes don’t torture their children for ritual purposes, and the other hominids like Neanderthals probably didn’t either. So they haven’t produced a civilisation. Sorry, but that which does not kill us does appear to have made us strong.
There is another story that we now tell, about what happened to the young men around the time when people were inventing agriculture, which explains barbaric societies. Don’t get us wrong here: we don’t mean that torturing adolescents is barbaric. It’s not, from the tribal point of view. It is an entirely proper way to get them accepted into the tribe. ‘We’ve done it ever since god-on-high made the world, and to prove it, here’s the holy circumcision-knife we’ve always used.’ No, from the tribal point of view, the barbarians that we have in mind are awful; they don’t have any rules or traditions … Even the Manky tribe, over that way a couple of miles, is better than them; at least the Mankies have traditions, even if they are different from ours. And we’ve stolen some of their women, and they have the most amazing tricks …
The problem is that lot up on the hillside, the young men who have been expelled from the tribe because they failed the rituals, or went of their own accord (and so failed the test anyway). ‘Couple of my brothers up there with ’em, and Joel’s boy, and of course the four kids that were left when Gertie died. Oh, they’re all right on their own; it’s when they’re in that gang together, all doing their hair in that same funny way to be different, that you lock up the sheep and let the dogs loose. They’ve got these funny words like “honour” and “bravery” and “pillage” and “hero” and “our gang”. When my brothers come down the valley to my farm – by themselves – I give ’em some food. But some gang of young men, I’m not saying it was that lot and I’m not saying it wasn’t, set the Brown’s farm alight, just for the hell of it …’
In any cowboy film we find the message that barbarism is opposed to tribalism, that honour and tradition are not good bedfellows. And that, having selected himself or herself for imagination and the ability to endure pain for future pleasure, Homo sapiens is now prepared to die for his or her beli
efs, for his or her gang, for honour, for hatred, or for love.
Civilisation, as we know it, seems to combine elements of both ways of human culture, tribal by tradition and barbaric for honour, for pride. Nations are internally tribal, but present a barbarian face to other nations. Our extelligence tells us stories, and we tell our children stories, and the stories guide us about what to be or do in what circumstances. Shakespeare is the ultimate civiliser, in this view. His plays were composed against the barbarian background, in a city where you could see heads on spikes and ritually dismembered bodies; all of them were set on the tribal, traditional base that is most of human life, most of the time. He tells us very persuasively that evil fails in the end, that love conquers, and that laughter – the greatest gift that barbarism brought to tribalism – is one of the sharpest weapons, because it civilises.
Cohens are the hereditary High Priest lineage of the Jews. Jack was once asked, in Jerusalem, whether he was not proud to be a Cohen, in view of the noble Jewish history that the High Priests had promoted. Jack sees this nobility as based in about six inches of blood in the streets, nearly all of it other people’s, so he is not proud. Instead, to the extent that any of us is responsible for what their ancestors did, he is ashamed. He loves Small Gods, in much the way he enjoys the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur: it engenders a feeling of repentance, and he can always find plenty to repent. He is sure that this emotion – guilt – is a legacy of the Morgan/Campbell selection of his ancestors through tribal rituals.
Tribesmen aren’t ‘proud’; for them, everything that isn’t mandatory is forbidden, so what is there to be proud about? You can praise your children for doing things right, or admonish or punish them for doing things wrong, but you can’t take pride in what you – a fully fledged member of the tribe – do. That comes with the territory. However, you can be guilty about not having done the things that you should have done. Having said that, High Priests waging war on dissenters or neighbouring tribes, leading to atrocities like heads on spikes, is straight barbarism.
The distinction between tribalism and barbarism is illuminated by the story of Dinah in chapter 34 of Genesis. Dinah, an Israelite, was the daughter of Leah and Jacob, and ‘when Schechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her’. Then Schechem fell in love with her, and wanted to make her his wife. But the sons of Jacob felt that maybe Schechem had gone about things in the wrong order: ‘… the men were grieved, and they were very wroth, because he had wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob’s daughter, which thing ought not to be done’. So when Hamor, the father of Schechem, asked for approval of the marriage, and for an intermingling of his tribe with the Israelites, the sons of Jacob came up with a cunning plan.
They told the Hivites that they would agree to the proposal, but only after the Hivites had circumcised themselves, so that they were just like the Israelites. The Hivites were willing to go along with this, because they told themselves that ‘These men are peaceable with us, therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for the land, behold, it is large enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters’. The decision was made, and ‘every male was circumcised, all that went out of the gate of the city’. And they stood around in pain for a couple of days. At that point, Dinah’s brothers Simeon and Levi hauled Dinah out of Schechem’s house, put all the Hivite men to the sword, destroyed their city and took all their domestic animals, their wealth, their children and their wives. This story of deceit and betrayal has not been given much circulation in recent years; it doesn’t appeal to people’s sense of humour any more, as it once did.
At any rate, in that story, the Hivite response to Schechem’s crime is tribal, but the Israelites behave like barbarians. The Hivites, after their initial mistake, want to make amends and coexist peacefully, and they’re prepared to offer dowries and other concessions to try to make up for what Schechem did. But all that matters to the Israelites is a twisted kind of ‘honour’, in which cruelty, murder and theft are justified to protect Dinah’s reputation. Or, more likely, their own sense of manhood.
A favourite Discworld character is Cohen the Barbarian, a satire on sword-and-sorcery heroes like Conan the Barbarian, all muscles and trolls’ teeth necklaces and testosterone-propelled heroism. He first appears in the second Discworld novel The Light Fantastic:
‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Rincewind. ‘Cohen’s a great chap, neck like a bull, got chest muscles like a sack of footballs. I mean, he’s the Disc’s greatest warrior, a legend in his own lifetime. I remember my grandad telling me he saw him … my grandad telling me he … my grandad …’
He faltered under the gimlet gaze.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh. Of course. Sorry.’
‘Yesh,’ said Cohen, and sighed. ‘Thatsh right, boy. I’m a lifetime in my own legend.’
Cohen, by then 87, is the sort of barbarian whose hordes ride into town, set the houses on fire and look wistfully at the women. But he’s no softie: as he ages, he goes hard, like oak. In Interesting Times he explains to Rincewind why, in the area known as the Ramtops, there’s no future in the Barbarian business any more:
‘Fences and farms, fences and farms everywhere. You kill a dragon these days, people complain. You know what? You know what happened?’
‘No. What happened?’
‘Man came up to me, said my teeth were offensive to trolls. What about that, eh?’
According to Jewish tradition, Cohens are the true Cohanim, the lineal descendants of Aaron. Recent research into the genetics of Cohens has turned up some interesting findings about the very prideful (barbaric) issue of Cohen heredity. Professor Vivian Moses (yes, indeed …) and a group of scientists in Israel decided to check whether the tradition has any factual basis. Just as the mitochondrial DNA sequence traces female heredity, so the Y-chromosome, possessed only by males, can be used to trace male heredity.
There has been an interesting division of the Jewish peoples, and that provides a scientific check on the story of the Cohanim. During the Diaspora, some Jews remained in North Africa, but one large population went into Spain. They are known as Sephardi, and the Rothschilds, Montefiores and other banking families are all Sephardic. Another, more diffuse population went into middle-Europe, especially Poland, and they are known as Ashkenazi. Moses and his colleagues looked at the Y-chromosomes of representative Sephardi and Ashkenazi Cohens and non-Cohens (‘Israelites’). They found characteristic DNA sequences, specific to Cohanim, in about half of the Cohens that they tested, but with small and characteristic differences in the three groups. From these differences it is reasonable to suppose that Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews separated rather less than 2,000 years ago, and that all Cohens were a single group only 2,500 years ago.
This looks like a very nice story, with the DNA evidence supporting the expected history. But science is the best guard against believing things because you want to. There is a factor that Moses and his colleagues didn’t explicitly consider, and it needs to be explained away, because it makes those figures much too good.
Most human groups pretend to practise monogamy, but like swans and gibbons and other creatures that we thought were faithful for life, there are plenty of adulterous relationships and children ‘whose legal and biological parentage differ’. In English society, about one child in seven is in that position, and the proportion doesn’t differ much between the slums of Liverpool and the stockbroker belt of Maidenhead.6
The most restrained people that we know, in this regard, are the Amish of Eastern Pennsylvania and other parts of the United States, for whom the figure is a mere one in twenty. So, to err on the safe side, let’s assume that all of the Mrs Cohens, from the present day back 100 generations to the sons of Aaron, were as well behaved as the Amish. Then the proportion of Cohen males with Aaron’s Y-chromosome should be 0.95100, which is considerably less than one in a hundred. So how can it be as high
as one in two?
There is a possible explanation, consonant with what we know about human sexuality, or at least with what John Symons, an expert on human sexual practices, says in his books. According to many surveys of sexual behaviour, going right back to Alfred Kinsey around 1950, women practise adultery with men of both higher and lower status. The two situations frequently occur in different social contexts, with women ‘doing favours for’ higher status men (think Clinton), but going down-market for ‘a bit of rough’. Overwhelmingly often, however, when a baby results the father is of higher status than the woman’s husband or regular partner.
This implies that if Mrs Cohen, living in a ghetto or any other pre-dominantly Jewish society, wants to go up-market, her only choices are other Cohens. So the maintenance of the Aaron Y-chromosome may have been assured by sexual snobbery rather than amazing fidelity, and that’s a much more likely story.
1 This is why we have been forced to invent differences of religious belief, which give us an excuse to kill each other because They are so dramatically different from us True Human Beings – they don’t even know that spilling salt, and then failing to hop three time around the table, invites a demon into your home. So it’s all right to wipe the False Humans, Them, from the face of the planet.
2 The! is a symbol denoting a particular clicking sound.
3 A meal that should see you through the week, as the old music hall joke reminds us.
4 Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika still have their cichlid species flocks; your local tropical-fish shop will have representatives.
5 ‘Going walkabout’ seems to have been a way to avoid this torture for at least some Australian tribes.
6 Yes, we know you don’t believe this, but … The first reliable data are in Elliott Philipp’s analysis of blood-groups from families in high-rise apartments in Liverpool in the late 1960s, published in 1973. There, 10 per cent of the ‘legal paternities’ were biologically impossible. So, correcting for the cases where the milkman had the same blood-group as the legal father, about 13–17 per cent were ‘discrepant paternities’, as the coy phrase goes. Hundreds of births in Maidenhead, in the stockbroker-belt, yielded the same proportions. American figures for the 1980s were about 10 per cent, but these were underestimates because they were not corrected as above. That’s the thing about science: it tells you stuff you didn’t expect. It gets worse. Or maybe you feel it gets better. At any rate many animals that until recently were famed for their fidelity, such as swans, turn out to be partial to a bit on the side. That ubiquitous beast, the monogamus, is rapidly going extinct.
The Science of Discworld II Page 15