We are at a critical juncture in our national history. When significant social initiatives were called for in the not too distant past, the party in power could expect some level of support from the minority party for needed legislation. That is no longer the case. Our two political parties have realigned themselves from diverse entities into feuding tribes. Each tribe views the other as an existential threat and generally refuses to cooperate. We essentially are in a second Civil War, with the battles being waged in legislatures and courts. Attacks by one group on the other’s motives and “stupidities” seem only to intensify the tribal nature of our politics. Greg Jackson provided an interesting suggestion for unravelling this standoff: a good war could bring us back together. He presents his thoughts in an article that appeared in Harper’s Magazine: Prayer for a Just War. His just war would be one waged against climate change.
While a “war on climate change” seems necessary and a good thing, our concern here is with the observations Jackson makes with respect to human behavior during an actual war. What instructs Jackson is the documentation of war that suggests it can satisfy some fundamental need in humans. The need seems related not to the violence of war but to the camaraderie, to its purposefulness and its meaningfulness.
“The blessings of war have been obscured by its horrors, no doubt rightly, but we mustn’t confuse the impulse to war for the impulse to violence. It is instead, as many have documented, the impulse to encompassing meaning: lives of purpose, actions of consequence, excitement, comradeship, and responsibility.”
“In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, the former war correspondent Chris Hedges notes that, for all its destruction and carnage, war ‘can give us what we long for in life.’ It awakens us to the deadness of the everyday, of life without meaningful struggle and thus meaningful triumph. Even those who have experienced war’s brutality firsthand, he notes, often find themselves disillusioned afterward.”
Quoting Hedges.
“Once again they were, as perhaps we all are, alone, no longer bound by that common sense of struggle, no longer given the opportunity to be noble, heroic, no longer sure what life was about or what it meant.”
Jackson turns to Sebastian Junger for additional support.
“Sebastian Junger reiterates this point in his book War, in which he chides our culture for lacking the courage to see ‘that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up.’ Civilian life feels empty by comparison…”
Quoting Junger.
“When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at—you’d have to be deranged—it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.”
Jackson elaborates.
“Junger wrote War after embedding with soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the war’s deadliest fronts. He talks to soldiers on leave who were desperate to return to the fight. ‘I got to get back there,’ one says. ‘Those are my boys.’ The Army Research Branch has documented cases of wounded soldiers going AWOL to rejoin their units faster, Junger tells us. What keeps drawing ‘sane, good men’ back to combat is not the killing, but ‘the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing you’d rather do’.”
That final statement about tribalism is rather startling—both for what it suggests about our growing partisan divide, and what it says about our inherent human nature. Jackson suggests we should consider what the lack of opportunity to provide a compelling contribution to “defense of the tribe” might mean to modern humans.
“Our fundamental affliction is not the magnitude of our problems but our alienation from their manifest solutions. Our tools have never made us more powerful, yet we seem more powerless than ever to effect change. Our primary way of interacting with the world is through a screen, and our principal avenue to changing anything appears to be typing into or clicking on that screen. We are alienated from the earth, from our hands, and from one another. We appear to be part of an efficient system that has brought ever more and cheaper goods to market, but our skills have become specialized to the point of practical uselessness. Our ability to create and cultivate the goods that we rely on and enjoy has shriveled to almost nothing. There is a maddening abstraction to our reality, a virtuality to all life. We are told that we are hopelessly partisan and polarized—patriotic or traitorous, awake to truth or in thrall to lies—but above all we are separate: from one another despite our mutual dependency and from the material reality on which every aspect of our life depends. We are separate from the actions we might undertake, and undertake together, to solve the tangible problems before us, which do not care what brand name or party affiliation their solutions go by.”
Combating global warming will need an all-encompassing response which will force us to work together to avoid the ultimate catastrophes that will inevitably ensue from inaction. We should wish Jackson good luck in propagating that notion—for he is correct. But our interest here is the intriguing notion that what has been called a tribal response activated by the shared hazards of warfare is a fundamental component of human nature.
Humans are members of the primate family of which monkeys and apes are our nearest relatives. Scientists tell us that we once shared an existence with chimpanzees until we broke off from that line and went our own way, up to 6 million years ago. An unknown number of million years previous there must have been a primate ancestor from which all evolved. Over the millions of years, humans became bipeds, shed most of their body hair, rearranged their bodies via mate selection, presumably to make them more sexually attractive to the other gender, and grew larger brains. Most assume that we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers over those millions of years. We would only become sufficiently numerous and robust to venture out of our African home a few hundreds of thousands of years ago. We must have begun as just another species in a vast network of predators and prey. As we evolved, so did our enemies, providing an always dangerous environment. We would have to struggle with food supplies as the climate underwent enormous changes over those millions of years. Some researchers claim we nearly went extinct—perhaps numerous times. It is not difficult to make an argument that such a group (or tribe) of humans would require the same tendencies that modern humans only experience in warfare. Living continuously over millions of years in an environment akin to wartime conditions could make the measures needed for group survival instinctive and inheritable.
What are the characteristics that a primitive group of hunter-gatherers should develop in order to survive in a threatening environment, and is there any evidence that these characteristics are innate to our nature? Let us turn to the work of Frans de Waal for some enlightenment. His most recent effort is titled Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves. Emotions were once considered an example of a higher order cognitive response that was available to humans, but largely lacking in other species. De Waal’s purpose is to convince us that emotions are not only common among animals, but that emotional response has been a part of natural selection since quite early in animal evolution. Human emotional makeup, and that of a chimp for example, both result from the same evolutionary path that extended many millions of years into the past.
It was once thought that animal behavior was mainly instinctual. Certain stimuli produce certain responses. It only takes a few minutes to conclude that such a mechanism is insufficient for the complex environments in which animals live. Higher order animals had to develop emotions such as fear, joy, disgust, affection, and empathy if they were to survive, particularly in a group or family environment. The role of emotions is to signal to the conscious part of the brain that something is afoot and action must be considered. Instinct might lead a small vulnerable ape like ourselves to run when seeing a large leopard nearby, but that could be a fatal mistake. The emotion of fear tells us a decision on action is required but gives us time to make a conscious decision about which is the best option.
Perhaps the emotion most important for group function is empathy. Empathy can be defined as the ability to interpret and share the feelings of another. What de Vaal wishes to make perfectly clear is that the emotion of empathy is not restricted to humans, and that empathy is a physical phenomenon—our bodies are designed to participate in the process, and its activities often take place subconsciously. Humans are a social animal. It appears evolution has decided that social animals are more effective as a society if members have some way of interpreting the emotions other members are experiencing.
Humans have many facial expressions that convey emotion. Evolution has provided us with the muscles we can use to produce very nuanced expressions. A group of humans would be unable to function if its members were unable to recognize each other’s emotions. It was long thought that this presumed unique complexity was consistent with higher order human intelligence and sociability. However, chimpanzees have the exact same number of facial muscles and nearly the same muscular topology as humans.
“When a team of behavioral scientists and anthropologists finally tested the idea by carefully dissecting the faces of two dead chimpanzees, they found the exact same number of mimetic muscles as in the human face—and surprising few differences. We could have predicted this, of course, because Nikolaas Tulp, the Dutch anatomist immortalized in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, had long ago reached a similar conclusion. In 1641 Tulp was the first to dissect an ape cadaver and found it resembled the human body so closely in its structural details, musculature, organs, and so on, that the species looked like two drops of water.”
If chimps and early humans were once the same species and after millions of years of evolution the two species possess the same facial musculature for expressing emotion, then that attribute must have come into existence prior to the divergence of the two species—perhaps millions of years before. And the machinery must have been fundamentally important to each species for it to have survived millions of years of additional natural selection with little or no change.
Chimps are quite adept at recognizing and responding to emotions expressed by humans. An example is provided by Nadia Ladygina-Kohts of a pet chimp’s response to the perceived distress of his mistress.
“If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his play or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists.”
Note that the pet chimp assumed the woman was in distress because she was in danger. Yet he immediately came and acted as if he was ready to protect her from whatever the threat was. In the past it was generally regarded that natural selection (survival of the fittest) would reward the more selfish option of avoiding any personal danger. It seems that the opposite has been favored by evolution: survival of the group is the best way to ensure survival of the individual. If a member of the group is in trouble, animals seem to be programmed to move to the distressed individual not away from potential danger.
“Emotional contagion, as it is known, begins at birth, such as when one baby cries upon hearing another baby cry. On airplanes and in maternity wards, babies sometimes chorus like frogs. You might think they cry in reaction to any kind of noise, but studies have shown they respond specifically to the cries of same-age babies. Girl babies do so more than boy babies. That the emotional glue of society emerges so early in life reveals its biological nature. It is a capacity we share with all mammals.”
“Once an infant [chimp] accidently landed on a dominant female, who bit him. He screamed so incessantly that he was soon surrounded by other infants. I counted eight of them in the baby pile, all climbing on top of the poor victim, pushing, pulling, and shoving each other aside. That obviously did little to alleviate the first infant’s fright. But the monkeys’ response seemed automatic, as if they were just as distraught as the victim and sought to comfort themselves as much as the other.”
“It is as if nature has endowed children and many animals with a simple rule: ‘If you feel another’s pain, get over there and make contact!’ It is good to realize, however, that any theory of strict self-preservation would predict the exact opposite…That mice, monkeys, and many other animals actively seek out those in trouble…proves the fundamental flaw of the sociobiological theories popular in the 1970s and ‘80s.”
Evidence of similar programming is found in humans.
“The early development of this behavior has been studied in our species by filming children in their homes. The investigator asks an adult family member to pretend to cry or act as if they are in pain, in order to see what the children do. In the film the children look worried while approaching the distressed adult. They gently touch, stroke, hug, or kiss the adult. Girls do so more than boys. The most important finding was that these responses emerge early in life, before the age of two. That toddlers already express empathy suggests it is spontaneous, because it is unlikely that anyone has been instructing them how to proceed.
“When people in a neuroimaging experiment were given a choice between a selfish and an altruistic option, most opted for the latter. They went with the selfish choice only if there were good reasons to avoid cooperation. Many studies support this view, saying that we tend to be kind and open to others unless something holds us back.”
What we have observed is that evolution has provided animals who live in groups with tools to protect and support the group. These tools allow an individual to surrender his/her safety in order to assist in protecting the group. Soldiers are trained to assume that attitude as exhibited by the tales told by Jackson and Unger. However, that training likely gets a major assist from our evolutionary history.
Jackson realizes that what we know of tribalism is not working in our favor since we have mobilized ourselves into two contending tribes who respond to threats as we expect. How to make two contending tribes switch to operating as a single tribe to contend with climate change seems too much to hope for at this point. History tells us that this type of confrontation between tribes often leads to war. Let us hope we can avoid that.
We should thank Jackson and Junger for raising our
awareness of a prosocial tendency observed in warfare that could easily be
misunderstood. Some researchers,
particularly male anthropologists, like to describe humans as intrinsically
violent creatures. Nothing in their
description of wartime behavior or the discussion of intrinsic characteristics
evolution has provided supports that notion.
Go to bed tonight believing we are decent creatures and sleep well.
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