Evolution and the American Myth of the Individual

By JOHN EDWARD TERRELL

NOVEMBER 30, 2014
We will certainly hear it said many times between now and the 2016 elections that
the countrys two main political parties have fundamental philosophical
differences. But what exactly does that mean?
At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing
conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the
frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In
a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely
to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that
emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party
members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom
and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who
argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is
naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Selfdescribed libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of
logic and reasoning over emotion.
Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are
essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading
abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research,
anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side
of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not
and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and
Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so
that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the
individual plus his or her relationships with others.
This conclusion is unlikely to startle anyone who is at all religious or spiritual. When I
was a boy I was taught that the Old Testament is about our relationship with God
and the New Testament is about our responsibilities to one another. I now know this
division of biblical wisdom is too simple. I have also learned that in the eyes of
many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either
accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both. The irony
here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings,
religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence.
And as Matthew D. Lieberman, a social neuroscience researcher at the University of
California, Los Angeles, has written: we think people are built to maximize their
own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to
overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following
societys norms.
While I do not entirely accept the norms clause of Liebermans claim, his
observation strikes me as evocatively religious. Consequently I find it more than

ironic that American individualism today which many link closely with Christian
fundamentalism is self-consciously founded on 17th- and 18th-century ideas
about human beings as inherently self-interested and self-centered individuals
despite the fact that what essayists like Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau wrote back
then about the natural state of humankind at the beginning of history was
arguably never meant to be taken as the gospel truth.
Case in point, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared in The Social Contract
(1762) that each of us is born free and yet everywhere we are in chains. He did not
mean physical chains. He meant social ones. We now know he was dead wrong.
Human evolution has made us obligate social creatures. Even if some of us may
choose sooner or later to disappear into the woods or sit on a mountaintop in deep
meditation, we humans are able to do so only if before such individualistic antisocial resolve we have first been socially nurtured and socially taught survival arts
by others. The distinction Rousseau and others tried to draw between natural
liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual and civil liberty,
which is limited by the general will is fanciful, not factual.
This is decidedly not what Enlightenment philosophers wanted to hear. According to
Rousseau and others, our responsibilities and duties to one another as members of
society do not come from nature, but instead from our social conventions. Their
speculations about the origins of the latter generally asserted that the most ancient
of all societies was the family. Yet in their eyes, even the family as a social unit was
seen as ephemeral. As Rousseau wrote: children remain attached to the father only
so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the
natural bond is dissolved. When released from obedience to their father, the next
generation is free to assume a life of singular freedom and independence. Should
any child elect to remain united with the family of his birth, he did so no longer
naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by
convention.
In fairness to Rousseau it should be noted, as I observed earlier, that he may not
have meant such claims to be taken literally. As he remarked in his discourse On
the Origin of Inequality, philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of
society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of
them has got there. Why then did Rousseau and others make up stories about
human history if they didnt really believe them? The simple answer, at least during
the Enlightenment, was that they wanted people to accept their claim that civilized
life is based on social conventions, or contracts, drawn up at least figuratively
speaking by free, sane and equal human beings contracts that could and should
be extended to cover the moral and working relationships that ought to pertain
between rulers and the ruled. In short, their aims were political, not historical,
scientific or religious.
However pragmatic their motivations and goals, what Rousseau and others crafted
as arguments in favor of their ideas all had the earmarks of primitive mythology. As
the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued almost a century ago: Myth fulfills
in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies
belief, it safeguards and enforces morality, it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and

contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myths achieve this social function,
he observed, by serving as guides, or charters, for moral values, social order and
magical belief. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle
tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an
artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.
While as an anthropologist I largely agree with Malinowski, I would add that not all
myths make good charters for faith and wisdom. The sanctification of the rights of
individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is
contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in
history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we
elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures. The thought that it
is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own
preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication. This is not
how we got to be the kind of species we are today. Nor is this what the worlds
religions would ask us to believe. Or at any rate, so I was told as a child, and so I
still believe.
Startling Adult Friendships

There Are Social and Political Benefits to Having Friends

By David Brooks
SEPT. 18, 2014

Somebody recently asked me what I would do if I had $500 million to give

away. My first thought was that Id become a moderate version of the Koch
brothers. Id pay for independent candidates to run against Democratic or
Republican members of Congress who veered too far into their partys fever
swamps.
But then I realized that if I really had that money, Id want to affect a smaller
number of people in a more personal and profound way. The big, established
charities are already fighting disease and poverty as best they can, so in
search of new directions I thought, oddly, of friendship.
Ancient writers from Aristotle to Cicero to Montaigne described friendship as
the pre-eminent human institution. You can go without marriage, or justice,
or honor, but friendship is indispensable to life. Each friendship, they
continued, has positive social effects. Lovers face each other, but friends
stand side-by-side, facing the world often working on its behalf. Aristotle
suggested that friendship is the cornerstone of society. Montaigne thought
that it spreads universal warmth.
These writers probably romanticized friendship. One senses that they didnt
know how to have real conversations with the women in their lives, so they
poured their whole emotional lives into male friendships. But I do think they

were right in pointing out that friendship is a personal relationship that has
radiating social and political benefits.
In the first place, friendship helps people make better judgments. So much of
deep friendship is thinking through problems together: what job to take;
whom to marry. Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second
sympathetic self.
Second, friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel
unguarded and fluid with their close friends. If youre hanging around with a
friend, smarter and funnier thoughts tend to come burbling out.
Finally, people behave better if they know their friends are observing.
Friendship is based, in part, on common tastes and interests, but it is also
based on mutual admiration and reciprocity. People tend to want to live up to
their friends high regard. People dont have close friendships in any hope of
selfish gain, but simply for the pleasure itself of feeling known and respected.
Its also true that friendship is not in great shape in America today. In 1985,
people tended to have about three really close friends, according to the
General Social Survey. By 2004, according to research done at Duke
University and the University of Arizona, they were reporting they had only
two close confidants. The number of people who say they have no close
confidants at all has tripled over that time.
People seem to have a harder time building friendships across class lines. As
society becomes more unequal and segmented, invitations come to people
on the basis of their job status. Middle-aged people have particular problems
nurturing friendships and building new ones. They are so busy with work and
kids that friendship gets squeezed out.
So, in the fantasy world in which I have $500 million, Id try to set up places
that would cultivate friendships. I know a lot of people who have been
involved in fellowship programs. They made friends who ended up utterly
transforming their lives. Id try to take those sorts of networking programs
and make them less career oriented and more profound.
To do that, you have to get people out of their normal hunting grounds where
their guard is up. You also probably want to give them challenging activities
to do together. Nothing inspires friendship like selflessness and cooperation
in moments of difficulty. You also want to give them moments when they can
share confidences, about big ideas and small worries.
So I envision a string of adult camps or retreat centers (my oldest friendships
were formed at summer camp, so I think in those terms). Groups of 20 or 30
would be brought together from all social and demographic groups, and
secluded for two weeks. Theyd prepare and clean up all their meals

together, and eating the meals would go on for a while. In the morning, they
would read about and discuss big topics. In the afternoons, theyd play
sports, take hikes and build something complicated together. At night,
thered be a bar and music.
You couldnt build a close friendship in that time, but you could plant the
seeds for one. As with good fellowship programs, alumni networks would
grow spontaneously over time.
People these days are flocking to conferences, ideas festivals and cruises
that are really about building friendships, even if they dont admit it
explicitly. The goal of these intensity retreats would be to spark bonds
between disparate individuals who, in the outside world, would be
completely unlikely to know each other. The benefits of that social bridging,
while unplannable, would ripple out in ways long and far-reaching.

The Legacy of Fear

NOV. 10, 2014

David Brooks
Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the biggest surprise is how badly
most of the post-communist nations have done since. There was a general
expectation back then that most of these countries would step out from tyranny and
rejoin the European club of prosperous nations. Most of us did not appreciate the
corrosive power of distrust, and how long it would take to heal the mental scars
caused by it.
Branko Milanovic, an economist at the City University of New York, measured the
wreckage in a recent essay on his blog, Global Inequality. He looked at the growth
rates of post-communist countries and broke them down into four groups.
In the bottom group are basket-case nations that havent even recovered the level
of real income they had in 1990, as measured by real G.D.P. per capita. These
failures include Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia, Serbia and others about 20 percent of
the post-communist world. Basically, Milanovic writes, these are countries with at
least three to four wasted generations. At current rates of growth, it might take
them some 50 or 60 years longer than they were under communism! to go
back to the income levels they had at the fall of communism.
The next group includes those nations that are merely moderate failures, with per
capita economic growth rates under 1.7 percent a year. These are nations like
Russia and Hungary that continue to fall steadily behind the West about 40
percent of the post-communist world by population.
The third group includes those with growth rates between 1.7 percent and 1.9
percent. These countries, like the Czech Republic and Slovenia, are holding steady
with the capitalist world.
Finally there are the successes, the nations that are catching up. This group includes
Poland, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. But Milanovic points out that many of these
nations are growing simply because they have oil, or something valuable to dig out
of the ground. There are only five countries that have emerged as successful
capitalist economies: Albania, Poland, Belarus, Armenia and Estonia.
To put it another way, only 10 percent of the people living in post-communist
nations are living in a place that successfully made the transition to capitalism.
Ninety percent are living under failed transitions of one sort or another. This fact is
already yielding screwed up politics in places like Hungary and Russia and will shape
the 21st century.
Why did some countries succeed while others failed?
First, leaders in some countries simply made better political decisions. Most of these
countries enacted economic reforms, like deregulating prices and privatizing

nationalized companies. Some nations like Estonia and Poland enacted reforms
radically and quickly, while others tried to do them gradually or barely at all with
expensive security blankets for protected interests. The quick and radical group saw
a slightly bigger output drop over the near term but much more prosperity over the
long run.
Then there is the level of institutions. Many Western advisers focused on the
headline reforms writing new constitutions and creating stock markets. But Larry
Lawson, an economist who worked with the Poles and Ukrainians, points out that
these nations lacked the basic building blocks we take for granted. Before you have
a stock market, for example, you have to have publicly available data about
companies, credit records and accounting systems.
Finally, and most important, there is the level of values. A nations economy is
nestled in its moral ecology. Economic performance is tied to history, culture and
psychology.
Poland, for example, had been invaded throughout its history, yielding a pragmatic,
survivor ethos. The Poles had a keen desire to initiate reforms on their own. Poles
also had a clear sense of justice and injustice, since they had seen the Russians do
things the wrong way on their own territory. They placed a high value on education
and social mobility.
Other countries lacked this cultural brew. Worse, life was marked by fear, by
arbitrary power, by suspicion that people are watching you, by distrust. People
raised in this atmosphere of distrust have trouble forming companies and
associations. They are more likely to be driven by a grab-what-you-can logic a
culture of corruption and appropriation. They are more likely to hunker down and
become risk averse.
Many of the ailing countries are marked by distant power relationships. Those with
power even in an office or neighborhood are aloof and domineering. Those
without power hanker for security at all costs. Theyre nostalgic for the imagined
stability of communism. When everything seems arbitrary and crooked, people
tolerate strongman rule.
The lesson of the past 25 years is that democratic prosperity is built on layers of
small achievements 10,000 fathoms deep. Communism ripped at all that bottom-up
society-making and damaged the psyches of its victims. Healing from those wounds
is gradual. Progress is not guaranteed.

Our Machine Masters

OCT. 30, 2014

By David Brooks
Some days I think nobody knows me as well as Pandora. I create a new
music channel around some band or song and Pandora feeds me a series of
songs I like just as well. In fact, it often feeds me songs Id already
downloaded onto my phone from iTunes. Either my musical taste is
extremely conventional or Pandora is really good at knowing what I like.
In the current issue of Wired, the technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we
had all better get used to this level of predictive prowess. Kelly argues that
the age of artificial intelligence is finally at hand.
He writes that the smart machines of the future wont be humanlike geniuses
like HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. They will be more
modest machines that will drive your car, translate foreign languages,
organize your photos, recommend entertainment options and maybe
diagnose your illnesses. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now
cognitize, Kelly writes. Even more than today, well lead our lives enmeshed
with machines that do some of our thinking tasks for us.
This artificial intelligence breakthrough, he argues, is being driven by cheap
parallel computation technologies, big data collection and better algorithms.
The upshot is clear, The business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are
easy to forecast: Take X and add A.I.
Two big implications flow from this. The first is sociological. If knowledge is
power, were about to see an even greater concentration of power.
The Internet is already heralding a new era of centralization. As Astra Taylor
points out in her book, The Peoples Platform, in 2001, the top 10 websites
accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. page views, but, by 2010, they
accounted for 75 percent of them. Gigantic companies like Google swallow
up smaller ones. The Internet has created a long tail, but almost all the
revenue and power is among the small elite at the head.
Advances in artificial intelligence will accelerate this centralizing trend.
Thats because A.I. companies will be able to reap the rewards of network
effects. The bigger their network and the more data they collect, the more
effective and attractive they become.
As Kelly puts it, Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow
so big, so fast, that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a result, our

A.I. future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, generalpurpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.
To put it more menacingly, engineers at a few gigantic companies will have
vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to
harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which
the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices. If you think this power
will be used for entirely benign ends, then you have not read enough history.
The second implication is philosophical. A.I. will redefine what it means to be
human. Our identity as humans is shaped by what machines and other
animals cant do. For the last few centuries, reason was seen as the ultimate
human faculty. But now machines are better at many of the tasks we
associate with thinking like playing chess, winning at Jeopardy, and doing
math.
On the other hand, machines cannot beat us at the things we do without
conscious thinking: developing tastes and affections, mimicking each other
and building emotional attachments, experiencing imaginative
breakthroughs, forming moral sentiments.
In the age of smart machines, were not human because we have big brains.
Were human because we have social skills, emotional capacities and moral
intuitions. I could paint two divergent A.I. futures, one deeply humanistic,
and one soullessly utilitarian.
In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgery so we can
focus on higher and happier things. In this future, differences in innate I.Q.
are less important. Everybody has Google on their phones so having a great
memory or the ability to calculate with big numbers doesnt help as much.
In this future, there is increasing emphasis on personal and moral faculties:
being likable, industrious, trustworthy and affectionate. People are evaluated
more on these traits, which supplement machine thinking, and not the rote
ones that duplicate it.
In the cold, utilitarian future, on the other hand, people become less
idiosyncratic. If the choice architecture behind many decisions is based on
big data from vast crowds, everybody follows the prompts and chooses to be
like each other. The machine prompts us to consume what is popular, the
things that are easy and mentally undemanding.
Im happy Pandora can help me find what I like. Im a little nervous if it so
pervasively shapes my listening that it ends up determining what I like. I
think we all want to master these machines, not have them master us.