Anthony Bourdain did a bit at Orlando's Hard Rock Cafe last night. Funny guy, and boy can he cuss. Later, when I got home, I took a look at his blog, and discovered
that Mr. Bourdain allows that there was a time when he believed that people were
no damn good and that “the human race as a whole was basically a few steps above wolves.”
First of all, let me extend an apology to wolves
everywhere, a noble species that, for example, is much better at parenting and
other social skills than are most humans. But never mind. Bourdain’s point
was that after spending months in remote parts of the world, talking to ordinary
people about their lives and their food, he decided that “…the world is, in fact,
filled with mostly good and decent people who are simply doing the best they
can.”
Welcome to the world of ethnography, Brother Bourdain,
and if we ever meet, let me be the first to teach you the Secret Anthropologists’
Handshake.
Anthony in Paradise
(Thanks, Baltimore Sun)
Actually, the question of whether or not people
suck is one that has haunted me since my adolescence (which did not, contrary
to the claims of some, only end when I turned 65). Like Bourdain, I have ultimately decided that
people mostly don’t suck, though they certainly can. And one crucial source of human suckiness
comes from the yearning to dominate our fellow Homo sapiens. This yearning, it turns out, has been
bestowed on us through honest Darwinian pathways, as is revealed when we compare ourselves to
such human cousins as Pan troglodytes,
the common chimpanzee.
According to Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, humans have a
built-in propensity to dominate each other. Anthropologist Boehm draws his conclusion partly by comparing us to the
chimp and other close human relatives. Of course, you may think it insulting to have one’s species compared to
inherently savage and violent brutes, but so far no chimpanzees have
complained.
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
Anyway, a remarkable conclusion that Boehm reaches
is that despite our propensity for bullying and self-aggrandizement, humans
have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian
communities. In other words, give us a
chance and we will start pushing each other around, but for a great long
stretch of human prehistory, we weren’t given that chance. What then, kept us in check? To a certain extent it was the fear of being
scathingly satirized and ridiculed by our compatriots. Humans have for millennia lived in moral
communities, and the agreed upon morality of these communities has provided a
basis for keeping the jerks and shysters somewhat in line through growls, guffaws, and verbal chastisements.
But behind the moral community there has lurked
the capacity for lethal violence that humans have commanded and that for a
couple million years has made us, with our spears, clubs and poison arrows,
much deadlier than our chimp cousins. In
fact, the human capacity to kill efficiently, according to Boehm, has forced us
to accept a moral code, or, better, a myriad of moral codes, each of which
shared at their core such ideas as “bullying is intolerable,” and “greed and
stinginess are bad.”
Boehm argues that moral systems, originally linked
to religion, offered communities criteria according to which the jerks and
assholes of the world could be kept in line, and that societies would therefore
not devolve into murderous Survival
shows in which only one man would be left standing. The propensity to dominate has continued to haunt human nature since we diverged from the apes,
but for millennia this propensity has been kept in check by the power of society as a whole; among early Homo sapiens it was the social group that dominated the would-be dominators.
A lot of Boehm’s evidence comes from some of the same
places where Bourdain found the gentler side of his own soul – the worlds of
tribes and peasants. One point that
Boehm doesn’t emphasize (and, understandably, neither does Bourdain) has to do
with the origin of marriage. Like food
sharing and the resentment of bullies, marriage is a human universal (except
maybe among the Mosuo – see blog post on Love and Marriage – October 24, 2010). Since marriage occurs virtually everywhere
that humans are found, there must be a strong genetic basis on which this
institution is built, something beyond mere masochism.
To tie in the marriage factor, we can look to
Canadian anthropologist Bernard Chapais, author of a fascinating book -- Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society. Chapais describes the origins of human pair-bonding at length, and offers a compelling thesis to explain this human phenomenon. Briefly, Chapais’ argument is that pair-bonding first emerged in human evolution as a
morality-based cognitive-behavioral system by which males would be discouraged
from killing each other over females.
Professor Chapais, meet Professor Boehm.
Of course, there remains the question of why Brother Bourdain came
to look down on humanity in the first place during his urban cookery days. A possible answer to this can also be found in Boehm’s
work (and in Marx’s and Engels's, by the way): it has to do with the
accumulation of property made possible when humans settled into agricultural civilizations. When some people found it possible to amass
wealth, which they then used to manipulate others – that’s when we stopped
being nice. You might say, that’s when
we gave up our wolf-like sense of decency and turned vicious. The rest is history – history being a nightmare
from which, following Stephen Daedalus, we all now need to awake.
