Basic instincts Humans are inclined to love their neighbours, so long as they play fair
Andrew Brown Saturday October 29, 2005 The Guardian [U.K.] Have you ever wondered how much your neighbours earn? If you're Norwegian, the answer is only a mouse click away. For the last three weeks in October, the Norwegian Inland Revenue runs a website which shows last year's income, and the tax paid on it, for almost everyone in the country. Only the homeless and those in institutions are exempt. But there are limits. Tax records must be looked up individually, and you need to know the full name and town of the target. But the principle is clear: your neighbours have a right to know what you earn and what you pay in tax. That was true before the internet, when the tax records were laid out in local government offices. But in those days, you had to go there to check. Now, they are accessible from anywhere in the world - I just checked upon the income of a farmer from whom I rented a holiday cottage in 2001, and then, just for the hell of it, I checked how much his wife earns too. It's worth asking how Norwegian society can possibly benefit from this. It diminishes privacy for the victims, and incites envy or scorn among those who look up the answers. There is a case that it helps to lower the tax revenue, too, by helping to ensure that the really rich must emigrate. Tax rates in Norway, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, are among the highest in the world, so no doubt the rich would tend to emigrate anyway; but it's no incentive to know that everyone can see how much they declared in personal income. Rightwing governments have tried to limit or even abolish the period in which these records appear on the internet. None, so far as I know, has contested the principle that they should be accessible to real neighbours, rather than virtual ones; and in this responsibility to neighbours lies the justification of the practice. Moral societies - and the Norwegians would certainly want their society to be a moral one - need vices as well as virtues, and, in particular, they need to harness envy, and the quality that evolutionary biologists call spite, which is the willingness to damage others even at your own expense. This is hard to accept. Spitefulness is not one of the seven sins classed as deadly, but it may be the most shameful of all. To say that you are greedy, or lustful or even lazy is much more acceptable than to say you are spiteful. In Britain the Idler magazine promotes indolence and innumerable other titles suggest gluttony, lust, anger and all the rest. But there is nothing on the newsstands called Spitefulness Today, or even Modern Envy. The market's just not ready for open celebration of those feelings, even where they are most prevalent. In Scandinavia, they call them the Jantelag after the 10 commandments of village life, first propounded in 1933 by the Danish/Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose. Among these commandments are: "You must not believe you know more than us; you must not believe you are better than us; you must not laugh at us; you must not believe that you can teach us anything." But they all boil down to the first one: "You must not believe you are anything special." Like the original 10 commandments, these gain their force because it's understood that anyone who offends against them will suffer for it. The Jantelag was meant as an attack on the stifling conformities of village life, by a novelist who had escaped to the big city. But it was soon understood to be a general condemnation of all Scandinavian societies. The link between conformity, envy and the welfare state may be a deep and important one, and the way to understand it is through the work of the American economist Herbert Gintis. In a series of books and papers written with Samuel Bowles, most notably Moral Sentiments and Material Interests and The Hitchhiker's Guide to Altruism, he argues that conventional economic models don't represent the way people think about the world. He says they ignore our instincts for justice; and suggests ways in which morality and a sense of fairness might evolve and prosper even in a species that started out composed of amoral and completely selfish individuals. "I believe moral principles are facts in the world," Gintis has written, "and the evolution and transformation of ethical principles follow natural laws which, if we understand them, can be successfully altered to improve the lives of people." If human nature is generous, trusting and sympathetic, that didn't happen despite biology. We have these instincts because those of our ancestors who were generous, trusting, and sympathetic, within reasonable limits, had more surviving children than those who were treacherous, grasping and callous towards everyone. Gintis claims that economic analysis can't capture the kindness of humans. He says - with considerable evidence - that statistics reveal these things. One example is the ultimatum game, where players are asked to share out a sum of money. One player starts off with all of it, and must make the other an offer of some portion of it. They can't negotiate, and only one offer can be made. If it is accepted then the money is shared out on that basis. If it is rejected, neither gets anything. What usually happens is that the second player will accept whatever is offered - since anything is better than nothing; and the first player offers as little as possible, since he knows that the second player is in this bind. When people play this game - and it has been tried by researchers in more than 30 countries - the player with the money often gives away around half of it. Even more surprising, if they offer less than a third, this is likely to be rejected, even though the alternative is no money at all. Gintis argues that the experiment shows people do care about the welfare of others almost as much as they care about their own. "There is no way to interpret these experimental results, other than that people care about fairness, and are willing to sacrifice personal gain in pursuit of moral ends." Many of us are creatures who genuinely want others to flourish, and will act to see this happen. This is not a consequence of civilisation, or a skin covering the crueller features of human nature. It is as real and as important as the cruel and violent tendencies whose existence we do not doubt. Kindness is likely to be a trait found almost exclusively in humans. Chimpanzees would not hesitate to cheat each other if they thought they could benefit from it. We don't behave like chimpanzees but this isn't because we have been liberated from our animal desires, but because we desire different things from chimps. Yet we, and they, descend from some species of apes who all wanted the same things. So there must be an evolutionary model that explains how we got from there to here. The first shot at this was produced in the early 1960s, by the British biologist WD Hamilton, who showed mathematically how altruistic behaviour might spread among animals related to each other - an insight later popularised in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. But kin selection cannot explain why we give to earthquake victims on the other side of the world. Another explanation is supplied by the various forms of "reciprocal altruism", a theory formulated by Robert Trivers. This suggests that favours will be done if we can expect them to be returned. Computer simulations of great complexity have been done to show that behaviour of this sort will spread, providing that there is some way to keep score of who owes us favours and who is good about returning them. Both of these mechanisms clearly operate among humans, but they are not enough to fully explain altruism. We are not just helpful to our relatives or other people we know, which is what reciprocal altruism suggests. Walk out on any high street in Britain and you will see people collecting for and giving to charity - even though this cannot be expected to bring them any favours. The additional psychological mechanism that Gintis suggests evolution has implanted in us is what he calls "strong reciprocity". Essentially, this means that we take very seriously the duties of belonging to a group. Looked at from the point of view of an economist trying to model human behaviour, we have "a propensity to cooperate and share with others similarly disposed, even at personal cost, and a willingness to punish those who violate cooperative and other social norms, even when punishing is personally costly and cannot be expected to entail net personal gains in the future." The vital difference between this way of thinking and that involved in more individualistic analyses is that in the Gintis model we care directly about the behaviour of third parties. Within a group, everyone is expected to feel the wrong done to any member, a rather different sort of reaction that kicks in if someone is exposed as a cheat at cards, rather than a successful bluffer. Then, we expect all the players around the table, not just the loser, to round on them with indignation. An economist can analyse such propensities objectively, from the outside. From the inside we experience them as emotions, which lure us or spur us onwards. If we really believe in the values of the group we grow up in, and feel shame when we fail to live up to them, and outrage when we see others flouting them. The argument here comes close to that of David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist who argues that religion is best understood as a way to make groups more internally coherent and successful. The benefits of my altruism towards the group are endangered when anyone in the group shirks or lets the others down. But Gintis does not believe, as Wilson does, that competition between groups is necessary for the development of cooperation and kindliness. He thinks it is enough that there should be selection for following cultural norms in your group - a process sociologists call "the internalisation of norms". The American writer Ambrose Bierce defined conscience as "the uneasy feeling that someone, somewhere, might be watching" but it is only half true. When our consciences are truly engaged, we behave and feel as if someone were watching us, even when we know they are not. Gintis suggests several rules of conduct which would have increased the survival rate among our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the past 100,000 years, among them personal hygiene, self-control, hard work and planning for the future. What Gintis believes has a genetic basis is not any of these behaviours in particular but the inner monitoring system which allows or compels us to live up to the standards of the group even when no one is watching. For most of the last 100,000 years, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers in widely changing environments where the right rules of behaviour, and the ability to follow them, were always important, but what these rules might be changed far too fast to be written in our genes. Hunter-gatherer societies are not idyllic. The homicide rate in stone age tribes far surpasses that of violent, gun-infested modern Colombia. But they are egalitarian, and they do put a premium on belonging, so we can be pretty certain the traits that make egalitarian societies possible were selected over tens of thousands of years, and persist in modern human societies. This doesn't mean that everyone has them. But President George Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove are just as much descended from egalitarian hunter-gatherers as were Francis of Assisi or Andrei Sakharov. Gintis is not trying to replace a picture of humanity as purely selfish and Machiavellian with one where we are all cuddly anarchists at heart. He is only trying to supplement the existing explanations for human morality. If he's right, and the evolutionary roots of welfare states lie in our genes for conformity, then the Norwegian tax returns suddenly make a lot more sense. They offer a guarantee that everyone is playing by the same rules. That satisfies our sense of fairness, which is what leads us to vote for redistributive policies in the first place. Nothing, then, threatens political support for the welfare state more than the perception of unfairness - the sense that someone is breaking the rules and getting away with it. So David Blunkett, railing at the cheats on invalidity benefit, is talking like the last real socialist [i.e., social democrat] in [the British] government. -- Jim Devine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
