The Age of Empathy (4 page)

The chimps barely seemed to notice the new construction. Some of them walked right underneath it as if it were invisible. They seemed in denial! Until they noticed the bananas we had placed at strategic locations visible from the ground. The first ones to get into the structure were the older females, and, ironically, the very last chimp to touch wood was a female known as the group’s bully.

As soon as the fruits had been collected and eaten, though, everyone left the structure. They clearly weren’t ready for it. They gathered in the old metal jungle gym, which my students had tested out the day before, finding it most uncomfortable to sit on. But the chimps had known it all their lives, so they lazily lay around in it looking up at the Taj Mahal that we had erected next to it, as if it were an object to be studied rather than enjoyed. It was months before they spent significant amounts of time in the new climbing frame.

We had been blinded by our own proud achievement, only to be corrected by the apes, who reminded us of the basics. It made me think again of Immanuel Kant, because isn’t this the problem with modern philosophy? Obsessed by what we consider new and important about ourselves—abstract thought, conscience, morality—we overlook the fundamentals. I’m not trying to belittle what is uniquely human, but if we ever want to understand how we got there, we will need to start thinking from the bottom up. Instead of fixating on the
peaks of civilization, we need to pay attention to the foothills. The peaks glimmer in the sun, but it is in the foothills that we find most of what drives us, including those messy emotions that make us spoil our children.

It was a typical primate conflict over dinner in a fancy Italian restaurant: one human male challenging another—me—in front of his girlfriend. Knowing my writings, what better target than humanity’s place in nature? “Name one area in which it’s hard to tell humans apart from animals,” he said, looking for a test case. Before I knew it, between two bites of delicious pasta, I replied, “The sex act.”

Perhaps reminded of something unmentionable, I could see that this took him aback a little, but only momentarily. He launched into a great defense of passion as peculiarly human, stressing the recent origin of romantic love, the wonderful poems and serenades that come with it, while pooh-poohing my emphasis on the mechanics
of l’amore,
which are essentially the same for humans, hamsters, and guppies (male guppies are equipped with a penislike modified fin). He pulled a deeply disgusted face at these mundane anatomical details.

Alas for him, his girlfriend was a colleague of mine, who with great enthusiasm jumped in with more examples of animal sex, so we had the sort of dinner conversation that primatologists love but that embarrasses almost everyone else. A stunned silence fell at neighboring tables when the girlfriend exclaimed that “he had
such
an erection!” It was unclear if the reaction concerned what she had just said, or that she had indicated what she meant holding thumb and index finger only slightly apart. She was talking about a small South American monkey.

Our argument was never resolved, but by the time desserts arrived it fortunately had lost steam. Such discussions are a staple of my existence: I believe that we are animals, whereas others believe we are something else entirely. Human uniqueness may be hard to maintain when it comes to sex, but the situation changes if one considers air-planes,
parliaments, or skyscrapers. Humans have a truly impressive capacity for culture and technology. Even though many animals do show some elements of culture, if you meet a chimp in the jungle with a camera, you can be pretty sure he didn’t produce it himself.

But what about humans who have missed out on the cultural growth spurt that much of the world underwent over the last few thousand years? Hidden in far-flung corners, these people do possess all the hallmarks of our species, such as language, art, and fire. We can study how they survive without being distracted by the technological advances of today. Does their way of life fit widely held assumptions about humanity’s “state of nature”—a concept with a rich history in the West? Given the way this concept figured in the French Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, and other historical steps toward modern democracy, it’s no trivial matter to establish how humans may have lived in their original state.

A good example are the “Bushmen” of southwest Africa, who used to live in such simplicity that their lifestyle was lampooned in the 1980 movie
The Gods Must Be Crazy.
As a teenager, anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas went with her parents, also anthropologists, to the Kalahari Desert to live among them. Bushmen, also known as the San, are a small, lithe people who have carved out a very modest niche in a grassy, open ecosystem that for half of the year is so low on water that the few reliable water-holes seriously restrict human movement. They have lived this way for thousands and thousands of years, which is why Marshall Thomas titled her book on them
The Old Way.

A Bushman mother offers a child a drink from an ostrich eggshell filled with water.

The old way includes minimal clothing made out of antelope hides, a modest grass shelter, a sharpened digging stick, and an ostrich eggshell to transport water on day trips. Shelters
are built and rebuilt all the time by putting a few sticks into the ground, intertwining the top, and covering the frame with grass. It reminded Marshall Thomas of the way apes build one-night nests in the trees by quickly weaving a few branches together into a platform before they go to sleep. This way, they stay off the ground, where danger lurks.

When Bushmen travel, they walk in single file, with a man in the lead who watches out for fresh predator tracks, snakes, and other dangers. Women and children occupy safer positions. This, too, is reminiscent of chimpanzees, who at dangerous moments—such as when they cross a human dirt road—have adult males in the lead and rear, with females and juveniles in between. Sometimes the alpha male stands guard at the road until everyone has crossed it.

Our ancestors may have been higher on the food chain than most primates, but they definitely were not at the apex. They had to watch their backs. This brings me to the first false myth about our state of nature, which is that our ancestors ruled the savanna. How could this be true for bipedal apes that stood only four feet tall? They must have lived in terror of the bear-sized hyenas of those days, and the saber-toothed cats that were twice the size of our lions. As a result, they had to content themselves with second-rate hunting time. Darkness is the best cover, but like the Bushmen today, early human hunters likely opted for the heat of the day, when their prey could see them coming from miles away, because they had to leave the night to the “professional” hunters.

Lions are the supreme rulers of the savanna, as reflected in our “lion king” stories and the Bushmen’s high regard for lions. Significantly, Bushmen never use their deadly poison arrows on these animals, knowing that this may start a battle they can’t win. The lions leave them alone most of the time, but when for some reason the lions in some places become man-eaters, people have had no choice but to leave. Danger is so much on the Bushmen’s mind that at night, while the others sleep, they keep their fire going, which means getting up to stoke it. If the glow-in-the-dark eyes of nightly predators are
spotted, appropriate action will be taken, such as picking up a burning branch from the fire and waving it over one’s head (making one look larger-than-life) while urging the predator in a calm but steady voice to go find something better to do. Bushmen do have courage, but pleading with predators hardly fits the idea of humans as the dominant species.

The old way must have been quite successful, though, for even in the modern world we still show the same tendency to come together for safety. At times of danger, we forget what divides us. This was visible, for example, after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, an unbelievably traumatic experience for those who lived through it. Nine months afterward, when asked how they saw relations between the races, New Yorkers of all races called those relations mostly good, whereas in foregoing years, they had called them mostly bad. The postattack feeling of “we’re in this together” had fostered unity in the city.

These reflexes go back to the deepest, most ancient layers of our brain, layers that we share with many animals, not just mammals. Look at how fish, such as herring, swim in schools that tighten instantly when a shark or porpoise approaches. Or how schools turn abruptly in one silvery flash, making it impossible for the predator to target any single fish. Schooling fish keep very precise individual distances, seek out companions of the same size, and perfectly match their speed and direction, often in a fraction of a second. Thousands of individuals thus act almost like a single organism. Or look at how birds, such as starlings, swarm in dense flocks that in an instant evade an approaching hawk. Biologists speak of “selfish herds,” in which each individual hides among a mass of others for its own security. The presence of other prey dilutes the risk for each one among them, not unlike the old joke about two men being chased by a bear: There’s no need to run faster than the bear so long as you outrun your pal.

Even bitter rivals seek companionship at times of danger. Birds that in the breeding season fight one another to death over territory
may end up in the same flock during migration. I know this tendency firsthand from my fish, each time I redo one of my large tropical aquariums. Many fish, such as cichlids, are quite territorial, displaying with spread fins and chasing one another to keep their corner free of intruders. I clean my tanks out every couple of years, during which time I keep the fish in a barrel. After a few days they are released back into the tank, which by then looks quite different from before. I am always amused at how they suddenly seek out the company of their own kind. Like best buddies, the biggest fighters now swim side by side, exploring their new environment together. Until, of course, they start to feel confident again, and claim a piece of real estate.

Fish band together in tight schools that confuse predators, such as these fish evading a shark.

Security is the first and foremost reason for social life. This brings me to the second false origin myth: that human society is the voluntary creation of autonomous men. The illusion here is that our ancestors had no need for anybody else. They led uncommitted lives. Their only problem was that they were so competitive that the cost of strife became unbearable. Being intelligent animals, they decided to give up a few liberties in return for community life. This origin story, proposed by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the
social contract,
inspired America’s founding fathers to create the “land of the free.” It is a myth that remains immensely popular in political science departments and law schools, since it presents society as a negotiated compromise rather than something that came naturally to us.

Granted, it can be instructive to look at human relations
as if
they resulted from an agreement among equal parties. It helps us think
about how we treat, or ought to treat, one another. It’s good to realize, though, that this way of framing the issue is a leftover from pre-Darwinian days, based on a totally erroneous image of our species. As is true for many mammals, every human life cycle includes stages at which we either depend on others (when we are young, old, or sick) or others depend on us (when we care for the young, old, or sick). We very much rely on one another for survival. It is this reality that ought to be taken as a starting point for any discussion about human society, not the reveries of centuries past, which depicted our ancestors as being as free as birds and lacking any social obligations.

We descend from a long line of group-living primates with a high degree of interdependence. How the need for security shapes social life became clear when primatologists counted long-tailed macaques on different islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Some islands have cats (such as tigers and clouded leopards), whereas others don’t. The same monkeys were found traveling in large groups on islands with cats, but in small groups on islands without. Predation thus forces individuals together. Generally, the more vulnerable a species is, the larger its aggregations. Ground-dwelling monkeys, like baboons, travel in larger groups than tree dwellers, which enjoy better escape opportunities. And chimpanzees, which because of their size have little to fear in the daytime, typically forage alone or in small groups.