The Evil in Goodness
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. . . . And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven . . . And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
GENESIS 11:1–8
MUZAFER SHERIF WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD WHEN soldiers landed on the beaches of his home town of Izmir in Turkey. The armed men spoke Greek and called the town Smyrna, as did half the citizens of the town itself. The Greeks in the city rejoiced when the occupiers entered the town, but soon there were scenes of horror. Before the bayonets of the soldiers, the Muslims of Izmir were forced to take off their traditional fezzes and trample them on the ground while cursing against Mohammed. Whoever refused was murdered. There were massacres on that fifteenth of May, 1919, as reported later by a commission of inquiry appointed by the Americans, English, French, and Italians. The Greek soldiers tied the hands of Turkish-speaking men, women, and children, lined them up, and shot them.1
Muzafer Sherif found himself in one of these doomed lines. One victim after another was shot. When the man next to him fell, Sherif knew his turn was next. The soldier was loading his rifle. But suddenly he hesitated. Did he feel pity for his young victim? Sherif never learned why he was spared, but the Greek soldier turned away and left.
In the following months, in Izmir as everywhere in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the separate ethnic groups fought one another. Greeks persecuted Turks, Turks persecuted Armenians, Christians burned down Muslim houses, and Muslims murdered Christians. It was not so much the violence itself that puzzled Sherif, however. What made a deep impression on him was the selfless comradeship in each group. The altruism within the community corresponded to its hostility, murderous rage, and vengefulness toward its hated enemies. People were simultaneously sympathetic and possessed by prejudice, ready for both supreme self-sacrifice and bestial acts. What was going on in their heads? Sherif decided to devote his life to investigating and understanding the causes of this paradox.2
The Eagles Versus the Rattlers
Sherif’s experiences in Germany twenty-two years later must have seemed like a nightmare returned from his childhood. The young social scientist had gone to Berlin to study psychology, but goon squads from the SA, the SS, and the Communists were battling one another and the police in the streets. Hitler was named chancellor in 1933 and began persecuting his political opponents and Jews in the name of the Volksgemeinschaft—the community of the German Volk (people).
Sherif emigrated to the United States, where in June 1954 he conducted a groundbreaking experiment.3 He and his wife, who collaborated on the experiment, had spent weeks trolling schoolyards for appropriate subjects. They were looking for eleven-year-old boys who were, from their perspective, completely “normal” and average in every respect—“healthy, socially well-adjusted, somewhat above average in intelligence and from stable, white, Protestant, middle-class homes”—but unknown to one another.4 Once they had found twenty-two such boys, they divided them into two groups of eleven and had them picked up by two separate busses.
They were driven to a summer camp on a river. At first, the two groups were kept far apart, without any contact. Sherif posed as the director of the camp and documented everything that happened. After less than a week, each group of eleven boys had become a strong community. They had even given their “tribes” names; one group called itself the Rattlers, the other the Eagles. In each group, leaders and followers had emerged and the boys had developed rituals and customs. The Rattlers specialized in profanity. The Eagles went skinny-dipping.
Sherif had planned to induce conflict between the groups, but that proved to be unnecessary. Although neither band had previously laid eyes on the other, some boys were already calling the other group “nigger campers” at the mere sound of their voices in the distance. They asked their adult counselors to organize a competition with the strangers as soon as possible. At the same time, the audible presence of the other group altered the behavior within each group. The boys helped each other and shared more. Non-swimmers who had been looked down upon were now actively helped to learn how, “so that we’ll all be able to swim.”5
When Sherif brought the two bands together at last for group competitions such as rope-pulls and treasure hunts, they reviled each other as “communists,” “stinkers,” and “sissies.”6 Although none of them had the least reason to be hostile, the Eagles and the Rattlers apparently couldn’t stand each other. They held their noses when a member of the other group was nearby and refused to eat together.
On the next day, the Eagles burned a Rattler flag; the Rattlers retaliated by attacking and destroying a hut the Eagles had built. They found a pair of jeans belonging to one of the Eagle leaders and raised it on their flagpole with the motto “The Last of the Eagles.” Thereupon, the Eagles armed themselves with baseball bats and ransacked the Rattlers’ camp. Luckily, the other band was not at home.
The more bitter the rivalry became, the stronger the intra-group selflessness grew. Especially, the youngest boys at the bottom of the pecking order tried to distinguish themselves through heroic action—and with special hate for their enemies.
Attempts by Sherif and his colleagues to overcome the rivalry were unsuccessful. Neither a joint trip to the movies nor fireworks on the Fourth of July was able to bring Rattlers and Eagles closer together. A meal planned to seal their reconciliation ended with a food fight in which the boys threw steaks and chicken drumsticks at one another.
We will see below that Sherif did succeed in finding a way to make peace, but the conclusion he drew from the study was still unsettling: Groups hate and attack each other not because psychopaths like Hitler seduce them into it. Conflicts between communities that seem senseless to an outside observer arise spontaneously. All one has to do is bring two average citizens together; without further prompting they will begin to reject outsiders and find reasons why they are different from others.
In direct proportion to the increase in hostility toward outsiders, selflessness and solidarity grow within a community. Israeli investigators organized a competition between harvesting teams in the orange groves.7 Although each group continued to be paid as a whole and members therefore had a strong motivation to let others work harder, no one dared to try freeloading anymore. The average yield per group rose by 30 percent.
Corruption through Selflessness
Does this mean that xenophobia, vindictiveness, and war are the price we must pay for our ability to act altruistically? After all, leaders have always instigated conflict to unite their subjects behind them.
It lies in the nature of selflessness that cooperation needs competition, since altruists are under constant threat of being exploited. If in the long term they give too much to the wrong people, it will lead to their downfall. They can only survive by distributing their charity unequally. They should confer their largesse preferentially upon people like themselves—other altruists. As long as the selfless stick together, they all benefit from the cooperation and are thereby at an advantage over egocentric loners. But if they help others indiscriminately, their charity goes for naught: Random people profit from it and are happy, but they give no thought to doing something for others themselves.
The difficulty, of course, is finding the right recipients. It’s simplest to stick to the people you know and trust—your friends. Entire careers have been built on the principle “one hand washes the other.” Almost one-third—and in small businesses and particular industries like financial services even more than half—of all jobs in Germany are filled through personal contacts.8 It’s practical for all concerned and sounds harmless enough. But of course, it is to the detriment of applicants who don’t know the right people as well as of firms that aren’t hiring the best-qualified candidates.
Altruism and morality are two different things. People who give their feckless buddy a leg up are often behaving with true selflessness. If a man helps the not-very-bright son of his ex-girlfriend get a job in his company, he’s not doing it with the hope of getting anything in return, but out of old affection. Yet he thereby damages the company.
Of course, many generous people hope that their actions will be repaid some day when they themselves are in need of a small favor. But usually, repayment comes not from the particular recipient of their generosity, but from someone else. That’s the principle of networking. Whoever belongs to such a group can count on the support of the others, but also has to be there for them. A group of politicians in the conservative Christian Democratic Union in Germany formed such a network during a trip to South America in 1979. The members of the group, which became known as the Andes Pact, pledged never to say a word against another member, much less oppose one another in party primaries. Many of them rose to prominence and held dominant positions in German politics for decades.
Their success is a perfect illustration of the principle of group selection described in the previous chapter. A clique also depends on selflessness. If an ally needs support, it must be given. Whether the supporting person benefits thereby doesn’t matter. It is the group norm; whoever refuses is ejected from the group. Several members of the now-defunct Andes Pact made the unpleasant discovery that membership in such a network does not automatically benefit everyone in it. While some rose to powerful positions with the group’s support, others languished in provincial obscurity.
A study of small-scale societies in Papua New Guinea shows how weakly altruism is connected to higher moral principles. Swiss investigators had members of two mutually hostile ethnic groups take part in experiments that involved sharing.9 The subjects only cared about fairness with respect to their own community. If a member of the enemy group was swindled, they were less ready to punish the miscreant, and they were unwilling to punish him at all if he came from their community. Those Papua New Guinea hunter-gatherers are not so different from some trade unions in democratic societies: They fight for their members but don’t do much for the unemployed.
Even the success of the Mafia depends on extremely altruistic group norms. Whoever joins must submit to its infamous code of omertà and keep silent even if he is unjustly accused of a murder. According to a list of “Ten Commandments” that the Sicilian police discovered in November 2007 in the hideout of the captured boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo, the mafiosi must put the interests of the organization above their own in every respect, “even if their wife is in labor.” A good mafioso must never lie or take money “that belongs to others or their families.” All this assumes, of course, that the “others” are also “men of honor.”
“When Envy Breeds Unkind Division”
It is characteristic that the codex of the Mafia, like the rules of the Andes Pact, places great emphasis on group members not competing with one another. For the more a group is able to direct the competition for resources outward, the more successful it is and the more intramural altruism flourishes. Instead of competing with one another, group members attempt to capture a bigger piece of the pie together at the cost of other groups.
This situation arises spontaneously whenever competition within the community is unproductive because everyone is equal. And that seems to be the state in which our ancient forebears did indeed live.10 Almost all hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into modern times and have been studied are egalitarian. Whether on the steppes of East Africa, in the jungles of the Amazon, or in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, important decisions are as a rule made communally and members of the community react strongly when one individual tries to rise above the others. In contrast to our nearest biological relatives, the great apes, hierarchies are absent among the hunter-gatherers. If someone tries to make himself into a boss or accumulate too many possessions, he will face stiff resistance and possible exclusion from the community. There was obviously strong evolutionary pressure on our forebears to resist all-too-noticeable differences in status for the sake of cooperation in the group.
Thus the longing for equality seems to have become a part of our nature. It plagues us to this day in the form of envy, a feeling that exists in no other animal—the wish to take something away from someone else to bring that person down to the same level. Envy is painful, as measurements of brain activity show. To see someone else in a better position than oneself activates similar processes in the brain as when one is stabbed with a knife.11
Thus it’s not surprising that envy has such explosive potential. Studies in social psychology have repeatedly shown that people are willing to forego part of their salary as long as others get even less. But the gnawing feeling of envy all too often breaks out in psychological harassment, damage to property, and even physical violence.12
“When envy breeds unkind division / there comes the ruin, there begins confusion.”13 In Henry VI, Shakespeare sums up the double-edged nature of envy. In its destructiveness, it often injures the envious person as much as the person envied. Selfless actions are advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint as long as the community wins at the expense of its altruists. But when farmers in some remote corners of Eastern Europe even today set fire to the farm of a neighbor who they think has become too prosperous, on balance they lessen the future prospects of their community.
Such acts can only be explained as relics from archaic times. In a tribal society whose disintegration would mean the ruin of all its members, any hint of inequality is an existential threat. To forestall that threat, it can be worth the cost to temporarily reduce the resources of the entire group.
It is not just envy that causes communities to make dangerous sacrifices in order to stay together. Dietary taboos restrict the amount of available food. The higher castes in India, a country often plagued by famine, may not eat meat and thus leave an important source of protein unexploited. Even more remarkable is the discovery that the Greenland Vikings left no traces of having eaten fish. Archeologists working in their abandoned habitation sites have found no fish hooks, net weights, or other traces of fishing. Could it be that this seafaring people on the coasts of Greenland really ate only seals and the few livestock able to survive north of the Arctic Circle? The geographer and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond suspects that this was in fact so; a taboo forbade the Norsemen in Greenland from eating fish, in contrast to their relatives in Iceland and Scandinavia. And so they were unable to survive in their arctic environment when the climate became considerably colder. The less-choosy Inuit, on the other hand, survived the harshest times.14
Many of the initiation rituals customary in almost all societies seem to us destructive and cruel. In some African and Oceanic societies, adolescents are inflicted with deep cuts into which ashes are then sprinkled so that they take as long as possible to heal and leave behind so-called decorative scars. Apart from the pain, there is also a high risk of infection. Many peoples perform such rituals, especially on the genitalia. In some cultures in Oceania and among Australian Aborigines, boys entering puberty have their penises cut open. In Indonesia, bamboo balls are implanted in their penises. In parts of Africa, female circumcision is still widely practiced. It not only entails excruciating pain but also deprives many of its victims of sexual pleasure for the rest of their lives and raises the risk of death at delivery for both mother and child. Under the usual extremely unhygienic conditions, the operation itself is often life-threatening. A people with such traditional customs not only does violence to individual women and men but lessens its own biological fitness as a whole.
Why do people inflict such things on themselves? Dietary taboos, voluntary mutilation, life-threatening initiation rituals, and complicated sacrifices all serve not only to strengthen the community’s cohesiveness but to differentiate it from other groups. The form of the decorative scarring almost always indicates what group the bearer belongs to; once scarred, that person remains identifiable as a member of a particular clan or people. Even dietary taboos are effective in keeping people divided, since we acquire our tastes for food early in childhood and disgust is such a strong emotion. It’s not just that Europeans and Americans would never touch the meat of a dog specially bred to be butchered and eaten; the very thought of Korean gourmands enjoying this delicacy makes us nauseated.
Rituals and taboos reinforce the boundary between the members of a community and “the others.” They insure that the fruits of selfless action benefit only one’s own people.
A study by the American anthropologist Richard Sosis shows the degree to which costly proscriptions hold a group together. He analyzed the fate of 200 communes that experimented with new lifestyles in nineteenth-century America.15 Some of the proto-dropouts were the adherents of socialistic or anarchistic ideas, while others lived according to their religious convictions. Sosis compared how long the communities survived and discovered that the religious communes had four times as much chance of surviving as the secular ones. Moreover, the stricter the former were, the more successful they were. Precisely because fasting, celibacy, and abjuring private property and modern technology lessen each individual’s chance of surviving, they promote the success of the community.16 Of course, the sacrifice of biological fitness must not exceed a certain limit—must not be in toto higher than the accrued benefit to the community. Otherwise, as the example of the Greenland Vikings shows, the self-imposed limitations can easily lead to disaster.
The Tower of Babel
There are more than 800 languages still spoken today on Papua New Guinea, some as different from each other as English and Chinese. If one believes the story in Genesis with which we introduced this chapter, the babel of languages arose as God’s punishment for humanity’s hubris. Never again should there be an effrontery like the Tower of Babel, and so the Lord “scattered them abroad . . . upon the face of all the earth.”
The authors of the biblical text rightly guessed that there was a connection between the lack of unity among humans and their greatest common achievements. But in the light of our present knowledge, we would tell the story in a different way: Cooperation on a large scale was first made possible by humanity’s division into groups. For it is only under the pressure of competition between communities that individuals subordinate their private interests to the common good. Accordingly, the confusion of languages came first, then the Tower of Babel. Only the division of humans into separate groups enabled the building of the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, the Acropolis, and finally the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Shanghai, and Dubai.
Fortunately, modern societies no longer express their identity through sacrifices or mutilations, but it is obviously part of human nature to unconsciously distinguish friend from foe on the basis of language. A 2007 study found that infants were already able to distinguish between people of their own nationality and foreigners.17 By the age of five months, they preferred people who spoke their mother tongue. For example, when a baby raised in a German-speaking family heard a stranger speaking unaccented German, it would later seek more eye contact with that person than with another stranger whom it had heard speaking a foreign language. Although the five-month-olds did not yet know the meaning of words, they had already internalized the typical sounds and combinations of their native language.
And it is not just that the babies preferred familiar sounds. They reacted more positively to the native speaker even when that person had remained silent for quite some time. They recognized and rejected someone speaking German with an accent. At ten months of age, they preferred to accept a stuffed animal from a person who spoke without a foreign accent rather than from someone who had not learned German until she was an adult. And yet the foreigners spoke fluent German with only tiny variations in accent. The r of a Russian woman may have sounded too rolled or the ch of a Greek man too harsh, although a far greater proportion of their sounds were familiar. But the babies seemed to react to precisely these subtle differences—as if they possessed from the first a sensor for foreignness.
Normal Madness
Even in the trivial situations of everyday life, we can see how xenophobia is connected to our natural predisposition to be altruistic. For those of us who regard ourselves as cosmopolitan, it is depressing to observe that people will do more for a stranger who speaks their own language or at least comes from the same culture. Investigators have found this bias, for example, among Belgian university students.18 The Flemings speak Flemish and come from northern and western Belgium; the Walloons speak a French dialect and live in the southern and eastern parts of the small country. When these highly educated young people played the trust game, the Flemings would offer less when they knew that their otherwise-anonymous partner was a Walloon, and vice versa. Of course, such behavior is neither a Belgian specialty nor a question of language alone. When the Israeli economist Chaim Fershtman tried the same experiment in Jerusalem, he had similar results. Strictly observant Jews were willing to share only with other orthodox Jews. If they knew nothing about the religious affiliation of the other player, they kept their money in their pockets.
At the extreme end of the spectrum are the crimes people commit in the name of their communities. Contrary to what one might expect, the attackers of September 11, 2001, were not characterized by a special inclination to violence or perversion. By now, entire archives are full of psychological analyses of the conspirators who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What those studies brought to light were unremarkable biographies. Ziad Jarrah is a typical example. He took over the controls of United Airlines Flight 93. Like the other three pilots, he had studied in Hamburg.19 He came from a well-to-do family in Lebanon. His parents had sent him to a Catholic school. As a young man, he did volunteer work with handicapped children, drug addicts, and in an orphanage. He began his studies in Greifswald, Germany. He lived with his Turkish girlfriend and planned to get married. He transferred to Hamburg, where he had such a good relationship with his landlady that she painted an oil portrait of him. His life only changed when he came into contact with radical Islamists at the technical university in Hamburg-Harburg. He joined them and swore a blood oath to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. But during the whole time he was being trained as a terrorist, he kept the tie to his fiancée; on September 10, 2001, he wrote her a moving letter of farewell in which he thanked her for their five years together.
Analyses of Palestinian suicide bombers and of assassins who survived also reveal nothing remarkable.20 The killers-to-be have normal personalities and are not even more religious than average. Another study in the Gaza Strip concluded that at most the militant young men were characterized by their pride, strong attachment to the community, and social consciousness. Almost all of them had provided supplies to other activists, visited the families of those killed, and taken care of the injured.
The feeling that one’s own community is being treated unjustly makes young people susceptible to radical ideas, according to the American anthropologist Scott Adams in a study of suicide bombers. But they become involved in extremist organizations via friends or relatives.21 And these bonds play a decisive role in their subsequent criminal careers. For organizations like Al-Qaeda and Hamas mold the close friends into conspirators and reinforce their hatred of the enemy. The often charismatic trainers consciously exploit the young people’s predisposition to help others. They train together in three- to six-person cells until they take the final pledge to die for the cause.
A world populated by egocentrics would contain no one prepared to kill innocent people along with himself in the mad conviction that it would benefit his community. As early as the Book of Judges, however, we read of this most terrible manifestation of altruistic behavior. The Israelite hero Samson killed 3,000 enemy Philistines—men and women—along with himself when he knocked down the pillars supporting their banquet hall, “So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.”22
Even more victims than in that ancient massacre or the attacks of September 11 were killed by the suicide missions of Japanese kamikaze pilots during the Second World War. Those insane acts were also driven by a strict altruistic norm. When the Japanese admiral Takijirō Ōnishi was looking for pilots for the first kamikaze missions in 1944, all twenty-three young airmen assembled to hear him speak raised their hands to volunteer. None wanted to be branded a coward. And it continued to be mostly young pilots who preferred to sacrifice themselves rather than have shame heaped on their heads. On April 6, 1945, Ōnishi’s squadron carried out what was probably the most lethal suicide mission in history. About 1,500 planes appeared in the sky over the southern Japanese island of Okinawa and dived toward the American and English warships cruising off the island. More than thirty ships were sunk or suffered serious damage. It was this attack on Okinawa, among other things, that led American strategists to decide to use the atom bomb to break the Japanese resistance once and for all. A few days after the capitulation, Admiral Ōnishi asked forgiveness from the families whose young men he had sent to their deaths and then committed suicide himself.
A Common Goal
Even if the dark sisters of selflessness seem to follow a compelling logic, we are able to resist them. In the miniature world of his summer camp, Muzafer Sherif discovered an elegant trick to make peace between the Rattlers and the Eagles: He steered their aggressive impulses toward a new and common goal.
First, he secretly had the pipe that brought drinking water to the camp blocked up. When the boys learned of the emergency, the director told them that he needed more than twenty helpers to solve the problem quickly, since the entire line between the water tank and the camp needed to be checked. Rattlers and Eagles worked together to test the line, even lending each other tools. But as soon as the water was flowing again, they returned to their old habits.
Now Sherif organized a movie night for which both groups had to contribute toward the cost of renting the film. After that, he planned an overnight camping excursion for the whole group, but secretly disconnected the starter of the truck that was supposed to transport their food. And again, one team was not sufficient to get the vehicle started. As soon as the Eagles and the Rattlers realized they needed each other, they all pushed the truck to get it started. When they reached the campsite, it turned out that somebody had mixed up the components of the tents. To set up camp, members of both groups had to sort out tent pegs, ropes, and poles together. And when the food truck finally arrived, the main item was a nine-pound side of beef that had to be cut up.
All this led to conciliation. Rattlers and Eagles celebrated their last night of camp together, boarded a single bus for the ride home, and when the Eagles had no money left at a rest stop, the Rattlers treated them all to milkshakes.
Today, Sherif’s idea is regarded as the classic path to reconciliation. If it is possible to give competing groups a common goal, they can overcome their rivalry. Former enemies then regard each other as allies in a new, common struggle. The eternally quarreling regions of Italy regularly forget their regional pride as Lombards, Tuscans, Sicilians, etc. and their contempt for all other regions whenever the national soccer team plays in the European Championship or the World Cup tournament. For two weeks, they’re all just Italians and they all root for their team against the French, Brazilians, Germans, etc. (Once the cup is won or lost, on the other hand, the whole country reverts to its usual regional rivalries.)
The difficulty for a peacemaker in a real conflict is not only finding a common goal. Unlike Sherif, whose boys were not burdened by preexisting animosity toward one another, the real intermediary must overcome persistent psychic obstacles—memories of injustices that were suffered decades if not centuries ago.
But there is no lack of encouraging examples. Today it seems almost unreal that only a few decades ago, French and German troops lay in trenches shooting at each other, but in fact, the ancient enmity was overcome a few years after the Second World War. The rise of the Soviet Union as an atomic power contributed to the reconciliation. The fear that the Red Army could overrun the whole of Europe in a few days bonded Western Europeans together. But it was also trade, economic ties, and tourism that strengthened their common interests in the following decades. Later, the growing global competition for jobs, markets, and raw materials led to the realization that Europeans could only hold onto their high standard of living by working together. No one today can imagine that Germans and Frenchmen, Britons and Spaniards would ever again be capable of what had been one of their main preoccupations since the Middle Ages: trying to kill one another.