The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (43 page)

And enmity becomes two mutual-detestation societies. If your true friend has a true enemy, you're supposed to adopt that enemy as your own; that's how you support your friend's status. By the same token, that enemy — and that enemy's friends — are expected to dislike not just your friend, but you. This isn't a rigid pattern, but it's a tendency. To maintain close friendship with two avowed enemies is to be in a position whose awkwardness is viscerally felt.

The malevolent conspiracy between reciprocal altruism and status hierarchies runs one level deeper. For enmity itself is a cocreation of the conspirators. On the one hand, enmity grows out of rivalry, the
 {283} 
mutual and incompatible pursuit of status. On the other hand, it is the flip side of reciprocal altruism. Being a successful reciprocal altruist, as Trivers noted, means being an enforcer — keeping track of those who take your aid but don't return it, and either withholding future aid or actively punishing them.

Once again, all of this enmity may be expressed not plainly and physically, as among chimps, but verbally. When people are our enemies, or when they support our enemies, or fail to support us after we've supported them, the standard response is to convincingly say bad things about them. And, again, the best way to convincingly say such things is to believe them — believe that the person is incompetent or stupid or, best of all, bad, morally deficient, a menace to society. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin captured the morally charged nature of enmity: "[F]ew individuals ... can long reflect about a hated person, without feeling and exhibiting signs of indignation or rage."

Darwin's own assessments of people sometimes had a flavor of retaliation. While at Cambridge, he met a man named Leonard Jenyns, a gentleman entomologist who, like Darwin, collected beetles. It seemed possible that, notwithstanding a natural rivalry between them, the two men could become friends and allies. Indeed, Darwin made the overture, giving Jenyns "a good many insects" for which, Darwin reported, Jenyns seemed "very grateful." But when the time came to reciprocate, Jenyns "refused me a specimen of the Necroph. sepultor ... although he has 7 or 8 specimens." In relaying this news to his cousin, Darwin commented not only on Jenyns's selfishness, but on his "weak mind." Eighteen months later, though, Darwin considered Jenyns "an excellent naturalist." This revised opinion may be related to Jenyns having bestowed on Darwin, in the meanwhile, a "magnificent present of Diptera."

When grudges are expanded into networks, as friends form coalitions to support each other's status, the result is vast webs of self-deception and, potentially, of violence. Here is a sentence from the
New York Times
: "In a week's time, both sides have constructed deeply emotional stories explaining their roles, one-sided accounts that are offered with impassioned conviction, although in many respects they do not stand up, in either case, under careful scrutiny."
⁴⁹
 {284} 

The sentence refers to an incident in which Israeli soldiers shot Palestinian civilians, and each side clearly saw that the other had started the trouble. But the sentence could be applied with equal accuracy to all kinds of clashes, big and little, through the centuries. By itself this sentence tells a large part of human history.

The mental machinery that drives modern wars — patriotic fervor, mass self-righteousness, contagious rage — has often been traced by evolutionists to eons of conflict among tribes or bands. Certainly such large-scale aggression has surfaced repeatedly during the life of our species. And no doubt warriors have often gotten Darwinian rewards through the rape or abduction of enemy women. Still, even of the psychology of war has indeed been shaped by out-and-out wars, they may well have been of secondary importance. Feelings of enmity, of grievance, of righteous indignation — of collective enmity and grievance and righteous indignation — probably have their deepest roots in ancient conflicts within bands of humans and pre-humans. In particular: in conflicts among coalitions of males for status.

The tendency of friends to dislike each other's enemies needn't be merely an exchange of favors. Often it's simple redundancy. One of the strongest bonds two friends can have — the great starter and sustainer of friendships — is a common enemy. (Two people playing a game of prisoner's dilemma will play more cooperatively in the presence of someone they both dislike.)
⁵²

This strategic convenience is often obscured in modern society. Friendships may rest not on common enemies but on common interests: hobbies, tastes in movies or sports. Affinities emerge from shared passions of the most innocent sort. But this reaction presumably evolved in a context in which shared passions tended to be less innocent: a context of frankly political opinions about who should lead a tribe, say, or how meat should be divided. In other words, the affinity of common interest may have evolved as a way to cement fruitful political alliances, and only later attached itself to matters of little consequence. This, at any rate, would help explain the absurd gravity surrounding disputes over seemingly trivial
 {285} 
matters. Why is it that a smooth dinner party can turn suddenly awkward over a disagreement about the merits of John Huston's movies?

And, moreover, "matters of little consequence" often turn out, on close examination, to involve real stakes. Take two Darwinianly minded social scientists, for example. Their binding interest is "purely intellectual" — a fascination with the evolutionary roots of human behavior. But this is also a common political interest. Both scholars are tired of being ignored or attacked by the academic establishment, tired of the dogma of cultural determinism, tired of its stubborn prevalence within so many anthropology and sociology departments. Both scholars want to be published in the most esteemed journals. They want tenure at the best universities. They want power and status. They want to depose the ruling regime.

Of course, if they do depose the ruling regime, and thus become famous and write best-selling books, there may be no Darwinian payoff. They may not convert their status into sex, and if they do they may use contraception. But in the environment in which we evolved — indeed, until the last few hundred years — status got converted into Darwinian currency more efficiently. This fact seems to have deeply affected the texture of intellectual discourse, especially among men.

We'll explore an example of this effect in the next chapter, in describing the particular intellectual discourse that made Darwin fa mous. For now, let's simply note Darwin's delight, in 1846, at dis covering common scientific interests with Joseph Hooker, who more than a decade later would join with Darwin in the scientific battle of the century and devote much energy to the elevation of Darwin's social status. "[W]hat a good thing is community of tastes," Darwin wrote to Hooker. "I feel as if I had known you for fifty years... ."
 {286} 

Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage. The information in question was the prevailing account of how human beings, and all organisms, came to exist; Darwin reshaped it in a way that radically raised his social status. When he died in 1882, his greatness was acclaimed in newspapers around the world, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the body of Isaac Newton.
²
Alpha-male territory.

And to top it all off: he was a good guy. The
Times
of London observed, "Great as he was, wide as was the reach of his intelligence, what endeared him to his many friends, what charmed all those who were brought into even momentary contact with him, was the beauty of his character."
³
Darwin's legendary lack of pretense persisted until the very end, when it slipped beyond his control. The local coffin
 {287} 
maker recalled: "I made his coffin just the way he wanted it, all rough, just as it left the bench, no polish, no nothin'." But then, after the sudden decision to bury him at Westminster Abbey, "my coffin wasn't wanted and they sent it back. This other one you could see to shave in."
⁴

This is the basic, oft-noted paradox of Charles Darwin. He became world famous yet seemed to lack the traits that typically fuel epic social ascents. He appears, as one biographer put it, "an unlikely survivor in the immortality stakes, having most of the decent qualities that deter a man from fighting with tooth and claw. "

The paradox can't be resolved simply by noting that Darwin authored the correct theory of how people came to exist, for he wasn't alone in doing this. Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived at natural selection independently, began circulating a written description of it before Darwin had gone public. The two men's versions of the theory were formally unveiled on the same day, in the same forum. But today Darwin is Darwin, and Wallace is an asterisk. Why did Darwin triumph?

In chapter ten we partly reconciled Darwin's decency with his fame, noting that he lived in a society in which doing good was typically a prerequisite for doing well. Moral reputation meant much, and just about everything you did caught up with your reputation.

But the story is more complex than that. A closer look at Darwin's long and winding road to fame calls into question some common assessments of him — that, for example, he had little ambition and not a shred of Machiavellianism, that his commitment to truth was unadulterated by the thirst for fame. Viewed through the new paradigm, Darwin looks a bit less like a saint and a bit more like a male primate.

From early on, Darwin exhibited a common ingredient of social success: ambition. He competed with rivals for status, and longed for the esteem it brings. "My success ... has been very good amongst the water beettles [sic]," he wrote to a cousin from Cambridge. "I think I beat Jenyns in Colymbetes." When his insect collecting got him cited in Illustrations of British Insects, he wrote,
 {288} 
"You will see my name in Stephens' last number. I am glad of it if it is merely to spite Mr. Jenyns."
⁶

The notion of Darwin as a typical young male, bent on conquest, seems at odds with standard appraisals. The Darwin described by John Bowlby — "nagging self-contempt," a "tendency to disparage his own contributions," an "ever-present fear of criticism, both from himself and from others," an "exaggerated respect for authority and the opinions of others" — doesn't sound like an alpha male in the making.
⁷
But remember: often in chimpanzee societies, and almost always in human societies, the social scale can't be ascended alone; a common first step is to forge a bond with a primate of higher status, and this involves an act of submission, a profession of inferiority. One biographer has described Darwin's purported pathology in especially suggestive terms: "some flaw of self-confidence, some absence of certainty, that made him emphasize his shortcomings when dealing with those in authority."
⁸

In his autobiography, Darwin recalled the "glow of pride" he felt when, as a teenager, he heard that an eminent scholar, after chatting with him, had said, "There is something in that young man that interests me." The compliment, Darwin said, "must have been chiefly due to his perceiving that I listened with much interest to everything which he said, for I was as ignorant as a pig about his subjects of history, politicks and moral philosophy."
⁹
Here, as usual, Darwin is too humble by half, but he is probably right to suggest that his humility itself had played a role. (Darwin goes on to note: "To hear of praise from an eminent person, though no doubt apt or certain to excite vanity, is, I think, good for a young man, as it helps to keep him in the right course."
¹⁰
Yes: upward.)

To call Darwin's humility tactically sound isn't to call it disingenuous. The tendency of people to view the next rung on the social ladder with respect is most effective when they're thoroughly in its thrall, and not conscious of its purpose: we feel genuinely in awe of people before whom, it so happens, we might profitably grovel. Thomas Carlyle, one of Darwin's contemporaries (and acquaintances), was probably right to say that hero worship is an essential part of human nature. And it is probably no coincidence that hero wot ship grows powerful at the time of life when people begin their
 {289} 
social competition in earnest. "Adolescence," one psychiatrist has observed, "is a time of a renewed search for ideals... . [T]he adolescent is seeking a model, a perfect person to emulate. It's much like the moment in infancy before they realized their parents' imperfections."

Yes, the awe for role models feels much like the early awe for a parent — and may spring from the same neurochemistry. But its function is not only to encourage instructive emulation; it also helps write the implicit contract between senior and junior partners in a coalition. The latter, lacking the social status that counts heavily in reciprocal altruism, will compensate for this shortcoming through deference.

While Darwin was at Cambridge, his most extreme deference was reserved for the professor (and reverend) John Stevens Henslow. Darwin had heard from his older brother that Henslow was "a man who knew every branch of science, and I was accordingly prepared to reverence him."
¹²
After striking up an acquaintance, Darwin reported that "he is quite the most perfect man I ever met with."
¹³