The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (32 page)

Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the "goal" of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to bring the reciprocation. The second goal always entailed the first in Axelrod's computer, and in human society it often does. But when it doesn't — when we can look nice without really being so nice, or can be profitably mean without getting caught — don't be surprised if an ugly part of human nature surfaces. Hence secret betrayals of all gradations, from the everyday to the Shakespearean. And hence the general tendency of people to burnish their moral reputations; reputation is the object of the game for this "moral" animal. And hence hypocrisy; it seems to flow from two natural forces: the tendency toward grievance
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— to publicize the sins of others — and the tendency to obscure our own sins.

The evolution of George Williams's 1966 musings about reciprocal aid into a compelling body of explanation is one of the great feats of twentieth-century science. It involved ingenious and distinctly modern tools of analysis, and brought momentous results. Though the theory of reciprocal altruism isn't proved in the sense that theories of physics can be proved, it rightly commands much confidence within biology, and that confidence should grow as the connection of genes to the human brain becomes clearer in the coming decades. Though the theory isn't as arcane or as mind-bending as the theories of relativity or quantum mechanics, in the end it may alter the world-view of the human species more deeply and more problematically.
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Darwin is sometimes thought of as an excessively decent man. Recall the assessment of one of his biographers, the psychiatrist John Bowlby. Bowlby found Darwin's conscience "overactive" and "overbearing." While admiring Darwin's lack of pretension and his "strong moral principles," Bowlby believed that "these qualities were unfortunately developed prematurely and to excessive degree," leaving him "prone to self-reproach" and to "periods of chronic anxiety and episodes of fairly severe depression."
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Self-reproach was indeed second nature to Darwin. He recalled, as a boy, "thinking that people were admiring me, in one instance for perseverance, and another for boldness in climbing a low tree," and at the same time feeling "that I was vain, and contempt of myself."
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As he grew up, self-criticism became a kind of tick, a reflexive humility; an appreciable fraction of his voluminous correspondence consists of apologies for itself. "How shockingly untidy this letter
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is," he wrote as a teenager. "I find I am writing most precious nonsense," he wrote in his twenties. "I have written an unreasonably long & dull letter, so farewell," he wrote in his thirties.
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And so on.

Nighttime was a feast for Darwin's doubts. Then, according to his son Francis, "anything which had vexed or troubled him in the day would haunt him." He might lie awake rehashing a conversation with a neighbor, worried that he had somehow caused offense. He might lie awake thinking about letters he hadn't yet answered. "He used to say that if he did not answer them, he had it on his conscience afterwards," Francis recalled.
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Darwin's moral sentiments covered much more than social obligations. Many years after the voyage of the Beagle, he was still plagued by the memory of slaves being tortured in Brazil. (Aboard the Beagle he had antagonized the captain by sarcastically probing his defense of slavery.) Even the suffering of animals Darwin found unbearable. Francis remembered him once returning from a walk "pale and faint from having seen a horse ill-used, and from the agitation of violently remonstrating with the man."
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There is no denying Bowlby's point: Darwin's conscience was a very painful thing.

Then again, natural selection never promised us a rose garden. It doesn't "want" us to be happy. It "wants" us to be genetically prolific. And in Darwin's case it didn't do too badly. He had ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. So as we try to discern some of the finer features that natural selection has designed into the conscience, there is no glaring reason not to use Darwin's conscience as Exhibit A: an example of a basically sound adaptation. If it goaded him into doing things that amplified his genetic legacy, it may have been working as designed, even if the goading hurt.
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Of course, happiness is great. There's every reason to seek it. There's every reason for psychiatrists to try to instill it, and no reason for them to mold the kinds of people natural selection "wants." But therapists will be better equipped to make people happy once they understand what natural selection does "want," and how, with humans, it "tries" to get it. What burdensome mental appliances are we stuck with? How, if at all, can they be defused? And at what cost — to ourselves and to others? Understanding what is and isn't pathological from natural selection's point of view can help us
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confront things that are pathological from our point of view. One way to approach that understanding is to try and figure out when Darwin's conscience was and wasn't malfunctioning.

One striking feature of the rewards and punishments dished out by the conscience is their lack of sensuality. The conscience doesn't make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that's wrong or something that's right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we're in touch with higher truths. Truly a shameless ploy.

But effective — effective all over the world. Kin selection has ensured that people everywhere feel deeply guilty about, say, grievously harming or neglecting a brother or sister, a daughter or son, even a niece or nephew. And reciprocal altruism has extended the sense of obligation — selectively — beyond the circle of kin. Is there a single culture in which neglecting a friend is a guiltless and widely approved behavior? We would all be skeptical if some anthropologist claimed to have found one.

Reciprocal altruism may have left a more diffuse imprint on the conscience as well. Several decades ago, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg tried to construct a natural sequence of human moral development, ranging from the toddler's simple conception of "bad" (that which parents punish you for) to the detached weighing of abstract laws. The higher rungs of Kohlberg's ladder, the ones occupied by ethical philosophers (and, presumably, by Kohlberg), are far from species-typical. But progression through what he called "stage three" seems to be standard in diverse cultures.
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That stage entails a desire to be known as "nice" and "good." Which is to say: a desire to be known as a reliable reciprocal altruist, a person with whom one could profitably associate. This impulse helps give consensual moral codes their tremendous power; we all want to do — or, more precisely, to be seen doing — what everyone says is good.

Beyond these sorts of basic and apparently universal dimensions
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of moral sentiment, the contents of the conscience begin to vary. Not only do the particular norms enforced by collective praise and censure differ from culture to culture (another reminder of the huge variability human nature leaves room for); within any one culture, the strictness of obedience varies from person to person. Some people, like Darwin, have big and acute consciences and lie awake at night reflecting on their crimes. Some people don't.

Now, some aspects of Darwin's distinctively strong scruples presumably had to do with distinctive genes. Behavioral geneticists say the heritability of the cluster of traits they call "conscientiousness" is between .30 and .40.
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That is: about one-third of differences among people (in a typical late-twentieth-century social environment, at least) can be traced to their different genes. But that still leaves two-thirds traceable to environment. In large part, the conscience seems to be an example of the genetically endowed knobs of human nature getting environmentally tuned to widely varied settings. Everyone feels guilt. But not everyone feels it acutely, as Darwin did, over everyday conversations. Everyone empathizes with human suffering at times, and at other times feels (if only briefly) that suffering is justified, that retribution is warranted. But the very fact that slaves were being brutally punished as Darwin visited Brazil suggests that not everyone shared his feelings about when empathy and retribution are, respectively, in order.

The questions are: Why has natural selection given us a fairly flexible conscience, rather than fixing its contents innately? And how has natural selection arranged for the conscience to be shaped? Why and how are the morality knobs of human nature tunable?

As for the "how" question: Darwin himself saw his moral tuning as beginning early, under the guidance of kin. That he could call himself, on balance, "a boy humane" he credited to the "instruction and example of my sisters. I doubt indeed whether humanity is a natural or innate quality." His plans to start an insect collection were complicated when, "on consulting my sister, I concluded that it was not right to kill insects for the sake of making a collection."
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Chief moralist was sister Caroline, nine years his elder, who functioned as surrogate mother after their mother's death in 1817, when Darwin was eight. Darwin recalls that Caroline was "too zealous
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in trying to improve me; for I clearly remember ... saying to myself when about to enter a room where she was — 'What will she blame me for now?' "
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Darwin's father was also a force to be reckoned with, a large, imposing, often austere man. His severity has spawned theories about the psychodynamics between father and son, and they have often not been flattering to the father. One Darwin biographer summarized a common profile of Robert Darwin: "his shape is that of a domestic bully and his effect on his son a continuing disaster of neurosis and disability."
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The emphasis placed by Darwin on the moral influence of kin has been affirmed by behavioral science. Parents and other authority figures, including older kin, serve as role models and as tutors, molding the conscience with praise and blame. This is basically the way Freud described the formation of the superego — which, in his scheme, encompasses the conscience — and he seems to have gotten it basically right. A child's peers also provide positive and negative feedback, encouraging conformity with playground norms.

It makes sense, of course, that kin should critically guide moral development. Because they share so many genes with the young child, they have a strong, though not unbounded, reason to give useful guidance. By the same token, the child has reason to follow. There is, as Robert Trivers noted, cause for skepticism on the part of children — cause, for example, to discount parental sermons about sharing equally with siblings. But in other realms — how to deal with friends, with strangers — the grounds for parental manipulation diminish, and thus the grounds for offspring obedience grow. In any event, it is clear that the voice of close kin carries a special resonance. Darwin says he reacted to sister Caroline's pedantic nagging by making himself "dogged so as not to care what she might say."
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Whether he succeeded is another question. In his letters to Caroline from college, he apologizes for his penmanship, makes strained efforts to convince her of his religious piety, and generally evinces continued concern about what she might say.

The channels of paternal influence also seem to have been kept wide open by Darwin's brain. The young Darwin idolized his father and committed to lifelong memory both his sage advice and his
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crudest rebuke — "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."
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He devoutly wanted his father's approval, and worked hard to get it. "I think my father was a little unjust to me when I was young," he said, "but afterwards I am thankful to think I became a prime favourite with him." When Darwin made this remark to one of his daughters, it left her with "a vivid recollection of the expression of happy reverie that accompanied these words," as if "the remembrance left a deep sense of peace and gratitude."
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The many people who share this sense of peace — and the many who instead suffer, well into adulthood, from a chafing sense of parental disapproval — attest to the power of the emotional equipment at work.

What about the "why" question? Why has natural selection made the conscience malleable? Granted, Darwin's kin were the natural providers of useful moral guidance; but what was useful about it? What is so valuable, from the genes' point of view, about the expansive guilt they infused in the young Darwin? And anyway, if a big conscience is so valuable, why don't the genes just hard-wire it into the brain?

The answer begins with the fact that reality is more complicated than Robert Axelrod's computer. In Axelrod's tournament, a bunch of electronic TIT FOR TAT organisms triumphed and then lived happily ever after in mutual cooperation. This exercise had value in showing how reciprocal altruism could evolve and thus suggesting why we all have the emotions that govern it. But of course, we don't use those emotions with the simple steadiness of TIT FOR TAT. People sometimes lie, cheat, or steal — and, unlike TIT FOR TAT, they may behave this way even toward people who have been nice to them. What's more: people sometimes prosper in this fashion. That we have this capacity for exploiting, and that it sometimes pays off, suggests that there have been times during evolution when being nice to nice people wasn't the genetically optimal strategy. We may all have the machinery of TIT FOR TAT, but we also have less admirable machinery. And the question we face is which machinery to use. Hence the adaptive value of a malleable conscience.