Human Sociality

from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com July-August, 2011 Last month I wrote about modern knowledge as an assault on traditional and common-sense thinking. "Most disturbing of all . . . ," I wrote, "are the findings of neuropsychology. Cartesian dualism is dead. We are not conscious, more-or-less rational minds, made in the image of God . . . Rather, our minds, our consciousness, our whole sense of what we are, is a construct of the workings of our primate brains." Largely unconscious, as I should have added. Now I want to expand on that point a little, especially as it bears on the problem of human sociality our "unsocial sociability," in Kant's famous comment. Accepting that our line diverged about 6 million years ago from that of the chimpanzees, and evolved a very different body, brain and lifestyle since that time, what kind of animals are we now? How does human sociality work? We are social animals in fact, ultra-social ones as anthropologists now say but not in any of the ways that ants and sheep and wolves are social. Though capable of almost robotic cooperation like the ants, of herding behavior and contagion of emotion like sheep or cattle, of hunting and fighting in packs like wolves, of status seeking and competition for mates like very many species, we are capable too of a stubborn individualism that sometimes sets us outside of, or against the groups we form. Collectively, communally, we build up our physical and cognitive environment to a complexity no other animal can match; and by such means, we dominate the planet for the time being, at any rate. Many features of human sociality are obvious to everyone: our gift for symbolic representation and virtuosity at communication and language; our knack not just for the use of tools, but for their manufacture and design; the protracted juvenile phase, and post-reproductive phase of a human lifespan, allowing time for cultural learning and teaching. Other features are subtler only recently noticed and studied by psychologists, anthropologists and other students of human biology the palette of physiological affects (as they are called) that recombine into the more familiar emotions; the crucial role of shame affect and emotion in human sociality; the innate moral sensibilities (studied by Jonathan Haidt), the phenomena of groupthink (studied by Irving Janis), etc.

All our hominid cousins (orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees) are curious, imitative and social animals. Yet in human biology, these traits have taken a remarkable turn. While other hominids camouflage the direction of their interest by ringing the pupil of the eye with a dark pigment, we 'telegraph' our attention by ringing the pupil with a coloured iris on a white background, to make a sign easily followed by others. We point at the things that interest us not just with our index fingers, but with our gaze. All our hominid and simian cousins are imitative creatures. ("Monkey see, monkey do," is proverbial.) But a chimp's imitation (for example) is highly concrete and situational. As Michael Tomasello has pointed out, the 12 or 13 month old child already imitates at a level that is not observed in chimps at any age, nor in any other non-human creature. Our babies seem to copy not just a behavior itself, but the attitude and intention behind that behavior. They imitate in a triangular pattern known as 'joint engagement,' looking back and forth between the person they are engaged with and an object of that person's attention. They follow finger-pointing and eagerly point themselves. They follow the glance of others with their own. As the African proverb says, "It takes a village to raise a child." Unlike the chimpanzees and every other known mammal, we pass our babies around to family and friends to be admired and cooed at by them, and initiated as social creatures in the process. Women in hunting-andgathering tribes commonly suckle each other's babies. Nearly all cultures organize groups of children under non-parental adults for advanced socialization and training. Alan Fiske has argued that humans in all cultures use just four fundamental models, often in combination, to organize most aspects of our sociality: Three of them Community Sharing, Hierarchical Ranking, and Market Pricing are self-explanatory. In Equality Matching relationships (the fourth model) people keep track of a balance or difference amongst the players, restoring the balance as required. Common examples include turn-taking, equal-share distribution of food, and all tit-for-tat reciprocity from baby-sitting pools to blood feuds. To Fiske's four I would suggest adding Open Conflict as the default pattern of our social behavior, when nothing better can be arranged. Though the idea is not scientifically respectable as yet, many have felt and I would argue that human groups and organizations actually have composite minds (of a sort) that strongly influence our individual thoughts and behaviors. I am writing a paper now to develop this notion, hoping to give precise and technical meaning to the very widespread conviction (which I share) that our present-day globalizing society is collectively insane.