Why does morality exist? Is this
evidence of a metaphysical realm, or can it be explained as an evolutionary
adaptation? Recently I’ve read a couple of books that argue that morality is a
product of natural selection.
The Science of Good and Evil
(2004) is by Michael Shermer, the editor of
Skeptic magazine. He begins by providing an
evolutionary explanation for morality, which I found very plausible. Shermer
claims that all moral attributes can be explained by natural selection over the
millions of years of human evolution: groups in which members cooperated and
could trust each other did better than groups that had a lot of infighting and
deceit.
In particular, Rosenberg
identifies a core morality, which includes cooperation, fairness/equality, and
trustworthiness, which is recognized by all human societies. He has an
interesting discussion about how different societies interpret this core
morality differently due to their different beliefs. For example, all societies
think caring for your children is moral, but some Islamic cultures believe that
includes genital mutilation of their girls: if you didn’t do this no man would
marry her. This doesn’t mean they don’t share the core moral value that caring
for children is good, they just filter that through beliefs that we in the West
would call mistaken.
American culture has been under
the sway of Social Darwinism for over a hundred years now. We mistakenly
believe Darwin’s theory of natural selection means competition is the natural
way to behave and thrive. Our version of capitalism is dependent on ruthless
cutthroat competition. Supposedly capitalism works so well because it is the
system that most closely follows the natural law of selfishness.
But now biologists and
anthropologists say that that interpretation of Darwin's theory is incomplete. Natural selection works through both competition and cooperation. Humans survived as a species because we learned to cooperate. This is the adaptation that
allowed us to become the dominant animal on the planet.
Rosenberg imagines two early
hominids (creatures that predated Homo
sapiens) on the savannah coming across a half-eaten gazelle. At this point
hominids were quite a bit lower on the food chain than we are today. If both
the hominids ate at the same time, maybe the animal that killed the gazelle would
return, or a pack of jackals would ambush them, and they both would be killed. But
if they cooperated, if one watched while the other grabbed food for both of
them and then they shared it in a safer location, they would increase their
chances of survival.
One of the ways we can tell that
evolution has programmed us to cooperate is to study babies. How do they behave
before they have had time to learn about social interactions? Chimpanzees
almost never help another and never share information. But Rosenberg writes,
modern “human babies do all these things, and with strangers, well before they
can do much more than crawl. They help, they share food, they even convey
information before they have language and certainly without knowing anything
about norms or niceness. That means that human babies have both an ability
conveniently called theory of mind and an inclination to cooperate; both are
hardwired or quickly and easily learned with very little experience at a very
early age.”
What’s important to realize is that hominids learned to
cooperate with the members of their
group. Prehistoric groups fought with other hominid groups for possession of
resources and territory. Shermer debunks the noble savage myth, which he says
is still very strong in our culture, in particular in terms of violence. Many
people seem to believe that violence is a recent development: a product of
civilization, or patriarchy, or other relatively recent development. Shermer
cites the numerous examples of anthropological sites dating back tens of
thousands of years that show humans suffering violent deaths from such things
as a hatchet blow to the head.
In addition, these early human groups believed they were
special and better than people outside their group. Shermer uses an Amazonian
tribe, the
Yanomamo people,
as a window into the thinking of people unaffected by modern civilization. They
“consider themselves to be the ultimate chosen people—in their language their
name represents humanity, with all other peoples as something less than human.”
He quotes Aldous Huxley: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of
people forget that the other set is human. By robbing them of their
personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation.” [From
The Olive Tree, 1937]
Early human social evolution was the story of small tribes
cooperating within the group and fighting other groups. For most of humanity’s
time on this planet, tribes numbered no more than 150 people. But in the last
ten thousand years, the size of our social groups has mushroomed. Shermer includes
a chart illustrating this remarkably rapid social evolution of humans:
100,000 – 10,000 years ago Bands 10s
– 100s of individuals
10,000 – 5,000 years ago Tribes 100s
– 1000s of individuals
5,000 – 3,000 years ago Chiefdoms 1,000s
– 10,000s of individuals
3,000 – 1,000 years ago States 10,000s
– 100,000s of individuals
1,000 – present Empires 100,000s
– 1,000,000s of individuals
In other words, 10,000 years ago
all of humankind lived in small groups made up of extended families. Imagine
living in a group made up of your aunts, uncles, cousins, second-cousins, etc.
Maybe you wouldn’t be related to everyone in your group, but everyone would be
very much like you.
Today people live in groups made
up of millions of people. I live in the United States, part of a
300-million-member group. Most Americans identify as a member of this group and
cheer on its victories (most medals in the Olympics) and bemoan its defeats and
threats (9/11, China's rise, Islamic terrorism, etc). We are capable of feeling a kinship
with hundreds of millions of people, many of whom are very different from ourselves. Most of us never give this a
moment’s thought, but being able to feel a membership in this large and diverse a group is an incredibly significant advance in consciousness.
I talked about these ideas with
a friend, and he seemed to dismiss the idea that human social organization is
improving. Finally I asked him, “Do you think human culture evolves?” He
replied, “I don’t think evolution necessarily means things get better.” Very
true—evolution just means a change that renders an organism better adapted to its
environment. However, it is our ability to work together that has allowed us to
prosper in every environment on this planet—from the poles to the Equator.
From what my friend said he
seems to think humans’ ability to interact socially has gotten worse over the
last ten thousand years. It occurred to me that there are a lot of
new-age/liberals out there who probably feel the same way about this; they
romanticize those small hunter-gatherer tribes.
I have a very different spin. Once
upon a time, each tribe of 150 or so considered their members the only true
humans. Now we can feel a common identity with 300 million people. Soon we’ll
be capable of perceiving that every person on the planet is a member of our
tribe—the human tribe—and the amount of creative energy that will be released by no
longer having to fight each other will be astronomical.
"Our social systems of cooperation and helping are revealed as sophisticated marketplaces, capable of generating both individual returns and goods that benefit others. They work like a monetary system, with our personal reputations acting as the currency we use to buy trust and cooperation. Reputations are valuable, so we have to earn or pay for them. Once purchased, a good reputation can then be used to buy cooperation from others, even people we have never met, just as we can use money to buy goods from people we have never met…Indeed, our reputations represent the first ‘monetary union’ or single currency. We could even see them as a form of credit, because a good reputation might allow you to negotiate an exchange on the promise you will produce your part of the bargain later (in this context it is noteworthy that ‘credit’ derives from the Latin credo or ‘I believe’)…So fundamental are our reputations to our social systems that comparing them to a monetary system is not merely apt, it should probably be made the other way around."
