There are two ways of trying to create a good life. One is by punishing evil, and the other is by actively promoting virtue. My evolutionary theory is that the punishment of deviant behavior is older, so several chapters in this book will be devoted to crime and punishment and their deep evolutionary background. Later, in Chapter 7, I will take up the positive side of social interactions, which includes preaching in favor of being generous to others and of being helpful even if the recipients are not members of a person’s own extended family and are not necessarily helping back.
To begin this discussion, we’ll need to consider the human emotions that make for a sense of right and wrong.1 An evolutionary view needs to be global, and to achieve this, ethnocentrism must be avoided. Guilt is frequently on the tongues of Americans and for that matter on the tongues of Christians and Jews everywhere, but it is not very much on those of Buddhists or Hindus or of Confucians or followers of Islam. Although the word is not easy to define and definitions may vary, for most people “guilt” seems to mean an inward, private focus arising from the experience of negative feelings about past misdeeds or sins. “Shame” has more the meaning that a past malfeasance has become known to others, or might well become public. Although either guilt or shame may lead to remorse, shame, with its more outward focus, seems to be more salient for many people raised in Asia, where the idea of “face” is important, or in the Middle East, where “honor cultures” are so prominent. The Garden of Eden fable tells us that shame also is important for Christians and Jews insofar as the Middle-Eastern-based Old Testament has trained us to think in terms of fig leaves and blushing—with shame.
To avoid confusion, and also to avoid placing my own Western perspective at the fore, I’m going to make a choice and use “shame,” rather than “guilt,” when speaking of uneasy or painful feelings people have about their present or past morally reprehensible deeds. I’ve made this simplifying decision not because Asians and Middle Easterners outnumber guilt-ridden Judeo-Christian Europeans and Americans, but for a quite different set of reasons that strike me as being anthropologically sound.
First, a moral word similar to “guilt” is not to be found in many world languages, including those of hunter-gatherers and tribal people. However, “shame words” do appear everywhere,2 and they seem to be quite prominent in people’s minds. Furthermore, shame feelings are directly linked to a universal human physiological response that is triggered by a sense of moral culpritude—blushing— whereas guilt has no such physical correlate as far as we know. When Darwin saw this connection between shame and blushing and deemed it important, he was right. Shame will be a key universal concept here as we begin to deal with the evolutionary basis of the human conscience.
In thinking about moral behavior, Darwin opened his mind to ask if other animals might also have a sense of right and wrong.3 After devoting considerable thought to the matter, I’ve come to the personal conclusion that, although chimpanzees and for that matter domestic dogs are very good as learners of rules, humans may be the only animal species to deal moralistically in virtue and evil and to internalize rules on that basis. If any other animal had such abilities, most likely it would be a highly social animal like an African great ape or perhaps a socially sensitive carnivore like a wolf or a dolphin.
I’m quite certain that many people with beloved pets would disagree, dog owners in particular. Many sense that their animal companions are feeling morally chastised when told, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” just as they may seem to respond proudly and virtuously to “That’s a very good dog!” I’ve experienced such anthropomorphic reactions myself, with delight born out of a sense of kinship, but obviously that doesn’t make such a reaction scientifically the case.
Darwin focused on dogs because they’re unusually congenial to us psychologically and because dog owners have such a well of experience, so many tales to tell about their humanlike pets. In fact, he gathered a large corpus of stories that were suggestive of canine sympathy, loyalty, and self-sacrificial protectiveness, along with a few anecdotes that might have suggested the presence of guilt feelings or shame. But this open-minded scientist did not jump to conclusions.
It is with a wistful sense of personal regret that I must inform other loyal dog owners that when their charges seem to be giving them guilty looks, in all probability they (the owners) are projecting their own moralistic human reactions onto an amoral canine. An empathetic dog may be feeling uncomfortable in the face of disapproval, or submissively fearful of punishment for breaking a rule, and it may be showing this eloquently by means of body language, but I’m reasonably certain that a humanlike sense of being ashamed—and I mean feeling shame because there exists a strong and moralistic emotional identification with a serious and important rule that has been broken—plays no part in this picture.
Charitable interpretations with respect to doggie shame or doggie guilt are scarcely surprising, precisely because we humans have been breeding dogs to have feelings similar to our own for at least fifteen thousand years. Today this is done very methodically, but in the distant past simply favoring puppies that made the best pets, and then doing so over many generations, would have modified the “basic personality” of domesticated canines.4
As a fanatical dog lover, I would be the first to say that the dogs we’ve domesticated truly are friendly, affectionate, loyal, empathetic, eager for approval, and, if their masters are in trouble, often protective and self-sacrificing. If properly trained, they are as good as we are at following rules, and with all of these similarities it is natural to expect them to also have feelings of shame. But moral they are not, for a rule-internalizing conscience and sense of shame would appear to be missing. I realize that my skepticism is a matter of opinion and that a human can never get inside the head of a dog. However, there are at least a few facts that tend to support this hard-nosed viewpoint.
It’s easy enough to think you’re seeing a dog conscience in action when you come home to find not only a mess on the floor but also a cowering canine with head bowed, ears back, and tail between its legs. It also seems logical that if you then punish this humanlike culprit in the presence of its misdeed, it will recognize the shameful error of its past ways and desist in the future, just as a human would, because shame feelings are unpleasant and are to be avoided. And it’s certainly true that nasty nose rubs or training whacks with rolled-up newspapers will be remembered by your dog—as evidence of a beloved master’s obvious disapproval. In that sense dogs can learn our kind of rules, for we’ve bred them to be sensitive this way for thousands and thousands of generations by favoring the more docile individuals.
However, the idea that after-the-fact punishment can produce a positive shift in the dog’s behavior, just as it does with humans, is quite erroneous. Any professional dog trainer will tell you that you must punish your canine pet right in the commission of the deviant act—or at most within just six-tenths of a second after the dog’s unappreciated deed is done.5 Otherwise, apparently your dog will be confused because it will see you, a person it is closely bonded to, being hostile or hurting it for no good reason. People, on the other hand, understand perfectly well when they are punished now for a previous rule infraction, and as we’ll be seeing in Chapter 5, so can an African great ape. But in this respect dogs seem to live only in the present.
A devoted dog owner could argue that nevertheless dogs must be feeling shame—just look at their body language and those eyes. I can’t prove that to be false. What I can point out objectively, however, is that dogs neither blush with shame as we do nor seem to respond to punishment after the fact. Thus, in spite of being selected for humanlike qualities during the course of many thousands of dog generations, dogs remain on a significantly different wavelength regarding ex post facto condemnation and punishment.
“Might makes right” is what prevails among the ancestors of all dogs, the wolves. In every pack there are alphas who impose their rules of dominance upon subordinates, and if a subordinate successfully breaks a rule—when it gets away with something behind the alpha’s back—there’s absolutely no evidence of “shame” or “remorse” in the sneaky, willful subordinate’s body language. A subordinate caught in such an act will certainly try to appease the superior, but this has nothing to do with feeling morally reprehensible. It’s simply a matter of manipulative self-protection, and this, too, is found in humans. The difference is that we’re also moral.
It appears that the minds of dogs continue to be genetically set up to make them respond to punishment in only a very immediate way and that for some reason, yet to be discovered, this particular piece of brain wiring has resisted the attempts of egoistic humans to modify their domestic dogs and make them into obedient companions who totally remind us of ourselves. One major hint is that in dogs the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that helps in making social decisions that result in self-control—is much smaller, proportionately, than it is in human brains. Perhaps the potential just wasn’t there, even though as dog breeders we humans have tried hard enough to make our pets as prosocially oriented as we are.
Some of the most interesting things we know about our brains and their connection with morals come from what we can learn about a very small proportion of our human populations—people who most decidedly, to judge from their attitudes and behavior, are quite “amoral.” Although many seem to be born that way, a few others have suffered brain traumas with remarkable and revealing effects. If early in life the prefrontal cortex (residing just behind the forehead) of healthy, “normal” children is physically damaged, they may then grow up without the ability to understand and follow rules or to deal with authorities. Because their sense of right and wrong is impaired, they may find it difficult or even impossible to plan reasonably successful social lives.
Neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio reports on several cases. A year-and-a-half-old child had her head run over by a car, with no ostensible negative effects after a few days.6 Her behavioral problems came to light only when as a three-year-old she proved to be unusually unresponsive to parental rules. (I should mention that, morally speaking and otherwise, her parents were perfectly normal people.) Subsequently, she grew up to be an impulsive petty thief who simply couldn’t follow rules well enough to keep a job, showed a pathetic lack of empathy for her own baby, and didn’t really seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. Unable to evaluate and control her own impulses, she couldn’t function properly as a social being, and her life was a mess.
Just as this woman’s brain showed damage to the prefrontal cortex, so, too, did the brain of Phineas Gage, a responsible and amicable late-nineteenth-century railroad worker who became famous in the annals of psychology. Phineas was involved in an accident in which a metal spike went up into his eye socket and out through the front of his head, damaging this same brain region. Gage was able to stand up and think and speak immediately after the accident, but his personality was changed on a permanent basis. He lost his affability and became impulsively irritable, obscene, and impossible to get along with. Tragically, Phineas could no longer hold a regular job, and he ended up as a circus sideshow freak.7
An equally telling case was that of a schoolteacher, happily married at forty, who was caught by his utterly surprised wife looking at Internet pornography involving children and subsequently tried to “come on” to an eleven-year-old girl. His lack of impulse control led to divorce and possible prison. Eventually, the poor fellow was diagnosed with a benign tumor that was pressing on his prefrontal cortex—and when the tumor was removed, he went back to being normal. When the tumor reappeared, his deviant interests again became uncontrollable, so the cause and effect relationship was all too clear.8 As a brain area devoted in general to planning, the prefrontal cortex helps us to assess social consequences and also to control antisocial impulses. These functions go far in defining the human conscience as a faculty that enhances our personal fitness by keeping us out of trouble with our groups.
Then there are those who are born “impaired.” Psychologist Robert Hare spent his life studying criminals he objectively evaluated as being “psychopathic.” One aim of his screening test—he was the first to develop one that cunning psychopaths couldn’t outwit—was to identify such people in prison and keep them off the streets.9 Hare’s assumption was that psychopaths had inherited characteristics that kept them from developing normal consciences based on the usual moral emotions, which include a deeply felt sense of right and wrong and feelings of empathy for others. These unusual people range from deadly and unrepentant serial killers, some of whom we all know by name but many of whom we never manage to identify or police never manage to catch, to a much larger number of often glib and sometimes quite charming but utterly egoistic and unempathetic con artists, who lie recklessly and predictably exploit and harm other people without remorse or shame.
Whether psychopaths devote themselves to murder or to street crime or white-collar crime or con games that exploit the gullible, they are unusually given to domination or control, and what they all share are a lack of a normal moral compass and little trace of concern for the damage they are inflicting on the trusting souls they exploit. In lacking a normal conscience that includes making emotional connections with others, they lie without compunction in order to selfishly exploit others—and they fail to feel any sympathy for those they defraud or murder. These people are more frequently male than female, and in general their emotions are shallow, with a lack of the feelings that connect ordinary people with the moral rules they are able to internalize as children. Psychopathy shows up early in life, so in an important, emotional sense the learning of moral rules is incomplete.
I should hasten to emphasize that the typical psychopath is not the popularly conceived serial killer but is simply a con man who has no empathy for those he despoils. Typically, he’s intelligent, self-centered, and good at putting on a convincing face, even though sometimes his lying becomes obvious. He’s the perfect candidate to be a seller of bogus stocks to retirees or to be a battering husband whose wife doesn’t realize he was born that way and keeps on hoping he’ll reform. However, if killing does attract him, he kills without mercy, and the psychopath’s hall of fame includes the Hillside stranglers—there were two of them, cousins, who mercilessly tortured their California victims—along with, of course, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Silence of the Lambs aside, those are the ones we’ve heard of, but there obviously are many more of them, mostly uncaught, who thrive in modern urban societies, where a cloak of anonymity is available to the nefarious. With no very active conscience functions, and often with no fear of God’s punishment, they only have to stay ahead of the police.
Psychopaths are absolute masters at dissembling, and they understand how moral feelings operate, even though personally they live in an emotional wasteland. Curiously, this enables them to be true experts at manipulating the feelings of others, and that’s why they’ve so often had their way with parole boards, convincing them that if only they are given the opportunity, they’ll reform and become contributing members of society. Remember, psychopaths are born that way, so the normal hookup between positive emotions and a sense of “rules” cannot develop. That’s why Hare’s book is titled Without Conscience. The best we can expect of a psychopath, Hare tells us, is that as old age approaches, his (or her) antisocial tendencies will tend to dwindle somewhat on their own. Otherwise, parole boards beware.
Typical psychopaths have suffered no trauma to their prefrontal cortexes, so they are natural-born immoralists. Because they tend to have above-average intelligence, some of them are unusually adept at understanding societal rules, and they can be brilliant in pretending to have normal emotions. In addition, they can be quite astute in exploiting the trust of normal people: as one example, a serial killer lured a series of well-meaning, doomed girls to his car by asking for assistance with his “broken leg.” However, many less careful psychopaths tend to be reckless thrill-seekers, who spend most of their lives behind bars as relatively petty criminals who predictably get caught.
People very significantly afflicted in this way probably number as high as one or more out of several hundred in our total population. Not only are they without feelings of remorse or shame; often, they also take a curious kind of pride in their impulsive depredations. These individuals crop up in every walk of life, and the disorder is so fundamental that if they rate high on Robert Hare’s screening test, psychiatric treatment does them little or no good. They will never be fully moral for two reasons: first, they haven’t these emotional hookups, which are needed to identify with and internalize society’s rules, and second, they lack empathetic concern for others.
Half a century ago, sociologist Talcott Parsons tried to look at human social behavior from a number of perspectives, including the cultural and the psychological, and he spoke convincingly of the “internalization” of values and rules.10 By this he meant, in effect, that when groups translate their social values into rules of conduct, such as “Do unto Others,” individuals form emotional connections with those rules so that they feel fine about following them and uneasy about breaking them. Going against an internalized rule such as “Thou shalt not steal” can make normal people—but not psychopaths—feel apprehensively ashamed of themselves, socially tortured if they are caught in the act, and sincerely remorseful after the fact.
Let’s consider Parsons’s insight as it relates to psychopaths. These predators can’t internalize society’s values and rules as normal people do, and as a result they lack the active “inner voice,” laced with self-judgmental moral feeling, that Darwin talked about so eloquently.11 In contrast, the rest of us will feel that an important part of our identity is tied in with how we follow rules, and our self-respect will suffer or prosper accordingly. Morally normal human beings identify strongly with their own cultures and with the specific rules inherent in living a productive social life. They do so even though their appetites for power or “things” or sex or status may easily lead them to break some of these rules. Psychopaths simply don’t identify with the rules in the first place.
How can such a pathology evolve? How is it that at least one person in perhaps a few hundred can be a seriously predatory psychopath today? How can these socially perverse people’s genes stay alive and well in the human gene pool given that seriously deviant types are punished severely, with consequences for their fitness? To answer this question, we must rephrase the problem in evolutionary terms and ask, what benefits could psychopathy have brought to individuals who carried this trait in our hunter-gatherer past?
Prehistorically, some of these people surely became targets of capital punishment, but perhaps there were also some fitness advantages. For instance, that such individuals were unusually selfish with tendencies to dominate might have worked for them quite well in the strongly hierarchical early human communities that predated an egalitarian human lifestyle based on systematic group punishment. And even in nonhierarchical prehistoric band societies that were moralistically egalitarian, being unusually “selfish” could have had some fitness payoffs—even though if expressed in seriously antisocial ways, it could have led to big trouble. As we’ll see, the name of the game was self-control.
It seems likely that there would be some specific genes involved, but how would this be demonstrated? Like Robert Hare, psychologist Kent Kiehl, whom Hare mentored, works with prison populations. He’s an innovator: he brought mobile MRI units right into prison yards to scan the brains of felons. This research professor at the University of New Mexico’s Mind Institute used Hare’s formal evaluation procedures to decide reliably which criminals were psychopaths and which ones had a normal, “emotionally connected” sense of morality, and then he compared the two.12
A murderer could fall into either category, depending on whether a moralistic sense of empathy with the victim led to feelings of remorse afterward. Whereas typically a psychopathic murderer felt untroubled by the killing during and afterward, a morally normal felon who killed someone in a flash of uncontrollable anger would be deeply upset with himself over the ultimate hurt and damage he had done. This demonstrates that his moral makeup was no different from anyone else’s, and the remorse could be lifelong. After doing brain scans on large samples of prisoners in both categories, Kiehl noted that there were apparent anomalies in the paralimbic systems (at the base of the brains) of the psychopaths. This fairly old component of the brain facilitates the coupling of emotions with how people react to a variety of social situations, so this brings us back to the matter of rule internalization as a normal function of the conscience.
Having a conscience can be considered in a number of ways. For instance, Sigmund Freud talked about the superego as a mechanism of the mind that stands between us and our unruly libidos.13 And economist Robert Frank has made the case that a conscience, with its emotions, is individually adaptive.14 In more general usage, having a conscience simply means being internally constrained from antisocial behavior, and, I would add, deriving one’s self-regard from following society’s rules. Here, however, the evolutionary conscience will be defined still more broadly.
Decades ago, in Darwinism and Human Affairs, biologist Richard D. Alexander defined the evolutionary conscience as being more than an inhibitor of antisocial behavior. He called it the “still small voice that tells us how far we can go in serving our own interests without incurring intolerable risks.”15 Thus, a conscience seems to be as much a Machiavellian risk calculator as a “pure” moral force that maximizes prosocial behavior and minimizes deviance. If we are interested in the conscience and its evolution, we must define it dispassionately in terms of how it has served our fitness, and in this respect Alexander’s realistic definition is a bit better than Darwin’s. Of course, Darwin saw the conscience as a means to inhibit immorality, rather than to strategize how much immorality a person might get away with. Simple introspection will tell us, if we are honest with ourselves, that an evolutionary conscience does both.
In this context, we may ask exactly how strong the emotions are that bond normal human beings to their group’s rules. Internalization doesn’t mean that our best citizens become so deeply involved with society’s rules that they follow them automatically without thinking about alternatives—especially if socially disapproved alternatives happen to offer great satisfaction. Not at all. As we all know from personal experience, the selfish needs and desires that orient our behavior and generally help our fitness provide many social temptations that can result in moral censure and even personal disaster. What well-internalized moral values and rules do is to slow us down sufficiently that we are able, to a considerable extent, to pick and choose which behaviors we care to exhibit before our peers. As a result, most of our self-interested acts don’t become so predatory or antisocial that we’re likely to be discovered and severely punished—with our fitness ultimately being damaged.
Thus, our consciences can often make us into ambivalent conformists when an attractive but socially disapproved behavior presents itself. Imagine, for instance, finding a big paper bag full of money in an anonymous urban setting with nobody else in sight. For the first half of my professional life as a lowly paid academic, I found myself occasionally wondering how I would respond if faced with such a dumpster windfall. Would I at least be tempted if it was obviously money lost by criminals and not some poor eccentric’s life savings? As we’ll see, such purely hypothetical moral dilemmas can be used to scientifically probe the moral functions of our brains, and, as we’ll see, among hunter-gatherers in the far north such hypotheticals can even be used to influence how children learn the moral rules of their cultures.
Sometimes, of course, we may simply succumb to life’s predictable temptations—in spite of being haunted by an impending sense of shame that combines with fear of punishment. Our consciences not only identify a given alternative as being moral or immoral but also help us decide what to do about it. And in this context it makes evolutionary sense if we can cut some useful corners competitively without taking major social risks. That way, our fitness can be advanced.
So internalization doesn’t make people socially perfect. Far from it. But even the opportunistic evolutionary conscience that Alexander identified does serve as a cognitive beacon when we are about to stray and harm our social reputation and also as an emotional inhibitor that often keeps us from straying too far—and perhaps disastrously. Thus, an internalizing conscience has been useful in keeping us out of serious trouble socially, and today in modern society it may also keep us out of jail, where our reproductive success would be considerably diminished. At the same time, a conscience can help us to maintain respect for ourselves, for basically we judge ourselves by the same group moral standards that we use in judging others.
From the previous discussion, it seems obvious that several brain areas have evolved to give us this remarkable moral faculty that might be unique to humans. A sense of right and wrong and a capacity to blush with shame, along with a highly developed sense of empathy, compel us as moral beings to consider how our actions may negatively affect the lives of others—or how we may gain satisfaction in helping them. We also possess the capacity to understand that our groups may punish us for present and past misdeeds, including deeds in the distant past, and a conscience helps us to be aware of our social reputations in general. Yet the conscience also has its Machiavellian functions, for it can guide us to take a flexible approach to being moral that allows us to profit from having a decent reputation and at the same time judiciously cut the occasional not-too-serious corner and profit from doing so.
How should a reproductively useful conscience be designed, then? First, in the Darwinian competition among individuals a conscience shouldn’t be too weak because this can lead to personal disaster. Nor should it be too strong, for the internalization of rules shouldn’t be too inflexible. We’ll be discussing this further, but an efficient evolutionary conscience is one that lets us express ourselves socially in ways that help us to both keep ourselves out of trouble and get ahead in life. For instance, this conscience doesn’t make us give the government the benefit of the doubt when we are paying income tax—but it does keep most of us from robbing banks or, unless we are prominent politicians, from committing flagrant and reckless adultery.
Ever since Darwin, sympathy and conscience have been talked about in the same breath, but feeling concern for others and listening to an inner voice are far from being identical. For instance, we may stop ourselves from doing harm to another simply because we fear being caught and punished. Of course, we may also feel for our victim and refrain—sometimes even though we have good reason to dislike that victim—because we have internalized a social norm that tells us hurting another human being is wrong.
The interactions of such psychological forces can be complex, and they often breed ambivalence. In A Fable, one of William Faulkner’s less appreciated novels, soldiers on both sides of the trenches in World War I France mutiny to try to stop the senseless killing.16 This action is partly a matter of self-preservation, but it is also a matter of conscience and a refusal to dehumanize the enemy. A Christ-like figure is the main actor, and the story involves a combination of motives that include self-preservation, empathy, and morality. Normally, across the front lines in warfare both morality and sympathy tend to be suspended because a soldier is dealing with “outsiders,” but Faulkner’s well-told story makes clear that under the right circumstances conscience and feeling for others can apply strongly not just to the in-group but to members of the out-group as well.
When people are dealing only with others of their own group, this dimension of the human conscience is prominent.17 Notions of right and wrong may not rule our lives, but they regulate them very significantly, and many of the mores we internalize are shaped by helpful feelings toward others. For instance, in addition to moral rules aimed at keeping us from doing harm to others, there are rules that spur us to give needed assistance to others even if they are not close kin. Clearly, having a sympathetic conscience that includes a sense of shame helps us to fit with the prosocially oriented communities we reside in and to fit in with networks of cooperation that profit ourselves and others. The only problem with having such feelings is that they lead us to aid others even if they won’t necessarily pay us back, and this is a major theoretical problem we’ll try to resolve in Chapter 7. Again, the answer I’ll be favoring is social selection.
The rules individuals internalize are the cultural product of groups that gossip moralistically on an ongoing basis. That’s how moral codes originate, stay in place, and are continuously refined. Surely gossip is a hunter-gatherer universal from way back,18 and it still manifests itself today in our national media in the form of gossip columns, TV “entertainment shows,” and soap operas, while in our workplaces and neighborhoods we continue to discuss privately (and deliciously) the doings of others—just as has been done in small communities of human foragers for dozens and dozens of millennia.
Such “talking” with trusted associates permits people not only to evaluate their peers, but also to intuitively mull over what is useful or disruptive in human social life and to keep in place a moral consensus about how group members shouldn’t—or should—act toward one another. In a rather immediate sense, then, it’s gossiping that’s responsible for the group mores that orient social control and lead people to preach actively in favor of cooperation and generosity. I’ll have much more to say on the subject of gossiping in Chapter 9, for every cultural anthropologist has to be adept at this verbal art.
Today human groups come in the form of nations or cities as well as tribes and nomadic bands, but they all have such moral codes. And even though certain types of moral belief can vary considerably (and sometimes dramatically) between cultures, all human groups frown on, make pronouncements against, and punish the following: murder, undue use of authority, cheating that harms group cooperation, major lying, theft, and socially disruptive sexual behavior. These basic rules of conduct appear to be human universals. In any event they are so widespread that we may make an evolutionary assumption that as cultural practices they would have been reasonably well suited to whatever social exigencies were common in Late Pleistocene human living situations, which, as I’ll be demonstrating, in many ways were not that dissimilar to exigencies we face today.
It’s clear that “biology” and “culture” have been working together to make us adaptively moral. For instance, when we use our cultural acumen to learn moral rules as children, this is based on developmental “windows” that are sequentially hardwired. The same rules about helping others that have been internalized through early child socialization are later reinforced in adults by the prosocial “preaching” we’ll be discussing throughout the book, which basically encourages group members to live a socially useful life by being helpful to others. Salient are strictures to be generous both within the family and to group members who are not family. For nomadic modern hunter-gatherers who are strongly egalitarian, we may add being humble in demeanor and avoiding aggressive domination to their particular list of desirables,19 along with being truthful with other group members, being cooperative and respectful of others, being fair in “business dealings,” and being prosocially inclined in general.
If language is used for such encouragement, language also generates criticism that comes in the form of pointedly hostile corrective advice or the mocking of a deviant. And still stronger forms of language-based social control exist, of course, such as group shaming. There’s also ostracism or shunning, which conversely removes deviants from normal communication. There’s expulsion from the group, a distressing measure arrived at through group consensus. Mobile hunter-gatherers in their small bands do all of these things, all over the world, and very much the same is true of all other humans, whether they’re living in larger sedentary “tribes” or in villages or towns or even in enormous urban environments.
In extreme cases where acts of deviance seriously threaten the lives of others or are felt to be truly abhorrent, a death penalty may be inflicted after a hunter-gatherer consensus is reached by privately talking things out. Such dire punishment is still widespread today, and just a few thousand years ago—before movements against such measures arose—it probably was the norm worldwide. Indeed, 15,000 years ago in a Pleistocene world peopled just by mobile foragers, capital punishment surely was universal or quite widespread as a practical but extreme expression of social distancing.
A vivid instance of hunter-gatherer moral life—and the role of language—can be taken from the Mbuti Pygmies. They live in what was once called, in colonial times, the Congo, a place I have seen only from a distance—and a bit fearfully. For six years I made an annual trip to Gombe National Park in Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees while working in collaboration with Dr. Jane Goodall, and in the early 1980s, from our isolated research quarters on the beach, we could just see the hills of Zaire forty miles away, on the far side of enormous Lake Tanganyika.
Except when storms are raging, this huge inland waterway is easy enough to cross, and on those distant hills some nights the fires burned bright orange for hours, the visible signature of rebel forces resisting the Zairian government and attacking agricultural villages that did not cooperate with them. A few years earlier forty of those same rebels had motored right across the lake to kidnap four of Jane’s student fieldworkers, so watching these burning villages definitely brought a sense of malaise. As I heard it, the Stanford University students were eventually ransomed for $500,000 by one student’s father, but I knew that if the chips were down, I personally would have no such backer.
The Mbuti Pygmies live in the interior far beyond those hills, in truly dense forests that provide these skillful hunters with enough meat to satisfy their needs because they trade some of it with Bantu farmers for grain the farmers grow.20 Aside from this unusual economic symbiosis, these foragers live pretty much as other mobile hunter-gatherers do, camping in small egalitarian bands of up to a dozen or so families in one locale, until it is time to move on and exploit another. The Mbuti have no formal religion as we know it, but in their own way they use rituals to worship and placate “The Forest,” which, as they see things, provides generously for them. They are a loquacious and intelligent people, and if they are morally aroused, their capacity to express themselves is far from restrained.
Anthropologist Colin Turnbull lived with these people and wrote several books about their way of life. An excellent writer, Turnbull was exceptionally sensitive to the nuances that attend social life in small moral communities. Like myself when I am studying humans rather than chimpanzees, he felt it was important to become reasonably proficient in the native language, and surely, like all cultural anthropologists when a situation of exceptional social interest arose, he took notes as things went along and afterward checked his records independently with a number of indigenous informants to make sure he’d gotten it all right.
The episode I shall be describing here—often using Turnbull’s own words and the words of the Pygmies themselves—is one that reflects some of the core moral values in forager life. These involve political egalitarianism and cooperation in procuring and sharing meat, and both practices will play a key role in the coming prehistoric analysis of conscience evolution, just as they play a central role in the social lives of all mobile foragers today.
Here’s the shameful story. A rather arrogant mature hunter named Cephu was a member of the Mbuti band in question, even though his extended family seemed to be not as well integrated into the band as the rest of the families, a few of which were closely related by blood but most not. Such an admixture is typical of forager bands, and even though these people are quick to show preference toward their kinsmen, just as Hamilton’s kin selection theory predicts, they will in many contexts treat everyone in the band almost like “family.”
This is particularly the case when large game—a favorite food because of its exceptional fat content and general nutritious value—is taken down. All over the world, mobile hunter-gatherers use social control guided by moral rules to see to it that when a successful hunter kills a large mammal, his ego is held in check. To this end, he is not only precluded from decisively favoring his family and kinsmen with larger portions of the meat, but usually he is also forbidden by his fellow egalitarians even to preside over and distribute the meat—for fear that he might use this position to gain political or social advantages. Rather, the band sees to it that some neutral person will distribute the meat fairly and equitably, according to the rules.21 These rules are, of course, moral, and it is virtuous, as well as mandatory, to give over one’s kill to the entire group. By the same token, it’s dangerously deviant to play the possessive meat bully—and downright shameful to sneakily cheat on the system. This last is precisely what Cephu did.
Foragers most often use projectile weapons to hunt large game in small groups, but the Mbuti sometimes engage in collaborative net hunts that involve the entire band. Each man has a very long net, and up to a dozen nets are positioned so that they form an extremely long, semicircular trap. Some distance away the women and children then start beating the bush and approaching the nets to drive frightened animals like forest antelope into this trap. Each man then spears any prey that become ensnared and keeps the meat for his family.
This variant of Pygmy hunting and sharing does not require a designated, fair-minded meat distributor because the game are medium to small and the nets are so long that everyone is bound to get about the same amount of meat. But that is true only if no one cheats. During the net hunt in question, the egoistic Cephu quietly decided he wasn’t getting his due. As fleeing animals randomly rushed into other nets and were speared by their owners, Cephu decided to improve his luck. When he thought no one was looking, in the dense forest he repositioned his net so that it would be well ahead of all the others, and the driven animals would run into his net first. Cephu succeeded very well in the final take, but this cheater had the misfortune of being spotted.22
Colin Turnbull had gone along on the hunt, but he was unaware of Cephu’s crime, just as Cephu was unaware that his dastardly act had been witnessed. As most of the families were returning to camp, Turnbull noticed a very gloomy mood among them, and he heard both men and women quietly swearing at Cephu, who had yet to arrive. No one would tell Turnbull what had happened, but finally an adult male, Kenge, said to the group, “Cephu is an impotent old fool. No, he isn’t, he is an impotent old animal—we have treated him like a man for long enough, now we should treat him like an animal. Animal!”
This statement broke the ice, and some serious gossiping began as the score was carefully added up and a group consensus materialized. The result of Kenge’s tirade was that everyone calmed down and began criticizing Cephu a little less heatedly, but on every possible score: the way he always built his camp separately, the way he had even referred to it as a separate camp, the way he mistreated his relatives, his general deceitfulness, the dirtiness of his camp, and even his own personal habits.
Just then, Cephu returned from the hunt. As he stopped at his hut, Kenge shouted over to Cephu that he was an animal! As he strolled over to the main camp, Cephu attempted to tough it out:
Trying not to walk too quickly, yet afraid to dawdle too deliberately, he made an awkward entrance. For as good an actor as Cephu it was surprising. By the time he got to the kumamolimo everyone was doing something to occupy himself—staring into the fire or up at the tree tops, roasting plantains, smoking, or whittling away at arrow shafts. Only Ekianga and Manyalibo looked impatient, but they said nothing. Cephu walked into the group, and still nobody spoke. He went up to where a youth was sitting in a chair. Usually he would have been offered a seat without his having to ask, and now he did not dare ask, and the youth continued to sit there in as nonchalant a manner as he could muster. Cephu went to another chair where Amabosu was sitting. He shook it violently when Amabosu ignored him, at which he was told, “Animals lie on the ground.”
Next Cephu was told that he took more help from other band members than he gave back, and Cephu tried to defend himself. It is at that point that Ekianga, another adult male, let on in no uncertain terms that the group knew what had gone on. “Ekianga leaped to his feet and brandished his hairy fist across the fire. He said that he hoped Cephu would fall on his spear and kill himself like the animal he was. Who but an animal would steal meat from others? There were cries of rage from everyone, and Cephu burst into tears.”
This action involved very strong shaming, and Turnbull makes it clear that Cephu’s deviance was extraordinary: “I had never heard of this happening before, and it was obviously a serious offense. In a small and tightly knit hunting band, survival can be achieved only by the closest co-operation and by an elaborate system of reciprocal obligations which insures that everyone has some share in the day’s catch. Some days one gets more than others, but nobody ever goes without. There is, as often as not, a great deal of squabbling over the division of the game, but that is expected, and nobody tries to take what is not his due.”
Cephu’s next acts were to cover his deviance with a lie and then engage in some egoistic boasting, which, to me, seems almost worthy of the sometimes megalomaniac, fast-talking, recklessly-lying psychopaths described by Hare and Kiehl:
Cephu tried very weakly to say that he had lost touch with the others and was still waiting when he heard the beating begin. It was only then that he had set up his net, where he was. Knowing that nobody believed him, he added that in any case he felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets. After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band? Manyalibo tugged at Ekianga to sit down, and sitting down himself he said there was obviously no use prolonging the discussion. Cephu was a big chief, and Mbuti never have chiefs. And Cephu had his own band, of which he was chief, so let him go with it and hunt elsewhere and be a chief elsewhere. Manyalibo ended a very eloquent speech with “Pisa me taba” (“Pass me the tobacco”). Cephu knew he was defeated and humiliated.
Cephu could have continued to protest his innocence and left the band. But he didn’t, and Turnbull knew exactly what Cephu had to be thinking.
Alone, his band of four or five families was too small to make an efficient hunting unit. He apologized profusely, reiterated that he really did not know he had set up his net in front of the others, and said that in any case he would hand over all the meat. This settled the matter, and accompanied by most of the group he returned to his little camp and brusquely ordered his wife to hand over the spoils. She had little chance to refuse, as hands were already reaching into her basket and under the leaves of the roof where she had hidden some liver in anticipation of just such a contingency. Even her cooking pot was emptied. Then each of the other huts was searched and all the meat taken. Cephu’s family protested loudly and Cephu tried hard to cry, but this time it was forced and everyone laughed at him. He clutched his stomach and said he would die; die because he was hungry and his brothers had taken away all his food; die because he was not respected.
The playacting was totally ignored, but Turnbull makes it clear that Cephu’s apology and concession of the meat set things on a conciliatory path. Within a few hours, Cephu joined the group in its evening singing ritual, and he and his extended family were no longer socially distanced deviants but accepted members of the group again. Reconciliation was, of course, in the interest of all, for it enabled the band to continue to have many hunters and frequent opportunities to eat their beloved meat.
Turnbull, who like myself surely has read famous French sociologist Émile Durkheim on the punitive power of small moral communities, sums up this group-sanctioning episode very nicely:
Cephu had committed what is probably one of the most heinous crimes in Pygmy eyes, and one that rarely occurs. Yet the case was settled simply and effectively, without any evident legal system being brought into force. It cannot be said that Cephu went unpunished, because for those few hours when nobody would speak to him he must have suffered the equivalent of as many days solitary confinement for anyone else. To have been refused a chair by a mere youth, not even one of the great hunters; to have been laughed at by women and children; to have been ignored by men—none of these things would be quickly forgotten. Without any formal process of law Cephu had been firmly put in his place, and it was unlikely he would do the same thing again.
This was a case of corrective social control through shaming and threat of expulsion in which a deviant’s behavior was modified so that the group needn’t lose a productive member who was misbehaving. The breach of mores was serious, and Manyalibo made one thing clear: if Cephu really thought he was too good to be just another egalitarian band member who followed the group’s rules, he was free to take his little handful of relatives and friends, go elsewhere, play the “big chief,” and possibly starve. Thus, in trying to defend himself in one transgression, Cephu committed another: he tried to lord it over his egalitarian peers. For both sins he was forgiven, but only after proffering a weepingly submissive apology.
All of these nuances become so obvious because Turnbull offers an unusually detailed description. Cephu’s life was never in immediate danger, but the threat of expulsion from the band was a compelling one. People in small moral communities fear the wrath of the group for good reason. If a crime is an ultimate one, and if words and social pressure are not sufficient to rehabilitate the transgressor, sanctioning, both physical and verbal, can become far more decisive. Although some hunter-gatherers don’t do this, the Mbuti beat sneak thieves when they are caught. And any small human group has the potential to use capital punishment if a deviant poses a sufficiently ultimate danger. But even just being expelled from a band can bring serious risks, and it was in the face of such a threat that Cephu came down off of his defensive high horse, grudgingly but apologetically all but admitted his shameful act, and, having submitted, became an accepted group member again.
The impact of actively shaming deviants deserves further discussion. Once ridicule has been used to shame someone, say for behaving arrogantly, others with a similar penchant are likely to stay in line almost automatically—just to avoid similar humiliation. More than fear is at work here, for the potential deviants have internalized egalitarian group mores that condemn self-aggrandizement, have personally experienced shame feelings while growing up, and fear being further ridiculed or shamed as adults. They also have language, so the learning of moral lessons can be vicarious. Any Pygmy who later heard the story of Cephu would think twice before shifting his net ahead of the others.
The effectiveness of even mild forms of ridicule is perhaps best seen in anthropologist Richard Lee’s vivid (and oft-quoted) descriptions of how the !Kung Bushmen keep alpha-male tendencies in check. (The “!” that precedes “Kung” is a clicking sound that is part of their language.) Unlike the Mbuti, these Kalahari Bushmen are economically independent mobile foragers of the same general type as people who were evolving our genes for us 45,000 years ago, and they, too, are verbally adept. When a !Kung hunter comes back from a hunting expedition, others in the camp are eager to eat their favorite food, meat, and expectantly they’ll ask him what he has killed. Knowing that he’ll be subjected to ridicule if he shows the slightest tendency to boast and set himself up as being a superior hunter, he’ll all but poetically deprecate the size and quality of his prey. An articulate Bushman named Gaugo tells Lee, “Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all . . . maybe just a tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself because I know he has killed something big.”23
Or as a renowned healer named Tomazho says, “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”24
Thus, even though the successful hunter’s chest may be quietly swelling with pride, he’ll shape his words very humbly, and his egalitarian peers, all too ready to put him down with ridicule, will approve his self-effacement and respect him both as a hunter and as a person of humility.
Cutting proud hunters down to size verbally isn’t the end of it, for usually Bushmen don’t even get to distribute the meat they’ve hunted. Once the carcass is hauled into camp, by custom someone else will probably preside over the meat and share it out to the main kin groups in the band—who’ll then share it further with their close kin and other associates. The effect is to remove the hunter from the meat he has killed as a possible ticket to power, and the Bushmen understand this situation all too well.
This beautifully detailed pair of ethnographic descriptions from sub-Saharan Africa shows how groups morally manipulate individuals for practical purposes that serve everyone but the would-be deviant and his family. With the Pygmies we saw how morally based indignation can spread contagiously through a group so that almost everyone becomes emotionally exercised—even though a few persons may take the lead. It also shows that the close relatives of the culprit may stand aside and remain neutral, for Cephu’s extended family didn’t verbally attack Cephu or join in the shaming.
But even though they didn’t enter into the active criticism, ridicule, shaming, and threat of expulsion directed at Cephu, they were not trying to defend him either. Had they done so actively, we simply would have had a case of conflict within the group, with both sides trying to use morality to justify themselves. Instead, we had an instance of moral sanctioning in the name of the group and its vital social functions, with a familial faction choosing to stand aside rather than backing their leader, who was so clearly in the wrong.
Cephu did try to defend himself, but we must assume that he understood all too well how repugnant meat-cheating was to his bandmates and that to some significant degree he’d internalized group values that condemned such behavior—unless he was a full-blown psychopath. His argument that he was a “big man” who need not follow the rules was extremely repugnant to his Pygmy colleagues, just as it would be in any mobile forager band, with its emphasis on the essential equality of all the adult hunters. And it smacked of the grandiosity that we see in American psychopaths who are incarcerated. But all that line of reasoning got him was a threat—that if this was the case, then he could take his extended family with him and split from the band.
It’s tempting to suggest that Cephu might have been something of a psychopath, and in studies of modern psychopaths this affliction has been found to be a matter of degree. However, this would be very difficult to determine because we lack studies for Mbuti Pygmies like those of Hare and Kiehl. Furthermore, in spite of the sometimes arrogant and facile attempts to defend and justify his behavior, Cephu did appear to be engaged with normal moral emotions even though their expression was combined with playacting.
If manifestations of psychopathy hold across cultures, which seems very likely, Cephu may have had at least a touch of this innately based moral ailment. This is sheer speculation, however, and privately his remorseful feelings afterward could have been deep or shallow or even nonexistent. We’ll never know, unless Dr. Kent Kiehl decides to move his mobile MRI wagon to the forests of central Africa.
Let’s consider more broadly the nature of hunter-gatherer social control. To do so, we must move from this pair of African societies to the many scores of anthropologically studied mobile band cultures, which, like the Bushmen but not like the grain-bartering Pygmies, are directly comparable to the independent mobile bands that lived under Late Pleistocene conditions. Before the Holocene Epoch phased in about 10,000 years ago, this prehistoric world was populated mainly or possibly exclusively by politically egalitarian hunter-gatherers, and because an individual lived in a small band of about twenty to thirty or perhaps forty people, she or he certainly didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the group as Cephu did.
Group moral indignation can take a number of forms, most of them quite uniform today among these foragers from one continent to the next. Their reactions range from moderate rebukes and sharp criticism to ostracism, ridicule, shaming, and outright banishment; and at the end of the line is the fearsome specter of capital punishment. Foragers—who morally appreciate the sanctity of human life within the group and do so strongly—use this measure rarely but decisively, as a desperate last resort. Presently, in Chapter 4 we’ll be seeing which crimes bring about this dire type of community reaction.
I’ve already drawn up a short list of proscribed behaviors that seem to be universally condemned and punished. However, the actual strength of these group reactions can vary from culture to culture. For instance, even though close degrees of incest are universally disapproved, in some band-level cultures such behavior is not punished very severely, perhaps by a scolding or by ostracism for a time, whereas in others it brings a death sentence because it is felt to be so monstrously abhorrent or so threatening to group social life or to the lives of other group members.25 When it comes to serious meat cheaters like Cephu, however, they are always likely to be treated roughly because their behavior is seen as threatening everyone else’s welfare, and in some groups they may be killed. Likewise, if a man becomes overbearing in dealing with his peers or, where shamanism prevails, if a person selfishly and maliciously misuses supernatural power, that deviant may be actively rebuked or the rest of the band may simply slip away in the night. But such people may also be killed if there’s no other way to escape their threatening domination.
In fact, if such self-aggrandizers try persistently to intimidate or tyrannize their peers, or if they actually succeed in doing so, they are quite likely to be killed. Indeed, with these egalitarians, to seriously disrespect other hunters in the group and to trample on their precious rights as equals creates really serious anger and disapproval, leading to true moral outrage. That said, however, foragers take little joy in killing a group member, and usually they try to reform deviants rather than eliminating them through banishment or execution.26 This is partly because they feel for them as fellow human beings, and partly because they’re practical people who understand the need to have as many hunters as possible in the band—even if, like Cephu, they have irritating qualities and are occasionally prone to deviance.
As we’ll see in Chapter 4, however, when it comes to the really serious political dominators I just mentioned, and also a few other seriously deviant types, a firm and sometimes ultimate line is drawn in the sand: he who crosses this line must be prepared to sacrifice his genetic future.