Lying, cheating, provoking, antagonising–these are what each instalment would have us believe it means to ‘get real’. But take the time to look behind the scenes of programmes like these and you’ll see candidates being led on, boozed up and played off against each other in ways that are nothing less than shocking. It shows just how much manipulation it takes to bring out the worst in people.
Another reality show, Kid Nation, once tried throwing forty kids together in a ghost town in New Mexico in the hope they would wind up at each other’s throats. That didn’t happen. ‘Periodically they would find that we were getting along too well,’ one participant later recalled, ‘and they’d have to induce something for us to fight over.’24
You could say: What does it really matter? We all know it’s just entertainment.
But seldom is a story only a story. Stories can also be nocebos. In a recent study, psychologist Bryan Gibson demonstrated that watching Lord of the Flies-type television can make people more aggressive.25 In children, the correlation between seeing violent images and aggression in adulthood is stronger than the correlation between asbestos and cancer, or between calcium intake and bone mass.26
Cynical stories have an even more marked effect on the way we look at the world. In Britain, another study demonstrated that girls who watch more reality TV also more often say that being mean and telling lies are necessary to get ahead in life.27 As media scientist George Gerbner summed up: ‘[He] who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour.’28
It’s time we told a different kind of story.
The real Lord of the Flies is a story of friendship and loyalty, a story that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. Of course, it’s only one story. But if we’re going to make Lord of the Flies required reading for millions of teenagers, then let’s also tell them about the time real kids found themselves stranded on a deserted island. ‘I used their survival story in our social studies classes,’ one of the boys’ teachers at St Andrew’s High School in Tonga recalled years later. ‘My students couldn’t get enough of it.’29
So what happened to Peter and Mano? If you happen to find yourself on a banana plantation outside Tullera, near Lismore, you may well run into them: two older men, trading jokes, arms draped around each other’s shoulders. One the son of a big industrialist, the other from more humble roots. Friends for life.
After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren.
I looked down at the first page. ‘Life has taught me a great deal,’ it began, ‘including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.’
Peter Warner, September 2017. Photo © Maartje ter Horst.
Mano Totau, September 2017. Photo © Maartje ter Horst.
Part One
THE STATE OF NATURE
‘Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.’
David Hume (1711–1776)
Is that heart-warming story of six boys on the island of ‘Ata an aberration? Or does it signify something more profound? Is it an isolated anecdote, or an exemplary illustration of human nature?
Are we humans, in other words, more inclined to be good or evil?
It’s a question philosophers have grappled with for hundreds of years. Consider the Englishman Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose Leviathan set off a shockwave when it was published in 1651. Hobbes was censured, condemned and castigated, and yet we still know his name, while his criticasters are long forgotten. My edition of The Oxford History of Western Philosophy describes his magnum opus as ‘the greatest work of political philosophy ever written’.
Or take the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who penned a succession of volumes that got him into ever-deeper trouble. He was condemned, his books were burned and a warrant was issued for his arrest. But while the names of all his petty persecutors are lost to memory, Rousseau remains known to this day.
The two never met. By the time Rousseau was born, Hobbes had been dead thirty-three years. Nevertheless, they continue to be pitted against each other in the philosophical boxing ring. In one corner is Hobbes: the pessimist who would have us believe in the wickedness of human nature. The man who asserted that civil society alone could save us from our baser instincts. In the other corner, Rousseau: the man who declared that in our heart of hearts we’re all good. Far from being our salvation, Rousseau believed ‘civilisation’ is what ruins us.
Even if you’ve never heard of them, the opposing views of these two heavyweights are at the root of society’s deepest divides. I know of no other debate with stakes as high, or ramifications as far-reaching. Harsher punishments versus better social services, art school versus reform school, top-down management versus empowered teams, old-fashioned breadwinners versus baby-toting dads–take just about any debate you can think of and it goes back, in some way, to the opposition between Hobbes and Rousseau.
Let’s begin with Thomas Hobbes. He was one of the first philosophers to argue that if we really want to know ourselves, we have to understand how our ancestors lived. Imagine we were to travel back 50,000 years in time. How did we interact in those hunting and gathering days? How did we conduct ourselves when there was no code of law, no courts or judges, no prisons or police?
Hobbes thought he knew. ‘Read thyself,’ he wrote: dissect your own fears and emotions and you will ‘thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men upon the like occasions.’
When Hobbes applied this method to himself, the diagnosis he made was bleak indeed.
Back in the old days, he wrote, we were free. We could do whatever we pleased, and the consequences were horrific. Human life in that state of nature was, in his words, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. The reason, he theorised, was simple. Human beings are driven by fear. Fear of the other. Fear of death. We long for safety and have ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death’.
The result? According to Hobbes, ‘a condition of war of all against all.’ Bellum omnium in omnes.
But don’t worry, he assured us. Anarchy can be tamed and peace established–if we all just agree to relinquish our liberty. To put ourselves, body and soul, into the hands of a solitary sovereign. He named this absolute ruler after a biblical sea monster: the Leviathan.
Hobbes’ thinking provided the basic philosophical rationale for an argument that would be repeated thousands, nay, millions of times after him, by directors and dictators, governors and generals…
‘Give us power, or all is lost.’
Fast-forward about a hundred years and we encounter Jean-Jacques Rousseau one day, a no-name musician, walking to the prison at Vincennes, just outside Paris. He’s on his way to visit his friend Denis Diderot, a poor philosopher who’s been locked up for cracking an unfortunate joke about the mistress of a government minister.
And that’s when it happens. Having paused to rest underneath a shady tree, Rousseau is leafing through the latest issue of Mercure de France when his eye falls on an advertisement that will change his life. It’s a call for submissions to an essay contest being held by the Academy of Dijon. Entrants are instructed to answer the following question:
‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?
Rousseau immediately knows his answer. ‘At the moment of that reading,’ he later wrote, ‘I beheld another universe and became another man.’ In that instant, he realised that civil society is not a blessing, but a curse. As he continued on his way to where his innocent friend was incarcerated, he understood ‘that man is naturally good, and that it is from these institutions alone that
men become wicked’.
Rousseau’s essay won first prize.
In the years that followed, he grew to become one of the leading philosophers of his day. And, I have to say, his work is still a delight to read. Not only was Rousseau a great thinker, he was a gifted writer, too. Take this scathing passage about the invention of private property:
The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
Ever since the birth of that cursed civil society, Rousseau argued, things had gone wrong. Farming, urbanisation, statehood–they hadn’t lifted us out of chaos, but enslaved and doomed us. The invention of writing and the printing press had only made matters worse. ‘Thanks to typographic characters,’ he wrote, ‘the dangerous reveries of Hobbes […] will remain for ever.’
In the good old days before bureaucrats and kings, Rousseau believed that everything was better. Back when humans existed in a ‘state of nature’ we were still compassionate beings. Now we’d become cynical and self-interested. Once we’d been healthy and strong. Now we were indolent and feeble. Civilisation had, to his mind, been one giant mistake. We should never have squandered our freedom.
Rousseau’s thinking provided the basic philosophical rationale for an argument that would be repeated thousands, nay, millions of times, after him, by anarchists and agitators, free spirits and firebrands:
‘Give us liberty, or all is lost.’
So here we are, three hundred years later.
Few other philosophers have had as profound an impact on our politics, education and world view as these two. The whole science of economics became premised on the Hobbesian notion of human nature, which sees us as rational, self-serving individuals. Rousseau, for his part, has been enormously influential in education, due to his belief–revolutionary in the eighteenth century–that children should grow up free and unfettered.
To this day, the influence of Hobbes and Rousseau is staggering. Our modern camps of conservative and progressive, of realists and idealists, can be traced back to them. Whenever an idealist advocates more freedom and equality, Rousseau beams down approvingly. Whenever the cynic grumbles that this will only spark more violence, Hobbes nods in agreement.
The writings of these two do not make for light reading. Rousseau, in particular, leaves lots of room for interpretation. But these days we’re in a position to test their principal point of contention. Hobbes and Rousseau, after all, were armchair theorists, while we’ve been gathering scientific evidence for decades now.
In Part 1 of this book I’ll examine the question: which philosopher was right? Should we be grateful that our days of nature are behind us? Or were we once noble savages?
A great deal hinges on the answer.
3
The Rise of Homo puppy
1
The first thing to understand about the human race is that, in evolutionary terms, we’re babies. As a species we’ve only just emerged. Imagine that the whole history of life on earth spans just one calendar year, instead of four billion. Up until about mid-October, bacteria had the place to themselves. Not until November did life as we know it appear, with buds and branches, bones and brains.
And we humans? We made our entrance on 31 December, at approximately 11 p.m. Then we spent about an hour roaming around as hunter-gatherers, only getting around to inventing farming at 11:58 p.m. Everything else we call ‘history’ happened in the final sixty seconds to midnight: all the pyramids and castles, the knights and ladies, the steam engines and rocket ships.
In the blink of an eye, Homo sapiens populated the entire globe, from its coldest tundras to its hottest deserts. We even became the first species to blast off the planet and set foot on the moon.
But why us? Why wasn’t the first astronaut a banana? Or a cow? Or a chimpanzee?
These may sound like silly questions. But genetically we’re 60 per cent identical to bananas, 80 per cent indistinguishable from cows and 99 per cent the same as chimpanzees. It’s not exactly a given that we would milk cows, instead of them milking us, or that we would cage chimps and not the other way around. Why should that 1 per cent make all the difference?
For a long time we considered our privileged position to be part of God’s plan. The human race was better, smarter and superior to every other living thing–the pinnacle of His creation.
But imagine, again, that ten million years ago (on roughly 30 December), aliens visited the earth. Could they have predicted the rise of Homo sapiens? Not a chance. The genus Homo didn’t yet exist. The earth was literally still a planet of the apes, and certainly nobody was building cities, writing books, or launching rockets.
The uncomfortable truth is that we, too–the creatures that consider ourselves so unique–are the product of a blind process called evolution. We belong to a raucous family of mostly hairy creatures also known as primates. Right up to ten minutes before midnight, we even had other hominins for company.1 Until they mysteriously disappeared.
I distinctly remember when I first began to grasp the significance of evolution. I was nineteen and listening to a lecture about Charles Darwin on my iPod. I was depressed for a week. Sure, I’d learned about the English scientist as a kid, but I’d attended a Christian school and the biology teacher presented evolution as just another wacky theory. Um, not exactly, I would later learn.
The basic ingredients for the evolution of life are straightforward. You need:
Lots of suffering.
Lots of struggle.
Lots of time.
In short, the process of evolution comes down to this: animals have more offspring than they can feed. Those that are slightly better adapted to their environment (think thicker fur or better camouflage) have a slightly higher chance of surviving to procreate. Now imagine a friendly game of run till you’re dead, in which billions upon billions of creatures bite the dust, some before they can pass the baton to their offspring. Keep this footrace going long enough–say four billion years–and the minuscule variations between parents and children can branch out into a vast and varied tree of life.
That’s it. Simple, but brilliant.
For Darwin the biologist, who’d once considered becoming a priest, the impossibility of reconciling the cruelty of nature with the biblical story of creation ultimately destroyed his faith in God. Consider, he wrote, the parasitoid wasp, an insect that lays its eggs in a live caterpillar. Upon hatching, the larvae eat the caterpillar from the inside out, inducing a horrific, drawn-out death.
What kind of sick mind would think up something like that?
Nobody, that’s who. There is no mastermind, no grand design. Pain, suffering and struggle are merely the engines of evolution. Can you blame Darwin for putting off publishing his theory for years? Writing to a friend, he said it was ‘like confessing a murder’.2
Evolutionary theory doesn’t seem to have got any jollier since. In 1976, British biologist Richard Dawkins published his magnum opus on the instrumental role genes play in the evolution of life, tellingly titled The Selfish Gene. It’s a depressing read. Are you counting on nature to make the world a better place? Then Dawkins is clear: Don’t hold your breath. ‘Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,’ he writes, ‘because we are born selfish.’3
Forty years after its publication, the British public voted The Selfish Gene the most influential science book ever written.4 But countless readers felt dispirited upon reaching the end. ‘It presents an appallingly pessimistic view of human nature […] yet I cannot present any arguments to refute its point of view,’ wrote one. ‘I wish I
could unread it.’5
So here we are, Homo sapiens, the product of a brutish and protracted process. While 99.9 per cent of species have gone extinct, we’re still here. We’ve conquered the planet and–who knows?–the Milky Way could be next.
But why us?
You might assume that it’s because our genes are the most selfish of them all. Because we are strong and smart, lean and mean. And yet… are we? As for being strong: no, not really. A chimpanzee can clobber us without breaking sweat. A bull can effortlessly lance us with one sharp horn. At birth we’re utterly helpless, and after that we remain frail, slow, and not even all that good at escaping up trees.
Maybe it’s because we’re so clever? On the face of it, you might think so. Homo sapiens has a whopper of a brain that guzzles energy like a sauna at the North Pole. Our brains may account for just 2 per cent of our body weight, but they use 20 per cent of the calories we consume.6
But are human beings really all that brilliant? When we do a difficult sum or draw a pretty picture, we’ve usually learned that skill from someone else. Personally, for example, I can count to ten. Impressive, sure, but I doubt I could have come up with a numeric system by myself.
Scientists have been trying for years to figure out which animal has the most natural smarts. The standard procedure is to compare our intelligence to that of other primates like orangutans and chimpanzees. (Normally, the human subjects are toddlers, since they’ve had less time to crib off other people.) A good example is the series of thirty-eight tests designed by a research team in Germany, which assesses subjects on spatial awareness, calculation and causality.7 The chart below shows the results.
Humankind Page 5