Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

An unfocused inclination towards ethnocentrism and xenophobia can be particularized as needed in each generation. The groups to which loyalty is owed and the ones deserving special hatred and contempt may change from generation to generation. Imprinting is a means for fitting general proclivities to practical politics, and is a form of education. The machinery stands ready for those who know how to use it. The young animals have a nearly eidetic memory. But they have no critical faculties. They’ll believe anything—whatever they’re taught. As the example of the parade of ducklings waddling adoringly after the ethologist reminds us, imprinting might lead, in unscrupulous higher animals, to misuse. The young are so ready to learn who to love and who to hate.

If the nipples and vaginas of nursing rats (“suckling dams,” the scientists call them) are regularly swabbed with the scent of lemon, the male pups, when grown, are preferentially attracted to lemon-scented females—foreswearing the naturally aromatic, accessible, and nubile alternatives.¹⁵ This odor imprinting suggests how powerfully early experiences can affect later sexual preference and performance. It’s something like the line in the song that goes, “I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad.” But humans are not rats.

With long childhoods and efficient imprinting, animals can make wholesale changes in their behavior to adapt to a changing environment—taking only a few lifetimes instead of a geological age. In turn, this bonds mothers and offspring together still more closely. It creates something akin to love. It also means that different communities of the same species may have different patterns of behavior that are passed down the generations—even if the groups are, genetically, essentially identical. The strategy of long childhoods and early learning introduces a new element: culture.

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Human life begins in a race of one against hundreds of millions The stampeding sperm cells are competitive from the start. But the whole point of the-rivalry is cooperation of the most intimate sort. The two cells wholly merge. They combine their genetic material. Two very different beings become one. The act of making a human being involves an almost bizarre mix of opposites—desperate competition against all odds, and cooperation so perfect that the partners’ separate identities vanish. It would be inconsistent for beings who arise out of intense rivalry and begin in perfect cooperation to decry either.

“In the ways of Nature,” said Marcus Aurelius, “there is no evil to be found”¹⁶ Animals are aggressive not because they are savage, or bestial, or evil—those are words with very little explanatory power—but because such behavior provides food and defense against predators, because it spaces out the population and avoids overcrowding, because it has adaptive value. Aggression is a survival strategy, evolved to serve life. It coexists, especially in the primates, with compassion, altruism, heroism, and tender, self-sacrificing love for the young. These are also survival strategies. Eliminating aggression would be a foolish as well as an unachievable goal—it’s built too deeply into us. The evolutionary process has worked to achieve the right level of aggression—not too much, not too little—and the right inhibitors and disinhibitors.

We emerge out of a turbulent mix of contradictory inclinations. It should be no surprise that in our psychology and our politics a similar tension of opposites should prevail.

* A very nice test of these ideas are the observations by the animal behavior expert Stephen Emlen He thought to examine jacanas, birds in which the usual sex roles are reversed: Males do all the parenting and the females compete vigorously for something like a harem of males Those females who don’t possess a harem don’t reproduce, so the dominant females are often challenged by lower-ranking females When a takeover attempt succeeds, the incoming female routinely destroys the eggs and kills the chicks She then sexually solicits the males, who now have no young to distract them—and so are able to attend to propagating the genetic sequences of the incoming female The genetic strategy of infanticide is situational, not gender-based* Another aspect of the gestural vocabulary of appeasement is infantile behavior in adults, including begging. It’s a little like human lovers using baby talk and calling each other “baby.” They’re applying a lexicon established in infancy to another purpose

Chapter 11

DOMINANCE AND SUBMISSION

When we no longer look at an organic being as

a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly

beyond his comprehension; when we regard

every production of nature as one which has

had a long history; when we contemplate every

complex structure and instinct as the summing

up of many contrivances, each useful to the

possessor, in the same way as any great

mechanical invention is the summing up of the