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The Righteous Mind
Part III.
Central Metaphor
We Are 90 Percent Chimp and 10 Percent Bee
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p190 I do believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest, and if it’s self-interest, then it’s easily explained by Darwinian natural selection working at the level of the individual. Genes are selfish, (Note 3. As Dawkins 1976 so memorably put it. Genes can only code for traits that end up making more copies of those genes. Dawkins did not mean that selfish genes make thoroughly selfish people.) selfish genes create selfish people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules make us strategically altruistic, not reliably or universally altruistic. Our righteous minds are shaped by kin selection plus reciprocal altruism augmented by gossip and reputation management. That’s the message of nearly every book on the evolutionary origins of morality, and nothing I’ve said so far contradicts that message.
But in Part III... I’m going to show why that portrait is incomplete... it’s also true that people are groupish. We love to join teams, clubs, leagues, and fraternities. We take on group identities and work shoulder to shoulder with strangers toward common goals so enthusiastically that it seems as if our minds were designed for teamwork. I don’t think we can understand morality, politics, or religion until we have a good picture of human groupishness and its origins. We cannot understand conservative morality and the Durkheimian societies I described in the last chapter. Neither can we understand socialism, communism, and the communalism of the left. [And of the church.]
p191 ... When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.
...do we have groupish mechanisms (such as the rally-round-the-flag reflex) because groups that succeeded in coalescing and cooperating outcompeted groups that couldn’t get it together? If so, then I’m invoking a process known as “group selection,” and group selection was banished as a heresy from scientific circles in the 1970s.
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Victorious Tribes
Here’s an example of one kind of group selection. In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principle objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection:
When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other. . . . The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows chiefly from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. . . . Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and be victorious over other tribes.
When I read this I sense the presence of Livy. This is -- besides the reasons Haidt finds it remarkable -- the lesson of Livy’s The History of Rome in a nutshell. I assume Darwin had a Classical education so, like me, he read through book after book of Livy, repeating again and again how Rome learned, forgot, and learned again this valuable lesson. Western military history starts with the Greeks, and there’s much to learn from them, but I can’t think of any Greek author who drives home this point as Livy does.
Cohesive tribes began to function like individual organisms, competing with other organisms. The tribes that were more cohesive generally won. Natural selection therefore worked on tribes the same way it worked on every other organism.
But in the very next paragraph, Darwin raised the free rider problem, which is still the main objection raised against group selection:
But it may be asked, how within the limits of the same tribe did a large number of members first become endowed with these social and moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised? It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents, or of those who were the most faithful to their comrades, would be reared in greater numbers than the children of selfish and treacherous parents belonging to the same tribe. He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.
p193 Darwin grasped the basic logic of what is now known as multilevel selection. Life is a hierarchy of nested levels... genes within chromosomes within cells within individual organisms within hives, societies, and other groups. There can be competition at any level of the hierarchy, but for our purposes (studying morality) the only two levels that matter are those of the individual organism and the group. When groups compete, the cohesive, cooperative group usually wins. But within each group, selfish individuals (free riders) come out ahead. They share in the group’s gains while contributing little to its efforts. The bravest army wins, but within the bravest army, the few cowards who hang back are the most likely of all to survive the fight, go home alive, and become fathers.
(Note 12. I note that the old idea that there were genes “for” traits has fared poorly in the genomic age. There are not single genes, or even groups of dozens of genes, that can explain much of the variance in any psychological trait. Yet somehow, nearly every psychological trait is heritable. I will sometimes speak of a gene “for” a trait, but this is just a convenience. What I really mean is that the genome as a whole codes for certain traits, and natural selection alters the genome so that it codes for different traits) ...A gene for suicidal self-sacrifice would be favored by group-level selection (it would help the team win), but it would be so strongly opposed by selection at the individual level that such a trait could evolve only in species such as bees, where competition within the hive has been nearly eliminated and almost all selection is group selection. Bees (and ants and termites) are the ultimate team players: one for all, all for one, all the time, even if that means dying to protect the hive from invaders... (Note 14. I’m oversimplifying here; species of bees, ants, wasps, and termites vary in the degree to which they have achieved the status of superorganisms. Self-interest is rarely reduced to absolute zero, particularly in bees and wasps, which retain the ability to breed under some circumstances. See Holldobler and Wilson 2009. [This is a rather important point to hide in a note, especially given my reluctance to accept his humans as hivish hypothesis. Turns out I need to learn more about hive insects. But more about this anon.])
For a hive animal there literally is no survival outside the hive. This is my observation, not Haidt’s.
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p194 ... In ancient times, loners were more likely to get picked off by predators than were their more gregarious siblings, who felt a strong need to stay close to the group... People who helped others were more likely to get help when they needed it most.
But the most important “stimulus to the development of the social virtues” was the fact that people are passionately concerned with “the praise and blame of our fellow-men.” Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon’s view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations. Darwin believed that the emotions that drive this obsession were acquired by natural selection acting at the individual level: those who lacked a sense of shame or a love of glory were less likely to attract friends and mates. Darwin also added a final step: the capacity to treat duties and principles as sacred, which he saw as part of our religious nature.
...In a real army, which sacralizes honor, loyalty, and country, the coward is not the most likely to make it home and father children... Real armies, like most effective groups, have many ways of suppressing selfishness. And anytime a group finds a way to suppress selfishness, it changes the balance of forces in a multilevel analysis: individual-level selection becomes less important, and group-level selection becomes more powerful... if there is a genetic basis for feelings of loyalty and sanctity... then intense intergroup competition will make these genes become more common in the next generation. The reason is that groups in which these traits are common will replace groups in which they are rare, even if these genes impose a small cost on their bearers (relative to those what lack them within each group).
p195 In what might be the pithiest and most prescient statement in the history of moral psychology, Darwin summarized the evolutionary origin of morality in this way:
Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment -- originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.
Darwin’s response to the free rider problem satisfied readers for nearly a hundred years, and group selection became a standard part of evolutionary thinking...
[George Williams in Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) and Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) show that group-related adaptations do not occur anywhere in the animal world. The new understanding at the time was that,]
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p197 ...Our “moral qualities” are not adaptations, as Darwin had believed. They are by-product; they are mistakes. Morality, said Williams, is “an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability.” Dawkins shared this cynicism: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish.”
p198 I disagree. Human beings are the giraffes of altruism. We’re one-of-a-kind freaks of nature who occasionally -- even if rarely -- can be as selfless and team-spirited as bees... if you focus, as Darwin did, on behavior in groups of people who know each other and share goals and values, then our ability to work together, divide labor, help each other, and function as a team is so all-pervasive that we don’t even notice it...
(Note 21. Williams (1966, pp8-9) defined an adaptation as a biological mechanism that produces at least one effect that can properly be called its goal.)
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Exhibit A: Major Transitions In Evolution
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p200 [To summarize, life on earth started with,] ...prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself.
But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria [Interesting Wiki info] have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus... (Note 35. Margulis 1970. In plant cells, chloroplasts also have their own DNA.) Cells that had internal organelles could reap the benefits of cooperation and the division of labor (see Adam Smith). There was no longer any competition between these organelles, for they could reproduce only when the entire cell produced, so it was “one for all, all for one.”... Single-celled eukaryotes were wildly successful and spread throughout the oceans.
A few hundred million years later, some of these eukaryotes developed a novel adaptation: they stayed together after cell division to form multicellular organisms in which every cell had exactly the same genes... Once again, competition is suppressed (because each cell can only reproduce if the organism reproduces...). A group of cells becomes an individual, able to divide labor among the cells (which specialize into limbs and organs)... in a short span of time the world is covered with plants, animals, and fungi...
p201 Major transitions [like this] are rare. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry count just eight clear examples over the last 4 billion years (the last of which is human societies)... Whenever a way is found to suppress free riders so that individual units can cooperate, work as a team, and divide labor, selection at the lower level becomes less important, selection at the higher level becomes more powerful, and that higher-level selection favors the most cohesive superorganisms... As these superorganisms proliferate, they begin to compete with each other, and to evolve for greater success in that competition. This competition among superorganisms is one form of group selection. (Note 40. Okasha 2006 calls this MLS-2. I’ll call it selection among stable groups in contrast to MLS-1, which I’ll call selection among shifting groups... For selection among stable groups, we focus on the group as an entity, and we track its fitness as it competes with other groups. For this kind of selection to matter, groups must maintain strong boundaries with a high degree of genetic relatedness inside each group over many generations. Hunter-gatherer groups as we know them today do not do this; individuals come and go, through marriage or for other reasons. (Although... the ways of current hunter-gatherers cannot be taken to be the ways that our ancestors lived 100,000... or even 30,000 years ago.)... ) There is variation among the groups, and the fittest groups pass on their traits to future generations of groups.
(Note 41. I do not mean to imply that there is an overall or inevitable progression of life toward ever greater complexity and cooperation. Multilevel selection means that there are always antagonistic selection forces operating at different levels... )
That is something that Robert Pirsig, in Lila (1992), did argue for:
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems "run down" like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only "runs up," converting low-energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep "running up" faster and faster.
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?...
Mechanisms are the enemy of life. The more static and unyielding the mechanisms are, the more life works to evade them or overcome them.
The law of gravity, for example, is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus, while the simple protozoa just barely get around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly into the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon.
...if one gathered together enough of these deliberate violations of the laws of the universe and formed a generalization from them, a quite different theory of evolution could be inferred. If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored. The reason that atoms become chemistry professors has got to be that something in nature does not like laws of chemical equilibrium or the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or any other law that restricts the molecules' freedom. They only go along with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that does not follow any laws whatsoever.
Now that is a tangent.
...some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share. This... was discovered by the early hymenoptera (members of the order that includes wasps, which gave rise to bees and ants) and it was discovered independently several dozen other times (by the ancestors of termites, naked mole rats, and some species of shrimp, aphids, beetles, and spiders). In each case, the free rider problem was surmounted and selfish genes began to craft relatively selfless group members who together constituted a supremely selfish group.
These groups were a new kind of vehicle:[organizing structure] a hive or colony of close genetic relatives, which functioned as a unit... and reproduced as a unit... The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators). Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth. (Note 43. Holldobler and Wilson 2009; E. O. Wilson 1990. I note that the new superorganisms don’t shoot up to dominance right away after the free rider problem is addressed. Superorganisms go through a period of refinement until they begin to take maximum advantage of their new cooperation, which gets improved by group-level selection as they compete with other superorganisims... humans... probably developed fully groupish minds in the late Pleistocene, but didn’t achieve world dominance until the late Holocene.)
p202 ...if we... ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees -- a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding -- then the analogy [with hive or colony creatures] gets much tighter.
Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. [Also packs, just saying.] But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor. Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies.
(Note 45. The term eusocality arose for work with insects, and it is a defined in a way that cannot apply to humans -- i.e., it requires that members divide reproduction so that nearly all group members are effectively sterile. I therefore use the more general term ultrasocial, which encompasses the behavior of eusocial insects as well as of human beings. This is the root of my problem with his use of “hivish.” )
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p203 ...Like bees, our ancestors were (1) territorial creatures with a fondness for defensible nests... who (2) gave birth to needy offspring that required enormous amounts of care, which had to be given while (3) the group was under threat from neighboring groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, therefore, conditions were in place that pulled for the evolution of ultrasociality, and as a result, we are the only ultrasocial primate. The human lineage may have started off acting very much like chimps, but by the time our ancestors started walking out of Africa, they had become at least a little bit like bees.
...Like bees, humans began building ever more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on Earth -- the city-state, able to raise walls and armies. City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly across Eurasia, North Africa, and Mesoamerica, changing many of the Earth’s ecosystems and allowing the total tonnage of human beings to shoot up from insignificance at the start of the Holocene (around twelve thousand years ago) to world domination today. (Note 50. We’re not literally a majority of the world’s mammalian weight, but... if you include us together with our domesticated servants [cows, pigs, etc.,] our civilization now accounts for an astonishing 98 percent of all mammalian life, by weight... ) As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude. The analogy to bees is not shallow or loose. Despite their many differences, human civilizations and beehives are both products of major transitions in evolutionary history...
p204 ...Group selection creates group-related adaptations, It is not far-fetched, and it should not be a heresy to suggest that this is how we got the groupish overlay that makes up a crucial part of our righteous minds.
In Lila Robert Pirsig made a somewhat different argument about people living in cities. I was going to talk about this later, but since Haidt invoked the city-state above, this looks like it may be the right place.
Haidt has used the term “self-domesticating”, but Pirsig views this another way. He argues that it is the city -- which he terms “The Giant” -- that is the higher form of organization that uses people the way a farmer uses farm animals. We are domesticated by, and in the interest of, the city. He points out that, from the perspective of farm animals, the farmer is a kind of servant seeing to all of the animal's needs. And up until the end, this is mostly true. Likewise, people see cities as the creations of man with the purpose of serving our needs. This despite the fact that there is no one human that completely understands the city and how it works. When something goes wrong -- a sinkhole in the middle of a busy street, for example -- there are systems in place to locate the variety of agencies and people required to address the various systems compromised by the sinkhole, but it’s doubtful you could call up one person with a complete knowledge of everything under the pavement there and the best way of repairing or bypassing the compromised components. To quote Pirsig,
People look upon the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer: different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet the social patterns of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can accomplish alone...
This city [the Giant] is a higher pattern than either a substance or a biological pattern called man. Just as biology exploits substance for its own purposes, so does this social pattern called a city exploit biology for its own purposes... This is what the Giant really does. It converts accumulated biological energy into forms that serve itself.
People assume the city is our creation and is there to serve us, but you could also argue that it has it’s own agenda that is sometimes at odds with ours. The only cities that are entirely man organized are “planned” cities like Washington D.C., Brasilia, Chandigarh and Sejong City in South Korea, and even then that is only true at the very beginning. And these planned cities usually are failures because architects and planners seem unable to grasp how cities really work. Planned cities are usually either abandoned or they are allowed to develop “on their own” beyond the original human plan.
In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, (1984) Jane Jacobs argued that almost all “human” “progress” -- even including agriculture -- took place in and was driven by cities. Empires and nations are abstract human concepts but the economic power of cities drives all the other systems, just as the energy of the sun drives all the ocean currents, atmospheric currents, and biological growth on earth. (This is my analogy, it’s been too long since I read this book to recall any of hers. Also, for the Earth, you have to give some credit to thermal energy from the core of the planet and to gravity and centrifugal forces, but these are comparatively minor.)
Exhibit B: Shared Intentionality
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p204 It’s great fun to look back at history and identify Rubicon crossings. [Events equivalent in significance to Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon with his army.] I used to believe that there were too many small steps in the evolution of morality to identify one as the Rubicon, but I changed my mind when I heard Michael Tomasello, one of the world’s foremost experts on chimpanzee cognition, utter this sentence: “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”
I was stunned. Chimps are arguably the second-smartest species on the planet, able to make tools, learn sign language, predict the intentions of other chimps, and deceive each other to get what they want. As individuals, they’re brilliant. So why can’t they work together? What are they missing?
[Yet more clever experiments this time pitting chimps against human toddlers. I would love to hear how he sold this to the parents.]
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p205 According to Tomasello, human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality At some point in the last million years, a small group of our ancestors developed the ability to share mental representations of tasks that two or more of them were pursuing together. For example, while foraging, one person pulls down a branch while the other plucks the fruit, and they both share the meal. Chimps never do this...
p206 ...when early humans began to share intentions, their ability to hunt, gather, raise children, and raid their neighbors increased exponentially. Everyone on the team now had a mental representation of the task, knew that his or her partners shared the same representation, knew when a partner had acted in a way that impeded success or that hogged the spoils, and reacted negatively to such violations. When everyone in a group began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and then felt a flash of negativity when any individual violated those expectations, the first moral matrix was born. (Remember that a matrix is a consensual hallucination.) That, I believe, is our Rubicon crossing.
Tomasello believes that human ultrasociality arose in two steps. The first was the ability to share intentions in groups of two or three people who were actively hunting or foraging together... Then, after several hundred thousand years of evolution for better sharing and collaboration as nomadic hunter-gatherers, more collaborative groups began to get larger, perhaps in response to the threat of other groups. Victory went to the most cohesive groups -- the ones that could scale up their ability to share intentions from three people to three hundred or three thousand people. This was the second step: Natural selection favored increasing levels of what Tomasello calls “group-mindedness” -- the ability to learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and, ultimately, to create and obey social institutions, including religion. A new set of selection pressures operated within groups (e.g., nonconformists were punished, or at very least were less likely to be chosen as partners for joint ventures) as well as between groups (cohesive groups took territory and other resources from less cohesive groups).
Another tangent: Growth in the size of armies. A very similar process took place in western history as the size of armies increased. Between Classical times and Modern times (the Napoleonic Wars), the upper limit of army size stayed about the same -- usually around 40,000 -- with the limiting factors being logistical (finding food and forage and roads for the men to march or ride over) but also organizational. Napoleon's armies were larger because he could draw on mobilized revolutionary France, and because be divided his army into discrete "corps" that were really armies in their own right and could move and fight independently but (when the Marshals were not feuding) join together to overwhelm an enemy. Napoleonic and American Civil war armies could be larger than 100,000 men and still move and fight effectively.
By the time of the Great War, it was necessary to go up yet another level of organization with corps combining to form armies which combined to form "army groups." In the two world wars, army groups could bring millions of men into a battle. But this process was not smooth and trouble free. At every level, throughout both the 19th and 20th centuries, individual armies would find it difficult to organize themselves as they grew larger -- with disastrous results to the people fighting in those armies.
...Once you grasp Tomasello’s deep insight, you begin to see the vast webs of shared intentionality out of which human groups are constructed. Many people assume that language was our Rubicon, but language became possible only after our ancestors got shared intentionality. Tomasello notes that a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things. [Remember old Ferdinand de Saussure and semiotics? We're kind of back there again. Also, this could be the Rubicon for individuation. The point where we disconnected from nature and started assembling a symbolic layer between ourselves and reality. To take up one of David Darling’s themes, you also have to wonder at what point people became “self” conscious. Was this the same Rubicon? Can our ancestors be said to have had selves (souls) before they shared intentionality or before language? And what of time? Can time really be said to exist (as we perceive it) prior to individuation? I just have the questions, not the answers at the moment.] If the key to group selection is a shared defensible nest, then shared intentionality allowed humans to construct nests that were vast and ornate yet weightless and portable. Bees construct hives out of wax and wood fibers, which they then fight, kill, and die to defend. Humans construct moral communities our of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.
I prefer where Haidt went with this, but, since I’ve already invoked Livy I have to point out that a Roman army is a splendid example of a less abstract instance of constructing a community like this. As a result of lessons learned in earlier disasters -- and passed down by history -- a Roman army always carried with it both the form that a defensible camp (castra) should assume (the same layout of tents and paths that forms the core design of many cities in Europe that grew out of those camps) but they also brought with them the substance, for instance the stakes they used to defend the perimeter wall of such camps. In theory, and mostly in practice as well, a Roman soldier could walk into any Roman camp and know where to find the commander and any other “institution” that he might need because all camps were similar and all, in a sense, were an abstraction of the Roman state.
This is another long chapter so we will break here and resume next time with,
Exhibit C: Genes and Cultures Coevolve
