The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (48 page)

Sharp intellectual self-scrutiny, likewise, might grow out of early social frustration. Children to whom status doesn't come naturally may work harder to become rich sources of information, especially if they seem to have a natural facility with it. Darwin turned his fits of intellectual self-doubt into a series of polished scientific works that both raised his status and made him a valued reciprocal altruist.

If these speculations hold water, then Darwin's two basic kinds of self-doubt — moral and intellectual — are two sides of the same coin, both of them manifestations of social insecurity, and both of them designed as a way to make him a prized social asset when other ways seemed to be failing. Darwin's "acute sensitiveness to praise and blame," as Thomas Huxley put it, can account for his fastidiousness in both realms, and may be rooted in a single principle of mental development.
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And Darwin's father may have done much — with Darwin's implied consent — to nourish that acute sensitiveness.

When we call people "insecure" we generally mean that they worry a lot: they worry that people don't like them; they worry that they'll lose what friends they have; they worry that they've offended people; they worry that they've given someone bad information. It is common to casually trace insecurity to childhood: rejection on the grade-school playground; romantic failures in adolescence; an unstable home; the death of a family member; moving around too often
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to make lasting friends, or whatever. There is a vague and usually unspoken assumption that various kinds of childhood failure or turbulence will lead to adult insecurity.

One can think up reasons (such as those I've just tossed out) why natural selection might have forged some of these links between early experience and later personality. (The early death of Darwin's mother is fertile ground for speculation; in the ancestral environment, complacency was a luxury that a motherless child could not afford.) One can also find, in the data of social psychology, at least loose support for such correlations. Clarity will come when these two sides of the dialectic get in touch with one another: when psychologists start thinking precisely about what kinds of developmental theories make Darwinian sense and then designing research to test those theories.

It is by the same process that we'll start understanding how various other tendencies get forged: sexual reserve or promiscuity, social tolerance and intolerance, high or low self-esteem, cruelty and gentleness, and so on. To the extent that these things are indeed consistently linked to commonly cited causes — the degree and nature of parental love, the number of parents in the household, early romantic encounters, dynamics among siblings, friends, enemies — it is probably because such linkage made evolutionary sense. If psychologists want to understand the processes that shape the human mind, they must understand the process that shaped the human species.
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Once they do, progress is likely. And unequivocal progress — growing, objective corroboration of ever-more-precise theories — would distinguish the Darwinism of the twenty-first century from the Freudianism of the twentieth.

When the topic turns to the unconscious mind, differences between Freudian and Darwinian thought persist; and again, some of the difference revolves around the function of pain. Recall Darwin's "golden rule": to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories — "for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones." Freud cited this remark as evidence of the Freudian tendency "to ward off from memory that which is unpleasant." This tendency was for Freud a broad and general one, found among the mentally healthy and ill alike, and central to
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the dynamics of the unconscious mind. But there is one problem with this supposed generality: sometimes painful memories are the very hardest to forget. Indeed, Freud acknowledged, only a few sentences after citing Darwin's golden rule, that people had mentioned this to him, stressing in particular the painfully persistent "recollection of grievances or humiliations."

Did this mean the tendency to forget unpleasant things wasn't general after all? No. Freud opted for another explanation: it was just that sometimes the tendency to discard painful memories is successful and sometimes it isn't; the mind is "an arena, a sort of tumbling-ground," where opposing tendencies collide, and it isn't easy to say which tendency will win.
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Evolutionary psychologists can handle this issue more deftly, because, in contrast to Freud, they don't have such a simple, schematic view of the human mind. They believe the brain was jerry-built over the eons to accomplish a host of different tasks. Having made no attempt to lump the memory of grievances, humiliations, and inconvenient facts under the same rubric, Darwinians don't have to hand out special exemptions to the cases that don't fit. Faced with three questions about remembering and forgetting — (1) why we for get facts inconsistent with our theories; (2) why we remember grievances; (3) why we remember humiliations — they can relax and come up with a different explanation for each one.

We've already touched on the three likely explanations. Forget ting inconvenient facts makes it easier to argue with force and con viction, and arguments often had genetic stakes in the environment of our evolution. Remembering grievances may bolster our haggling in a different way, making us remind people of reparations we're owed; also, a well-preserved grievance may ensure the punishment of our exploiters. As for the memory of humiliations, their uncom fortable persistence dissuades us from repeating behaviors that can lower social status; and, if the humiliations are of sufficient magni tude, their memory may adaptively lower self-esteem (or, at least, lower self-esteem in a way that would have been adaptive in the environment of our evolution).

Thus, Freud's model of the human mind may have been — believe
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it or not — insufficiently labyrinthine. The mind has more dark corners than he imagined, and plays more little tricks on us.

What is best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings — having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.

One biological view of this sort of conflict has come from Paul D. MacLean. He calls the human brain a "triune" brain whose three basic parts recapitulate our evolution: a reptilian core (the seat of our basic drives), surrounded by a "paleomammalian" brain (which endowed our ancestors with, among other things, affection for offspring), surrounded in turn by a "neomammalian" brain. The voluminous neomammalian brain brought abstract reasoning, language, and, perhaps, (selective) affection for people outside the family. It is, MacLean writes, "the handmaiden for rationalizing, justifying and giving verbal expression to the protoreptilian and limbic [paleomammalian] parts of our brains... ."
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Like many neat models, this one may be misleadingly simple; but it nicely captures a (perhaps the) critical feature of our evolutionary trajectory: from solitary to social, with the pursuit of food and sex becoming increasingly subtle and elaborate endeavors.

Freud's "id" — the beast in the basement — presumably grows out of the reptilian brain, a product of presocial evolutionary history. The "superego" — loosely speaking, the conscience — is a more recent invention. It is the source of the various kinds of inhibition and guilt designed to restrain the id in a genetically profitable manner; the superego prevents us, say, from harming siblings, or from neglecting our friends. The "ego" is the part in the middle. Its ultimate, if unconscious, goals are those of the id, yet it pursues them with long-term calculation, mindful of the superego's cautions and reprimands.
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Congruence between the Freudian and Darwinian views of psychic conflict has been stressed by Randolph Nesse and the psychiatrist Alan T. Lloyd. They see the conflict as a clash among competing advocacy groups, designed by evolution to yield sound guidance, much as the tension among branches of government is designed to yield good governance. The basic conflict — the basic discourse — is "between selfish and altruistic motivation, between pleasure-seeking and normative behavior, and between individual and group interests. The functions of the id match the first half of each of these pairs, while the functions of the ego/superego match the second half." And the basic truth behind the second half of the discourse is the "delayed nature of benefits from social relationships."
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In describing this tension between short-term and long-term selfishness, Darwinians have sometimes used the image of "repression." The psychoanalyst Malcolm Slavin suggests that selfish motives may be repressed by children as a way to stay in the good graces of parents — and retrieved moments later, when the need to please passes.
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Others have stressed the repression of selfish impulses toward friends. We may even repress the memory of a friend's transgressions — an especially wise trick if the friend is of high status or otherwise valuable.
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The memory could then resurface should the friend see his status plummet or for some other reason merit a more frank appraisal. And, of course, the arena of sex is rife with occasions for tactical repression. Surely a man can better convince a woman of his future devotion if he isn't vividly imagining sexual intercourse with her. That impulse can blossom later, once the ground has been prepared.

As Nesse and Lloyd have noted, repression is just one of the many "ego defenses" that have become part of Freudian theory (largely via Freud's daughter Anna, who wrote the book on ego defenses). And, they add, several other ego defenses are similarly intelligible in Darwinian terms. For example, "identification" and "introjection" — absorbing the values and traits of others, including powerful others — may be a way of cozying up to a high-status person who "distributes status and rewards to those who support his be liefs."
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And "rationalization," the concoction of pseudoexplanations that conceal our true motives — well, need I elaborate?
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All told, Freud's scorecard is not bad: he (and his followers) have identified lots of mental dynamics that may have deep evolutionary roots. He rightly saw the mind as a place of turbulence, much of it subterranean. And, in a general way, he saw the source of the turbulence: an animal of ultimately complete ruthlessness is born into a complex and inescapable social web.

But when he got less general than this, Freud's diagnosis was sometimes misleading. He often depicted the tension at the center of human life as essentially between not self and society but self and civilization. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he described the paradox this way: people are pushed together with other people, told to curb their sexual impulses and enter "aim-inhibited relationships of love," and told not just to get along with their neighbors cooperatively but to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Yet, Freud observes, humans are simply not gentle creatures: "[T]heir neighbour is for them not only a potential helper ... but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. [Man is a wolf to man. ]" No wonder people are so miserable. "In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct."

This last sentence contains a myth whose correction underlies much of evolutionary psychology. It has been a long, long time since any of our ancestors enjoyed "no restrictions" on these "instincts." Even chimpanzees must weigh their predatory impulses against the fact that another chimp can be "a potential helper," as Freud put it, and thus may be profitably treated with restraint. And male chimpanzees (and bonobos) find their sexual impulses frustrated by females that demand food and other favors in exchange for sex. In our own lineage, as growing male parental investment expanded those demands, males found themselves facing extensive "restrictions" on sexual impulses well before modern cultural norms made life even more frustrating.

The point is that repression and the unconscious mind are the products of millions of years of evolution and were well developed long before civilization further complicated mental life. The new
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paradigm allows us to think clearly about how these things were designed over those millions of years. The theories of kin selection, parent-offspring conflict, parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and status hierarchy tell us what kinds of self-deception are and aren't likely to be favored by evolution. If present-day Freudians start taking these hints and recast their ideas accordingly, maybe they can save Freud's name from the eclipse it will probably suffer if the task is left to Darwinians.
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All told, the Darwinian notion of the unconscious is more radical than the Freudian one. The sources of self-deception are more nu merous, diverse, and deeply rooted, and the line between conscious and unconscious is less clear. Freud described Freudianism as an attempt to "prove to the 'ego' of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on un consciously in his own mind."
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By Darwinian lights, this word ing almost gives too much credit to the "self." It seems to suggest an otherwise clear-seeing mental entity getting deluded in various ways. To an evolutionary psychologist, the delusion seems so pervasive that the usefulness of thinking about any distinct core of honesty falls into doubt.