These two versions of the goose that lays the golden egg speak to the two kinds of assaults befalling the Miracle. In one, sheer rage driven by the feeling that “I deserve more!” leads to the creature’s death. In the other, intellectual hubris drives the couple to think they can outsmart this Miracle that literally waddled into their lives as a gift. The first is an analogue to the populist rage that churns on the left and the right. The second is a mirror of the mind-set of supposed intellectuals who are convinced they are smarter than the market and the system they inherited. And both stories highlight the ingratitude that defines our times.
Let me close with another parable of sorts, probably more familiar to the reader.
In the opening scene of The Godfather (both the book and the film), Don Corleone is receiving visitors on his daughter’s wedding day. Sicilian tradition holds that he must grant any favor asked of him on this day. His first supplicant is Amerigo Bonasera, the undertaker.15
“I raised my daughter in the American fashion,” Bonasera says in the book that inspired the movie. “I believe in America. America has made my fortune. I gave my daughter her freedom and yet taught her never to dishonor her family.”
Alas, the daughter found an American boyfriend who tried to rape her. “She resisted. She kept her honor.” The boyfriend and another boy beat her viciously in retaliation. “I went to the police like a good American,” he says. But, despite being arrested and convicted, the boys receive a slap on the wrist from a lenient, probably corrupt judge. “They went free that very day. I stood in the courtroom like a fool and those bastards smiled at me. And then I said to my wife: ‘We must go to Don Corleone for justice.’ ”
Don Corleone breaks the silence to ask, “Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me at the beginning of this affair?”
Bonasera dodges the question and asks, “What do you want of me? Tell me what you wish. But do what I beg you to do.” He then whispers in the Don’s ear that he wants the boys killed.
The Don tells the undertaker he’s getting carried away, that this punishment is unreasonable. The undertaker replies, flatly, “I will pay you anything you ask.”
This infuriates Don Corleone. In a voice Mario Puzo describes as “cold death,” the Don answers: “We have known each other many years, you and I…but until this day you never came to me for counsel or help. I can’t remember the last time you invited me to your house for coffee though my wife is godmother to your only child. Let us be frank. You spurned my friendship. You feared to be in my debt.”
The undertaker mutters, “I didn’t want to get into trouble.”
Don Corleone interrupts him with a wave of his hand. “No. Don’t speak. You found America a paradise. You had a good trade, you made a good living, you thought the world a harmless place where you could take your pleasures as you willed. You never armed yourself with true friends. After all, the police guarded you, there were courts of law, you and yours could come to no harm. You did not need Don Corleone. Very well. My feelings were wounded but I am not that sort of person who thrusts his friendship on those who do not value it—on those who think me of little account.”
The Don smiles derisively. “Now you come to me and say, ‘Don Corleone give me justice.’ And you do not ask with respect. You do not offer me friendship. You come into my home on the bridal day of my daughter and you ask me to do murder and you say ‘I will pay you anything.’…[W]hat have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?”
The undertaker responds, “America has been good to me. I wanted to be a good citizen. I wanted my child to be American.”
The Don applauds sardonically and says: “Well spoken. Very fine. Then you have nothing to complain about. The judge has ruled. America has ruled. Bring your daughter flowers and a box of candy when you go visit her in the hospital. That will comfort her. Be content. After all, this is not a serious affair, the boys were young, high-spirited, and one of them is the son of a powerful politician….So give me your word that you will put aside this madness. It is not American. Forgive. Forget. Life is full of misfortunes.”
The two argue about the nature of justice versus vengeance. And once again the undertaker asks, “How much shall I pay you?” The Don, furious, turns his back on Bonasera and asks, “Why do you fear to give your first allegiance to me?” He lectures the undertaker about the delays and corruption of the American system. “You go to the law courts and wait for months. You spend money on lawyers who know full well you are to be made a fool of. You accept judgment from a judge who sells himself like the worst whore in the streets…[But if] you had come to me for justice those scum who ruined your daughter would be weeping bitter tears this day. If by some misfortune an honest man like yourself made enemies, they would become my enemies…and then, believe me, they would fear you.”
The undertaker finally understands and pleads: “Be my friend. I accept.”
When Bonasera relents and asks Don Corleone to be his friend, he is turning his back on America. He is rejecting—not without cause, of course—the Lockean worldview, the Miracle, in favor of the more natural and eternal political order. It works on the assumption that there is no extended order of abstract rules and contracts, there is only power, loyalty, reciprocity, alliances, honor, and friendship. Right and wrong are defined by what is good for our tribe. It is no coincidence that the name Amerigo Bonasera, translated from the Italian, means “Good night, America.”
The moral universe of The Godfather is the moral universe of all politics before the Miracle. It is natural. It lurks beneath the surface in every society and in every soul. It is there waiting to reclaim the Miracle and restore humanity to nature. And all it takes for nature to succeed is for us to let it. Nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is written. All that is good in the world requires work. I hope this book helps in the task that falls on every one of us.
*1 Traditionally the date for the emergence of Homo sapiens is around 200,000 years ago. More recent research suggests that the first Homo sapiens may have existed in the area that is today Morocco some 300,000 years ago. I split the difference.
*2 Think of it this way. My father was born when Oliver Wendell Holmes was on the Supreme Court. Holmes fought in the Civil War, under Lincoln. Lincoln was a young man working on a farm in Indiana when John Quincy Adams was president. In 1775, John Quincy Adams, as a boy, heard the gunfire at the Siege of Boston, where George Washington commanded the colonial forces. Washington was born in 1732, at the dawn of the Miracle. That’s five lifetimes. If you want to make it six, Washington’s father was born in 1694—and died at the ripe age of forty-eight, about fourteen years past the average life expectancy for an Englishman or colonial at the time.
*3 Irving Kristol observed that there are no non-capitalist economic theories. I think that is right. The moment a supposedly alternative economic system stops recognizing the role that markets and prices play, it ceases to be economics and becomes some romantic ideology that borrows from the language of economics to sound more attractive or authoritative.
1
HUMAN NATURE
Our Inner Tribesman
Human nature is real. Few statements are less controversial among the people who study the subject and more controversial among people who don’t.
It is fair to say that no reputable psychologist, neuroscientist, linguist (including Noam Chomsky), or economist disputes the fact that human beings come preloaded with a great deal of software. Indeed, the fashionable metaphor today is not software but “apps”—as in the applications we have on our smartphones. Different situations trigger different apps, and sometimes these apps can be in conflict.
All of the serious debates about nature versus nurture start with the premise that there is already a lot built into our nature. The only question is what we can add on top of nature or what apps we can override. Think of a car. We all generally agree that a car
comes with an engine, four wheels, and a steering wheel. These things come standard. That’s nature. Nurture provides the options, and there are a great many options. But no matter how many add-ons you buy, a car is not going to be a helicopter.
In his enlightening book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, psychologist Paul Bloom chronicles a remarkable number of experiments conducted on infants and toddlers. (Rest assured: No babies were harmed in the process.) He demonstrates that babies as young as six months already come preloaded with a number of psychological traits that suggest an innate moral sense. For instance, infants between six and ten months old were shown puppet plays. One puppet would be trying to get up a hill. Another puppet would either come to the hill-climbing puppet’s aid or it would get in the way, stymieing the climber’s efforts. Afterward, the babies were given a choice between the mean puppet and the nice puppet. The babies almost uniformly preferred the nice puppet over the jackass puppet. When a similar study was performed with twenty-month-old toddlers, the kids would reward the nice puppet with candy and punish the bad puppet by taking its candy away.1 Other studies confirm that we are all born with some very basic programming about empathy, altruism, cooperation, and other moral intuitions.
Bloom takes great care in pointing out that, just because we are born with a kind of moral sense, that doesn’t mean we are therefore moral. Rather, we are born with moral taste buds. How we use them depends on the environment we grow up in and, crucially, how we define “morality.”
One of the most important findings of not just Bloom but thousands of researchers across numerous disciplines is that we are all born with a natural distrust of strangers. Very young babies can identify language; their cries even have regional accents. “Young babies can recognize the language that they have been exposed to, and they prefer it to other languages even if it is spoken by a stranger,” Bloom reports. “Experiments that use methodologies in which babies suck on a pacifier to indicate their preferences find that Russian babies prefer to hear Russian, French babies prefer French, American babies prefer English, and so on. This effect shows up mere minutes after birth, suggesting that babies were becoming familiar with those muffled sounds that they heard in the womb” [emphasis mine].2
Interestingly, our brains dedicate an enormous amount of resources to facial recognition. We are born with an intense interest in human faces. No doubt there are many reasons for this. For instance, much early human communication was done nonverbally and that’s still true for humans today, particularly before we learn to speak. One can debate whether reading faces was important in the past or today, but our ability to recognize faces was clearly more vital in the past. Being able to instantly recognize kin or friends from strangers could mean the difference between life and death. (It’s telling that our ability to identify faces is actually much more sophisticated than our ability to verbally articulate the differences between faces. Most of us can instantly distinguish between, say, Matt Damon’s face and Matthew McConaughey’s. But can you instantly explain what makes their faces so different?)
The desire for unity and distrust of strangers are universal human tendencies—but just tendencies. While I don’t think they can be wholly taught out of us, they certainly can be tempered and channeled in productive ways. It is a common cliché among certain tribes of humanists to say something like “There is no race but the human race,” which of course is just a more secular version of “We are all children of God” and similar endearing platitudes. All things being equal, I think this is a benign cliché and worth incorporating into our civilizational dogma. But I should point out that, of all the systems ever created that actually put this belief into practice, none has been more successful on the ground than the market. The market lowers the risk—or “price”—of distrust by letting very different peoples and cultures find common interest.
The distrust of strangers and the craving for unity are important themes in this book, because they illuminate a much broader fact: Ideology is downstream of human nature. Children and adults are constantly told that one needs to be taught to hate. This is laudable nonsense. We are, in a very real sense, born to hate every bit as much as we are born to love. The task of parents, schools, society, and civilization isn’t to teach us not to hate any more than it is to teach us not to love. The role of all of these institutions is to teach what we should or should not hate.
Bloom writes that “just about all the readers of this book believe that it’s wrong to hate someone solely because of the color of his or her skin. But this is a modern insight; for most of human history, nobody saw anything wrong with racism.”3 All good people are supposed to hate evil, but the definition of what constitutes evil is rather expansive across time, and refining the definition of evil is the very essence of what civilizations do.
Every culture ever known has things it hates and things it loves. And every political ideology ever known has some group it considers the Other. The pro-Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt famously said, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.”4 Fascism is supposedly defined by its demonization of “the other.” Obviously, in Nazi Germany, the Other was best represented by the Jew. But communism had its Others too. They went by such names as the bourgeois, or the ruling class, or the kulaks. Contemporary liberalism has a host of Others it hates. We’ve all probably met avowed lovers of tolerance who talk about how much they hate intolerant people—but only certain kinds of intolerant people. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people insist that the slightest prejudice against Muslims is evil and then proceed to explain how awful evangelical Christians are.
The anthropologist Richard Shweder compiled a useful list of things that different societies have thought was praiseworthy, neutral, or appalling:
masturbation, homosexuality, sexual abstinence, polygamy, abortion, circumcision, corporal punishment, capital punishment, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, capitalism, democracy, flag burning, miniskirts, long hair, no hair, alcohol consumption, meat eating, medical inoculations, atheism, idol worship, divorce, widow marriage, arranged marriage, romantic love marriage, parents and children sleeping in the same bed, parents and children not sleeping in the same bed, women being allowed to work, women not being allowed to work.5
In other words, the capacity for humans to think certain things are “naturally” good or bad is remarkably elastic. But there’s a difference between elastic and infinite. For example, incest has been a taboo everywhere. Obviously the strength of that taboo has varied, but no society has celebrated it. (Alas, that taboo has been steadily weakening in American popular culture.) Similarly, there’s no society in the world—now or known to have existed—where people didn’t give preference to relatives and friends over strangers, a point I’ll be coming back to quite a bit in later chapters.
Anthropologist Donald E. Brown compiled a list of attributes that describe “the Universal People”—i.e., everybody, everywhere. “Human universals—of which hundreds have been identified—consist of those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and mind that, so far as the record has been examined, are found among all peoples known to ethnography and history.”6 The list is too long to reprint here. But some of the most important, for our purposes at least, include coalitions; conflict; cooperation and cooperative behavior; corporate statuses; collective decision making; divination; ethnocentrism; entification (treating patterns and relations as things); envy; etiquette; fear; feasting; folklore; food sharing; gift giving; gossip; government; group living; (collective) identity; in-groups (as distinguished from out-groups); in-group biases in favor of close kin (as distinguished from distant kin groups); kin terms translatable by basic relations of procreation; kinship statuses; judging others; law (rights and obligations); law (rules of membership); leaders; magic; magic to increase life; magic to sustain life; male and female and adult and child seen as having different natures; males dominating the public/politic
al realm; males more aggressive; males more prone to lethal violence; males more prone to theft; moral sentiments; myths; narrative; overestimating objectivity of thought; planning; planning for the future; preference for own children and close kin (nepotism); prestige inequalities; private inner life; promise; property; psychological defense mechanisms; rape; rape proscribed; reciprocal exchanges (of labor, goods, or services); reciprocity, negative (revenge, retaliation); reciprocity, positive (recognition of individuals by face); redress of wrongs; rites of passage; rituals; role and personality seen in dynamic interrelationship (i.e., departures from role can be explained in terms of individual personality); sanctions; sanctions for crimes against the collectivity; sanctions including removal from the social unit; self distinguished from other; self as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomous; self as subject and object; self as responsible; self-image, awareness of (concern for) what others think; self-image, manipulation of; self-image, wanted to be positive; social structure; socialization; socialization expected from senior kin; socialization includes toilet training; spear; special speech for special occasions; statuses and roles; statuses ascribed and achieved; statuses distinguished from individuals; statuses based on something other than sex, age, or kinship; succession; sweets preferred; symbolism; symbolic speech; taboos: tabooed foods; tabooed utterances; taxonomy; territoriality; trade; and turn taking.
Again, this is only a partial list.
One of the most interesting taboos in American life is the taboo against discussing human nature. This is an entirely modern prohibition. The ancient Greeks and Romans, not to mention every major world religion, considered human nature not only real but an essential subject for study and contemplation. I think there are multiple overlapping reasons—many of them laudable—for our aversion to the subject. Our civilization has struggled to live up to the ideals of universal equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and similar canons. Discussion of human nature inevitably bleeds into debates about genetic differences between groups or claims that certain behaviors or choices are “unnatural.” Discussion of human nature also grinds against the idea that the individual is unconstrained by external—or internal!—restraints, a nearly unique dogma of the West. Another reason why “human nature” sounds like fighting words is that it is at loggerheads with the French Enlightenment tradition that believes in the “perfectibility of man.”