Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

One can push this reasoning back further, to earlier intellectual predecessors with farther reach. For Freud, many pleasurable experiences, flights of the imagination—the creation of fiction, unnervingly insightful dreams, or uplifting, perspective-altering jokes—as well as many acts of altruism are really mechanisms that fight off basic human anxieties about our inappropriate sexual urges, or unacceptable inclinations toward aggression and destruction. You write an uplifting piece of fiction or give left-over food to a panhandler: The motive driving those acts is the reduction of neurotic anxiety.

One can forgive Freud these notions in light of the Victorian culture that surrounded him and which was the fertile ground of his theorizing. One finds the Woody Allen thesis in more recent scientific inquiry. Terror management theory, a widely influential theory in social psychology, holds that many noble acts—intellectual creativity, philosophical and spiritual traditions, participation in old cultural forms like collective celebrations or our devotion to artistic and political groups—arise out of an anxiety about our inevitable demise, for these acts convince us of the possibility that we live beyond our own physical death. It is assumed in the study of parent-child attachment that the fundamental emotion that drives attachment processes between parents and children, friends and intimates, is anxiety. It is the dread of being abandoned to the perils of solitude that prompts infant smiles, coos, squeaks, and giggles, which bring parents near, and the touch and intimate, idiosyncratic nicknames and voices of romantic partners.

The Woody Allen hypothesis has deep roots in Judeo-Christian thought about original sin and the fall from grace. Within this framework, human nature is evil, sinful, and decaying. True happiness arises not in the present life but in the escape from the body and its corruptions. Happiness is found in a spiritual state freed from the sins of the flesh, in the afterlife—in communion with God. Happiness arises in the abandonment of the present moment, and when we are free of our earthly desires. In terms more friendly to psychological science: Happiness is to be found only in the quiescence of negative states like greed, anxiety, and anger.

As we conclude our search back in time for a precise understanding of the evolution of that most common of facial displays—the smile—we encounter a different view of the roots of happiness. We have one question left to answer: How did the first primate smile, the silent bared-teeth display, so intertwined with submissiveness, evolve into the Duchenne smile, our display of happiness? We return to Signe Preuschoft’s subtle observations, which help illuminate how the smile was freed from anxiety and defense and became the display it is today.

Specifically, Preuschoft finds that in more hierarchical macaques, such as the rhesus macaque, there is a narrow use of the silent bared-teeth and relaxed open-mouth display. The silent bared-teeth display—the predecessor to our smile—is used only as an appeasement display. In these status-conscious monkeys, the smile is intertwined with anxiety and defense.

There are more egalitarian macaque species, however, such as the Tonkean macaque. In these macaques, hierarchies are flatter and power is equally distributed. This social condition more closely resembles the hierarchies observed in our hominid predecessors and contemporary hunter-gatherers—power differences are reduced, and equality is more pronounced. In egalitarian primates, food sharing is pervasive, alliances among subordinates are common, and social life consists more of negotiation than assertion of force. Preuschoft has found that in less stratified macaques, monkeys put the silent bared-teeth display to many new uses: to reassure, to affiliate, and to reconcile, as well as to appease. This is a standard evolutionary principle—that adaptations such as the silent bared-teeth display are put to new uses in a broader array of contexts to respond adaptively to shifting selection pressures. With the rise of primate equality, the silent bared-teeth display became freed from its one-to-one mapping to fear and submissiveness, and was extended into new social contexts that promote affectionate cooperation and affiliation. This display became a sign of friendly intent, and the trigger of behavioral processes that allow for close proximity and cooperation—grooming, embraces, hand clasping, and the like. In egalitarian primates, the silent bared-teeth display folded into affiliative, pleasurable exchanges.