LITMIR.BIZ

       SIX The Pressures of Society

      Individuals buy in to (their) community…by eternal psychological vigilance. They may spend time apparently doing nothing, passing time in idle gossip. But this time spent socialising is as crucial to their survival as any time spent hunting or gathering in the field. For it is round the campfire or lying out in the sun that the social backbone of…society is laid down and, if necessary, repaired: friendships are established, problems talked out, plans hatched, love affairs commented on.

      Nicholas Humphrey35

      It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a chimpanzee kept in solitude is not a real chimpanzee at all.

       Wolfgang Kohler

      The brain-mind’s retrieval problems obviously get more acute the more different scenarios you have to keep tabs on. A solitary animal has only a few different types of situation that it has to take part in. Sociable animals such as fish and birds may also have only a limited number of roles to play as they do not make many distinctions between other members of the group. Animals such as the large cats that hunt in packs have to be rather more concerned about their roles and relationships.

      But it is when we get to the social primates, and our own human ancestors, the early hominids, that the number of different scenarios which each individual has to keep track of begins to mushroom. The nature of each encounter becomes increasingly dependent on the particular individual you are dealing with. And if you have to have a separate minitheory for every member of your community, the larger and more complex that community becomes, the more the fragmentation of the brain-mind is likely to become a problem. (When we get on to the complexities of modern industrialized human society, the extent of the problem becomes staggering.) If each of our familiar scenarios were stored separately, there would be an enormous duplication of effort, and an incredible waste of usable information.

      The Mixed Blessing of Community

      Before we embark on the story of how the brain-mind solved the problem of scenario-overload, we need to say something about why it was that social living – and the development of individual ‘character’ – came about.

      Living together in groups is a survival strategy that bodies can adopt, in just the same way as living together in bodies is, as we have seen, a survival strategy that cells can adopt (and living together in cells is a survival strategy that even more primitive little creatures can adopt). Gambling on community is not, at any of these levels, the only way to go. Solitary multicellular animals abound in the modern world, just as there are unicellular organisms and bacteria of many different sorts. But human genes opted for the corporate life, so it is that path that I shall focus on here.

      The basic advantage of community is, of course, that there is safety in numbers. A cooperative group of animals can defend their young, collectively, against the unwanted interest of a predator, more successfully than a single mother can on her own. A pride of lions can hunt together more subtly and reliably than any one of them alone. And if the kill is big enough to feed them all, then the strategy has paid off well. Furthermore, living in herds – of antelope, let us say – increases the likelihood that those of the extended family who are caught by predators will be the older or weaker members. As the herd wheels in confusion, or turns and flees from the approaching lions, and as the mothers do their best to ensure that their offspring are concealed and surrounded in the middle of the herd, it will be the slowest or the most confused, and not necessarily the youngest, that will become exposed, and the most likely target of the lions’ attentions. Thus, even though the creation of a herd may not save you from the periodic loss, it acts as another mechanism for strengthening the gene pool, by increasing the chances that it is indeed the fittest that survive.

      But collaboration demands its price, and poses its problems. When the catch is good, everyone is happy; but when food is scarce, who is it who has to go short? Must there be equal hardship all round, or will some kind of pecking order emerge? When ‘we’ are under threat, where exactly do the fundamental loyalties of any individual lie? When such choices have to be made, the demands on the group to develop some form of social organization, even of hierarchy, becomes stronger. And this in its turn requires the development of more elaborate forms of social intelligence and social communication.

      At its most fundamental, communal living continually poses the dilemma of how selfish, and how self-less, to be. Living in society, there are benefits to be gained from individualism and entrepreneurship but there are also costs, in terms of social cohesiveness, collective trust and goodwill. When a society starts to be dominated by a few conspicuously successful bandits, a wave of imitation may be stimulated that is not only bound to fail, as more and more people try their hand at outwitting each other, but sooner or later undermines the very rationale for social living. Anarchy is a useful call-to-arms in a passive and oppressed culture, but a hopeless game plan for any species that is indelibly, genetically sociable. (The individualistic consumerism of the 1980s, and the short-lived financial beanfeast to which its ‘Greed is Good’ philosophy gave rise, is of course the most recent case in point.)

      In a complementary fashion, altruism is a valid strategy, especially if directed towards kin whose genes are very similar to one’s own, or towards those who can protect you and promote your status or interests. But it can clearly be to an individual’s disadvantage to give away everything, or always to direct any passer-by to your precious store of winter food, if your altruism is not, at some level, reciprocated. It is also possible for a whole society to be too caring or trusting, and to lose a competitive edge when it comes to dealing with a rogue member of the tribe, or a stranger. ‘Third world’ societies, such as Ladakh in Northern India for instance, have proven to be tragically easy prey for silver-tongued purveyors of ‘development’, and have happily abandoned a thousand years of ecological and social wisdom for the promise of a pair of denim jeans, and the reality of urban poverty.³⁶

      ‘Enlightened self-interest’ would be the ideal compromise, but the practical definition of enlightened depends on who your neighbours are, and on a whole host of ever-shifting considerations. In many species, kinship turns out to be the medium through which ‘enlightenment’ is manifest, and unrepentant nepotism is rife. A group who share genes will share more in the way of resources, labour and defence with each other than with other members of society – with the possible exception of the very important category of ‘potential mates’. If the clan’s preference for its own members extended also to each member’s choice of sexual partners, then the gene pool would be at risk, so this is the one area in which it pays to look outside the immediate family circle. In human societies, of course, the clan itself, or its ‘elders’, have often reserved the right to define who is a ‘potential mate’,

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