So the problem of a growing population is that a reason needs to be found to not kill strangers. We've happened upon a number of these over the course of our development. One example is the sanctity of blood kinship, however tenuous. The highlanders of Papua New Guinea, as described by Jared Diamond, when they encounter one another on the trails, will immediately launch into long and detailed genealogies describing the many forkings of their family trees until a connection is found and a reason not to kill one another is established. In a much more tragic fashion, African slaves did the same thing in the New World, though perhaps more to be able to maintain a sense of community and continuity as their families were repeatedly torn apart.
Another example is that of sacred hospitality. Once someone is under your roof, they are honorary members of your family and cannot be harmed. A violation of this custom and the shock it inspired was rather graphically included in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series in the form of the Red Wedding, when the host slaughtered the visiting wedding party. This custom was upheld in the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah when Lot offered up his daughters to the mob instead of his guests (his guests were part of his family, his daughters were just property. Valuable property, but chattel property nevertheless. Never confuse the Bible for a source of good morals.).
In both of these cases, kinship and guest rights, the third pillar of morality elucidated by Jonathan Haidt of In-Group Loyalty (also known as kin selection in evolutionary biology) is expanded to include those not of the group. These are two potential strategies for overcoming the Stranger Problem, but the first is awkward and time-consuming and the second strictly temporary. In order to overcome the Stranger Problem long term, a method needs to be found whereby the default position is "Do not kill a stranger unless he first gives you cause." rather than "Stranger! Danger! Kill! KILL!".
Once a population expands beyond the four to five hundred person limit*, a long term solution needs to be found. Initially, a monopoly on inter-personal violence can be a successful strategy. After the egalitarian band, what generally evolved was a proto-chiefdom, with a "big man" acting as a de facto authority figure by virtue of being, well, big. This co-opted the fourth pillar, Respect for Authority, and repurposed it to a long-term survival strategy for the population rather than a short term cooperative strategy. Simply put, Jim doesn't kill Dan because Big Dave will get pissed. Jim and Dan don't need to know one another for this to work, they just both have to know Big Dave. And Big Dave doesn't even have to know Jim or Dan, he just has to make sure they know him by being a visible presence.
As the population grows larger, the Big Man's presence becomes more distant; it becomes unfeasible for him to be personally known to several thousand people. The Chief/proto-king has to rely on a presence more visible from a distance. Not coincidentally, this is where conspicuous consumption became an art form; no longer a matter of biological ornamentation like our long hair or a peacock's tail, but a matter of artificial ornamentation. Hawaiian kings wore capes made from thousands of parrot feathers. Greek and Roman nobility wore clothes dyed a brilliant vermilion hue, which necessitated the gathering and careful crushing of thousands of sea snails to achieve (and which was relegated to the nobility by law on pain of death).
But this next phase didn't happen in a vacuum. Along with increased displays of wealth and power was a greater division of social hierarchy. And religion.
There are two reasons the title 'Oedipus Rex' is wrong. First, putting a Latin word in the title of a Greek play is just asinine, like eating shepherd's pie with chop sticks. More importantly, Oedipus wasn't a king (basileus), but a tyrant, one who came to power through "unofficial" channels. In ancient Greece, as in the rest of the world, the king was a sacred person/position, appointed by the gods if not semi-divine himself. Chinese dynasties were founded on the Mandate of Heaven; the Fisher King's impotence strikes the land; Herakles, Jesus, and how many others are divine sun kings, sacrificed at the end of winter to bring forth the new harvest.
In short, Respect for Authority/Elders combined with Sanctity/Purity to create religion so as to reinforce a distant hierarchy of thousands of strangers and maintain a peaceful civilization. But first, how could Sanctity/Purity play a role in this and second, what role did it play?
As I said many posts ago, Respect for Elders first comes into play as a learning tool; children are credulous to a fault and take in all they are told and store it. This expedites the learning process so that the child can learn how to survive in a hostile world in the abbreviated time his elders are available to teach him. However, as Richard Dawkins and others have noted, this comes with a price. Children absorb and take at face value nonsense just as readily as they do genuine knowledge. And then they hold fiercely to it, rejecting attempts by others to dislodge the noise. "Are you calling my father a liar?!" The Sanctity/Purity drive, which I suspect was initially simply a disgust response to keep animals from eating or drinking what was bad for them, in this model becomes a means of buttressing the Respect for Authority drive, insuring that learned information is more readily stored. The unfortunate consequence of passing on pointless superstitions about witches and blood and the full moon are a small price to pay for seeing to it that important information be passed on intact.
Further, if the information is truly valuable it will be repeatedly reinforced by contact with the real world (make a spear this way and it works, make it *this* way and you get killed by an elephant in a painful fashion, which sucks), whereas superstitions and other noise, having no real world reference, are free to mutate and change and act, in all ways, as noise. In short, valuable information stays the same, everything else is more or less harmless (unless it kills you, in which case you don't get the chance to pass it on anyway. Win-win).
I suspect that by this means, visible symbols, as tangible icons of ideas passed on from one generation to the next, became the fortunate heritors of this legacy. Sanctity/Purity attaches not just to food and water and not just to what we're taught by our elders, but also to the symbols that represent those ideas. Thus a nation's flag represents all the ideas and ideals of that nation, burning it is as much an affront as burning the nation itself. Desecrating a holy text or a holy symbol is as horrific as desecrating a loved one's corpse, not least because the ideas it represents was passed on to you by that loved one. Not everyone attaches the same importance to the sanctity of symbols, but it becomes more comprehensible in this hypothesis.
But how does it benefit a burgeoning civilization? By turning a stranger into someone who's not a stranger. It's not merely the king who benefits from the highly visible symbols of his holy office, nor just the priests in their recognizable hats. Everyone in a religion, and indeed a culture (which is often so interwoven with religion as to be inseparable), adopts certain visible signifiers. As Tevye said, "For instance, we always keep our heads covered, and always wear a little prayer shawl. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you. I don't know. But it's a tradition." The Jews have their yarmulkes, Muslims have their taqiyah (mostly central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa), Christians have crucifixes. It goes beyond that, with the hijab, the payot, and everything Amish, all cultural rather than explicitly required by the texts (maybe), but still visible identifiers for who is in and who is out.
Through the complex and involved process of looking at someone, it became possible to identify someone as being a stranger one could not kill**. And other visible identifiers said, "This person is of a higher rank than you. Go out of your way not to piss him off." or "This person is a slave, go ahead and poo on his head if you want. He'll smile and thank you for it, though his owner might not." and because all of this was wrapped up in the repurposed Respect for Elders/Sanctity/Purity drives, it was all passed along and kept intact. Unlike most superstitions, these had real-world ramifications because without them civilization would collapse.
I believe that the development of religion and civilization had to happen simultaneously. Religion can only exist in the large populations of civilization and the large populations of civilization could only exist with the support of the first. Think of religion as an epidemic of the mind; it can only sustain itself in a large population. I deliberately shifted verbs from "can" to "could", though, because I believe that we have spent the 10,000 years since the development of agriculture, civilization, and religion evolving. As with all populations, our evolution is slow and multifarious, but I suspect that one aspect is that we no longer need religion to survive. This I will discuss in Evolving Beyond Religion.
* That being the rough maximum number of people one can know, as in to put a face to a name and a name to a face. Check out a school website and match up the number of vice principals to the number of students.
** The Biblical proscription against killing should more accurately read "Thou shalt not kill thy fellow Jew". Rabbinical and Christian interpretations for thousands of years have been, "Killing a fellow Jew/Christian is murder and punishable as such. Killing a heathen? Meh. Have at it, hoss."
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Monday, November 07, 2011
Sanctity/Purity and Civilization
Before I begin, a note: I cannot recommend strongly enough Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The fifth pillar of human morality, as elucidated by Dr Jonathan Haidt is that of Sanctity/Purity. We maintain purity and eschew things that would make us dirty, physically and spiritually. Typically, in the West, this means not having sex. All across humanity, it seems to mean not having much to do with women. Something about human society is deeply misogynistic and anti-sex: Jesus was born of a virgin, the Buddha was born through a slit in his mother's side, pagan/animist tribal beliefs often have an unpleasant fixation with avoiding menstruating women. Misogyny aside, there are more examples: vegetarians and vegans eschew animal products, usually on moral grounds; we have strong disgust aversions to even associating with bodily wastes and often with the fluids of others; corpses and other near-human images evoke strong negative reactions; and there's something deeply disturbing about clowns.
I think the Purity/Sanctity response began (and this entire post is going to be supposition) as primarily a physical disgust reaction to keep our animal ancestors away from certain things; don't eat things that will make you sick. Later it coupled with methods of socialization and shame response to reinforce behaviors to promote cooperation and peace within a group. After that, I think it became very conceptual.
My understanding of the development of humanity, society, and civilization is that we exploded out of Africa and settled everywhere a living, meager or otherwise, could be scratched. Fecund environments were altered, whether consciously or not, to be more productive. Our modern understanding of the hunter-gatherer model as a nomadic lifestyle is based upon the fact that only people in marginal landscapes that cannot support agriculture still pursue the HG lifestyle and the paucity of resources forces a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence on them. But the majority of the Earth is quite happy to let us grow fat in one place even without farms, and populations would have settled in place, burgeoned, reached an equilibrium, altered their environment, reached a new equilibrium, and so on.
Farming wouldn't have been an overnight discovery. Rather, the people of an area would have exhaustively explored every single native plant and animal for edibility and perfected a method for harvesting it wild. This would have meant learning everything about growing/breeding seasons and inventing and perfecting the correct tools for the job. What would have followed would have been altering the environment so as to expand the range for the wild plant to grow and cultivating it in place. The next step, perhaps final, would have been relocation and deliberate cultivation. A modern example of this is the cultivation of various plants in the Australian desert by the aboriginal peoples there, and the aborted development of fish farming begun in, I believe, the islands off that continent's southern coast. Another example in recorded history was that of the deliberate cultivation of the American landscape by the Native Americans, as can be read about in Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; the first Europeans to reach the east coast of what are now the United States and Canada described a thickly settled landscape that resembled open parkland. The natives cultivated an open forest with limited undergrowth by repeatedly burning the forest, thus maintaining an environment ideally suited for hunting. They also maintained thick groves of nut-bearing trees, like hickory. These are just a few documented examples along the arc of deliberate, pre-agricultural landscape cultivation.
At all points along that scale, the population would have grown to the maximum allowable by the environment and the tools/methods discovered by those living there. From a tribal band of a few dozen members, the family group would eventually have been forced to a higher density. That was when trouble would have started. A modern day example was tellingly documented in Diamond's book, with a tribe from Papua New Guinea. A tribe of permanently settled HGs lived in a particularly fecund marshland, harvesting the calorie-rich pith of a certain palm tree, primarily. The population grew to a few hundred and then the inevitable happened; two men got in a fight. One killed the other and a cycle of revenge killings began that left the tribe with only a few dozen alive, alternately terrified and full of rage.
Essentially, the problem was strangers. In a small group, everyone knows everyone else. They may not all like each other, but everyone likes everyone well enough and rule three, In-Group Loyalty, keeps frictions from boiling over. But when the population gets too large, it becomes impossible for everyone to know everyone; the rough limit is somewhere between four and five hundred people. Once a population has strangers, then the disincentive for fighting goes away. But In-Group Loyalty still exists and they're going to get revenge. How many times do you think we repeated that tribe's tragedy? How many people on the verge of developing civilization instead tore themselves apart with pointless violence?
Civilization apparently began in just a few places and spread from there. By cultural diffusion, by population spread, and through conquest, those civilizations spread their examples across the globe. We modern humans are the heritors of a precious legacy; somewhere in the past, someone figured out the key. The question: how can we get along with strangers without killing them? The answer, and this may strike you as odd: Religion. Well, eventually.
To be continued.
The fifth pillar of human morality, as elucidated by Dr Jonathan Haidt is that of Sanctity/Purity. We maintain purity and eschew things that would make us dirty, physically and spiritually. Typically, in the West, this means not having sex. All across humanity, it seems to mean not having much to do with women. Something about human society is deeply misogynistic and anti-sex: Jesus was born of a virgin, the Buddha was born through a slit in his mother's side, pagan/animist tribal beliefs often have an unpleasant fixation with avoiding menstruating women. Misogyny aside, there are more examples: vegetarians and vegans eschew animal products, usually on moral grounds; we have strong disgust aversions to even associating with bodily wastes and often with the fluids of others; corpses and other near-human images evoke strong negative reactions; and there's something deeply disturbing about clowns.
I think the Purity/Sanctity response began (and this entire post is going to be supposition) as primarily a physical disgust reaction to keep our animal ancestors away from certain things; don't eat things that will make you sick. Later it coupled with methods of socialization and shame response to reinforce behaviors to promote cooperation and peace within a group. After that, I think it became very conceptual.
My understanding of the development of humanity, society, and civilization is that we exploded out of Africa and settled everywhere a living, meager or otherwise, could be scratched. Fecund environments were altered, whether consciously or not, to be more productive. Our modern understanding of the hunter-gatherer model as a nomadic lifestyle is based upon the fact that only people in marginal landscapes that cannot support agriculture still pursue the HG lifestyle and the paucity of resources forces a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence on them. But the majority of the Earth is quite happy to let us grow fat in one place even without farms, and populations would have settled in place, burgeoned, reached an equilibrium, altered their environment, reached a new equilibrium, and so on.
Farming wouldn't have been an overnight discovery. Rather, the people of an area would have exhaustively explored every single native plant and animal for edibility and perfected a method for harvesting it wild. This would have meant learning everything about growing/breeding seasons and inventing and perfecting the correct tools for the job. What would have followed would have been altering the environment so as to expand the range for the wild plant to grow and cultivating it in place. The next step, perhaps final, would have been relocation and deliberate cultivation. A modern example of this is the cultivation of various plants in the Australian desert by the aboriginal peoples there, and the aborted development of fish farming begun in, I believe, the islands off that continent's southern coast. Another example in recorded history was that of the deliberate cultivation of the American landscape by the Native Americans, as can be read about in Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; the first Europeans to reach the east coast of what are now the United States and Canada described a thickly settled landscape that resembled open parkland. The natives cultivated an open forest with limited undergrowth by repeatedly burning the forest, thus maintaining an environment ideally suited for hunting. They also maintained thick groves of nut-bearing trees, like hickory. These are just a few documented examples along the arc of deliberate, pre-agricultural landscape cultivation.
At all points along that scale, the population would have grown to the maximum allowable by the environment and the tools/methods discovered by those living there. From a tribal band of a few dozen members, the family group would eventually have been forced to a higher density. That was when trouble would have started. A modern day example was tellingly documented in Diamond's book, with a tribe from Papua New Guinea. A tribe of permanently settled HGs lived in a particularly fecund marshland, harvesting the calorie-rich pith of a certain palm tree, primarily. The population grew to a few hundred and then the inevitable happened; two men got in a fight. One killed the other and a cycle of revenge killings began that left the tribe with only a few dozen alive, alternately terrified and full of rage.
Essentially, the problem was strangers. In a small group, everyone knows everyone else. They may not all like each other, but everyone likes everyone well enough and rule three, In-Group Loyalty, keeps frictions from boiling over. But when the population gets too large, it becomes impossible for everyone to know everyone; the rough limit is somewhere between four and five hundred people. Once a population has strangers, then the disincentive for fighting goes away. But In-Group Loyalty still exists and they're going to get revenge. How many times do you think we repeated that tribe's tragedy? How many people on the verge of developing civilization instead tore themselves apart with pointless violence?
Civilization apparently began in just a few places and spread from there. By cultural diffusion, by population spread, and through conquest, those civilizations spread their examples across the globe. We modern humans are the heritors of a precious legacy; somewhere in the past, someone figured out the key. The question: how can we get along with strangers without killing them? The answer, and this may strike you as odd: Religion. Well, eventually.
To be continued.
Evolution on Good and Evil Part 3
Now for evil. I think we have to distinguish between banal evil and true villainy.
The Banality of Evil was a phrase coined for a report on how the Nazis could attempt to exterminate any number of groups without being a group composed entirely of monsters. As Terry Pratchett put it, "There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."
This sort of evil comes from the third pillar of morality. People on the outside don't count. You don't betray family or friends, you don't steal from them, or kill them. People on the outside just. Don't. Count. Granted, you have to go out of your way to dehumanize them and demonize them before you're willing to do really horrible things to them (a dozen or so centuries of hearing "perfidious Jew" as part of the Catholic liturgy every year probably helped the Nazis demonize their victims; perfidious originally meant unbelieving but somehow, impossibly, it came to mean "treacherous").
The other sort of evil is that sensationalized by Jack the Ripper and Hannibal Lecter. In somewhere near 5% of the population at large are people with no empathy and no remorse. The terms are confused between psychopath, sociopath, and antisocial personality disorder. Generally, these people have poor impulse control and no empathy for others. Whereas the moral impulse in the majority of people is governed by two parts of the brain, one utilitarian (sure, kill one guy and distribute his organs to save five) and one empathetic (kill a person to save five? You monster!), the psychopath lacks the empathetic response. They don't always become serial killers and monsters, but the majority of violent offenders in prison show signs of sociopathy.
Whence the sociopath? Whereas morality is a system whereby evolution has gamed for cooperation for mutual benefit, sociopathy is a system that parasitically takes advantage of the first. Too many sociopaths and society couldn't possibly exist. Too many backstabbing bastards and there would be no potential benefit to backstabbing. Only if sociopaths are a minority can they succeed. When 95 times out of 100 you can trust your buddy to do right by you, the backstabbing bastard can really make a killing.
This isn't an unsuccessful strategy, no matter that we like to believe people get their comeuppance. A bastard-coated bastard with a creamy bastard filling can really get ahead, particularly in a more populace society where strangers are common. A questionnaire filled out by CEOs with questions hidden within to indicate sociopathy indicated it's more common (perhaps twice as much as in the general population). It's not hard to imagine that being a ruthless jerk could make you successful on Wall Street, legally or not (see: Enron).
In the end, whether dealing with the banal evil or dispassionate sociopathy, evolution easily explains evil. As the existence of the theodicy problem demonstrates, the god hypothesis really doesn't.
The Banality of Evil was a phrase coined for a report on how the Nazis could attempt to exterminate any number of groups without being a group composed entirely of monsters. As Terry Pratchett put it, "There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."
This sort of evil comes from the third pillar of morality. People on the outside don't count. You don't betray family or friends, you don't steal from them, or kill them. People on the outside just. Don't. Count. Granted, you have to go out of your way to dehumanize them and demonize them before you're willing to do really horrible things to them (a dozen or so centuries of hearing "perfidious Jew" as part of the Catholic liturgy every year probably helped the Nazis demonize their victims; perfidious originally meant unbelieving but somehow, impossibly, it came to mean "treacherous").
The other sort of evil is that sensationalized by Jack the Ripper and Hannibal Lecter. In somewhere near 5% of the population at large are people with no empathy and no remorse. The terms are confused between psychopath, sociopath, and antisocial personality disorder. Generally, these people have poor impulse control and no empathy for others. Whereas the moral impulse in the majority of people is governed by two parts of the brain, one utilitarian (sure, kill one guy and distribute his organs to save five) and one empathetic (kill a person to save five? You monster!), the psychopath lacks the empathetic response. They don't always become serial killers and monsters, but the majority of violent offenders in prison show signs of sociopathy.
Whence the sociopath? Whereas morality is a system whereby evolution has gamed for cooperation for mutual benefit, sociopathy is a system that parasitically takes advantage of the first. Too many sociopaths and society couldn't possibly exist. Too many backstabbing bastards and there would be no potential benefit to backstabbing. Only if sociopaths are a minority can they succeed. When 95 times out of 100 you can trust your buddy to do right by you, the backstabbing bastard can really make a killing.
This isn't an unsuccessful strategy, no matter that we like to believe people get their comeuppance. A bastard-coated bastard with a creamy bastard filling can really get ahead, particularly in a more populace society where strangers are common. A questionnaire filled out by CEOs with questions hidden within to indicate sociopathy indicated it's more common (perhaps twice as much as in the general population). It's not hard to imagine that being a ruthless jerk could make you successful on Wall Street, legally or not (see: Enron).
In the end, whether dealing with the banal evil or dispassionate sociopathy, evolution easily explains evil. As the existence of the theodicy problem demonstrates, the god hypothesis really doesn't.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)