Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (12 page)

It might seem incredible that some of our most profound actions as a species could be based on such a simple mechanism, but we must take seriously the possibility that the nature of our cultural survival vehicles evolved because it creates the conditions that make our peculiar and yet powerful kind of altruism possible, and this is why they have been such formidable vehicles of our success. As we saw with the amoebae, even a single locus is enough to motivate costly ultra-social actions when cooperation serves all of our genes’ interests and not just the gene for cooperation. Next time you feel that warm nationalistic pride at the sound of your national anthem or the news of one of your country’s soldiers’ valor, think of the amoebae!

Still, maybe this is just a fanciful story in which our similarities to the amoebae are merely coincidental, and not of great significance. So before we are willing to accept that we are just jumped-up social amoebae with jingoistic tendencies, we want to find that this explanation somehow fits with other sides of our behavior. It is easy to say that the amoebae surround themselves with like-minded individuals because the mere presence of an amoeba in the tower means it carries the tower-building gene, and it is the act of building the tower that is altruistic and normally self-sacrificial. But it is not so easy for us. Someone’s mere presence in your society might not tell you anything about whether they share your altruistic dispositions. So we are forced to look for more than mere presence, and this might be why as a species we are so sensitive to cues of a shared cultural history, and so eager to create them. All those shared beliefs, customs, religious systems, languages, accents, rituals, songs, styles of dress, and mannerisms are the cues we instinctively and subconsciously use to assess our cultural relatedness to others. Our societies’ tendency throughout history to restrict the movement of people and ideas, and to develop strong identities around their languages and cultures, makes these cues more reliable.

The search for shared history can take powerful, dangerous, and even amusing turns, but it is never dull, and always revealing of our nature. I do not know whether it is true but I have heard it said of the “troubles” between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland that Catholic youths upon encountering strangers would often ask them to recite the catechism as a way to determine if these strangers were fellow Catholics. Failure to get it right could mean a severe beating, or worse. I was once selling a house and it emerged that a person interested in it had attended the same university as me, although at a different time. I am sure this helped clinch the sale. In 1993, the then Welsh secretary (a position that at that time was a little like a governor general sent from London to oversee the running of a far-flung nation) was a man called John Redwood, and a member of the ruling Tory government. Redwood was prone to controversy, but his most famous gaffe came at a public meeting in Wales at which everyone sang the Welsh anthem. Redwood didn’t know the words, but aware this would offend the Welsh, he attempted to mime them. His strangely animated attempt was caught on camera and Redwood was broadcast to the nation looking like a marionette on the end of its puppeteer’s strings. At America’s Super Bowl in 2011 Christina Aguilera lost her way singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and suffered weeks of abuse on the Internet. Ask any Briton what “LBW” means and they are likely to know, but it is doubtful that a visiting American would. Someone from America is likely to know what “RBI” means, but it is doubtful a British person will (hint: they are both related to sports).

I use some of these examples whimsically, but that is not to say the emotions that accompany them are mild or indifferent. Our special and limited form of cultural nepotism can even produce a disposition toward self-sacrifice that is eerily like that of the social amoebae. The journalist Sebastian Junger in his book
War
describes the experiences of a small platoon of U.S. soldiers in a remote, brutal, and violent region of Afghanistan known as the Korangal Valley. Junger spent time embedded with these men, who were on their own, with few amenities, ramshackle shelters, almost completely cut off at any given time from outside aid, and almost constantly under attack from deadly guerrilla forces. The men knew their fates rested on how well they performed together as a fighting force, and Junger came to realize that at the core of the platoon was a commitment on the part of each of the men to sacrifice his life for the others in battle.

It is tempting to romanticize such a commitment as the expression of noble heroes willing to die for their comrades, and this is the popular image of war films and national propaganda. But we have to ask ourselves how such dispositions could ever become widespread when for every noble hero there are many others of less noble disposition whose genes survive at the hero’s expense. We saw that the solution to this problem lies in recognizing that a disposition toward self-sacrifice can evolve so long as those who share it can identify each other. Then the deaths of some copies of the genes carrying this disposition help other copies of those genes to survive. Weirdly, a tendency to give your life can be adaptive to the gene that causes that disposition by virtue of promoting copies of itself that reside in others. Put more bluntly, your disposition toward self-sacrifice can be beneficial to you so long as you can surround yourself with like-minded people, because one of those people could save
your
life.

For many soldiers, one of the most disabling fears is the thought of being wounded and left to die, or of being captured and tortured. It can cause soldiers to hold back and not take chances. And yet, it is one of the tenets of small-scale battle that the group that escalates to violence most quickly often comes out on top. Junger describes how the men’s commitments to each other reduced their fears, and allowed them to fight more confidently. This meant the platoon was more likely to be triumphant in battle. And so, remarkably, the
men
were individually more likely to survive when they were all prepared to die for each other
. This is not to say that anyone had a good chance of surviving, just a better one when they all pulled together. Holding back is not an option because anyone who shows signs of wavering in their commitment knows they will be left alone on the battlefield, where they would be almost certain to die. Generals know that groups of men who fight together are more likely to survive, and this is why armies spend so much time drilling these instincts into combat troops. But it might just be true that the dispositions to behave this way are already a deep part of our psychology.

A willingness to die in battle—or at least some sort of disposition for it—might reside to a greater or lesser degree in all of us as an emotion that draws on the same kinds of motivations that get us to protect our own families, although here the group assumes the role of the family. It might indeed be this part of our makeup that responds to real threats, but that can also be exploited by propagandists to produce Kamikaze-like or other suicidal behaviors. It is certainly relevant to this discussion that the political narrative that is offered up to justify such acts is normally one of intergroup conflict and great honor bestowed on one’s family. The act of suicide then becomes a way that one set of genes or ideas promotes others like itself by killing off ones that compete with it. Imagine what havoc a suicide bomber amoeba could do that broke away from its tower and somehow joined and then destroyed a competing tower, perhaps by releasing a poison. Its death would promote large numbers of copies of its altruism gene in the others back in its tower. The psychology of suicide bombers could be just this simple and cold-blooded, derived ultimately from our special and limited form of cultural nepotism.

Taking a step back, our more general tendencies to help others in our groups at some expense to ourselves should not be taken as evidence that we are “nice” or robotically dedicated to our groups. We are nice, but we should recognize this as an emotion that encourages us to cooperate, because cooperation pays individual—not just group—dividends. Indeed, our social nepotism, being based on just a single locus, is an emotion that is easily overrun by the cacophony of our other genes when their interests might be better served by selfishness. We can be cooperative and collaborative on the one hand, opportunistic, calculating, and selfish on the other, even toward members of our own groups. This is the unavoidable tension of group living: even with shared fates and shared purpose, what is best for your group can conflict with what is best for you. Soldiers in combat platoons, for instance, know that their colleagues will become less helpful near the end of their tours. When soldiers have fewer than thirty days remaining on their tours, they are called “short timers” or just “short,” as if to acknowledge that they have shifted out of the mutual aid society.

In a less deadly situation, the Tour de France bicycle race covers around 2,000 miles in a series of long stages spread out over several weeks. During a race a small group of riders might try to lead what is called a “breakaway,” riding off to the front of the main pack of riders. The riders in this small group must then work together, taking turns to ride in the lead, the rest saving energy by riding in the slipstream behind the lead rider. Every time a rider takes the lead, he is sacrificing some of his endurance, and this benefits all of the other riders. But it is a sacrifice that each of them must make to have any chance of staying ahead of the larger pack. On the other hand, cyclists in the breakaway pack will often try to do less than their share, and the pack will sometimes swerve and veer to try to shake them off. But it is when the race nears the finish line that the riders are clearly revealed not as selfless altruists but as self-interested competitors. If this breakaway group has managed to stay ahead of the larger pack behind them, the mutual altruism now unravels, the riders break ranks and sprint to the line, doing everything they can to beat those they have been helping.

Even the social amoebae’s sociality turns out to be shrewd and calculating. The outwardly serene towers of cooperating altruists conceal a society of competing strains for which making the tower is an act draped with suspicion and the potential for duplicity and manipulation. The tower provides only one route into the future, but it is open to whichever amoebae can get to the top first. Some strains of related amoebae within the stalk cheat, advancing more of their members into this privileged collection of spores. Even before the tower is constructed, a carpet made up of many different strains moves more slowly across the forest floor than those composed of a single strain or of just a few. The delays arise from conflicts and jostling over desirable positions in the moving mass, just as the selfish riders in the breakaway packs ultimately slow their escape from the larger pack behind them.

Before leaving this discussion of how our altruism toward members of our societies might have evolved, I want to point out how the principle of identifying like-minded others invades another part of our lives: it is the same principle that governs our altruistic dispositions to favor our actual relatives, not just our honorary ones. Our nationalism really is a special case of a disposition to protect “our own.” Relatives, by definition, share many of their genes, so they are also likely to share any disposition that someone might have to “help relatives.” Surrounding yourself with relatives makes it likely you will receive as well as dispense benefits. There is nothing special about relatives, then, at least not from an evolutionary point of view, except that our relatives share many of their genes with us.

This weight of shared genes is why our familial nepotistic emotions are so strong—many genes are pulling in the same direction. In fact, the arbitrariness of the disposition we have toward relatives is revealed when we realize that we don’t really know who our relatives are—we merely assume they are the people around us in early life. This rule can go wrong, as when infants are mistakenly assigned to parents other than their own in hospital, but then reared normally with no one knowing. But this just proves that as we don’t really know who our relatives are, we use a rule of thumb. And that rule of thumb has worked well throughout our evolutionary past as a means of identifying people who are likely to share genes and hence our altruistic dispositions. Similar rules of thumb govern our dispositions to help other members of our societies.

Some readers might think the idea of a mutual aid society falls short of explaining cases in which our nepotistic help feels one-sided, as in the aid we altruistically pass on to our children. Many parents live in the probably vain hope that their children will return their favors one day. But if it is vain, why do we bother to help them so much? Thoughtful as it might be for children to help their parents, the altruistic tendencies we think of as our love for our children do not depend for their evolution on getting children to reciprocate. In fact, to expect this reciprocity is to misunderstand the nature of the altruism we are attempting to explain. That altruism is not based on getting something back from the person you helped; instead, it is based on attracting benefits from others who share your disposition to behave altruistically. The principle of attracting benefits is still fulfilled in the parent-offspring relationship because most of us will have received the same sort of help from our own parents, with whom we probably share the genes for helping relatives. The familial mutual aid society is a generational one.

THE CO-EVOLUTION OF WAR, PAROCHIALISM,
AND MORALISTIC AGGRESSION

WHATEVER THE
social capabilities of the little jellylike amoebae, we can expect ours will be far more developed, and not just because of our vastly greater intelligence. The amoebae in their fleeting moments of building the tower are like Macbeth’s poor player, who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.” By comparison, all of human life is played out on the social stage, and so we are entitled to expect that selection will have acted strongly on the emotions we carry to make it work. Not only would genes, or culturally transmitted ideas, have spread that give us that warm glow from cooperating with other members of our group, but elements of an entire psychology of cooperation would have sprung up to encourage it. Having a conscience keeps us from straying into selfish territory; feeling guilt puts a brake on our appetites; empathy, by getting us to feel what others feel, helps us to be helpful to them, and also reduces any tendency to harm others because we can feel their pain; shame motivates us to put things right; and dispositions to be kind and generous build reputations and attract allies.