The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder…. You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper one thing at the end: “Please.” You get the odd impression he is not imploring you not to harm him, but to do it right.
Over the objections of prison psychiatrists who saw that Abbott had PSYCHOPATH written all over his face, Mailer and other New York literati helped him win an early parole. Abbott was soon feted at literary dinners, likened to Solzhenitsyn and Jacobo Timerman, and interviewed on Good Morning America and in People magazine. Two weeks later he got into an argument with an aspiring young playwright who was working as a waiter in a restaurant and had asked Abbott not to use the employees’ restroom. Abbott asked him to step outside, stabbed him in the chest, and left him to bleed to death on the sidewalk.73
Psychopaths can be clever and charming, and Mailer was only the latest in a series of intellectuals from all over the political spectrum who were conned in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973 William F. Buckley helped win the early release of Edgar Smith, a man who had been convicted of molesting a fifteen-year-old cheerleader and crushing her head with a rock. Smith won his freedom in exchange for confessing to the crime, and then, as Buckley was interviewing him on his national television program, he recanted the confession. Three years later he was arrested for beating another young woman with a rock, and he is now serving a life sentence for attempted murder.74
Not everyone was conned. The comedian Richard Pryor described his experience at the Arizona State Penitentiary during the filming of Stir Crazy:
It made my heart ache, you know, to see all these beautiful black men in the joint. Goddam; the warriors should be out there helping the masses. I felt that way, I was real naïve. Six weeks I was up there and I talked to the brothers. I talked to ‘em, and… [Looks around, frightened]… Thank God we got penitentiaries! I asked one, “Why did you kill everybody in the house?” He says, “They was home.”… I met one dude, kidnap-murdered four times. And I thought, three times, that was your last, right? I says, “What happened?” [Answers in falsetto] “I can’t get this shit right! But I’m getting paroled in two years.”
Pryor was not, of course, denying the inequities that continue to put disproportionate numbers of African Americans in prison. He was only contrasting the common sense of ordinary people with the romanticism of intellectuals— and perhaps exposing their condescending attitude that poor people can’t be expected to refrain from murder, and that they should not be alarmed by the murderers in their midst.
The romantic notion that all malefactors are depraved on accounta they’re deprived has worn thin among experts and laypeople alike. Many psychopaths had difficult lives, of course, but that does not mean that having a difficult life turns one into a psychopath. There is an old joke about two social workers discussing a problematic child: “Johnny came from a broken home.” “Yes, Johnny could break any home.” Machiavellian personalities can be found in all social classes—there are kleptocrats, robber barons, military dictators, and rogue financiers—and some psychopaths, such as the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, have come from decent, upper-middle-class homes. And none of this means that all people who resort to violence or crime are psychopaths, only that some of the worst ones are.
Psychopaths, as far as we know, cannot be “cured.” Indeed, the psychologist Marnie Rice has shown that certain harebrained ideas for therapy, such as boosting their self-esteem and teaching them social skills, can make them even more dangerous.75 But that does not mean there is nothing we can do about them. For example, Mealey shows that of the two kinds of psychopaths she distinguished, inveterate psychopaths are unmoved by programs that try to get them to appreciate the harm they do, but they may be responsive to surer punishments that induce them to behave more responsibly out of sheer self-interest. Conditional psychopaths, on the other hand, may respond better to social changes that prevent them from slipping through society’s cracks. Whether or not these are the best prescriptions, they are examples of how science and policy might come to grips with a problem that many intellectuals tried to wish away in the twentieth century but that has long been a concern of religion, philosophy, and fiction: the existence of evil.
ACCORDING TO TRIVERS, every human relationship—our ties to our parents, siblings, romantic partners, and friends and neighbors—has a distinct psychology forged by a pattern of converging and diverging interests. What about the relationship that is, according to the pop song, “the greatest love of all”—the relationship with the self? In a pithy and now-famous passage, Trivers wrote:
If… deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.76
The conventional view may be largely correct when it comes to the physical world, which allows for reality checks by multiple observers and where misconceptions are likely to harm the perceiver. But as Trivers notes, it may not be correct when it comes to the self, which one can access in a way that others cannot and where misconceptions may be helpful. Sometimes parents may want to convince a child that what they are doing is for the child’s own good, children may want to convince parents that they are needy rather than greedy, lovers may want to convince each other that they will always be true, and unrelated folks may want to convince one another that they are worthy cooperators. These opinions are often embellishments, if not tall tales, and to slip them beneath a partner’s radar a speaker should believe in them so as not to stammer, sweat, or trip himself up in contradictions. Ice-veined liars might, of course, get away with telling bald fibs to strangers, but they would also have trouble keeping friends, who could never take their promises seriously. The price of looking credible is being unable to lie with a straight face, and that means a part of the mind must be designed to believe its own propaganda—while another part registers just enough truth to keep the self-concept in touch with reality.
The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which disputed the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the one true self. No, said Goffman; it’s masks all the way down. Many discoveries in the ensuing decades have borne him out.77
Though modern psychologists and psychiatrists tend to reject orthodox Freudian theory, many acknowledge that Freud was right about the defense mechanisms of the ego. Any therapist will tell you that people protest too much, deny or repress unpleasant facts, project their flaws onto others, turn their discomfort into abstract intellectual problems, distract themselves with time-consuming activities, and rationalize away their motives. The psychiatrists Randolph Nesse and Alan Lloyd have argued that these habits do not safeguard the self against bizarre sexual wishes and fears (like having sex with one’s mother) but are tactics of self-deception: they suppress evidence that we are not as beneficent or competent as we would like to think.78 As Jeff Gold-blum said in The Big Chill “ Rationalizations are more important than sex.” When his friends demurred, he asked, “Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?”
As we saw in Chapter 3, when a person suffers neurological damage, the healthy parts of the brain engage in extraordinary confabulations to explain away the foibles caused by the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self) and to present the whole person as a capable, rational actor. A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife, but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like his wife, may deduce that an amazin
g impostor is living in his house. A patient who believes she is at home and is shown the hospital elevator may say without missing a beat, “You wouldn’t believe what it cost us to have that installed.”79 After the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair, he invited reporters on a hike and told them he wanted to try out for the Washington Redskins. He was soon forced to step down when he refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong with his judgment.80
In social psychology experiments, people consistently overrate their own skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy. They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise.81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about “cognitive dissonance reduction,” in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image.82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well:
Dilbert reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.
Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly. It implies that the faculties that ought to allow us to settle our differences—seeking the truth and discussing it rationally—are miscalibrated so that all parties assess themselves to be wiser, abler, and nobler than they really are. Each party to a dispute can sincerely believe that the logic and evidence are on his side and that his opponent is deluded or dishonest or both.83 Self-deception is one of the reasons that the moral sense can, paradoxically, often do more harm than good, a human misfortune we will explore in the next chapter.
THE MANY ROOTS of our suffering illuminated by Trivers are not a cause for lamentations and wailings. The genetic overlaps that unite and divide us are tragic not in the everyday sense of a catastrophe but in the dramatic sense of a stimulus that encourages us to ponder our condition. According to a definition in the Cambridge Encyclopedia, “ The fundamental purpose of tragedy… was claimed by Aristotle to be the awakening of pity and fear, of a sense of wonder and awe at the human potential, including the potential for suffering; it makes an assertion of human value in the face of a hostile universe.” Trivers’s accounts of the inherent conflicts within families, couples, societies, and the self can reinforce that purpose.
Nature may have played a cruel trick by slightly mistuning the emotions of people who share their flesh and blood, but in doing so she provided steady work for generations of authors and playwrights. Endless are the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fact that two people can be bound by the strongest emotional bonds in the living world and at the same time not always want the best for each other. Aristotle was perhaps the first to note that tragic narratives focus on family relations. A story about two strangers who fight to the death, he pointed out, is nowhere near as interesting as a story about two brothers who fight to the death. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Oedipus and Laius, Michael and Fredo, JR and Bobby, Frasier and Niles, Joseph and his brothers, Lear and his daughters, Hannah and her sisters… As cataloguers of dramatic plots have noted for centuries, “enmity of kinsmen” and “rivalry of kinsmen” are enduring formulas.84
In his book Antigones, the literary critic George Steiner showed that the Antigone legend has a singular place in Western literature. Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, but the fact that her father was her brother and her sister was her mother was only the beginning of her family troubles. In defiance of King Creon, she buried her slain brother Polynices, and when the king found out, he ordered her buried alive. She cheated him by killing herself first, whereupon the king’s son, who was madly in love with her and unable to get her a pardon, killed himself on her grave. Steiner observes that Antigone is widely considered “not only the finest of the Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit.”85 It has been performed for more than two millennia and has inspired countless variations and spinoffs. Steiner explains its enduring resonance:
It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text to express all the principal constants of conflict in the condition of man. These constants are fivefold: the confrontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of god(s). The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation are not negotiable. Men and women, old and young, the individual and the community or state, the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals, define themselves in the conflictual process of defining each other.86… Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social confrontations and self-perceptions in the history of man, they endure as an animate legacy in collective memory and recognition.87
The bittersweet process of defining ourselves by our conflicts with others is not just a subject for literature but can illuminate the nature of our emotions and the content of our consciousness. If a genie offered us the choice between belonging to a species that could achieve perfect egalitarianism and solidarity and belonging to a species like ours in which relationships with parents, siblings, and children are uniquely precious, it is not so clear that we would choose the former. Our close relatives have a special place in our hearts only because the place for every other human being, by definition, is less special, and we have seen that many social injustices fall out of that bargain. So, too, is social friction a product of our individuality and of our pursuit of happiness. We may envy the harmony of an ant colony, but when Woody Allen’s alter ego Ζ complained to his psychiatrist that he felt insignificant, the psychiatrist replied, “You’ve made a real breakthrough, Z. You are insignificant.”
Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflict to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all.88 Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the rare and unpredictable things we need. We feel hunger, savor food, and have a palate for countless fascinating tastes because food was hard to get during most of our evolutionary history. We don’t normally feel longing, delight, or fascination regarding oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it was never hard to obtain. We just breathe.
The same may be true of conflicts over kin, mates, and friends. I mentioned that if a couple were guaranteed to be faithful, to favor each other over their kin, and to die at the same time, their genetic interests would be identical, wrapped up in their common children. One can even imagine a species in which every couple was marooned on an island for life and their offspring dispersed at maturity, never to return. Since the genetic interests of the two mates are identical, one might at first think that evolution would endow them with a blissful perfection of sexual, romantic, and companionate love.
But, Symons argues, nothing of the sort would happen. The relation between the mates would evolve to be like the relation among the cells of a single body, whose genetic interests are also identical. Heart cells and lung cells don’t have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony. Likewise, the couples in this species would have sex only for the purpose of procreation (why waste energy?), and sex would bring no more pleasure than the rest of reproductive physiology such as the release of hormones or the formation of the gametes:
There would be no falling in love, because there would be no alternative mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that’s the point: you don’t really love yourself, except metaphorically; you are yourself. The two of you would be, as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology…. You might feel pain if you observed your mate cut herself, but all the feelings we have about our mates tha
t make a relationship so wonderful when it is working well (and so painful when it is not) would never evolve. Even if a species had them when they took up this way of life, they would be selected out as surely as the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish are selected out, because they would be all cost and no benefit.89
The same is true for our emotions toward family and friends: the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.
Chapter 15
The Sanctimonious Animal
ONE OF THE deepest fears people have of a biological understanding of the mind is that it would lead to moral nihilism. If we are not created by God for a higher purpose, say the critics on the right, or if we are products of selfish genes, say the critics on the left, then what would prevent us from becoming amoral egoists who look out only for number one? Wouldn’t we have to see ourselves as venal mercenaries who cannot be expected to care for the less fortunate? Both sides point to Nazism as the outcome of accepting biological theories of human nature.
The preceding chapter showed that this fear is misplaced. Nothing prevents the godless and amoral process of natural selection from evolving a big-brained social species equipped with an elaborate moral sense.1 Indeed, the problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality. The problem may be that we have too much.