The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (39 page)

Of course, public policy, in the end, must comply with human nature. If people are basically selfish — and they are — then asking them to work hard yet earn no more than their unproductive neighbor is asking more than they'll readily give. But we already know that; communism has failed. We also know that mildly redistributive taxation does not snuff out the will to work. Between these two extremes is a large menu of policies. Each has its cost, but the cost is a product of plain old human selfishness — something that's not exactly news — and not of the human hunger for status per se.

Indeed, the hunger for status may actually lower the costs of redistribution. Humans, it seems, tend to compare themselves to those very near them in the status hierarchy — to those just above them, in particular.
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This makes evolutionary sense as a
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ladder-climbing technique, but that's not the point. The point is that if the government takes a thousand dollars more from everyone in your middle-class neighborhood, you're in about the same position relative to your neighbors as you were before. So if keeping up with the Joneses is what drives you, your work incentive shouldn't be dampened as it would if calibrated in absolute monetary terms.

The modern view of social hierarchy also deals a heavy blow to one of the cruder philosophical excuses for inequality. As I've tried to stress, there is no reason to derive our values from natural selection's "values," no reason to deem "good" what natural selection has "deemed" expedient. Still, some people do. They say that hierarchy is nature's way of keeping the group strong, so inequality can be justified in the name of the greater good. Since it now looks as if nature didn't invent human hierarchies for the good of the group, that piece of logic is twice as flawed as it used to be.

The crowning (alleged) anthropomorphism in de Waal's book is its title, Chimpanzee Politics. If politics is, as political scientists say, the process by which resources are divvied up, then chimps demonstrate, in de Waal's view, that the origins of human politics long predate humanity. In fact, he sees not just a political process, but "even a democratic structure" at work in the Arnhem chimp colony.
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Alpha males have trouble ruling without the consent of the governed.

Nikkie, for example, lacked Luit's common touch and never became as popular as either Luit or Yeroen were during their tenures. The females were especially sparing in their submissive greetings, and when Nikkie was needlessly violent, they would pursue him en masse. On one occasion he was chased up a tree by the entire colony. There he sat, alone, surrounded, and screaming — the dominant male, dominated. Maybe this wasn't modern representative democracy, but it wasn't a very smooth dictatorship either. (There's no telling how long Nikkie would have stayed trapped had Mama, the troop's chief conciliator, not climbed the tree, given him a kiss, and led him back down, after which he humbly sought mass forgiveness.)
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Here's a useful exercise: when watching a politician speak on TV, turn down the volume. Notice the gestures. Note their similarity to the gestures politicians everywhere in the world use — exhortation,
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indignation, and so on. Then turn up the volume. Listen to what the politician is saying. Here's a virtual guarantee: he (or, more rarely, she) is saying things that appeal to the group of voters most likely to get him into power or keep him there. The interests of the governed — or of some crucial slice of the governed — governs what human politicians say, just as it governs what chimpanzee politicians do. In both cases, the politician's ultimate aim (whether he knows it or not) is status. And in both cases we may see a certain flexibility as to what the politician is willing to do, or say, to get that status and keep it. Even the most stirring oratory can boil down to convenient coalition. In turning up the volume, you've capsulized several million years of evolution.

For all the suggestive parallels between ape and human striving, the differences remain large. Human status often has relatively little to do with raw power. It's true that overt physical dominance is often a key to social hierarchy among boys. But, especially in adults, the status story is much more complex, and in some cultures its plainly political aspects have been quite subdued. Here is one scholar's description of life among the Navajo: "No one who actively seeks power is to be trusted. Leaders arise out of example and emulation. If someone is successful at growing corn, he is emulated and to that extent is a leader. If someone knows many verses to a curing chant, he is respected for that accomplishment and his status as a 'singer' is considerable. Politicking, handshaking ... have no place in traditional Navajo society."
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This isn't to say that Navajos don't seek power — only that they seek it subtly. Nor is it to say that status is severed from the goal of reproductive advantage. The expert corn grower and the expert singer probably make for attractive mates. And it's easy to guess why; one has a knack for providing material resources and both show signs of intelligence. Still, these two Navajo didn't gain their reproductive advantage by physically intimidating or otherwise controlling people; they simply found their calling and excelled.

The range of things that can bring status in different cultures and subcultures is astonishing. Making beads, making music, delivering
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sermons, delivering babies, inventing drugs, inventing tales, collecting coins, collecting scalps. Yet the mental machinery driving these various activities is fundamentally the same. Human beings are designed to assess their social environment, and, having figured out what impresses people, do it; or, having found what people disfavor, avoid it. They're pretty open-minded about what "it" is. The main thing is that they be able to succeed at it; people everywhere want to feel pride, not shame; to inspire respect, not disdain.

This tendency of humankind's psychic unity to hide behind behavioral diversity is what enabled the Boasian anthropologists to minimize human nature. Ruth Benedict wrote in 1934, "We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behaviour, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition."
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Strictly speaking, she was right. Once you get past stereotyped acts such as walking, eating, and suckling, "behaviors" don't get transmitted biologically. Mental organs do, and they're usually limber enough to yield lots of different behaviors, depending on circumstance.

It is easy to see how the mental machinery of status seeking, in particular, eluded Benedict's emphasis. She studied the Zuni, who, like the nearby Navajo, play down competition and overt political striving. She wrote, "The ideal man in Zuni is a person of dignity and affability who has never tried to lead... . Any conflict, even though all right is on his side, is held against him... . The highest praise ... runs: 'He is a nice polite man.' "
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Note the subtext. There is an "ideal man," and anyone who approaches the ideal gets "praise," while anyone who falls short has his failure "held against him." In other words: the Zuni confer status on those who don't seek status too fiercely, and deny status to those who do. The very strength of the status-seeking machinery is what keeps Zuni status hierarchies subtle. (Also, as we've seen, the social infrastructure of reciprocal altruism tends in all cultures to exert some pressure toward friendliness, as well as generosity and honesty. Zuni culture may have harnessed this pressure with unusual efficiency, reinforcing the natural link between niceness and status.)

You can look at life among the Zuni as a tribute either to the
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power of culture or to the suppleness of mental adaptations. It is both, but let's ponder the latter: mental organs, it seems, are so flexible that they can participate in a virtual rebellion against the Darwinian logic behind them. Though the status-seeking machinery lias long energized fistfights and macho politicking, it can also be used to suppress both. In a monastery, serenity and asceticism can be sources of status. In some strata of Victorian England, a nearly ludicrous amount of gentility and humility could help earn status (rather like among the Zuni, perhaps).

In other words, what we call cultural "values" are expedients to social success.
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People adopt them because other people admire them. By controlling a child's social environment, by selectively dishing out respect and scorn, we can program his values as if he were a robot. Some people find this troubling. Well, that just goes to show that you can't please everybody. During the sociobiology controversy of the 1970s, a major source of outrage was the fear that, if the sociobiologists were right, people couldn't be programmed as B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists had promised.

The new paradigm does have room for Skinnerian conditioning, complete with positive and negative reinforcement. To be sure, some drives and emotions — say, lust and jealousy — may never be wholly erasable. Still, the great moral diversity among cultures — that is, diversity in the tolerated behavioral
expressions
of, say, lust and jealousy — suggests much leeway in the values department. Such is the power of social approval and disapproval.

The big question is: How deeply can the patterns of approval and disapproval themselves be shaped? Or to put it another way: How flexible is society about what it will find pleasing?

Here, no doubt, lie some pretty firm tendencies. Social assets that mattered consistently during evolution may stubbornly continue to carry weight. Big strong men and beautiful women may always have a head start in status competition. Stupidity may never provoke widespread admiration. The command of resources — that is, money — will tend to hold a certain appeal. Still, resistance is possible. There are cultures and subcultures that try to put less emphasis on the material and more emphasis on the spiritual. And their success is sometimes impressive, if less than total. And, moreover, there is
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no reason to believe that any of them have reached the limits of biological potential.

Even our own culture, for all its materialistic excess, starts to seem almost admirable when you look at some of the alternatives. Among the Yanomamo of South America, one route to status for a young man is to kill lots of men in neighboring villages.
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If, in the process, he can participate in the abduction and gang rape of women from that village, so much the better. If his wife tries to leave him for another man, he can feel free to, say, cut off her ears. At the risk of sounding morally nonrelativistic, we've come a long way.

In some modern urban neighborhoods, values have lately grown closer to those of the Yanomamo. Young men who kill get respect — at least within the circle of young men whose opinions they care about. This is evidence that the worst parts of human nature arc always near the surface, ready to rise when cultural restraint weakens. We are not blank slates, as some behaviorists once imagined. We are organisms whose more egregious tendencies can be greatly, if arduously, subdued. And a primary reason for this tenuous optimism is the abject flexibility with which status is sought. We will do almost anything for respect, including not act like animals.
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Natural selection's disdain for the principle of truth in advertising is widely evident. Some female fireflies in the genus Photuris mimic the mating flash of females in the genus Photinus and then, having attracted a Photinus male, eat him. Some orchids look quite like female wasps, the better to lure male wasps that then unwittingly spread pollen. Some harmless snakes have evolved the coloration of poisonous snakes, gaining undeserved respect. Some butterfly pupa bear an uncanny resemblance to a snake's head — fake scales, fake eyes — and, if bothered, start rattling around menacingly.
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In short: organisms may present themselves as whatever it is in their genetic interest to seem like.

People appear to be no exception. In the late 1950s and early sixties, the (non-Darwinian) social scientist Erving Goffman made a stir with a book called
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
, which stressed how much time we all spend on stage, playing to one
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audience or another, striving for effect. But there is a difference between us and many other performers in the animal kingdom. Whereas the female Photuris is, presumably, under no illusion as to its true identity, human beings have a way of getting taken in by their acts. Sometimes, Goffman marveled, a person is "sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality."

What modern Darwinism brings to Goffman's observation is, among other things, a theory about the function of the confusion we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better. This hypothesis was tossed out during the mid-1970s by both Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers. In his foreword to Richard Dawkins's
The Selfish Gene
, Trivers noted Dawkins's emphasis on the role of deception in animal life and added, in a much-cited passage, that if indeed "deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray — by the subtle signs of self-knowledge — the deception being practised." Thus, Trivers ventured, "the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution."
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