Our mastery of Cultural Evolution separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, as shown by Henrich in his two monumental tomes, Secret of our Success (Success),1 and most recently in The WEIRDest people in the World (WEIRD).2 Yet I humbly brazenly propose that the path that led us to this powerful tool, as he laid out in both works, is missing an important element. One that serves to further highlight the themes he does emphasize while offering a more complete and convincing connection between our uniquely human journey to life’s greater search for order. This is our ability to imagine identities and inhabit symbolic societies, an ability we gained early in our development as a species. We evolved to use vocational and reputational labels garbed in symbols and to navigate an complex social reality. A reality that is a product of our shard imagination and routinely fortified by behavioral values, norms, conventions and, most fundamentally, morality. Although Henrich does stress norms, morals, and even identity, however I believe our ability to modify our social allegiances is the causal driver of our culture and hence, both our WEIRDness and our Success .
Henrich posits that the evolutionary driver of our normative and moral constitution was driven from the domain of our nearest intimates and expanded outwards, i.e. moving from kin groups to friends and to more distant and anonymous conspecifics. I believe however our early moral sentiments were driven largely the other way around, i.e. from our outer most social circles and worked their way inward. Morality initially emerged as a solution to the cooperation problem presented with dealing with in-group yet non-intimate conspecifics. Those we saw as our social compatriots but with whom we were otherwise unfamiliar. We then leveraged the moral taxonomy developed to label strangers to subsequently reinforce and modify norms that governed behavior amongst intimates. Although this cuts against assertions made by other researches, it accords with novel but convincing views of our psychology, morality, anthropology, and a neuroscientific view of sentient and intelligent life. More generally, it offers a convincing narrative.
There were both psychological and ecological needs to understand foreigners with whom we were less rather than more acquainted, beginning with out-group conspecifics competitors and identifying potential cooperators. Reputations and their attendant behavioral expectations and incentives came about to assess their continued allegiances as threats would wax and wane. Reputations began as a friend/foe binary label slapped on anonymous individuals and flowered thereafter, ultimately creeping towards our intimates and creating the complex moral landscape we have today. A landscape that earned us mastery over the boundaries of our cooperative behavior and in turn the extent of our civilization.
Finally, the emphasis on identity and morality points to a tension in Moral philosophy that sheds light on our postmodern and characteristically WEIRD collective psychological disorder. The idea of moral and conventional institutional norms as bound in a shared imaginary identity joins the journey of WEIRD people to the philosophical pursuit of an objective moral framework. The idea that right and wrong behavior are not fundamentally transient notions but relate to a governing order that applies to all of humanity, not just a particular clan or even a broad but specific culture. However, leaving one’s kin and band members to join the broad tent of humanity as always been a lonely prospect, one that does not easily accord with our general hopes, desires, instincts, or bias.
WEIRD Take Aways
There are many take-aways from Joseph Henrich’s latest WEIRD masterpiece, a rare non fiction book whose value is even greater than its page count suggests. Despite its length, at 700 pages it’s still a net time saver as we can now throw away countless other texts that purport to identify the causes of the industrial revolution, the enlightenment , and what generally separated the ‘West from the rest,’ (although JH goes out of his way to note it’s not as a simple ‘East vs West Distinction’)(Henrich 2020, 194).
One take away, is that when my friend Paul and I showed up to practice a dance for the Bengali Patriots, a cultural group at George Mason University, it was not everyone else who was weird for showing up two hours later than the scheduled time, it was us for acting ‘WEIRD’ in treating time as a precious commodity. My friend Paul, a white guy whose lineage I assume is a conglomerate of northern European identities that coalesced into the ethnicity I just gave him, (white guy). And me, and Bengali-American who nonetheless was reared in a region of Rhode Island where I had no choice but to adopt the local WEIRD customs of punctuality and the like. Treating time as a scarce good and adopting the attendant anxieties, while moralizing against those that failed to do the same (360-367).
The broader takeaways are the collection of psychological shifts that served as the foundation of western modernity. According to Henrich, what led to our the collection of triumphs Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) people, including the industrial revolution, the adoption of democratic and liberal institutions, and even the breakdown of religious and familial authority followed the gradual ascension of an individualistic world view and psychology. Fixing the individual as the fundamental unit of society in lieu of band, family, and clan meant that each person is the ultimate bearer or responsibility. We course-grained at the level of the individual, evaluating a person not as part of their family or tribe but based on their behavior, their intentions(49-42), disposition (3), or worst case at the level of passport color.
the Western Church had inadvertently induced a series of social and psychological shifts. Without intensive kin-based institutions to organize production, provide security, and endow people with a sense of meaning and identity, individuals were both socially compelled and personally motivated to relocate, seek out like-minded others, form voluntary associations, and engage with strangers(253).
Humans were now judged based on perceived dispositions, or personal character. Honesty, work ethic, and more egalitarian ethos that were partly a throwback to our hunter-gatherer past remerged in a settled society. This followed the construct of a new, and ironic, impersonal personal identity. Where each has the ability to make voluntary associations with strangers based not on kith and kin, but on disposition and volition. Guilds, charter cities, and most importantly perhaps, religious sects including monastic orders were part of the web of voluntary institutions that forged the modern WEIRD elevation of the individual.
Culminating in the enlightenment. Its liberal ideology along with its technological and civic advances. From the magna carter to the declaration of independence, to FDR’s four freedom. From the steam engine and the exploitation of fossil fuels, to the the assembly line, to hyper-text markup language. All follows from a unique psychology.
Argument for an Original Identity
WEIRD psychology is unique, however, by degree less than category. As described in both WEIRD and Success, Henrich describes cultural evolution as the force that makes us distinct.
[Cultural Evolution is] how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptations. Culture, and cultural evolution, are then a consequence of genetically evolved psychological adaptations for learning from other people. That is, natural selection favored genes for building brains with abilities to learn from others(Henrich 2016, 34-35).
I see the driver of Culture through the lens of identity construction. As a species we have the ability to adopt enduring yet ultimately mutable symbolic identities. The story of Success and WEIRDest People are narratives involving the creation and expansion of social boundaries, determining the extent of what Hayek called our extended ordered civilization. This is a culmination of life’s greater journey for structure in the face of a tendency towards chaos, leading to the increasing complexity of our This grand epic is realized fundamentally by establishing and expanding the contours of identity. Humanity distinguished itself and extended its social order by learning how to create, abide, transform, and evengalized shared imaginary identities. Moreover our moral values and conventional norms that are fundamental in our social organizations are endogenous to these identities.
The transition from agrarian collectivism to WEIRD individualism echoes and is helpfully reflected, for me at least, in Nietzsche’s famous use of the Greek mythological gods Dionysus and Appollo to illustrate a dichotomy of social psychology that manifests in aesthetics and ritual. Apollo, according to Nietzsche at least, represents a kind of choral, irrational unity. Think a Rock concert, a rave, or especially the lyrical orientation of rap music. The latter, Apollo represents the individual, the celebration of prototypical character traits, virtues of self-restraint and rationality. Think of epics and novels with well-defined characters and moral themes. Origins then describes a kind of triumph of Apollo.3
However, the triumph came not by appeals to individualism for individualism sake. At least not initially. It came by appealing to a more Dionysian inclination in my view. As Henrich notes no one was sold on maximizing individual utility, they were instead motivated by identifying with at first, church over clan(Henrich 2020,159-186), and finally a personal and universal God over church(146-148).The promise of a harmonious salvation had the effect of releasing us from the shackles that bound us to organizations of our birth. This represents a cultural evolution that was essentially a transition of identities. Each step identifying with a broader group that culminates in a kind of lonely individualism. Henrich however describes a gradual evolution of our psychology that turned us into a species with shifting identity allegiances. I believe this shifting allegiance was at the heart of what made us a distinct primate. This speaks to our constitution and helps us better understand what makes us human.
WEIRD Normativity
WEIRDness is an exploitation of our normative framework (NF), the idea that our morality and subsequently our conventions are bound in imaginary identities. The formation and exercise of this shared third eye and the adaptable behavioral value sets it created ultimately drove our ecological, cognitive, and material advancements. Creating a feedback loop between the identities we envisaged and the actions they implied of the agent identified. This is stressed, albeit not using this specific framework, in both WEIRD and Success.
The NF allows us to create, enforce, adhere to, and of course, deviate from shared behavioral value sets. These value sets sit behind our uniquely rapid rate of identity construction. This process occurs for the entire biosphere, reaching back generally into the origins and lowest level units of life. Phase Separation, the partitioning of like from unlike matter establishes identity that are fundamental to cellular formation and function. It also is a material property of physical matter, present in systems of steady state equilibrium. Identity construction in nature including human society is critical, given the themes of identity constitution and transition that dominates the subjects of both natural and cultural evolution.
Identities depend on their designate partitions that can be understood, and modeled as a ‘Markovian Blankets’, a concept within the Free Energy Principle (FE),4 a statistical view of sentient organisms, their actions, behavior, perception, emotions, and brains. According to this view, partitions are fundamental to the process of individuation, separating a biological agent from its environment. Allowing it to evolve as befits the dynamics and challenges present therein. These blankets are manifest as membranes in cells, as the chemical pheromones’ of an ant colony, as the skin around our bodies, or as individual recognition in primate societies. Identity constitution involves the formation of these blankets, that promote the endurance of its demarcated structure. Acting as a bulwark against environmental challenges, the tendency to disorder to which constituents subsequently adhere and ultimately conform. 5
Once established, identities can be further exploited to build conjoining structures, the barriers of individuals use their respective delineations to combine and form a higher level structure. Blankets signal the behavior of its constituents. The formation of cells and their recombination into multi-cellular organisms echoes the transition of our primate social units based on intimate recognition into our cultural identities based on symbolic affiliation. Symbolic societies were established by exploiting visual and audible markings to identify with a broader set of individuals than possible by intimacy alone.6 Binding against out groups, and setting up a signaling process that fortified these anonymous societies over time.
This created imaginary communities(Moffett 2019, 231), substituting the need for individual recognition generally required of primate societies. We did this with audio and visual cues or symbols that signaled membership. This allowed us, then and now, to guide interactions and ultimately to reap the ecological benefits of an expanded group size with cooperation. Given that individual recognition is cognitively taxing, it provided us with a jump start on our social capacity and its subsequent ecological gains of cooperation, while it contributed to our cognitive abilities as it increased the complexity of our social arrangements. Leading us to gossip more, infer the intentions of strangers and eventually our intimates. Our interest in soap operas and morality tales began when we needed to resolve the disconcerting observation of deviance, specifically one whose behavior did not accord to the harmony we envisaged in our imaginary community.
The NF is a holistic way of seeing how we transitioned away from Pan and how we continue to seek new labels to understand one another and also attain personal psychological fulfillment. This is seen in our modern hominoid psychology, our cognitive bias exhibited in our adoption of the social self, the vocations, prototypes, and character traits we culturally adopt and project. Our ‘Self-Concepts’ that, according to Michael Hoggs’ Uncertainty Hypothesis within the realm of Social Identity Theory, allows us to understand and interact with otherwise foreign agents.
The processes of self-categorization and prototypical depersonalization responsible for social identification and group behaviors are well suited to subjective uncertainty reduction; they contextually assimilate self to a prescriptive prototype that guides and consensually validates perception, cognition, affect and behavior. Group membership, social category-based self-conceptualization, group behavior, and intergroup relations are motivated by uncertainty reduction. Contextual uncertainty can be reduced by group membership and group action. 7
We establish predictable sets of behavioral expectations by creating groups within groups within groups. These imaginary, concentric identities include parent, policeman, judge, banker and, most foundationally, heroes and villians. This connects conceptually with the FE model of sentient life as being driven by reducing uncertainty. Specifically the uncertainty of the model it creates between the environment and its self-identity. Humanity simply took this to an extreme, ultimately granting us a social reality
Much of what we think of as the natural world, the physical world is actually created by us, and what I mean by that is that we… Humans have this capacity that no other animal has as far as we know, which is to create what’s called social reality Lisa Feldman Bennett on Mindscape
Although Henrich does not address identity construction or our imaginary communities specifically, I find it a convincing way to understand much of the claims he does make. He tells a story of a very normatively oriented species, one that is ready and willing to change its behavioral pattern based on novel identities. Shifting allegiances at a rapid rate (relative to the rest of the animal kingdom), and subsequently obliging the norms, morals, ethics, customs that these new allegiances fortify. The transition that culminated in a WEIRD civilizations, the culling of the relatively fixed identities that made up landed kingdoms and societies into disposition and volition, relied on our understanding of ourselves in relation to a malleable and imaginary communities.
WEIRD Identity
Henrich highlights the transitions of our identities during more recent stages of cultural evolution in explaining how we became a species capable of adopting new identities and their associated behavioral norms. The groups with which we identify and the roles we play within them are the institutions that guide our behavior and establish the norms that endure, to varying degrees, through the life cycle of our society. These norms, or institutions, serve as the foundation of cultural evolution:
Human societies, unlike those of other primates, are stitched together by culturally transmitted social norms that cluster into institutions(Henrich 2020, 68).
norms are stable, self – reinforcing sets of culturally – learned and interlocking beliefs, practices, and motivations that arise as people learn from each other and interact over generations . Norms create social rules or standards that prescribe, forbid, or sometimes endorse some set of actions(71).
His focus are the norms set up within kin groups, how they expanded in Egalitarian societies(72),and subsequently contracted, giving way to more voluntary associations that allowed the construction of individualist, voluntarily adopted identities and characterized by the infamous self-imposed catholic (and protestant) guilt(22). This accompanies projections of individual disposition within WEIRD Societies(33). One open question is how humanity manages to shift allegiances so rapidly. This may be a product of earlier evolved preadaptations and hence a consequence of faculties gained for other evolutionary objectives. This still leaves open what those objectives may have been. Henrich points to Kin Altruism:
Emerging norms would have tended to anchor on and extend these instincts. Tethered to more solid psychological moorings, such norms would have tended to outlast more arbitrary, free-floating alternatives. This psychological tethering explains why our most fundamental institutions are rooted in kinship. Like other primates, humans possess innate altruistic inclinations toward our close genetic relatives—kin altruism. This evolved aspect of our psychology explains why mothers love their babies and siblings usually stick together. Kinship norms not only reinforce these powerful motivations, by creating social expectations in communities (e.g., siblings should help each other), but extend these expectations outward from the nuclear family to more distant relatives, and even to strangers. When more distant relatives get called “mom,” “dad,” “brother,” and “sister,” sets of norms and perhaps even some internalized motivations about the relationships get stretched outward along with the labels, effectively pulling more distant kinfolk closer over time (71-72).
Although kin groups are an effective way of increasing cooperation within a social unit. They do not explain the establishment of the superordinate identity that these kin groups are contained within. This latter identity is critical to understanding the establishment of norms even those that govern our intimate and kin relations. Although the first word in cultural evolution means something different than we use it in every day parlance, it seems clear humanity tends to identify with a broader culture. We struggle between allegiances to family, country, and faith. Our morality and adjacent conventional norms attach themselves to our identity. Hence our ability to shift between them seems important to the development of the psychological infrastructure of cultural evolution.
It was important, given our extended gestational periods, to establish maternal and paternal norms, but our gestational periods were extended as a consequence of our culture. Henrich laid out a causal pathways that addressed the cost and benefits of becoming a brainy culturally evolved societies, the socio-care (cost) and knowledge and know how (benefit). The former is the cost we endure for gaining the benefit of the latter, essentially creating an iterative feedback loop that begins with cultural knowledge as the reward and the care required to rear cultural learning children, namely the gestational and slow ontogeny observed today in our species(Henrich 2016, 300). The upshot is that our shifting norms were driven by expanding cultural assets. This makes broad sense however, much cultural accumulation is possible in our denser environments. This would be tricky without first establishing social norms.
An equivalent start up problem happens in a common theory of our cognitive development, the social, or Machiavellian brain hypothesis. This holds that it was our morality and norms that drove our cognitive development. We do spend a great deal of time, it seems, ‘gossiping’ and generally focused on our conspecifics adherence of norms and values.8 Yet this does not explain how we came to be so obsessed with them. This hypothesis focuses on the complexity feedback loop driven by interaction between the intimates of our ancestors. The number is focused at about 150. Yet this runs into trouble when we ask why other primates failed to meet such recursive complexities and hence experience the cognitive gain.
Both issues are resolved I believe if we zoom out of our kin groups and think of culture itself as a unit. Albeit an imaginary one:
Benedict Anderson , conceived of nations as “ imagined communities , ” since their populations are too numerous to allow for members to meet face to face […] Our shared imaginings bind people with a mental force no less valid and real than the physical force that binds atoms to molecules, turning them both into concrete realities . This has been the case for all time . […] imagined communities holds true not just for modern societies, but for all the societies of our ancestors, likely from their remote, prehuman origins . Hunter – gatherer societies, held together by a sense of common identity, did not depend on their members establishing one – to – one relationships — or knowing each other at all, as we shall examine; among the other animals, too (Moffett 2019, 353-358).
Other primates are members of social units beyond their brood. Humanity distinguished itself in part by expanding the partitioning of these these outer edges, of what represents even today as the outer orbit in the system of concentric circles that gives us purpose and meaning and helps us navigate the world. Humanity likely did develop social norms instinctively, establishing pair bonds and parental norms. However the idea of reputation I feel makes more sense in anonymous societies. Reputation gives way to the driving forces of our moral sentiments that even today dominant our psychology.
In order to survive the predation of early predators, a mercurial climate, and fellow conniving social hominids our ancestors learned to symbolically identify with conspecifics who were anonymous and in many cases unrelated. These imaginary communities were held together by reputational labels, producing an incentive schema that guided our behavioral norms, beginning with our moral sentiments and culminating in our conventions.
Phylogeny of a Wily Primate
Cultural evolution encourages things like ‘index signaling.’9 Peacock feathers offer a perceivably ‘authentic’ indication of fitness to fellow peacocks. Humanity, by contrast, has the sex appeal of its rock stars. Most dramatically though, we happened upon a categorically different signal. Instead of elaborate plumage or antennae, we developed increasingly intricate and increasingly conspicuous reputations. This began not as personal character traits. We had no initial need to ‘depersonalize’ intimates given that we simply didn’t need to reduce those with whom we were already acquainted to a label. It was, however, important for us to do so in order to cooperate with anonymous social members. This was the case given, as Mark Moffett assersts, we joined ‘symbolic societies.’ We broke free from the need to individually recognize each member of its social unit, a requirement of, chimps and bonobos, our primate kin. They replaced intimacy with symbolic signals, audio or visual marking, namely, shibboleth. This is one way to cut a line between ‘us and them’ during times of resource constraint or to form a sustainable coalition in a conflict, while allowing the gains from cooperative affiliation to flourish. Shibboleth may have offered our first non-intimate solution to Game Theory, or solved the dilemma of prisoners, or helped us avert the tragedy of the commons.
We first identified with a larger, anonymous societies. Apes and Bonobos do live in social units, according to Moffett, that exist beyond a single brood and persist over time. Thus primates, other mammals, and other social creatures including the social amoeabe, 10 in order to endure environmental flux formed coalitions with otherwise foreign agents. Cooperation occurs amongst this group in the most minimal sense of the word, i.e. the technical sense as defined by game theory.
This was likely possible, in line with Henrich’s causal pathway, given the environment of heavy competition and predation that followed our descent from our previous arboreal lifestyles. Once this predation ebbed, however, deviation from these social units was likely tempting. A social reality, one based on shared imagination not only requires the active participation of its social members, but promotes members who can imagine anti-social realities. Prosperity and a lack of competition, as Henrich notes in WEIRD, leads even in our modern markets to less cooperation and altruistic behavior(Henrich 2020, 340-349).To fortify the sinews of our imaginary social bodies against devious attenuation our ancestors, I propose, labelled deviant perpetrators as villians.
Or simply bad guys. Prior to collecting the moral vocabulary, indeed, before we practiced language, bands or groups that failed to adhere to the projected harmony we envisioned amongst our shared imagination, earned our ancestors social ire, expressed in affect.11 This shared affect tagging allowed for the creation of character narratives that are still integral in our ‘construction of moral values’ as described in the Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM).4According to which morality is universally expressed in a framework reducible to a consistent template. Involving a perpetrator perceived as harming an innocent victim. All the objective abstraction involved in moral practice ultimately is grounded in our perception of harm, whether actual or ‘synthesized.’ Critical to this is of course empathy we have to experience the weal and woe of our fellows. But even more fundamental I believe is the feeling of identification with one another. Experiencing the victim’s pain and the perpetrators capacity for agency. This mental practice is present in infants. This template one rests on the construction of identity, a process that is critical to the structure of our society.
TDM’s focus on harm, i.e. that our objective moral values transmits the most basic survival instinct outwards speaks to a broadening of one’s identity. Not that we see others as ourselves, even infants distinguish between harmful acts towards themselves and those directed to others, but being able to identify with others is fundamental to learning and practicing the behavioral rules that prevent harm from being done onto our social groups.
My claim is that our moral constitution is the most fundamental expression of a normative framework, one that underlies our acculturation and distinction as a species. The ultimate drive of this constitution drive its way from the outter rim of our social unit inwards, i.e. that reputational signals are most informative and hence reduce social uncertainty by establishing expectation of group behavior by those we have relatively little information about, other than symbolically associating with them as an in-group member. We did establish an incentive to enforce a set of norms amongst our own bands of intimates, but the driver of this enforcement lay in its signal capacity towards non-acquaintances. Moral values formed as part of an iterative feedback loop with reputation. People’s reputation offered a prediction of how they might behave along a cooperative/antagonist dimension, observing behavior that was in line or contradicted this expectation forced a reassessment of this ‘first pass’ reputational label.
Henrich in Origins lays out support for morality as a ‘band’, or group affair:
Clans often protect their collective reputation by punishing misbehaving members — older brothers and uncles have strong incentives to not only beat their errant subordinates but also to leave some visible marks , so that other clans can notice and feel confident that the misdeed was punished .
punishment . In intensive kin – based societies , you can punish a member of your own group to help preserve your group’s reputation , or you can seek revenge against another group for misdeeds against your group . But , you’d never interfere in interactions among strangers , and you’d be annoyed if some stranger poked his or her nose into your business(Henrich 2020, 2016).
This reminds us that out kin groups, however intensive or extensive, are still part of a broader social organization with expansive norms that we must adhere. These subordinate social groups are what distinguish our societies from those of our primate relatives. Even the intensive kin groups, the matrilineal or patrilineal clans bound by a ‘real’ shared common ancestor, are very much a shared, imagined, reality. There is no objective reason why the great great grand mother on your mother’s side should determine your allegiances more than your great great grand father on your father’s side. Moreover, the selection of which is weighted more is a function of the broader social unit, i.e. the culture to which you belong. These cultures in turn set other norms, and directly and indirectly establish the behavioral values that are ostensibly outside of your band of intimates. How parents should or should not treat children, whether the wife or husband leaves their own house for the in-laws, etc.
Identifying as WEIRD
The story in WEIRD can be bracketed into a three act drama of identity destruction and reconstitution. In Act I we have the extensive Kin-Based identities of hunter-gatherer societies, which tend towards egalitarian norms but restrict identity transformation to generations. In Act II we have the intensive kin-based institutions of Agrarian societies, such as clans. Elevating one’s familial associations far above one’s personal reputation, determining inheritance and social station based on family ties.
Finally, in Act III we have WEIRD societies. Where, in a return to a theme of Act I, ones reputation is dependent less strictly on kin ties and more on personal behavior. But with the added flexibility of being able to voluntarily associate with a particular group and hence adopt their projected identity and signal adherence to the associated behavioral norms. Guilds, monasteries, even your place of residence, for likely the first time, can offer the garb of a novel identity. Joining the stone-cutters lets people know that you have been selected, and self-selected into an organization with a particular reputation. one that will be collectively fortified or atrophied by the past and future behavior of its members. Shifting the perception of others and allowing the dynamic social structure with which we are accustomed.
Recent technical progress, civic achievements, and the general fruits of our Western society can be trade to the gradual destruction of traditional identity structures. Numerous events inadvertently influenced our psychology in ways that caused us over time to identify less with our land, clans, and ironically the very religious identities that initiated this path of identity destruction. We became to recognize ourselves as individuals and responsible for our own actions. We are each rewarded for the good we bestow and held accountable for the harm we each cause. This represents a triumph of character over caste.
The Triumph of Apollo
Although in Origins Henrich highlights numerous decision that “inadvertently” led to psychological changes, I feel it was in some ways along a tradition of individualism whose merits of objectivity over kin and class status that harkens back to an ideal in the Greco-Roman tradition. That there exists, or perhaps ought to exist, an objective moral code applicable universally across human all cultures and societies. This tradition, in Nietzschean eyes, represented by the god of Apollo along with his associated aesthetics, Socratic dialogues, and values of self-restraint and dispassionate sciences, has always vied with our more primal nature. This internal struggle neither unique to the Ancient Greeks nor to Western Civilization, nor to the modern WEIRD people, it is a human condition. It is, however, a more potent conflict in our post-modern world.
WEIRD individuality is a triumph of Apollo. It was a triumph, however, that involved appeal to Dionysian collective harmony as much as it bestowed value on the individual. The public was not sold on the glory of self-restraint for its own sake or for its earthly, material (and measurable) gain. Something that can be incorrectly inferred from a poor read of homo economicus. It was instead packaged with sales pitch of Dionysian harmony. Harmony however with church over clan.
Western individualistic rationality, the apotheosis of the Apollonian tradition of reason, and scientifically driven technical prowess, was ultimately achieved not fundamentally by evangelizing its own merits, this distance between Homo and Heroic Economicus is illustrated in his passage on what pushed the spread of literacy:
religious convictions appear central to the early spread of literacy and schooling, material self-interest and economic opportunities do not. (emphasis mine)
Specifically:
Luther and other Reformation leaders were not especially interested in literacy and schooling for their own sake, or for the eventual economic and political benefits these would foster centuries later. Sola scriptura was primarily justified because it paved the road to eternal salvation. What could be more important? Similarly, the farming families who dominated the population were not investing in this skill to improve their economic prospects or job opportunities. Instead, Protestants believed that people had to become literate so that they could read the Bible for themselves, improve their moral character, and build a stronger relationship with God. Centuries later, as the Industrial Revolution rumbled into Germany and surrounding regions, the reservoir of literate farmers and local schools created by Protestantism furnished an educated and ready workforce that propelled rapid economic development and helped fuel the second Industrial Revolution(13).
Religious identity cuts against the rational calculus of Utility Theory. It ensures that Western rationality, that the culture that Luther brought to culmination could not have happened without an irrational identification with others, and perhaps promises that this irrational choral Dionysian desire will never fully ebb. Socrates, who in Nietzsche’s mind was a worshiper in the cult of Apollonian rational restraint.
This passage from WEIRD illustrates our choral nature and hopefully makes it clear why I insist on talking about Nietzsche in this context:
[…] communal rituals , which forge enduring interpersonal ties , mend existing relationships , and enhance group solidarity , have been documented in most small – scale societies […] Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “ mind hacks ” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways. The most common active ingredients found in communal rituals : synchrony , goal – oriented collaboration , and rhythmic music(76).
Henrich draws on a rigorous review of religion by Candace Alcorta and Richard Sosis. Amongst their claims is that our religious practices, our odd proclivity for believing in supernatural agents and the influence such beliefs exerts individual and social behavior, is not a by-product of natural and cultural selection that was optimizing completely categorically separate metrics, it is endogenous to the human goals of social cooperative and environmental adaptation. Religion guides behavior patterned on environmental, social, and individual challenges. Hunter-Gatherer societies, agricultural societies, and urban-industrial societies see different religious practices and rituals emerge in somewhat predictable ways.
anthropological and psychological evidence, however, suggest that supernatural agents of religious belief systems not only engage, but also modify, evolved mental modules […] in socioecologically specific and developmentally patterned ways. Although agency detection modules probably do give rise to the human ability to imagine a broad array of supernatural agents, those that populate individual religions are neither random nor interchangeable.
types of religious practitioners [ …] nature of religious practices performed…correlated with measures of social complexity and integration (Alcorta and Sosis 2005, 323)
Supernatural agents come to represents various elements of a cultural identity in the way that bands and tribes are reduced to their leaders, their celebrities, their heroes. It is the notion of entitativity, but instead of reducing a group to a concept you represent a group conceptually with a person. This can be done amongst contemporaries with political and popular individuals but overtime it is done, in mythic heroes.
Religious identity practice speaks to our psychological constitution. Joseph Campell’s view of Mythology seems to echo the principles of Social Identity Theory, particularly to Hogg’s view it’s aim to reduce social uncertainty:
Mythology is ultimately and always the vehicle through which the individual finds a sense of identity and place in the world. – Joseph Campell
This is a reminder of why even our road to the most rational, individualistic, and material culture could not arrive without a belief in an identity, an bounded identity. The metaconrast principle of creating imaginary communities is also expressed by Campbell:
Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. […] For example, the ten commandments say, “Thou shalt not kill.” Then the next chapter says, “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.” That is a bounded field. […] The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other.5
The Normative Framework, our ability to create imagine these bounded fields cultivates an affective orientation for those within these bounds. Hence we are exhorted to release the natural bounds of skin and move beyond our direct kinship and apply the golden rule to this newly formed community, a community we are bounded to either by elaborate adolescent rituals or by a daily utterance of national oath. The ‘Pseudo-Speciation’ practices also reveals our behavior when interacting with those outside these envisaged bonds.
Virtue Grist of An Ambivalent Species.
Cultural evolution rests on the individuals ability to be acculturated, or to learn. Our species collectively decided that it was better to invest our biological resources in expanding our ability to acquire knowledge of our given environment from our fellow hominoids then it was to discover them for our selves independently. As Lisa Feldman Bennett observes this interdependence extends from our biology to our economics.
Scientists are often asked to make their research useful to everyday life . These scientific findings about words , chronic stress , and disease are a perfect example . There is a real biological benefit when people treat one another with basic human dignity . And if we don’t , there is also a real biological consequence , and it eventually trickles down to a financial and social cost for everyone . The price of personal freedom is personal responsibility for your impact on others . The wiring of all of our brains guarantees it.12
According to the Cultural brain hypothesis,13 offered by Henrich and his people and endorsed by Lisa Feldman Barret (Barret 2020, 48-49), the drive to acquire ‘cultural inherence’ were the demands and promises offered by our societal conspecifics.
However, much of the learning process, the cognitive mechanism that are pointed to as early drivers of these abilities, are in fact, culturally learned themselves. In Cecilia Heyes’ allusions they are more milly than gristy. 14 For a true grist candidate she gestures, albeit cautiously, towards our moral sentiments.
The idea of the normative framework claims that our practice of morality is bound to our ability to imagine an identity. According to the Free Energy (FE) principle sentient life can be framed as an attempt to model an environment, one whose basic drive is to reduce surprise, or uncertainty, as efficiently as possible. The greatest font of uncertainty related to the envisaged cohesion of imagined identity is deviance that bring harm to those vulnerable members within it. Together, this means that morality is critical to our psychological acculturation, in both our phylogeny as a species and our ontogeny as individuals. It seems clear to me that among the ingredients most critical to our loaded but malleable brain slate is virtue grist. A malleable ability to identify with conspecifics according to the information and signals available to our senses and the sentimental drive to avoid those deviance.
Paul Bloom, whose research and writings very much supports the idea of virtue grist, finds that babies exhibit moral sentiments, specifically they prefer not give their attention to morally deviant characters. By averting gaze away from puppets,15 or playing with anthropomorphized friendly rather than unfriendly triangles, 16 babies display the capacity to recognize agency in the potential perpetrator and the experience of the victim. This makes use of our expansive view of identity, recognizing the identify of others. This practice is observed in babies as old as 3 months old, the threshold is necessary simply because it is more difficult to test children earlier than that. This leads Bloom to conclude, that although our moral constitution may not be present at birth, after all, many phenotypes take time to develop, like hair and teeth, they are not learned:
I would be cautious about claiming that such tiny creatures really do have a moral life . After all , even if some of morality comes naturally to us , many natural traits don’t emerge right away — think of freckles and wisdom teeth and underarm hair .
What I am proposing , though , is that certain moral foundations are not acquired through learning (Bloom 2013, 8) .
We are able at what seems like the earliest detectable age to use identity recognition to set behavioral expectations. We begin to adopt the aversion to harmful behavior, the recognition of a perpetrator, the empathy and ultimately the identification with a vulnerable victim, or the the morality template offered by The Theory of Dyadic Morality.
Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM), suggests that acts are condemned proportional to three elements: norm violations, negative affect, and—importantly—perceived harm […] harm-based cognitive template functions intuitively and is rooted in innate and evolved processes of the human mind; it is also shaped by cultural learning […] (Schein and Gray 2018).
This may not necessarily imply a clear categorical distinction for our species, i.e. its possible to imagine any socialized primates engaging in prosocial preferences. Perhaps young chimps and bonobos, or now distinct primate relatives that never developed objective moral practices would still exhibit this behavior. It makes sense to prefer the kindly characters for our own sake, this falls short of a requirement of the objectivity of moral practice.
The clearest distinction however comes in affirmation of group identity. This represents moral practice as we think of it intuitively and represents the moral constitution sufficient for acculturation, or what primes us for cultural inheritance. Babies soon engage in decidedly altruistic behavior:
from very early in ontogeny young children have a biological predisposition to help others achieve their goals, to share resources with others and to inform others of things helpfully. Humans’ nearest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, engage in some but not all of these behaviors: they help others instrumentally, but they are not so inclined to share resources altruistically and they do not inform others of things helpfully. 17
This happens by about 14 months old. What I find key is Bloom’s suspicion that familiarity plays a key role in babies willingness to share resources for others.
children show little spontaneous kindness toward strange adults . Now , some of the studies […] do find kind behavior — such as helping — toward adults who aren’t friends or family , but keep in mind that the adults in these studies aren’t actually that strange . Before the typical study begins , the child ( along with his or her mother or father ) typically interacts with the adult experimenter as part of a ” warm – up ” session , where they engage in friendly reciprocal activities like rolling a ball back and forth . This makes a difference . The psychologists Rodolfo Cortez Barragan and Carol Dweck find if you don’t have this sort of reciprocal interaction — just a friendly greeting by the adult and warm thanks for agreeing to participate — the extent of later helping by the children drops by about half (Bloom 2013, 54).
Without familiarity without this he suspects this would not be the case:
My bet is if there were no prior positive interaction at all — if the adult were a true stranger at the moment that he needed help — then there would be little or no spontaneous kindness on the part of the child (54).
This finding, combined with others related to ‘Minimum Group Paradigm’ which discovers how early children use arbitrary audio and visual markings to categorize in and outgroups, i.e. Shibboleth, suggest in my view that our moral practice is a bounding of one’s self to an identity that extends beyond oneself to this outward identity we are able to detect at these younger age. We first set behavioral expectations according to recognized identities, then conform our own behavior to these expectations. In line with Moffet’s view, this is our early participation in an imaginary community. In Lisa Feldman Bennet’s view this is our experience of a social reality:
[…] as far as we know , humans are the only animal whose brains have enough capacity for compression and abstraction to create social reality . A single dog might develop its own social rules, like that a particular grassy area is for playing with humans or that pooping is not allowed inside the house. But a dog brain cannot communicate these concepts to other dog brains efficiently the way human brains convey concepts with words to make social reality (Barret 2020, 87).
The unique ability of human brains to compress sensory data into abstract summaries of its environment was first practiced in the domain of summarizing group reputational signals by the observed data of their behavior. Later this would evolve to gossip, and the other sense of reputation.
This does not claim that babies first need to depersonalize ourselves as bankers, or Americans/Canadians, before we express morality. It means I believe that we are particularly liberal about our identity construction. The first step of identity construction, whether when matter condenses into vaper and separates from solids, or whether organelles are bound by a membrane, or whether ants associate with pheromones, or whether we identify with familiar voices we heard in the womb, and letter accents that sound like our caregivers, than the modeled identity needs to be maintained.
Harm represents a threat to that, and projecting agency onto an anthropomorphized triangle is what you might expect in a species congenitally designed to construct identities in its third eye. The way a membrane signals the behavior of a cell and its constituent organelles, a perceived identity signals to us, even as infants, its behavior. We have come to accept not all agents will behave kindly, and thus defend against the deviation by a label, expressed early as a preference. Later on we
Remaining Skeptics
In addition to Henrich there are others, however, that I would need to convince of this normative framework, specifically the idea of an ingroup-yet-anonymous inward development morality. Given Bloom’s work on morality, I might have suspected some sympathy with the idea of an NF. alas, he is also not a confert. And seems to endorse the ‘intimates out’ sequence of our moral practice:
The natural history of morality began with small groups of people in families and tribes , not a world in which we regularly interact with thousands of strangers (Bloom 2013, 172).
Kindness to kin is the original form of morality and emerges directly through natural selection; since relatives share genes, it means that kindness to kin is , in a very real way , kindness to oneself . While other species have bonds of kinship , humans take this further — we moralize these bonds (76). ]
Bummer. This very much cuts against my claim. However he does offer some hope that he might be convinced otherwise. He even notes a particular salient cultural taboo:
Some of these sentiments extend to the protection of the group as a whole , such as respect for those who uphold the values of the community and hatred of heretics and apostates . Loyalty is a virtue ; betrayal is a sin — and a very serious one . It was treachery , and not lust or anger , that earned sinners a place in Dante’s ninth , deepest , circle of hell . Loyalty toward the in – group can clash with loyalty toward kin. Dante himself viewed the betrayal of one’s kin as less severe than betrayal of one’s friends or political party. Cain, who killed his brother Abel , is punished less than Antenor , who opened the gates of Troy to Greek invaders . The worst sinner of all , for Dante , was the betrayer of Christ , Judas Iscariot . Here Dante was following scripture . Religious texts , not surprisingly , insist that the religious in – group is more important than kin . In the Gospels , Christ is explicit that he is there to replace the family , not support it : “ I came not to send peace , but a sword . For I am come to set a man at variance against his father , and the daughter against her mother . … And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household . He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me : and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me . ” One sees the same preference in the Hebrew Bible , which states : “ If thy brother , the son of thy mother , or thy son , or thy daughter , or the wife of thy bosom , or thy friend , which is as thine own soul , entice thee secretly , saying , ‘ Let us go and serve other (176).
If our moral practice began, as I believe it did, with the tethering of intimate bands in the Pleistocene as a cooperative behavior signaling within a cultural social unit, then deviants to that culture would indeed deserve to occupy the lowest pit of Dane’s Inferno. The Apollonian character traits were developed by our early ability to unify with strangers in a Dionysian spirit. Maybe he, Henrich, and others will come around.
References
1. Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species and Making Us Smarter. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press.
2. Henrich, Joseph Patrick. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
3. Han-Pile, Béatrice. 2006. “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics in the Birth of Tragedy.” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (3): 373–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2006.00231.x.
4. Friston, Karl. 2010. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (2): 127–38. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787.
5. Kirchhoff, Michael, Thomas Parr, Ensor Palacios, Karl Friston, and Julian Kiverstein. 2018. “The Markov Blankets of Life: Autonomy, Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle.” Journal of The Royal Society Interface 15 (138): 20170792, pp. 3-4 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792.
6 Moffett, Mark W. 2019. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. New York: Basic Books, p. 256.
7 Hogg, Michael A. 2000. “Subjective Uncertainty Reduction through Self-Categorization: A Motivational Theory of Social Identity Processes.” European Review of Social Psychology 11 (1): 223–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/14792772043000040.
8 Dunbar, R.I.M. 2009. “The Social Brain Hypothesis and Its Implications for Social Evolution.” Annals of Human Biology 36 (5): 562–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/03014460902960289.
9 Alcorta, Candace S., and Richard Sosis. 2005. “Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols: The Evolution of Religion as an Adaptive Complex.” Human Nature 16 (4): 323–59.
10 Pagel, Mark D. 2012. Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, loc 1266.
11 Gray, Kurt, Chelsea Schein, and C Daryl Cameron. 2017. “How to Think about Emotion and Morality: Circles, Not Arrows.” Current Opinion in Psychology 17 (October): 41–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.06.011.
12 Schein, Chelsea, and Kurt Gray. 2018. “The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 22 (1): 32–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317698288.
13 Campbell, Joseph, Bill D. Moyers, and Betty S. Flowers. 1991. The Power of Myth. 1st Anchor Books ed. New York: Anchor Books.
14 Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2020. Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, page 71.
15 Muthukrishna, Michael, Michael Doebeli, Maciej Chudek, and Joseph Henrich. 2018. “The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How Culture Drives Brain Expansion, Sociality, and Life History.” Edited by Corina E Tarnita. PLOS Computational Biology. (11): e1006504. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006504.
16 Heyes, Cecilia M. 2018. Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ↩
17 Bloom, Paul. 2013. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. First Edition. New York: Crown Publishers, page 29.
18 Greene, Joshua David. 2013. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: The Penguin Press, pages 47-48.
19 Warneken, Felix, and Michael Tomasello. 2009. “Varieties of Altruism in Children and Chimpanzees.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 (9): 397–402. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2009.06.008.
ExhibitingBias 