The Age of Empathy (5 page)

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, and 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:

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

L
ong 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.

Social Darwinism is all about what Gordon Gekko called “the evolutionary spirit.” It depicts life as a struggle in which those who make it shouldn’t let themselves be dragged down by those who don’t. This ideology was unleashed by British political philosopher Herbert Spencer, who in the nineteenth century translated the laws of nature into business language, coining the phrase “survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly attributed to Darwin). Spencer decried attempts to equalize society’s playing field. It would be counterproductive, he felt, for the “fit” to feel any obligation toward the “unfit.” In dense tomes that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, he said of the poor that “the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.”

The United States listened attentively. The business world ate it up. Calling competition a law of biology, Andrew Carnegie felt it improved the human race. John D. Rockefeller even married it with religion, concluding that the growth of a large business “is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” This religious angle—still visible in the so-called Christian Right—forms the second great paradox. Whereas the book found in most American homes and every hotel room urges us on almost every page to show compassion,
Social Darwinists scoff at such feelings, which only keep nature from running its course. Poverty is dismissed as proof of laziness, and social justice as a weakness. Why not simply let the poor perish? I find it hard to see how Christians can embrace such a harsh ideology without a massive case of cognitive dissonance, but many seem to do so.