What is with these people? The question nags more than usual these days, as news feeds push evidence of angry tribalism on an hourly basis. Racists march with tiki torches, Trump supporters wear T-shirts that damn the free press, trolls spread memes generated by the Pepe the Frog crowd. (A Facebook group I helplessly hate-read includes one member who, in response to even a guardedly approving comment about the Obama administration, leaps into action to post an image of Michelle Obama captioned “Man-chelle.”) This is humanity, but of what sort? Born of what? And what, if anything, does one do about it?
Pascal Boyer’s intriguing if sometimes maddening book, Minds Make Societies, is not explicitly a book about Trumpian tribalism. But because it is a book about the collective thinking that we’ve had a hard time getting our heads around lately — including that ugly tribalism — its message is worth attending to. Boyer, an anthropology professor at Washington University of St. Louis, introduces the book with a series of sticky-wicket questions that speak to our current predicament: “Why do people believe so many things that ain’t so?” “Why are people so interested in ethnic identity?” “Why are humans so uncooperative?” “Could society be just?”
Those are all good questions, though Boyer comes not to present a grand unified theory of mind intended to answer them decisively. Rather, his book is framed as a survey of recent scholarship about cognition, and in doing so often demands disrupting some of the familiar and seemingly intuitive lay ideas about sociology. A typical passage in the book is roughly structured as: You’re inclined to think that Y happens because of X, but in fact X isn’t what we traditionally thought X is, and it’s more likely that Z is a factor anyway. “Nature vs. nurture” arguments, for instance, don’t hold much water here: “It makes little sense to try to mention nature and nurture, as if those terms had a stable meaning,” he writes. “It makes even less sense to talk about human ‘culture’ as a real thing in the world.”
How should we think about humanity instead? Hint: The book’s section breaks are set off with an image of a gear.
What produces, say, Nazism? Rather than dwell on matters of theories of racism, social dominance, economics, upbringing, and propaganda, Boyer focuses instead on human cognition, which the research suggests habitually structures most collective interactions as a zero-sum game. Tribes, operating from a hard-wired perception of scare resources, are built to recruit people who support their goals — and preserve said resources. Those who are shut out must build their own tribes: “Any interaction that promises to deliver social support for some individuals will lead the others to form their own network, lest they remain without partners.” But recruitment demands repayment by means of reinforcement — proof that the members will keep contributing support and resources and not merely tag along as free riders. Tattoos and scars are one common, hard-to-erase means of reinforcement. But a willingness to spread virulent, demonizing rumors about an enemy works, too. “Rumors that precede ethnic riots often describe ‘us’ as facing a terrible and imminent threat,” he writes. “‘They’ might poison us all, kill all the children, burn down our houses.”
That need for social cohesion, Boyer writes, often outweighs moral appeals or simple facts. Our rationality ends when threats to survival — real or perceived — begin. “We should not assume that human minds are designed to acquire true information about their natural and social environments,” he writes of the “folk sociology” that groups tend to embrace. “Just because something is a fact does not mean that humans are equipped to find out about it.”
Moreover, much of this irrational activity happens without much active thought, and is done in service of restrictive or oppressive activities. The socialized oppression of women in agrarian societies, Boyer argues, such as mobs of men shaming women for adultery or other betrayals, is a way of protecting all men from such betrayal, a way of unconsciously signaling “I’ve got your back.” “The loud and public demonstration may be largely for the benefit of other men, as a demonstration of commitment.” Similarly, religions were generated not out of faith or even spiritual seeking but as ways for wealthy benefactors to signal their philanthropy. War, stereotyping, tribalism — Boyer finds that science is full of research says that these are not so much aberrant behaviors so much as elements of collective being that, for better or for worse, we’ve adapted for.
Well, at least that would provide a rationale behind the Man-chelle meme guy — the man has a tribe to serve, even if he doesn’t know it, even if he has a perverse way of showing it. But there’s the troubling feeling, reading Boyer, that cognitive science has progressed so far forward that it’s regressed into old-fashioned behaviorism, the feeling that we’re all just helpless cogs in Darwinian machines and free will is a sorry delusion. Boyer isn’t especially inclined to disagree. “For a long time, social scientists were horrified at the very notion of reduction, and they would clutch their pearls at the very thought of explaining social phenomena in terms of physiology, evolution, cognition, or ecology,” he writes. “But, in rejecting that form of reduction, social scientists were rejecting what is the common practice of most empirical scientists.” War, racism, cultism — it’s just science.
Nobody would deny that those are indeed substantial elements of human nature. What’s missing from Minds Make Societiesis a sense that humanity could educate or adapt its way out of its worst activities, rather than simply regress toward them. But if we are intelligent enough to comprehend these processes, we’re theoretically capable of addressing their worst outcomes. This isn’t an impossible goal: Societies have fought their way out of tribalism before, even without warfare. In his 2010 book, The Honor Code, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes of cases where ingrained social abuses that were perceived as social norms — dueling, foot-binding, slavery in the British Empire –were eradicated, largely without violence. Awareness and organization were key to that eradication, but Minds Make Societies suggests that awareness is a complicated business. Indeed, Boyer describes societies shaped largely out of “cognition blindness” — that is, where our mental leaps are so unconscious and multilayered that we’re unaware of their existence. But we are capable of thinking our way out of problems. Perhaps the cognitive scientists have sorted out how we’ve surmounted violent tribalism, but the evidence of that good work is not in Boyer’s book.
Absent that understanding, we clumsy humans can only hope we can identify our instincts early. In the sixth and final volume of his epic novel, My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard stumbles on a line of inquiry similar to Boyer’s — what was it about Nazism that was so seductive for Germany? How could it have fallen so hard for a patently evil brand of groupthink? Boyer might nod at the process Knausgaard lays out: “Jews were deprived of their name; in the name lay not only their identity, but also their humanity; they became ‘it’, bodies with limbs that could be counted, but not named. They became no one. Then they became nothing. All that was left when they were gone was ash.”
But Knausgaard resists finding any sense of fatedness in that action. “We need to be alert whenever events shape themselves into narratives,” he writes. “For narratives belong to literature and not to life, and occurrences of the past seep into and absorb expectations of the future, for the true present stands open and knows as yet no consequence.” If we’re evolved to embrace tribalism, Knausgaard suggests, we’re also evolved to learn our lesson. If we choose. And we can choose, can’t we?
[Published by Yale University Press on May 8, 2018. 359 pages, $30.00 hardcover]