The Big Picture

So, as we saw in the last post, primates in their natural state are quite capable of making moral judgments about what is appropriate behavior and what is not without any moral authority above them in either this or some other world. And so it is with the primate Homo sapiens.

The idea of human nature being a problem or being inherently immoral is an idea born of civilizations where human nature must be molded by an artificial environment - that is, made subject to rules and regulations designed to benefit an impersonal state.

The state employs religion, with supposed connections to a world beyond, from where it claims to receive its authority to impose “oughts” and “thou shalt nots” that are believed to be contrary to human nature. The state, it is believed, has to make laws to save us from our natural selves. In The Moral Animal Robert Wright states that we should not care “…whether murder, robbery and rape are in some sense ‘natural’. It is for us to decide how abhorrent we find such things and how hard we want to fight them.” According to Wright, then, the crimes are natural and our abhorrence and opposition to them is unnaturally arrived at.

It’s clear, of course, that Wright supposes that only the human animal is capable of opposing conduct that is “…in some sense ‘natural’…” and so it is a safe bet to elevate any condemnation of it to something supernaturally arrived at - or arrived at through purely cultural means, which is virtually the same thing. But Wright’s suppositions are contradicted by the way in which the chimpanzees of Gombe opposed the abhorrent behavior of one of their number. So, it is perfectly natural to oppose abhorrent behavior. This contradicts what is known in philosophy as the naturalistic fallacy which states that nature cannot be the basis for how we ought to behave.

It was nature after all that informed and instructed primitives as to how to behave in order to survive. We know that must be true for there was no other institution to guide them. The literature on this subject can be confusing, however. For example, there are some curious statements to be found concerning the conduct of primitive people toward one another in Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He writes, “…long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death.” while a few pages prior to that he explains how conflicts between two people in a tribe are peacefully resolved, “…any two villagers getting into an argument will share many kin, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent.”

In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright states that, “Men have long competed for access to the scarcer sexual resource, women. And the costs of losing the contest are so high (genetic oblivion) that natural selection has inclined them to compete with special ferocity.”

However, in a documentary film of the Amazonian Yanomamo tribe, a male, who happened to be mate-less and childless, did not have to compete with the other males to obtain a female for himself. The tribes’ people arrived at a more “civilized” solution. The lone male was welcomed by a couple that gave him the opportunity to become a father. The male member of the couple stepped aside to allow the other male sole access to his wife until the child of the other male was born. Such a solution speaks to a powerful ethos at work to preserve tribal harmony over all.

We know from extensive documentation that primitive bands and tribes in places like the Amazon, New Guinea, Africa and Australia were not unruly bunches of savages without a clue as to how to maintain an orderly existence for themselves. On the contrary, members of bands and tribes formed ordered, cohesive groups within which, for the most part, everyone got along with everyone else. Even without the documentation it would stand to reason that primitives did not habitually engage in anti-social behavior within their groups. For, if that were the case, they could not have existed in perpetuity.

Both Diamond and Wright indicate that the real trouble is found in more developed societies. Diamond put it something like this - after tribes came chiefdoms where a more authoritarian leader became necessary as larger societies contained more and more people who were strangers and had to be held accountable to a central authority since the intervention of kin could no longer be relied upon to diffuse a conflict.

But what was there to account for the tendency toward cohesion within a primitive group absent some powerful moral authority imposing law and order upon them from above? Why were they not terminally afflicted by the seven deadly sins? What was there to temper their instinctual passions and appetites? After all, biologically we are individually instructed to pursue our own self-interest. So, what could possibly compel a pack of autonomous self-interested individuals out for themselves to form socially stable units?

Again, the answer in a word is nature. The natural world that primitives were part and parcel of exercised its influence upon them both externally and internally. And theirs was, of course, an exponentially simpler existence unencumbered by the complexities inherent in large social organizations. With regard to the seven deadly sins, for example, they did not enter into the equation of primitive groups at all. Greed and envy could not have played a part in communities where there was nothing to be greedy or envious about. No one owned anything. There was no inequality of possessions or status. No hierarchies or class divisions. Gluttony depends on a glut of food that living hand to mouth in the wild could not provide. Sloth was nonexistent with each and every individual prodded by basic instincts to perform whatever tasks were at hand in order to survive. Anger is usually the result of injustices that are the product of imbalances of power as in being taken unfair advantage of. There were not such imbalances of power in primitive groups. Pride is a sin when one exaggerates one’s importance and believes oneself to be better than others, where one holds oneself to be above the law. This requires distancing oneself from others and there was just no room for that in the necessarily close-knit groups of our primitive ancestral tribes. And lust, as in an unbridled sexual compulsion, was not really an issue for them. Sexual attraction was generally group-directed into pair bonding as the optimum condition for the community.

The opening of Pandora’s Box accompanied the onset of civilization. As the communal tribe changed into a society of separate individuals people were divided into classes, became subjects of a remote centralized power which, along with modernized methods of mass production, specialized jobs, forced labor and vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power created the seven deadly sins of envy, greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, anger and pride.

All in all the order in a primitive band was provided by the most powerful instinct of all, that of self-preservation. Each and every individual realized consciously and/or unconsciously that their own survival depended upon belonging to the band. And., again, not only belonging to the band but one and all felt it incumbent upon themselves to create and maintain a stable, orderly, cohesive group so as to ensure optimum survivability of the group and, in turn, their very own survival as well.

There is also an evolution of religion to be noted here. Diamond again, “…supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When super natural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.”

A nascent nation state with religious authority created an environment that attempted to impose the same conditions on their divided subjects as the natural environment imposed on primitive bands. Officialdom impressed upon the people its power and majesty through grand iconic architecture, ceremonies of pomp and circumstance, providing bountiful sources and abundant supplies of food, amassing huge well-armed military forces for foreign conquest as well as domestic policing and doling out severe punishments to lawbreakers. As noted above, the role of religion was to justify the rules and regulations of the state and provide reasons over and above mere earthly authority for obedience and cooperation among the masses.

We are naturally, genetically equipped to be intimately engaged by a natural environment where the process of self-regulation kicks in within small groups as a means of survival. Human nature is distorted, perverted and corrupted by civilization as much as it is provided with opportunities to achieve greatness in the arts and sciences. But with all the great accomplishments of the human race we have not arrived at the ways and means of conducting our affairs so as to inspire universal accord. It is, of course, not in our nature to do so. Accord is something we are naturally equipped to establish within particular groupings.

A simple illustration of how human nature can be perverted by civilization is provided in the following example: We are naturally inclined to seek out sweet smelling and sweet tasting foods. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, berries, nuts, meats and fish all have a particular sweetness about them when they are most edible. One rubric for the ingesting of food might be - the sweeter the better. Primitive tribesmen suffer stinging swarms of bees in order to procure a supply of honey for their tribe. Our appetite for sweet foods, especially as youngsters, can be insatiable. But the sugary foods and candies that we are constantly tempted by perverts a healthful natural inclination into an unhealthy habit. Now we even have candy posing as cereal. Appetite is a powerful motivator in the natural world that in a civilized world can become an out of control unhealthful indulgence.

Taking a look at the sexual appetite of the male, we can get the idea that, as Robert Wright put it, “…natural selection ‘wants’ men to have sex with an endless series of women.” That’s like saying that natural selection wants people to overindulge in sweets. But as with any instinct we have to ask what benefit male sexuality had in our distant past living in the wild. That males find themselves sexually attracted to females in general had a benefit for the survival of the species Homo living in small primitive bands. It assured that whatever women were available would be impregnated.

The opportunity to have sex with an endless series of women, presented itself in more civilized states, just as they generally present people with the opportunity to overindulge other appetites as well. But, as we know, those opportunities were not present within primitive bands eking out a life for themselves in the wild. In such bands of two to three dozen members there would be only about 3 to 5 available females for the same number of available males per generation. Whatever inter-band coupling there was would have changed the numbers but not the dynamics. Each and every male would have been attracted to each and every female in the sense that any particular female would do just fine for any particular male. The males did not compete amongst themselves for multiple females. Also, there was not the vast variety of types to choose from way back then as there is today where an average guy extremely attracted to super models has to settle for a “plain Jane". So, it wasn’t the case where any one male got the one prize that the other males were drooling after. And when pairing off was completed a male hankering for something different could not have been much of a factor because there wasn’t anything that different to be had. And in a primitive setting sexual pairing was just another survival tool that had to be managed within the context of maintaining group stability and, thus, survivability.

Another thing to consider about the desirability of monogamous pairings in primitive bands is that one’s mate was one thing, perhaps the only thing, in a highly communal social group that one could call one’s own. Furthermore, I can’t imagine that the females would have been at all tolerant of one of their number getting it on with another’s mate. It is also difficult to imagine where and when any “hanky-panky” might have taken place. Existing as a tight-knit group does not leave any room for privacy. Everyone pretty much knows exactly where everyone else is at any given moment and what they’re doing. Secret lives would not be possible. And a couple sneaking off into the jungle or the savannah to have sex would become easy prey for predators.

So, again, we see how human behavior could have been molded by direct involvement with the natural environment and how the continuation of that behavior within a civilization must be accomplished by some artificial environment that mimics the natural one. Our instincts and appetites, released from the strictures of a basic survival regimen, came to be regarded as evil and religion sought to instill in us the virtues of self-control by plugging us into an environmental substitute.

The instincts and appetites of primitive tribal people were controlled by their eking out a life in the wild. They were not tempted by the abundance provided by civilizations. In civilizations it is the conditioning power of religion that is supposed to develop self-control over ones appetites. And we are given to believe that it tries to accomplish this through divine inspiration. Religions are advertised as having no traffic whatsoever with base instincts. The religious realm is entirely above such earthly considerations.

However, religions actually appeal to the most basic instinct of all - that of self-preservation. Religion is a substitute for the conditioning power of the natural environment. It creates an ersatz natural environment wherein people can find a common purpose. Contrary to how religions advertise themselves they do not exist above and beyond the nature of things. Religions are really not on a higher plane from where they seek to provide the ways and means with which we are to gain mastery over base instincts and appetites. Religions link one’s base instinct for self-preservation to an eternal life to come and instruct one to obey its tenets in order to gain one’s reward in the after life. Religion instructs us to control, even deny our instincts and appetites as a means of making ourselves worthy of everlasting life. So, religion employs our instinct for self-preservation the way it was employed by the natural environment to bring our other instincts under the rule of the most powerful one. To survive in the wild one had to be a member in good standing of a tribe. To survive forever in the next life one must be a member in good standing of a religion. Another requirement for surviving in the next life is to get along with others, to cooperate with one another and help each other. So, religion seeks to control people’s behavior through self-interest in their survival just as it was controlled in the natural environment.

Also, living in the wild meant mortal danger from predators. There were rules to follow to avoid them, to avoid becoming their prey. And the whole moral drama of the forces of good and evil impacting on immortal souls can be seen as a conditioning substitute for the forces of life and death that impacted on mortal bodies in primitive times and served to keep our earliest ancestors on the “straight and narrow path". It was once necessary for us to follow certain rules and procedures to protect ourselves from beasts of prey. Later we became Satan’s prey and only proper moral conduct could save us.

Furthermore, the roots of our notions of good and evil are to be found in our pre-historic existence. Simply put, what benefited our survival was good and what threatened it was bad. Illness was a threat to our survival and was, of course, considered bad. The source of illness was believed to be evil spirits that “medicine men” or “witch doctors” would attempt to exorcise by means of potions and the performance of certain rituals. The creatures that preyed upon us were bad while those we preyed upon were good. All food sources were good, as were bodies of water. One’s band was good while other bands were just that - other. Other, as in not us, as in foreign to us, not worthy of the same consideration shown to one’s own band members. If bands were mutually beneficial that was good, if not they were possible threats and that was bad.

One would be hard put to distinguish between our present day notions of good and evil and those of our primitive ancestors. Whatever we think of as good must be beneficial to us in some way. Even taking on some terrible burden or suffering can in the end assure us of eternal paradise. And whatever we think of as evil is threatening to us in one way or another. Osama bin Laden and his ilk call the US the great Satan because they see it as a threat to their belief system. George Bush called Iran, Iraq and North Korea the axis of evil for the threat he thought they posed to the US.

Religion gives one a sense of intimately belonging to something bigger than oneself. Or rather renews that sense, which was very much part of membership in a close-knit band or tribe. In the wild one belonged to a group that was held to be bigger than oneself out of necessity. And beyond that there was the grand spectacle of nature that everyone was held subject to.

Religion seeks to keep us humbled by and in awe of an all-knowing omnipotent God with supernatural powers as we were once humbled by and in awe of the power of the natural world. As creatures of the natural world it was our instinct for survival under which all our other instincts were managed. Our survival was dependent on the group and we behaved as subjects to that dependency. Our appetites and passions were tamed by our survival instinct for which our other instincts were fashioned to serve. We must eat in order to survive, we must have shelter in order to survive, we must have sex in order to survive but, above all else, we must have a cohesive group in order to survive.

With the advent of civilization religion stepped in to provide the mortar for cohesive groups. It attempted to tame our appetites and passions through our survival instinct by attaching it to a concern for survival in an eternal after life. As we gained some mastery over the natural environment our instincts became less and less channeled through the demands of basic survival. The cultural environment then became that which informed and instructed our instincts. Civilized religious institutions are a substitute for the conditioning power of the natural world that we were once directly subjected to. Religion is an outgrowth of the awe we felt at the power of the natural world and an extension of the tribal rituals that lionized survival mechanisms. At base, morality is a survival manual to keep a people fit, healthy and loyal to each other and their group. As we became separated from our direct relationship with the natural world, consciously as well as physically, our gods also became separated from the natural world.

There are, of course, different survival mechanisms and stratagems in an impersonally organized civilized society than there were in a primitive society where there was a direct correspondence between one’s nature and the natural world. In a civilized society one was no longer an integral part of a group that was communally engaged in basic survival but rather one became a nonessential automaton in service to a city or nation state. The person of the king-god was the law and to survive one had to obey. Much different than being obedient to the demands of the natural world where one’s instincts formed a seamless congruous whole with one’s immediate environment.

From another standpoint, however, it was not that different at all. One was overwhelmed by the colossal majesty of the king-god’s power as one was once overwhelmed by the colossal majesty of nature itself. In that sense the change from tribal culture to civilized state was nil. All religions plug into the respect for an overwhelming presence that has always been part and parcel of the human condition. And that at base is what religious authority is built on.

From all of the preceding we can get an idea about how human behavior could have been molded by a direct involvement with the natural environment and how the continuation of that behavior within a civilization attempts to be accomplished by some artificial environment that mimics the natural one. Our instincts and appetites, released from the strictures of a basic survival regimen, came to be regarded as evil and religion sought to instill in us the virtues of self-control by plugging us into an environmental substitute.