No More Learning

The power of nepotism means that spouses are always being tugged apart by in-laws and, if there are any, by stepchildren. And the incentives of adultery mean that spouses can always be tugged apart by cuckolds and home-wreckers. It is no surprise to an evolutionary biologist that infidelity, stepchildren, and in-laws are among the main causes of marital strife.
Nor is it a surprise that the act of love itself should be fraught with conflict. Sex is the most concentrated source of physical pleasure granted by our nervous system, so why is it such an emotional bramble bush? In all societies, sex is at least somewhat "dirty. " It is conducted in private, pondered obsessively, regulated by custom and taboo, the subject of gossip and teasing, and a trigger for jealous rage. 36 For a brief period in the 1960s and 1970s people dreamed of an erotopia in which men and women could engage in sex without hang-ups and inhibitions. The protagonist of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying fantasized about "the zipless fuck": anonymous, casual, and free of guilt and jealousy. "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with," sang Stephen Stills. "If you love somebody, set them free," sang Sting.
But Sting also sang, "Every move you make, I'll be watching you. " And Isadora Wing concluded that fastener-free copulation is "rarer than the unicorn. " Even in a time when seemingly anything goes, most people do not partake in sex as casually as they partake in food or conversation. That includes today's college campuses, which are reportedly hotbeds of the brief sexual encounters known as "hooking up. " The psychologist Elizabeth Paul sums up her research on the phenomenon: "Casual sex is not casual. Very few people are coming out unscathed. "37 The reasons are as deep as anything in biology. One of the hazards of sex is a baby, and a baby is not just any seven-pound object but, from an evolutionary point of view, our reason for being. Every time a woman has sex with a man she is taking a chance at sentencing herself to years of motherhood, with the additional gamble that the whims of her partner could make it single motherhood. She is committing a chunk of her finite {254} reproductive output to the genes and intentions of that man, forgoing the opportunity to use it with some other man who may have better endowments of either or both.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The man, for his part, may be either implicitly committing his sweat and toil to the incipient child or deceiving his partner about such intentions.
And that covers only the immediate participants. As Jong lamented elsewhere, there are never just two people in bed. They are always accompanied in their minds by parents, former lovers, and real and imagined rivals. In other words, third parties have an interest in the possible outcome of a sexual liaison. The romantic rivals of the man or woman, who are being cuckolded or rendered celibate or bereft by their act of love, have reasons to want to be in their places. The interests of third parties help us understand why sex is almost universally conducted in private. Symons points out that because a man's reproductive success is strictly limited by his access to women, in the minds of men sex is always a rare commodity. People may have sex in private for the same reason that people during a famine eat in private: to avoid inciting dangerous envy. 38
As if the bed weren't crowded enough, every child of a man and a woman is also the grandchild of two other men and two other women. Parents take an interest in their children's reproduction because in the long run it is their reproduction too. Worse, the preciousness of female reproductive capacity makes it a valuable resource for the men who control her in traditional patriarchal societies, namely her father and brothers. They can trade a daughter or sister for additional wives or resources for themselves, and thus they have an interest in protecting their investment by keeping her from becoming pregnant by men other than the ones they want to sell her to. It is not just the husband or boyfriend who takes a proprietary interest in a woman's sexual activity, then, but also her father and brothers. 39 Westerners were horrified by the treatment of women under the regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2001, when women were cloaked in burqas and forbidden to work, attend school, and leave their homes unaccompanied. Wilson and Daly have shown that laws and customs with the same intent -- giving men control over their wives' and daughters' sexuality -- have been common throughout history and in many societies, including our own. 40 Many a father of a teenage girl has had the fleeting thought that the burqa is not such a bad idea after all.
On strictly rational grounds, the volatility of sex is a paradox, because in an era with contraception and women's rights these archaic entanglements should have no claim on our feelings. We should be ziplessly loving the one we're with, and sex should inspire no more gossip, music, fiction, raunchy humor, or strong emotions than eating or talking does. The fact that people are tormented by the Darwinian economics of babies they are no longer having is testimony to the long reach of human nature. {255}
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What about people who are not tied by blood or children? No one doubts that human beings make sacrifices for people who are unrelated to them. But they could do so in two different ways.
Humans, like ants, could have a gung-ho superorganism thing that prompts them to do everything for the colony. The idea that people are instinctively communal is an important precept of the romantic doctrine of the Noble Savage. It figured in the theory of Engels and Marx that "primitive communism" was the first social system, in the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin (who wrote, "The ants and termites have renounced the 'Hobbesian war,' and they are the better for it"), in the family-of-man utopianism of the 1960s, and in the writings of contemporary radical scientists such as Lewontin and Chomsky. 41 Some radical scientists imagine that the only alternative is an Ayn Randian individualism in which every man is an island. Steven Rose and the sociologist Hilary Rose, for instance, call evolutionary psychology a "right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity. "42 But the accusation is factually incorrect -- as we shall see in the chapter on politics, many evolutionary psychologists are on the political left -- and it is conceptually incorrect. The real alternative to romantic collectivism is not "right-wing libertarianism" but a recognition that social generosity comes from a complex suite of thoughts and emotions rooted in the logic of reciprocity. That gives it a very different psychology from the communal sharing practiced by social insects, human families, and cults that try to pretend they are families. 43
Trivers built on arguments by Williams and Hamilton that pure, public-minded altruism -- a desire to benefit the group or species at the expense of the self -- is unlikely to evolve among nonrelatives, because it is vulnerable to invasion by cheaters who prosper by enjoying the good deeds of others without contributing in turn. But as I mentioned, Trivers also showed that a measured reciprocal altruism can evolve. Reciprocators who help others who have helped them, and who shun or punish others who have failed to help them, will enjoy the benefits of gains in trade and outcompete individualists, cheaters, and pure altruists. 44 Humans are well equipped for the demands of reciprocal altruism. They remember each other as individuals (perhaps with the help of dedicated regions of the brain), and have an eagle eye and a flypaper memory for cheaters. 45 They feel moralistic emotions -- liking, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, shame, and anger -- that are uncanny implementations of the strategies for reciprocal altruism in computer simulations and mathematical models. Experiments have confirmed the prediction that people are most inclined to help a stranger when they can do so at low cost, when the stranger is in need, and when the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? stranger is in a position to reciprocate. 46 They like people who grant them favors, grant favors to those they like, feel guilty when they have withheld a possible favor, and punish those who withhold favors from them. 47 {256}
An ethos of reciprocity can pilot not just one-on-one exchanges but contributions to the public good, such as hunting animals that are too large for the hunter to eat himself, building a lighthouse that keeps everyone's ships off the rocks, or banding together to invade neighbors or to repel their invasions. The inherent problem with public goods is captured in Aesop's fable "Who Will Bell the Cat? " The mice in a household agree they would be better off if the cat had a bell around its neck to warn them of its approach, but no mouse will risk life and limb to attach the bell. A willingness to bell the cat -- that is, to contribute to the public good -- can nonetheless evolve, if it is accompanied by a willingness to reward those who shoulder the burden or to punish the cheaters who shirk it. 48
The tragedy of reciprocal altruism is that sacrifices on behalf of nonrelatives cannot survive without a web of disagreeable emotions like anxiety, mistrust, guilt, shame, and anger. As the journalist Matt Ridley puts it in his survey of the evolution of cooperation:
Reciprocity hangs, like a sword of Damocles, over every human head. He's only asking me to his party so I'll give his book a good review. They've been to dinner twice and never asked us back once. After all I did for him, how could he do that to me? If you do this for me, I promise I'll make it up later. What did I do to deserve that? You owe it to me. Obligation; debt; favour; bargain; contract; exchange; deal. . . . Our language and our lives are permeated with ideas of reciprocity. 49
Studies of altruism by behavioral economists have thrown a spotlight on this sword of Damocles by showing that people are neither the amoral egoists of classical economic theory nor the all-for-one-and-one-for-all communalists of Utopian fantasies. In the Ultimatum Game, for example, one participant gets a large sum of money to divide between himself and another participant, and the second one can take it or leave it. If he leaves it, neither side gets anything. A selfish proposer would keep the lion's share; a selfish respondent would accept the remaining crumbs, no matter how small, because part of a loaf is better than none. In reality the proposer tends to offer almost half of the total sum, and the respondent doesn't settle for much less than half, even though turning down a smaller share is an act of spite that deprives both participants. The respondent seems to be driven by a sense of righteous anger and punishes a selfish proposer accordingly; the proposer anticipates this and makes an offer that is just generous enough to be accepted. We know that the proposer's generosity is driven by the fear of a spiteful response because of the outcome of two variants of the experiment. In the Dictator game, the proposer simply divides the sum between the two players and there is nothing the respondent can do about it. With no fear of reprisal, the proposer makes a far
{257} stingier offer. The offer still tends to be more generous than it has to be, because the proposer worries about getting a reputation for stinginess that could come back to bite him in the long run. We know this because of the outcome of the Double-Blind Dictator game, where proposals from many players are sealed and neither the respondent nor the experimenter knows who offered how much. In this variant, generosity plummets; a majority of the proposers keep everything for themselves. 50
And then there is the Public Good game, in which everyone makes a voluntary contribution to a common pot of money, the experimenter doubles it, and the pot is divided evenly among the participants regardless of what they contributed. The optimal strategy for each player acting individually is to be a free rider and contribute nothing, hoping that others will contribute something and he can get a share of their contribution. Of course, if every player thinks that way, the pot stays empty and no one earns a dime. The optimum for the group is for all the players to contribute everything they have so they can all double their money. When the game is played repeatedly, however, everyone tries to become a free rider, and the pot dwindles to a self-defeating zero. On the other hand, if people are allowed both to contribute to the pot and to levy fines on those who don't contribute, conscience doth make cowards of them all, and almost everyone contributes to the common good, allowing everyone to make a profit. 51 The same phenomenon has been independently documented by social psychologists, who call it "social loafing. " When people are part of a group, they pull less hard on a rope, clap less enthusiastically, and think up fewer ideas in a brainstorming session -- unless they think their contributions to the group effort are being monitored. 52
These experiments may be artificial, but the motives they expose played themselves out in the real-life experiments known as Utopian communities. In the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, self-contained communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up throughout the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by religious ideology after a median of twenty years. 53 The Israeli kibbutzim, originally galvanized by socialism and Zionism, steadily dismantled their collectivist philosophy over the decades. It was undermined by their members' desire to live with their families, to own their own clothing, and to keep small luxuries or sums of money acquired outside the kibbutz. And the kibbutzim were dragged down by inefficiencies because of the free-rider problem --
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? they were, in the words of one kibbutznik, a "paradise for parasites. "54
In other cultures, too, generosity is doled out according to a complex mental calculus. Remember Fiske's ethnographic survey, which shows that the ethic of Communal Sharing arises spontaneously mainly within families (and on circumscribed occasions such as feasts). Equality Matching -- that is, {258} reciprocal altruism -- is the norm for everyday interactions among more distant relatives and nonrelatives. 55 A possible exception is the distribution of meat by bands of foragers, who pool the risks of hunting large game (with its big but unpredictable windfalls) by sharing their catch. 56 Even here, the ethic is far from unstinting generosity, and the sharing is described as having "an edge of hostility. "57 Hunters generally have no easy way of keeping their catch from others, so they don't so much share their catch as stand by while others confiscate it. Their hunting effort is treated as a public good, and they are punished by gossip and ostracism if they resist the confiscation, are rewarded by prestige (which earns them sexual partners) if they tolerate it, and may be entitled to payback when the tables turn. A similar psychology may be found among the last hunter-gatherers in our own culture, commercial fishermen. In The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger writes:
Sword[fish] boat captains help each other out on the high seas whenever they can; they lend engine parts, offer technical advice, donate food or fuel. The competition between a dozen boats rushing a perishable commodity to market fortunately doesn't kill an inherent sense of concern for each other. This may seem terrifically noble, but it's not -- or at least not entirely. It's also self-interested. Each captain knows that he may be the next one with the frozen injector or the leaking hydraulics. 58
Beginning with Ashley Montagu in 1952, thinkers with collectivist sympathies have tried to eke out a place for unmeasured generosity by invoking group selection, a Darwinian competition among groups of organisms rather than among individual organisms. 59 The hope is that groups whose members sacrifice their interests for the common good will outcompete those in which every man is for himself, and as a result generous impulses will come to prevail in the species. Williams dashed the dream in 1966 when he pointed out that unless a group is genetically fixed and hermetically sealed, mutants or immigrants constantly infiltrate it. 60 A selfish infiltrator would soon take over the group with its descendants, who are more numerous because they have reaped the advantages of others' sacrifices without making their own. This would happen long before the group could parlay its internal cohesion into victory over neighboring groups and bud off new offspring groups to repeat the process.
The term "group selection" survives in evolutionary biology, but usually with different meanings from the one Montagu had in mind. Groups were certainly part of our evolutionary environment, and our ancestors evolved traits, such as a concern with one's reputation, that led them to prosper in groups. Sometimes the interests of an individual and the interests of a group can coincide; for example, both do better when the group is not exterminated by enemies. Some theorists invoke group selection to explain a willingness to punish {259} free riders who do not contribute to the public good. 61 The biologist David Sloan Wilson and the philosopher Elliot Sober recently redefined "group" as a set of mutual reciprocators, providing an alternative language in which to describe Trivers's theory but not an alternative to the theory itself. 62 But no one believes the original idea that selection among groups led to the evolution of unstinting self-sacrifice. Even putting aside the theoretical difficulties explained by Williams, we know empirically that people in all cultures do things that lead them to prosper at the expense of their group, such as lying, competing for mates, having affairs, getting jealous, and fighting for dominance.
Group selection, in any case, does not deserve its feel-good reputation. Whether or not it endowed us with generosity toward the members of our group, it would certainly have endowed us with a hatred of the members of other groups, because it favors whatever traits lead one group to prevail over its rivals. (Recall that group selection was the version of Darwinism that got twisted into Nazism. ) This does not mean that group selection is incorrect, only that subscribing to a scientific theory for its apparent political palatability can backfire. As Williams put it, "To claim that [natural selection at the level of competing groups] is morally superior to natural selection at the level of competing individuals would imply, in its human application, that systematic genocide is morally superior to random murder. "63
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People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback, ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. Trivers, together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer, has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair-weather friends from loyal allies. 64 Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one's promises, reducing a partner's worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Of course, such virtue cannot be the dominant mode of human interaction or else we could dispense with the gargantuan apparatus designed to keep exchanges fair -- money, cash registers, banks, accounting firms, billing departments, courts -- and base our economy on the honor system. At the other extreme, people also commit acts of outright treachery, including larceny, fraud, extortion, murder, and other ways of taking a benefit at someone else's expense. Psychopaths, who lack all traces of a conscience, are the most extreme example, but social psychologists have documented what they call Machiavellian traits in many individuals who fall short of outright psychopathy. 65 Most people, of course, are in the middle of the range, displaying mixtures of reciprocity, pure generosity, and greed.
{260}
Why do people range across such a wide spectrum? Perhaps all of us are capable of being saints or sinners, depending on the temptations and threats at hand. Perhaps we are set on one of these paths early in life by our upbringing or by the mores of our peer group. Perhaps we choose these paths early in life because we are endowed with a deck of conditional strategies on how to develop a personality: if you discover that you are attractive and charming, try being a manipulator; if you are large and commanding, try being a bully; if you are surrounded by generous people, be generous in kind; and so on. Perhaps we are predisposed to being nastier or nicer by our genes. Perhaps human development is a lottery, and fate assigns us a personality at random. Most likely, our differences come from several of these forces or from hybrids among them. For example, we may all develop a sense of generosity if enough of our friends and neighbors are generous, but the threshold or the multiplier of that function may differ among us genetically or at random: some people need only a few nice neighbors to grow up nice, others need a majority.
Genes are certainly a factor. Conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, psychopathy, and criminal behavior are substantially (though by no means completely) heritable, and altruism may be as well. 66 But this only replaces the original question -- Why do people vary in their selfishness? -- with another one. Natural selection tends to make the members of a species alike in their adaptive traits, because whichever version of a trait is better than the others will be selected and the alternative versions will die out. That is why most evolutionary psychologists attribute systematic differences among people to their environments and attribute only random differences to the genes. This genetic noise can come from at least two sources. Inside the genome, rust never sleeps: random mutations constantly creep in and are only slowly and unevenly eliminated by selection. 67 And selection can favor molecular variability for its own sake to keep us one step ahead of the parasites that constantly evolve to infiltrate our cells and tissues. Differences in the functioning of whole bodies and brains could be a by-product of this churning of protein sequences.
68
But the theory of reciprocal altruism raises another possibility: that some of the genetic differences among people in their social emotions are systematic. One exception to the rule that selection reduces variability arises when the best strategy depends on what other organisms are doing. The child's game of scissors-paper-rock is one analogy, and another may be found in the decision of which route to take to work. As commuters begin to avoid a congested highway and opt for a less traveled route, the new one will no longer be less traveled, so many will choose the first one, until congestion builds up there, which will induce still other commuters to choose the second route, and so on. The commuters will eventually distribute themselves in some ratio between the two roads. The same thing can happen in evolution, where it is called frequency-dependent selection. {261}
One corollary of reciprocal altruism, shown in a number of simulations, is that frequency-dependent selection can produce temporary or permanent mixtures of strategies. For example, even if reciprocators predominate in a population, a minority of cheaters can sometimes survive, taking advantage of the generosity of the reciprocators as long as they don't grow so numerous as to meet other cheaters too often or to be recognized and punished by the reciprocators. Whether the population ends up homogeneous or with a mixture of strategies depends on which strategies are competing, which start off more numerous, howeasily they enter and leave the population, and the payoffs for cooperation and defection. 69
We have an intriguing parallel. In the real world, people differ genetically in their selfish tendencies. And in models of the evolution of altruism, actors may evolve differences in their selfish tendencies. It could be a coincidence, but it probably is not. Several biologists have adduced evidence that psychopathy is a cheating strategy that evolved by frequency-dependent selection. 70 Statistical analyses show that a psychopath, rather than merely falling at the end of a continuum for one or two traits, has a distinct cluster of traits (superficial charm, impulsivity, irresponsibility, callousness, guiltlessness, mendacity, and exploitiveness) that sets him off from the rest of the population. 71 And many psychopaths show none of the subtle physical abnormalities produced by biological noise, suggesting that psychopathy is not always a biological mistake. 72 The psychologist Linda Mealey has argued that frequency- dependent selection has produced at least two kinds of psychopaths. One kind consists of people who are genetically predisposed to psychopathy regardless of how they grow up. The other kind is made up of people who are predisposed to psychopathy only in certain circumstances, namely when they perceive themselves to be
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? competitively disadvantaged in society and find themselves at home in a group of other antisocial peers.
The possibility that some individuals are born with a weak conscience runs squarely against the doctrine of the Noble Savage. It calls to mind the old-fashioned notions of born criminals and bad seeds, and it was blotted out by twentieth-century intellectuals and replaced with the belief that all wrongdoers are victims of poverty or bad parenting. In the late 1970s Norman Mailer received a letter from a prisoner named Jack Henry Abbott, who had spent most of his life behind bars for crimes ranging from passing bad checks to killing a fellow prisoner. Mailer was writing a book about the murderer Gary Gilmore, and Abbott offered to help him get into the mindset of a killer by sharing his prison diaries and his radical critique of the criminal justice system. Mailer was dazzled by Abbott's prose and proclaimed him to be a brilliant new writer and thinker -- "an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge. " He arranged for Abbott's letters to be published {262} in the New York Review of Books and then as a 1980 book, In the Belly of the Beast. Here is an excerpt, in which Abbott describes what it is like to stab someone to death:
You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder. . . . You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper one thing at the end: "Please. " You get the odd impression he is not imploring you not to harm him, but to do it right.
Over the objections of prison psychiatrists who saw that Abbott had psychopath written all over his face, Mailer and other New York literati helped him win an early parole. Abbott was soon feted at literary dinners, likened to Solzhenitsyn and Jacobo Timerman, and interviewed on Good Morning America and in People magazine. Two weeks later he got into an argument with an aspiring young playwright who was working as a waiter in a restaurant and had asked Abbott not to use the employees' restroom. Abbott asked him to step outside, stabbed him in the chest, and left him to bleed to death on the sidewalk. 73
Psychopaths can be clever and charming, and Mailer was only the latest in a series of intellectuals from all over the political spectrum who were conned in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973 William F. Buckley helped win the early release of Edgar Smith, a man who had been convicted of molesting a fifteen-year-old cheerleader and crushing her head with a rock. Smith won his freedom in exchange for confessing to the crime, and then, as Buckley was interviewing him on his national television program, he recanted the confession. Three years later he was arrested for beating another young woman with a rock, and he is now serving a life sentence for attempted murder. 74
Not everyone was conned. The comedian Richard Pryor described his experience at the Arizona State Penitentiary during the filming of Stir Crazy:
It made my heart ache, you know, to see all these beautiful black men in the joint. Goddam; the warriors should be out there helping the masses. I felt that way, I was real nai? ve. Six weeks I was up there and I talked to the brothers. I talked to 'em, and. . . [Looks around, frightened] . . . Thank God we got penitentiaries! I asked one, "Why did you kill everybody in the house? " He says, "They was home. " . . . I met one dude, kidnap-murdered four times. And I thought, three times, that was your last, right? I says, "What happened? " [Answers in falsetto] "I can't get this shit right! But I'm getting paroled in two years. " {263}
Pryor was not, of course, denying the inequities that continue to put disproportionate numbers of African Americans in prison. He was only contrasting the common sense of ordinary people with the romanticism of intellectuals -- and perhaps exposing their condescending attitude that poor people can't be expected to refrain from murder, and that they should not be alarmed by the murderers in their midst.
The romantic notion that all malefactors are depraved on accounta they're deprived has worn thin among experts and laypeople alike. Many psychopaths had difficult lives, of course, but that does not mean that having a difficult life turns one into a psychopath. There is an old joke about two social workers discussing a problematic child: "Johnny came from a broken home. " "Yes, Johnny could break any home. " Machiavellian personalities can be found in all social classes -- there are kleptocrats, robber barons, military dictators, and rogue financiers -- and some psychopaths, such as the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, have come from decent, upper-middle-class homes. And none of this means that all people who resort to violence or crime are psychopaths, only that some of the worst ones are. Psychopaths, as far as we know, cannot be "cured. " Indeed, the psychologist Marnie Rice has shown that certain harebrained ideas for therapy, such as boosting their self-esteem and teaching them social skills, can make them even more dangerous. 75 But that does not mean there is nothing we can do about them. For example, Mealey shows that of the two kinds of psychopaths she distinguished, inveterate psychopaths are unmoved by programs that try to get them to appreciate the harm they do, but they may be responsive to surer punishments that induce them to behave more responsibly out of sheer self-interest. Conditional psychopaths, on the other hand, may respond better to social
? ? ? ? ? changes that prevent them from slipping through society's cracks. Whether or not these are the best prescriptions, they are examples of how science and policy might come to grips with a problem that many intellectuals tried to wish away in the twentieth century but that has long been a concern of religion, philosophy, and fiction: the existence of evil.
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According to Trivers, every human relationship -- our ties to our parents, siblings, romantic partners, and friends and neighbors -- has a distinct psychology forged by a pattern of converging and diverging interests. What about the relationship that is, according to the pop song, "the greatest love of all" -- the relationship with the self? In a pithy and now-famous passage, Trivers wrote:
If. . . deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for {264} a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray -- by the subtle signs of self-knowledge -- the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very nai? ve view of mental evolution. 76
The conventional view may be largely correct when it comes to the physical world, which allows for reality checks by multiple observers and where misconceptions are likely to harm the perceiver. But as Trivers notes, it may not be correct when it comes to the self, which one can access in a way that others cannot and where misconceptions may be helpful. Sometimes parents may want to convince a child that what they are doing is for the child's own good, children may want to convince parents that they are needy rather than greedy, lovers may want to convince each other that they will always be true, and unrelated folks may want to convince one another that they are worthy cooperators. These opinions are often embellishments, if not tall tales, and to slip them beneath a partner's radar a speaker should believe in them so as not to stammer, sweat, or trip himself up in contradictions. Ice-veined liars might, of course, get away with telling bald fibs to strangers, but they would also have trouble keeping friends, who could never take their promises seriously. The price of looking credible is being unable to lie with a straight face, and that means a part of the mind must be designed to believe its own propaganda -- while another part registers just enough truth to keep the self-concept in touch with reality.
The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which disputed the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the one true self. No, said Goffman; it's masks all the way down. Many discoveries in the ensuing decades have borne him out. 77
Though modern psychologists and psychiatrists tend to reject orthodox Freudian theory, many acknowledge that Freud was right about the defense mechanisms of the ego. Any therapist will tell you that people protest too much, deny or repress unpleasant facts, project their flaws onto others, turn their discomfort into abstract intellectual problems, distract themselves with time-consuming activities, and rationalize away their motives. The psychiatrists Randolph Nesse and Alan Lloyd have argued that these habits do not safeguard the self against bizarre sexual wishes and fears (like having sex with one's mother) but are tactics of self-deception: they suppress evidence that we are not as beneficent or competent as we would like to think. 78 As Jeff Goldblum said in The Big Chill, "Rationalizations are more important than sex. " When his friends demurred, he asked, "Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization? " {265}
As we saw in Chapter 3, when a person suffers neurological damage, the healthy parts of the brain engage in extraordinary confabulations to explain away the foibles caused by the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self) and to present the whole person as a capable, rational actor. A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife, but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like his wife, may deduce that an amazing impostor is living in his house. A patient who believes she is at home and is shown the hospital elevator may say without missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed. "79 After the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair, he invited reporters on a hike and told them he wanted to try out for the Washington Redskins. He was soon forced to step down when he refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong with his judgment. 80
In social psychology experiments, people consistently overrate their own skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy. They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise. 81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about "cognitive dissonance reduction," in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image. 82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well:
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.
Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly. It implies that the faculties that ought to allow us to settle our differences -- seeking the truth and discussing it rationally -- are miscalibrated so that all parties assess themselves to be wiser, abler, and nobler than they really are. Each party to a dispute can sincerely believe that the logic and evidence are on his side and {266} that his opponent is deluded or dishonest or both. 83 Self-deception is one of the reasons that the moral sense can, paradoxically, often do more harm than good, a human misfortune we will explore in the next chapter.
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The many roots of our suffering illuminated by Trivers are not a cause for lamentations and wailings. The genetic overlaps that unite and divide us are tragic not in the everyday sense of a catastrophe but in the dramatic sense of a stimulus that encourages us to ponder our condition. According to a definition in the Cambridge Encyclopedia, "The fundamental purpose of tragedy. . . was claimed by Aristotle to be the awakening of pity and fear, of a sense of wonder and awe at the human potential, including the potential for suffering; it makes an assertion of human value in the face of a hostile universe. " Trivers's accounts of the inherent conflicts within families, couples, societies, and the self can reinforce that purpose.
Nature may have played a cruel trick by slightly mistuning the emotions of people who share their flesh and blood, but in doing so she provided steady work for generations of authors and playwrights. Endless are the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fact that two people can be bound by the strongest emotional bonds in the living world and at the same time not always want the best for each other. Aristotle was perhaps the first to note that tragic narratives focus on family relations. A story about two strangers who fight to the death, he pointed out, is nowhere near as interesting as a story about two brothers who fight to the death. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Oedipus and Laius, Michael and Fredo, JR and Bobby, Frasier and Niles, Joseph and his brothers, Lear and his daughters, Hannah and her sisters . . . As cataloguers of dramatic plots have noted for centuries, "enmity of kinsmen" and "rivalry of kinsmen" are enduring formulas. 84
In his book Antigones, the literary critic George Steiner showed that the Antigone legend has a singular place in Western literature. Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, but the fact that her father was her brother and her sister was her mother was only the beginning of her family troubles. In defiance of King Creon, she buried her slain brother Polynices, and when the king found out, he ordered her buried alive. She cheated him by killing herself first, whereupon the king's son, who was madly in love with her and unable to get her a pardon, killed himself on her grave. Steiner observes that Antigone is widely considered "not only the finest of the Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit. "85 It has been performed for more than two millennia and has inspired countless variations and spinoffs. Steiner explains its enduring resonance:
It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text to express all the principal constants of conflict in the condition of man. These constants are {267} fivefold: the confrontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society, and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of god(s). The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation are not negotiable. Men and women, old and young, the individual and the community or state, the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals, define themselves in the confiictual process of defining each other. 86. . . Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social confrontations and self-perceptions in the history of man, they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? endure as an animate legacy in collective memory and recognition. 87
? The bittersweet process of defining ourselves by our conflicts with others is not just a subject for literature but can illuminate the nature of our emotions and the content of our consciousness. If a genie offered us the choice between belonging to a species that could achieve perfect egalitarianism and solidarity and belonging to a species like ours in which relationships with parents, siblings, and children are uniquely precious, it is not so clear that we would choose the former. Our close relatives have a special place in our hearts only because the place for every other human being, by definition, is less special, and we have seen that many social injustices fall out of that bargain. So, too, is social friction a product of our individuality and of our pursuit of happiness. We may envy the harmony of an ant colony, but when Woody Allen's alter ego Z complained to his psychiatrist that he felt insignificant, the psychiatrist replied, "You've made a real breakthrough, Z. You are insignificant. "
Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflict to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all. 88 Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the
rare and unpredictable things we need. We feel hunger, savor food, and have a palate for countless fascinating tastes because food was hard to get during most of our evolutionary history. We don't normally feel longing, delight, or fascination regarding oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it was never hard to obtain. We just breathe.
The same may be true of conflicts over kin, mates, and friends. I mentioned that if a couple were guaranteed to be faithful, to favor each other over their kin, and to die at the same time, their genetic interests would be identical, wrapped up in their common children. One can even imagine a species in which every couple was marooned on an island for life and their offspring dispersed at maturity, never to return. Since the genetic interests of the two mates are identical, one might at first think that evolution would endow them with a blissful perfection of sexual, romantic, and companionate love.
But, Symons argues, nothing of the sort would happen. The relation between the mates would evolve to be like the relation among the cells of a single body, whose genetic interests are also identical. Heart cells and lung cells don't
{268} have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony. Likewise, the couples in this species would have sex only for the purpose of procreation (why waste energy? ), and sex would bring no more pleasure than the rest of reproductive physiology such as the release of hormones or the formation of the gametes:
There would be no falling in love, because there would be no alternative mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that's the point: you don't really love yourself, except metaphorically; you are yourself.