Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (41 page)

Each colony of Hymenoptera consists of chambers connected to one another and to the surface by small tunnels. Colonies function around one or a few queens who can usually live for years. The queen’s task is to produce offspring. Males mate with the queen to produce daughters, then die. Sons have no fathers; all of their genes come from the queen mother. Most of the eggs laid by queens grow up to be infertile daughters called workers, who are specialized to maintain the colony’s chambers as “rooms” for nurseries, food storage, and mating. Workers usually do double duty as soldiers who defend the colony against attack—at the cost of their lives if needed. Sometimes there’s also a more specialized soldier caste whose behavior and anatomy is modified for group defense, including self-sacrifice.

Hamilton reasoned that because the daughters share most of their genes, it makes evolutionary sense for them to devote and sacrifice their lives for the group. The evolutionary task of these highly cooperative sisterhoods of workers and soldiers is to help the queen mother produce more members of the sisterhood—that is, more genetic near-copies of themselves. This insight led Hamilton to a broader theory of altruism in terms of “kin selection” and “inclusive fitness.”
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In a nutshell, genes for altruistic behaviors should tend to increase in a population when:

Kin B > C

Here, the fitness “cost” to survival, C, is less than the benefit to the survival of others, B, multiplied by their coefficient of kin-relatedness, Kin. By this logic, it “pays” for an individual to die if this action saves 2 siblings, 4 nieces or nephews, or 8 first cousins.

Biologist Richard Dawkins best expressed Hamilton’s fundamental insight from “the gene’s point of view”:
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A gene that increases the inclination to help siblings, for example, will foster its own spread by promoting individuals who are likely to bear copies of it. The important thing about genes is the information they encode, not the particular bodies they inhabit. A gene codes instructions for making bodies that can make more copies of the gene, but the information encoded hardly varies from one copy of a gene to another. Darwin didn’t know about genes and so focused on individuals. From a gene’s-eye view, individuals are merely “vessels” for the propagation of genes in quest of serial immortality.

Genes form coalitions with other genes to produce an individual who will likely propagate members of the coalition. An intermediate step in the process is the teaming up of gene coalitions into cells. Because cells in the individual possess identical genes (except for sperm and eggs), they are “close kin” and therefore naturally disposed to cooperate. Although genetically identical, cells are specialized for different body-building labors. The more kinds of specialization, the greater the complexity and flexibility of the body (including the brain) being built; just as the greater the division of labor in an economy, the greater the complexity and flexibility of the emerging market. Once an individual is no longer set to fulfill the function of passing on copies of its genes, the coalition starts to unravel, the cells begin to decay and malfunction, and the individual eventually dies.

Viewed from the gene’s point of view, Hamilton’s theory of altruism is not so much about group love as about a surreptitious form of self-love. It’s as much about nepotism as altruism. Even from the individual’s vantage, the theory of kin selection and inclusive fitness hardly does away with self-love and competition. For example, the theory predicts sibling rivalry when the benefits of sharing a resource are less than twice the costs because siblings only share half their genes.

Hamilton’s theory goes some way toward explaining cooperation in human tribes—not as a case of morally pure self-sacrifice, but as a particular variant of a broader evolutionary principle: “Cooperate to compete.” Take the Arab dictum “Me against my brother, brothers against cousins, cousins against the tribe, the tribe against the world.” Yet even blood feuds between kin groups rarely, if ever, follow strict Hamiltonian logic. Human reckoning of kinship obligations almost never follows a purely genetic reckoning of biological relationships: Among Arab tribes of the Middle East and North Africa, which are organized exclusively through descent in the father’s line, which anthropologists call a
patrilineage,
parallel cousins (father’s brother’s son and daughter) are considered first-degree “blood” relatives whereas cross-cousins (mother’s brother’s son and daughter)
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are not. This bit of Arab cultural logic, which arbitrarily gives preference to parallel over cross-cousins, has no real basis in biological logic.

Kinship, then, is not enough to explain levels of cooperative behavior within human societies, or the differences in collective behavior across societies. Cooperative mechanisms or algorithms that are based on genetic kinship should be designed to focus benefits only on close relatives. So biological kinship could not directly explain how large groups of individuals who are distantly related or unrelated can cooperate.

One possibility is that our psychology for picking out kin easily “misfires”
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or is “tricked” into overextending kin benefits to others. Because humans evolved in small groups whose members were closely related, evolution favored a kin psychology designed to help out members of their groups. By “overextending” the idiom and sentiments of kinship to non-kin, large-scale cooperation may be facilitated for trade or war. As “imagined kin,”
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members of large groups perform and profit from many tasks that they could not do alone, one by one, or only within the family.

Even casual study of anthropology and history indicates thatthe sentiment and idiom of kinship were critical to the formation of political communities and alliances. Among Native Americans of the Northwest Coast, war between chiefdoms would end, and trade begin, when their leaders (“Big Men”) exchanged gifts and became ceremonial “brothers.”
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For the ancient Hebrews and Phoenicians, “the worshipper is called brother (that is, kinsman or sister of the god).”
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“Brotherhood” is also the common term applied today among the Christian faithful and to the fraternity
(ikhwan)
of Islam. The rhetoric of family and kinship has also been a critical mobilizer in the formation of the “imagined community” of the modern nation,
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and a potent motivator in modern warfare, as in patriotism.
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The language of kinship and the emotions it evokes are also sustaining features of durable social movements as diverse as civil rights and jihad. Consider the “Oath to Jihad” quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The oath affirms that by their sacrifice, members help secure the future of their family of imagined kin.
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As U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in reference to justifiable war, “I’m a mother of five. I have five grandchildren. And I always say, Think of a lioness. Think of a mother bear. You come anywhere near our cubs, you’re dead.”
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From an evolutionary standpoint, imagined kinship isn’t all that different from pornography or advertising sex to sell cars or yogurt or almost anything at all. Our psychology evolved to respond to certain stimuli indicating fecundity, virility, or good health: like men to full breasts, women to well-formed muscles, and both sexes to white teeth. This happened to help us find mates who propagate our genes. But evolution only produces what’s better than worse, not what’s best. It was better to be sexually stimulated by features signaling reproductive potential than not. The fact that pornog-raphers and advertisers can “trick” and “tweak” our evolutionary proclivities for all sorts of other ends was not a concern in the ancestral environment that selected for human sexual psychology.At least since the Venus of Dolní Vestonice, a thirty-thousand-year-old ceramic nude with exaggerated hips and breasts, human cultures have learned to manipulate our species’ biological endowment to make us think and act in ways that go way beyond what was necessary or relevant to survive and reproduce in ancestral evolutionary environments. Indeed, “trick” and “tweak” is basically what human culture is all about.

THE ESSENCE OF US AGAINST THEM

The notion of imagined kinship helps us to understand how group feelings can be extended beyond family and genetics. By itself, though, imagined kinship still can’t explain why we consider all members of an imagined kin group to be of a kind. Imagined kin differ from real kin not only by the lack of genetic ties, but also by the lack of distinction between near kin and distant kin. In general, all members of a brotherhood or motherland have equal status, at least in terms of group membership, whereas real kin have different degrees of relatedness and no fixed or firm way of defining group membership or boundaries.

Having said all this, humans still more or less do know the difference between imagined kin and real kin, between sex objects and real people (although cultural manipulation of biology can get pretty good at blurring the line). The mere evocation of good sex is usually not enough to make you go out and buy a new car. The mere evocation of imagined kinship generally doesn’t suffice to create the greater bond. As a Babylonian king once wrote, “Between kings there is brotherhood, friendship, alliance and good relations—if there is an abundance of silver and an abundance of gold.”
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The fiction of kinship works well only if it has something more to work with.

That something more may be treasure, territory, or some other common good; but it is often underpinned by a universalpsychological bias known as “essentialism.”
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Studies of childhood development across cultures indicate that people everywhere tend to attribute hidden essences to human social categories, such as race, ethnicity, and personality.
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A common and potent form of essentialism bias is to think of different groups as akin to different biological species. Throughout history, and likely through human prehistory, people have routinely mobilized their own to fight or dominate others by seeing them as belonging to a different species.

To some extent, essentialism seems to be programmed into our brains by natural selection to apply to our understanding of biological species.
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Human beings universally and automatically divide the world of readily visible biological organisms into mutually exclusive categories that roughly correspond to the scientist’s notion of biological species or genus: dog, robin, shark, oak, holly, clover, and so on. In addition, humans are innately disposed by virtue of their own brain evolution to believe that each species has an underlying causal nature, or essence, which is uniquely responsible for the typical appearance, behavior, and ecological preferences of the kind.
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“Folk biology” is the term that anthropologists and psychologists use to label this universal and innate propensity of human beings to partition the world’s readily visible biodiversity into mutually exclusive essences. As Darwin noted, this natural tendency to classify organisms into species-like biological kinds has existed “from the remotest period in history” and “is not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.”
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There are tremendous evolutionary advantages to folk biology in terms of economy of information and ability to generate rich inferences from single instances to large classes of properties and types. When you see a lion, it really doesn’t matter which lion it is, because any lion can kill you; nor does it matter much which pineapple you eat because any (ripe) pineapple can feed you. But people also universally tend to attribute hidden essences to human social categories. For the most part, this psychological ploy is usedto generate notions of “in-group” versus “out-group” based on readily identifiable characteristics, whether physical features (skin color, place of residence, dress) or social and ideational attributes (language, nationality, religion).
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Humans, as already noted, are their own worst predators, far more deadly than lions or sharks. And in the spiraling competition between human groups, it is often prudent to make “fast and dirty” inferences about who is a potential friend or foe. A ready-made stereotype brings causal coherence to a group where initially there was none. The initially false or arbitrary presumption of a group essence makes culturally adaptive sense. A self-reinforcing interactional bias would foster in-group convergence and cooperation. The more you interact with some people rather than others in one domain, the greater the likelihood that you will interact with them even more in the future and in other domains as well: mating, war, economic cooperation, and so on. This reduces the energy, time, and risk involved in interacting with out-groups, which are more likely to contain potential enemies.

But essentializing has a historical downside: It biases interaction with out-groups toward enmity, increasing risk of conflict and injury. On balance, benefits may have outweighed costs in ancestral environments, when humans were all probably organized in competing but relatively small and isolated bands of nomadic hunters and gatherers. But in today’s rapidly interconnecting world, the survival value of exclusive social groups—armed with more destructive power than any Pleistocene relative could imagine—is not apparent.