The Compassionate Instinct

This question has generated long-standing philosophical disputes, but we now have enough data to propose some definite answers. Discoveries in the fields of anthropology and primatology suggest that though we may have a deeply rooted instinct to exert power over others, we also have what may be an equally strong aversion to abuses of power, along with some natural tendencies to punish people who commit those abuses.

Consider this fact: Before 10,000 years ago, only egalitarian societies existed on our planet—tiny societies with no strong leaders at all. Keeping in mind that gene selection requires at least a thousand generations to change our nature significantly, we must assume that most of our genes have evolved from the genetic makeup of people living in these small Paleolithic bands. This includes our “political genes,” if I may call them that. Yet, of course, we do not only see egalitarian societies in the world today; we also see nations ruled by fierce despots. So, somehow, prehistoric egalitarians set us up to live not only in egalitarian democracies but in these despotic nations as well.

I am careful to say “set us up,” for we are not speaking of hardwired, innately fixed patterns of action like an eyeblink or an uncontrollable scream of fear. Rather, we are talking about softwiring—behavioral propensities that make it very easy to learn certain kinds of behavior rather than others.

Over the years, researchers have tried to hypothesize what our softwired political and social propensities may be. But it was only in 1987 that Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham made a major breakthrough in his study of how human behavior relates to that of our closest primate relatives. In view of the fact that humans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees share a recent ancestor and more than 98 percent of their genes, Wrangham determined that any behaviors that all four of these species exhibit today must also have been present in their shared predecessor, which would have lived about 7 million years ago. He called this ancient ape the “common ancestor.”

Wrangham identified some social behaviors shared by all four species, including the tendency to live in groups and the willingness to attack members of the same species. But with respect to the common ancestral uses of power, he faced a problem: bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas were distinctly hierarchical, with aggressive alpha males; by contrast, human hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, suggesting that our species lacked both innate hierarchical tendencies and tendencies to develop leaders. This inconsistency made it impossible for Wrangham to determine how this ancestor used power, and therefore made it difficult to offer any definitive conclusions about human nature.

Puzzled by this human anomaly, I surveyed almost 50 small, nonliterate cultures, both bands and tribes—to see exactly how egalitarian they were, and why. I discovered that their egalitarian political arrangements were quite deliberate. They believed devoutly in maintaining political parity among adults. This belief was so strong that males who turned into selfish bullies or even tried to boss others around for reasons useful to the group were treated brutally, as moral deviants. The fact that on all continents, hunter-gatherers faced bullies or self-aggrandizing political upstarts—and faced them in spite of these strong egalitarian beliefs—told me that if these people had not so vigilantly worked against inequality, they would have soon turned hierarchical.

This new interpretation meant that by nature, today’s hunter-gatherers were prone to try to dominate one another, just like the three species of living apes—and therefore so were the common ancestor and humans all down the evolutionary line. In fact, because this urge to dominate is so intrinsic to humans’ political nature, hunter-gatherers who wish to stay egalitarian have to use not only ostracism and shaming but also ejection from the group and sometimes even capital punishment to hold down power-hungry political upstarts. We must ask, then, why a species so inclined to domination has been motivated to insist that power be shared so equally. And here, I believe, is the answer: Just as all four of the aforementioned species have strong propensities to domination and submission, so do they also naturally resent being dominated.