Not everyone will be comforted by such reassurances, though, because they eat away at the third cherished assumption of modern intellectual life. Love, will, and conscience are in the traditional job description for the soul and have always been placed in opposition to mere “biological” functions. If those faculties are “biological” too—that is, evolutionary adaptations implemented in the circuitry of the brain—then the ghost is left with even less to do and might as well be pensioned off for good.
Chapter 4
Culture Vultures
Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. Look here—my right hand has no index finger. Look here—through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo—it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who on nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the half-light of dawn, in a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible—I would cry out and no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be beheaded….
I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution—the Lottery—which is unknown in other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or secretly.1
JORGE LUIS BORGES’S story “The Lottery in Babylon” is perhaps the best depiction of the idea that culture is a set of roles and symbols that mysteriously descend on passive individuals. His lottery began as the familiar game in which a winning ticket was rewarded by a jackpot. But to enhance the suspense the operators added a few numbers that presented the ticket holder with a fine rather than a reward. They then imposed prison sentences on those who did not pay the fines, and the system expanded into a variety of nonmonetary punishments and rewards. The lottery became free, compulsory, omnipotent, and increasingly mysterious. People began to speculate on how it worked and whether it even continued to exist.
At first glance human cultures do appear to have the monstrous variety of a Borgesian lottery. Members of Homo sapiens ingest everything from maggots and worms to cow urine and human flesh. They bind, cut, scar, and stretch body parts in ways that would make the most perforated Western teenager wince. They sanction kinky sexual practices like teenagers receiving daily fellatio from younger boys and parents arranging marriages between their five-year-olds. The apparent caprice of cultural variation leads naturally to the doctrine that culture lives in a separate universe from brains, genes, and evolution. And this separation depends in turn on the concept of a slate that is left blank by biology and written upon by culture. Now that I have tried to convince you that the slate is not blank, it is time to put culture back into the picture. That will complete the consilience that runs from the life sciences through the sciences of human nature to the social sciences, humanities, and arts.
In this chapter I will lay out an alternative to the belief that culture is like a lottery. Culture can be seen instead as a part of the human phenotype: the distinctive design that allows us to survive, prosper, and perpetuate our lineages. Humans are a knowledge-using, cooperative species, and culture emerges naturally from that lifestyle. To preview: The phenomena we call “culture” arise as people pool and accumulate their discoveries, and as they institute conventions to coordinate their labors and adjudicate their conflicts. When groups of people separated by time and geography accumulate different discoveries and conventions, we use the plural and call them cultures. Different cultures, then, don’t come from different kinds of genes—Boas and his heirs were right about that—but they don’t live in a separate world or stamp a shape onto formless minds either.
THE FIRST STEP in connecting culture to the sciences of human nature is to recognize that culture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that accomplishes the feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate mimics but have to work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission of culture possible. That is why a focus on innate faculties of mind is not an alternative to a focus on learning, culture, and socialization, but rather an attempt to explain how they work.
Take the case of a person’s mother tongue, which is a learned cultural skill par excellence. A parrot and a child both learn something when exposed to speech, but only the child has a mental algorithm that extracts words and rules from the sound wave and uses them to utter and understand an unlimited number of new sentences. The innate endowment for language is in fact an innate mechanism for learning language.2 In the same way, for children to learn about culture they cannot be mere video cameras that passively record sights and sounds. They must be equipped with mental machinery that can extract the beliefs and values underlying other people’s behavior so that the children themselves can become competent members of the culture.3
Even the humblest act of cultural learning—imitating the behavior of a parent or a peer—is more complicated than it looks. To appreciate what goes on in our minds when we effortlessly learn from other people, we have to imagine what it would be like to have some other kind of mind. Fortunately, cognitive scientists have imagined it for us by plumbing the minds of robots, animals, and people whose minds are impaired.
The artificial intelligence researcher Rodney Brooks, who wants to build a robot capable of learning by imitation, immediately faced this problem when he considered using techniques for learning that are common in computer science:
The robot is observing a person opening a glass jar. The person approaches the robot and places the jar on a table near the robot. The person rubs his hands together and then sets himself to removing the lid from the jar. He grasps the glass jar in one hand and the lid in the other and begins to unscrew the lid by turning it counter-clockwise. While he is opening the jar, he pauses to wipe his brow, and glances at the robot to see what it is doing. He then resumes opening the jar. The robot then attempts to imitate the action. [But] which parts of the action to be imitated are important (such as turning the lid counter-clockwise), and which aren’t (such as wiping your brow)?… How can the robot abstract the knowledge gained from this experience and apply it to a similar situation?4
The answer is that the robot has to be equipped with an ability to see into the mind of the person being imitated, so that it can infer the person’s goals and pick out the aspects of behavior that the person intended to achieve the goal. Cognitive scientists call this ability intuitive psychology, folk psychology, or a theory of mind. (The “theory” here refers to the tacit beliefs held by a person, animal, or robot, not to the explicit beliefs of scientists.) No existing robot comes close to having this ability.
Another mind that finds it difficult to infer others’ goals is the chimpanzee’s. The psychologist Laura Petitto was the principal sign language trainer for the animal known as Nim Chimpsky and lived with him for a year in a university mansion. At first glance Nim seemed to “imitate” her washing the dishes, but with an important difference. A dish was not necessarily any cleaner after Nim rubbed it with a sponge than before, and if he was given a spotless dish, Nim would “wash” it just as if it were dirty. Nim didn’t get the concept of “washing,” namely using liquid to make something clean. He just mimicked her rubbing motion while enjoying the sensation of warm water over his fingers. Many laboratory experiments have shown something similar. Though chimpanzees and other primates have a reputation as imitators (“Monkey see, monkey do”), their ability to imitate in the way people do—replicating another person’s intent rather than going through the motions—is rudimentary, because their intuitive psychology is rudimentary.5
A mind unequipped to discern other people’s beliefs and intentions, even if it can learn in other ways, is incapable of the kind of learning that perpetuates culture. People with autism suffer from an impairment of this kind. They can grasp physical representations like maps and diagrams but cannot gr
asp mental representations—that is, they cannot read other people’s minds.6 Though they certainly imitate, they do it in bizarre ways. Some are prone to echolalia, repeating other people’s utterances verbatim rather than extracting the grammatical patterns that would allow them to compose their own sentences. Autistics who do learn to speak on their own often use the word you as if it were their own name, because other people refer to them as you and it never occurs to them that the word is defined relative to who is addressing it to whom. If a parent knocks over a glass and says, “Oh, damn!” an autistic child might use oh damn as the word for a glass—disproving the empiricist theory that normal children can learn words merely by associating sounds and events that overlap in time. None of this is a consequence of low intelligence. Autistic children can be competent (or even savants) when solving other problems, and retarded children without autism don’t show the same foibles with language and imitation. Autism is an innate neurological condition with strong genetic roots.7 Together with robots and chimpanzees, people with autism remind us that cultural learning is possible only because neurologically normal people have innate equipment to accomplish it.
Scientists often interpret the long childhood of members of Homo sapiens as an adaptation that allows children to acquire the vast store of information from their culture before striking out on their own as adults. If cultural learning depends on special psychological equipment, we should see the equipment up and running early in childhood. And indeed we do.
Experiments show that one-and-a-half-year-old babies are not associationists who connect overlapping events indiscriminately. They are intuitive psychologists who psych out other people’s intentions before copying what they do. When an adult first exposes a baby to a word, as in “That’s a toma,” the baby will remember it as the name of the toy the adult was looking at at the time, not as the name of the toy the baby herself was looking at.8 If an adult fiddles with a gadget but indicates that the action was an accident (by saying “Whoops!”), a baby will not even bother trying to imitate him. But if the adult does the same thing but indicates that he intended the action, the baby will imitate him.9 And when an adult tries and fails to accomplish something (like trying to press the button on a buzzer, or trying to string a loop around a peg), the baby will imitate what the adult tried to do, not what he did do.10 As someone who studies language acquisition in children, I have continually been amazed at how early they “get” the logic of language, availing themselves of most of the spoken vernacular by the age of three.11 That, too, may be an attempt by the genome to get our culture-acquiring apparatus online as early in life as the growing brain can handle it.
OUR MINDS, THEN, are fitted with mechanisms designed to read the goals of other people so we can copy their intended acts. But why would we want to? Though we take it for granted that acquiring culture is a good thing, the act of acquiring it is often spoken of with scorn. The longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” And we have a menagerie of metaphors that equate this quintessentially human ability with the behavior of animals: along with monkey see, monkey do, we have aping, parroting, sheep, lemmings, copycats, and a herd mentality.
Social psychologists have amply documented that people have a powerful urge to do as their neighbors do. When unwitting subjects are surrounded by confederates of the experimenter who have been paid to do something odd, many or most will go along. They will defy their own eyes and call a long line “short” or vice versa, nonchalantly fill out a questionnaire as smoke pours out of a heating vent, or (in a Candid Camera sketch) suddenly strip down to their underwear for no apparent reason.12 But the social psychologists point out that human conformity, no matter how hilarious it looks in contrived experiments, has a genuine rationale in social life—indeed, two rationales.13
The first is informational, the desire to benefit from other people’s knowledge and judgment. Weary veterans of committees say that the IQ of a group is the lowest IQ of any member of the group divided by the number of people in the group, but that is too pessimistic. In a species equipped with language, an intuitive psychology, and a willingness to cooperate, a group can pool the hard-won discoveries of members present and past and end up far smarter than a race of hermits. Hunter-gatherers accumulate the know-how to make tools, control fire, outsmart prey, and detoxify plants, and can live by this collective ingenuity even if no member could re-create it all from scratch. Also, by coordinating their behavior (say, in driving game or taking turns watching children while others forage), they can act like a big multi-headed, multi-limbed beast and accomplish feats that a die-hard individualist could not. And an array of interconnected eyes, ears, and heads is more robust than a single set with all its shortcomings and idiosyncrasies. There is a Yiddish expression offered as a reality check to malcontents and conspiracy theorists: The whole world isn’t crazy.
Much of what we call culture is simply accumulated local wisdom: ways of fashioning artifacts, selecting food, dividing up windfalls, and so on. Some anthropologists, like Marvin Harris, argue that even practices that seem as arbitrary as a lottery may in fact be solutions to ecological problems.14 Cows really should be sacred in India, he points out; they supply food (milk and butter), fuel (dung), and power (by pulling plows), so the customs protecting them thwart the temptation to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Other cultural differences may have a rationale in reproduction.15 In some societies, men live with their paternal families and support their wives and children; in others, they live with their maternal families and support their sisters and nieces and nephews. The second arrangement tends to be found in societies where men have to spend long periods of time away from home and adultery is relatively common, so they cannot be sure that their wives’ children are theirs. Since the children of a man’s mother’s daughter have to be his biological kin regardless of who has been sleeping with whom, a matrilocal family allows men to invest in children who are guaranteed to carry some of their genes.
Of course, only Procrustes could argue that all cultural practices have a direct economic or genetic payoff. The second motive for conformity is normative, the desire to follow the norms of a community, whatever they are. But this, too, is not as stupidly lemminglike as it first appears. Many cultural practices are arbitrary in their specific form but not in their reason for being. There is no good reason for people to drive on the right side of the road as opposed to the left side, or vice versa, but there is every reason for people to drive on the same side. So an arbitrary choice of which side to drive on, and a widespread conformity with that choice, make a great deal of sense. Other examples of arbitrary but coordinated choices, which economists called “cooperative equilibria,” include money, designated days of rest, and the pairings of sound and meaning that make up the words in a language.
Shared arbitrary practices also help people cope with the fact that while many things in life are arranged along a continuum, decisions must often be binary.16 Children do not become adults instantaneously, nor do dating couples become monogamous partners. Rites of passage and their modern equivalent, pieces of paper like ID cards and marriage licenses, allow third parties to decide how to treat ambiguous cases—as a child or as an adult, as committed or as available—without endless haggling over differences of opinion.
And the fuzziest categories of all are other people’s intentions. Is he a loyal member of the coalition (one that I would want to have in my foxhole) or a quisling who will bail out when times get tough? Does his heart lie with his father’s clan or with his father-in-law’s? Is she a suspiciously merry widow or just getting on with her life? Is he dissing me or just in a hurry? Initiation rites, tribal badges, prescribed periods of mourning, and ritualized forms of address may not answer these questions definitively, but they can remove clouds of suspicion that would otherwise hang over people’s heads.
When conventions are widely enough entrenched, they can become a kind of
reality even though they exist only in people’s minds. In his book The Construction of Social Reality (not to be confused with the social construction of reality), the philosopher John Searle points out that certain facts are objectively true just because people act as if they are true.17 For example, it is a matter of fact, not opinion, that George W. Bush is the forty-third president of the United States, that O. J. Simpson was found not guilty of murder, that the Boston Celtics won the NBA World Championship in 1986, and that a Big Mac (at the time of this writing) costs $2.62. But though these are objective facts, they are not facts about the physical world, like the atomic number of cadmium or the classification of a whale as a mammal. They consist in a shared understanding in the minds of most members in a community, usually agreements to grant (or deny) power or status to certain other people.
Life in complex societies is built on social realities, the most obvious examples being money and the rule of law. But a social fact depends entirely on the willingness of people to treat it as a fact. It is specific to a community, as we see when people refuse to honor a foreign currency or fail to recognize the sovereignty of a self-proclaimed leader. And it can dissolve with changes in the collective psychology, as when a currency becomes worthless through hyperinflation or a regime collapses because people defy the police and army en masse. (Searle points out that Mao was only half right when he said that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Since no regime can keep a gun trained on every last citizen, political power grows out of a regime’s ability to command the fear of enough people at the same time.) Social reality exists only within a group of people, but it depends on a cognitive ability present in each individual: the ability to understand a public agreement to confer power or status, and to honor it as long as other people do.