12. Home bloody home
Where do we find home and who do we find it with?
The purpose of life, biologically speaking, is to survive long enough to procreate so we can send our genes into the next generation, hoping that our descendants will do the same. That means, according to many evolutionists, we’re self-centered, always looking out for Number One, simply because our genes made us this way.
So is my true home just myself?
Not so, because we share genes with kin. This makes family a priority, too. The more closely related we are to someone, the more genetic material we share with them, and therefore the more motivated we’ll be, so the argument goes, to support them and defend them and even sacrifice for them, with the expectation they’ll return the favor as needed. Taking care of your family, then, is a way of taking care of yourself. And this is reason enough to think of family as home.
Some evolutionists have gone so far as to turn family kinship into genetic math. You share half your genes with each of your parents, half with your children, one-quarter with your siblings, and one-eighth with your cousins. This means, for example, you will sacrifice more for your children than for your siblings. Exactly twice as much. J.B.S. Haldane, an early expert in population genetics, was supposedly asked if he would give his life for his brother and said no. But then joked that he would give his life for two brothers or eight cousins.
Pretty neat to be able to predict human behavior with elementary arithmetic. The control freak in me likes this a lot. But now we’re speaking in the language of genetic determinism, which is the idea that genes control human behavior in a simple, direct, and kind of dumbed-down way and nothing else is really worth considering. And that’s a problem because rigid determinism misses the key point about genes.
Matt Ridley makes this clear on the final page of The Agile Gene, where he says that genes “are the epitome of sensitivity, the means by which creatures can be flexible, the servants of experience.” Our genes are not rigid but responsive. They allow us to adapt to changes in our environment and to different environments.
It’s true that genes are basically conservative, and have to be, because if they changed willy-nilly, organisms would fall apart from lack of coherence and degenerate into random messes. But our genes provide enough flexibility to allow us to adapt in a measured way, and as a general principle, species which are better at adapting do better in the long run.
We humans have done a whole lot of adapting, and we long ago moved beyond the realm where simple genetic math could adequately explain our most important decisions. It puzzles me how genetic determinists can hang onto their ideology so stubbornly when even a few quick glimpses at the real world show us there’s another force—group identity—that often supersedes kinship in motivating human behavior.
For example, during our Civil War, there were families, particularly in border states like Kentucky, that were split in terms of their loyalty between the North and the South. So brothers fought against brothers. Under the rules of rigid kinship selection that’s not supposed to happen.
During the centuries leading up to that war, a slave owner in the South had the legal right to rape his female slaves. What if a woman he raped bore him a little boy? That child would be his own flesh and blood, so genetic determinism would say the father should welcome the boy into his home as his son. But according to the social mores of that time and place, this boy would be Black and inferior and therefore would have to be kept in bondage. The master would be obligated to put him to work in the fields, and punish him with the lash when he misbehaved.
If the master openly claimed this child as kin, the white community would consider him a threat to the social order and would turn against him and his family, which would be bad for the welfare of the children he had with his white wife.
Honor killing is another example. Take for instance, a teenage girl who is overpowered and violated by a neighbor. Even though she fights against the rapist so vigorously that she’s badly injured, her community declares her ruined. This makes her a source of dishonor to her family, so her father kills her, this once-cherished daughter who could have given him grandchildren and thus a genetic legacy. And he does this because otherwise his community might punish him and the rest of his family.
And before any country that doesn’t have honor killing gets too smug, let’s look at honor suppression. It’s not nearly as dramatic as killing kin, but much, much more widespread. It involves breaking the spirits of your children to make sure they fit into the community in which you live so they will not bring shame upon you and your family. Maybe you punish tenderness in your sons and boldness in your daughters. Or you demand that your children stay true to the religion of their birth even if they find it repressive. Or you restrict education so your kids won’t discover there are other ways of doing things and become rebels.
While family has always been undeniably important to us, throughout most of our history our group took precedence over family. Our group was our true home, both the small band we spent our days with, and the larger tribe we were embedded in and which we identified with. And there was a good reason for this. We needed our group to survive. A nuclear family could not make it on its own.
So along with being self-centered and family-centered, we’re group-centered.
But, crucially, we’re not species-centered.
Our groupish nature blocks us from that.
Investigating our group-centered way of life, especially the boundaries we keep between our groups, makes for a fascinating study, except the further into it we go the more depressing it becomes and the more it reveals the inevitability of our extinction.
Let’s look at a simple example of how the power of group identity can outstrip genetic kinship in shaping world history. It’s estimated that two billion people worldwide identify themselves as Christians, while only about fifteen million identify as Jews. How did this disparity happen given that Christianity is the child of Judaism?
Three thousand and some years ago, a tribal religion began turning into Judaism. Historians say the Israelites were originally a subgroup of the Canaanites and Yahweh was a Canaanite deity. But eventually the Israelites split off to become a separate ethnic group. Their identity was based on both their own special religion and on their kinship connections, which was typical for tribes during that period. But today, for many Jews, identity is based more on kinship than religion. For example, in Israel somewhere around forty percent of Jews are secular. They don’t follow the religious practices of their ancestors, but their Jewish lineage still matters to them very much.
Christianity is also tribal, but it’s belief-based rather than kin-based. This one fact has given Christianity a major growth advantage because it’s free to cross kinship and ethnic divisions to gather in anyone anywhere in the world.
A kin-based religion or tribe grows through procreation. Christianity, by contrast, grows through evangelism. In Matthew 28:19–20, Jesus instructed his disciples, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you….”
Jesus was not a family guy, he was a belief guy. In Matthew 10:37 he said, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” In Matthew 19:29, he said, “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.” And in Matthew 12:48, he asked, “Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?” Then he pointed to his disciples, and said, “Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. ”
Paul took this message of inclusion and spread the Gospel around the Mediterranean far beyond Palestine. In his letter to the Galatians, he said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
In a relatively short period of time, as people from other lands were included in the Christian movement, its Jewish origin faded into the background, until Jews were no longer counted as family. Christians did not say, “I worship a Jew as my Lord and Savior.” Jesus became in their minds a non-Jew. The historical Jesus, who certainly never once thought of himself as anything but Jewish, and who, from what we can tell, was only intending to renew Judaism, not start a new religion, was decisively set apart from, and eventually set against, his Jewish kin. Christianity became a new tribe of its own with Jews excluded. Then as the centuries rolled on, Christians became persecutors and murderers of Jews, the very people who had given birth to their religion.
And how can we tolerate this vicious divisiveness? Why don’t we humans embrace the differences between our groups instead? The answer’s in a suffix. We’re not just groupish, we’re groupist. And that little ist is ominous, because it doesn’t just mean difference, it means opposition—us versus them, group versus group—as if our lives depended on it, which historically they have. And this is why human togetherness has bloody boundaries.
Of course, along with our drive to oppose other groups, we have a talent for making alliances, and we make them eagerly when we believe they’ll benefit us in terms of survival and reproduction. Sometimes we merge with our allies to form a new and larger tribe on a permanent basis. Sometimes we join forces with others only temporarily in order to gain a particular advantage but with no underlying commitment to mutual loyalty. So the minute the initiating advantage disappears, the deal is off and we’re ready to go at each other again.
In World War II, we fought Germany in a brutal conflict. You might think we would have hated Germans for decades to come, maybe forever. But the minute the war was over we were suddenly much more scared of the Soviet Union. It had become our ally after Hitler attacked it in 1941, and it had done the major share of the fighting. It lost a staggering 27 million people compared to our 400,000, so we should have been grateful. But it had taken over significant territory in Europe and threatened to become our rival, which it did become. So we launched our next war, the Cold War, against the Soviets, and quickly became best friends with the Germans.
Tribal identity is a force to reckon with at all levels, from the immense scale of international politics down to the most trivial of situations. I remember going on a picnic years ago with a bunch of people from work. We decided to play a pickup game of touch football. The captains began choosing teams and the minute my name was called and I stepped into the small cluster on my side of the scrimmage line, an electric shock ran through me. This group was my team. Suddenly I was part of a shared identity, and it mattered to me very much that we maintain this sense of us by beating them. Mr. Cooperation was suddenly taken over by a competitive urgency. And this was a transformation based on chance selection by a couple guys, who in our low-key group, had to be talked into serving as captains. And where were we playing? At Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park, where I had listened to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane play free concerts on mellow Sunday afternoons, the place thronged by hundreds of hippies who were devotees of world peace.
I used to wonder why sports fans identify with professional teams with such avid intensity. It’s not like they have any responsibility for the actual performance of the team. They don’t get to call any plays, they don’t own a share of the franchise, they don’t get to choose the coach. For the most part, team loyalty is due to the happenstance of geography. It doesn’t take any special effort to belong. Just put on a jacket with your team’s logo and you’re in. But it doesn’t matter that your connection to your team is so superficial. Being a fan taps into an ancient tribal feeling that runs deep.
In his book Among the Thugs, Bill Buford tells about soccer fans in Europe who go to games in other countries looking to brawl with opposing fans. They engage in bloody fights in the streets following the official game. No matter how sodden with stupidity these battles are, the only thing that matters to the thugs is getting their tribal high.
Or think about the phrase, “one of our own,” how it shows up in TV police dramas where it takes on a sacred meaning. When one of your own has been killed, retaliation is what matters. Even if you didn’t like the fallen officer, even if the retaliation is way out of proportion, what matters is that you get your shot of tribal endorphins.
Groupist behavior is not just a human trait. Chimps evolved it, too. I remember reading In the Shadow of Manby Jane Goodall when it first came out in 1971. I was taken with her upbeat descriptions of the chimps she studied, and felt hopeful, thinking maybe there was something we could learn from them that would help us make a better world.
During the early period of Goodall’s fame, I volunteered to work at a conference she keynoted. Speaking along with her was Raymond Dart, who, in 1924, discovered Australopithecus africanus, which was a probable ancestor of ours from between two to three million years ago. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
My duties were super important. I stood off stage in the wings just out of public view where I turned a single knob on the main control panel to slowly dim the auditorium lights when it was time for slides to start and turned it slowly back up again when they were done. And there was one more thing. I was assigned to guard the projection booth at the top of the theater before the program started. So when Goodall brought up her slides before her presentation, I got to have a conversation with her.
“These are all in correct order.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Later when the projectionist showed up, I handed the slides off to him.
After her talk, I had to collect the slides from the projectionist and return them to Goodall at the table where she was having lunch. I politely interrupted her and said, “Excuse, me, ma’am, here are your slides,” and gave a little bow. She said, “Thank you.” I paused for two beats, hoping she would look up and say, “You seem like an earnest and respectful young man, why don’t you come over and work for me at Gombe?” But she was back into serious conversation with her peers so I did a fade.
Sometime later the news came out that at Gombe, Goodall’s colleagues had witnessed chimps killing other chimps. Not a random killing of strangers, but the methodical, systematic killing of kin. All of the chimps involved had originally belonged to a single group called the Kasakela community. At some point a little less than half of them split off and moved south, carving out a new territory of their own in the forest and forming what was called the Kahama community. So these formerly united chimps were suddenly living in two different groups and now there was a boundary between them and it became tribal and then bloody.
The northern males would go on patrol along the boundary and when they caught a southern chimp, male or female, out on its own, they would swarm it, hooting and freaking, and kill it. But to get bitten and beaten to death by a group of chimps is not a quick execution. You might suffer terribly for days following the attack before you finally succumbed to your injuries.
This assaultive behavior went on from 1974 to 1978, until the southern community was entirely gone. The victorious Kasakela troop then took over the Kahama territory, but only for a while. A larger troop further to the south, the Kalande community, drove them back out of most of the area which they had acquired by committing serial murder.
At the time, there was a flurry of reports in the media about the discovery of “warfare” among chimps. But what had happened with those chimps strikes me as worse than classic warfare. It was a relentless, merciless annihilation.
When I heard this story, I did another fade. I was so glad I hadn’t signed my life over to studying chimps. I wasn’t sure I even liked them anymore. Then I thought about Goodall, how she must be heartbroken that her lovely, friendly chimps, were capable of this kind of violence. She knew each of them by name, she knew their families and their histories. Suddenly I wanted to go over there to Gombe and shake the surviving chimps by their shoulders and shout at them, “Look at how she loves you and then you go and do this?”
How powerful a force is our groupist nature? Sometime around the year of 1162, a boy named Temüjin was born into a pastoral society out on the steppes of Asia. Life was not easy. Tribes raided each other to steal livestock and women. Temüjin’s mother was a kidnapped bride. His own wife, Börte, was kidnapped by a hostile tribe, and some months later, Temüjin mounted an attack to get her back, killing many of his enemies in the process.
Slavery was practiced in that territory. As a boy, Temüjin was captured, locked into a wooden brace, and held as a slave for months by an enemy tribe. He only escaped because someone took pity on him and freed him. Otherwise, we might never have come to hear his story.
Once he grew up, having experienced so much savagery, he set himself on a mission to change things. He engaged in relentless alliance building, gathering warring tribes together under his leadership, to bring peace to the region.
He proved himself to be a remarkably enlightened ruler. He outlawed the kidnapping of women. He put an end to raiding livestock. He put a stop to slavery. He set up trade routes, with protected rest stops every twenty-five miles. His region began to develop a prosperity that his people had never imagined before. He supported artists and craftsmen and made them tax exempt. He honored competence and promoted people on the basis of merit. He issued laws to guarantee religious freedom. His army grew to be one hundred thousand men, and he had the troops elect their own commanders, except at the highest levels where he appointed the top officers himself. One of his chief advisers for his entire adult life was his wife, Börte, who he treated with unfailing respect.
Ultimately, what did Temüjin accomplish? He created the largest contiguous land empire ever—twelve million square miles. He did what Christianity did. He built a supertribe that went far beyond kinship, unifying people with very different customs, languages, and histories. His rule extended from China through Mongolia and central Asia, to Persia, and even into Europe, where he claimed a part of Hungary.
So this was a great guy, far ahead of his time, a man with a good heart, right?
Not even close. As you’ve probably guessed by now, Temüjin grew up to become Genghis Khan, the terror of Asia, an astounding mass murderer. If your city or region submitted to him, if you let him incorporate you into his supertribe, no problem, you were treated well. But if you refused him, god help you. When he decided to enact punishment his edict was “no one eye left open to weep.” When he attacked Beijing, a thriving and cultured city of 350,000 at the time, he slaughtered every single person living there. Travelers reported that a year later the streets were still slippery with the grease of decaying human fat.
It didn’t matter if you were two thousand miles away from his headquarters, if your city or region rebelled and killed his representative, it was over for you. It would take weeks for word to get back to Genghis Khan. Then he’d set off with his army, traveling at a pace of twenty-five to forty miles a day, undaunted by the most inhospitable terrain or the harshest weather. So punishment would not be swift, but when it came it would be sure. There’s no accurate record of how many people he and his army killed but historians say it was many millions.
This great Khan of khans built his empire without an advanced degree in political science, public administration, or behavioral psychology. He used what he learned as a boy. He was a master of tribal fundamentalism. When he brought all those warring peoples together, he was not overthrowing tribalism, he was maximizing it. He created the largest undivided home territory in the history of the world, and it was bloody at its boundary in the extreme.
How important is our groupist nature? Is it just something we do? Or is it us? Is it so much us that it shows up in our genome? Does it go that deep? We know that kin selection is a real part of human evolution. Is there such a thing as group selection, too?
Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, says no. Harvard professor Steven Pinker, popular expert on language and human development, says no. Matt Ridley says no.
David Sloan Wilson, though, says yes. He’s not as famous as those other three, but he’s got me convinced. First, on an intuitive level. Our ability to cooperate in groups is so well developed and specialized and so critical to our success as a species, I don’t understand how it could not have become part of our genetic makeup. We Homo sapiens have been around long enough for that to have happened.
But of course scientists won’t settle for intuitive conviction. In Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, Wilson teams up with Elliott Sober to champion group selection. When we see people behaving altruistically toward strangers, these authors argue, the motivation for that behavior would have to come from something beyond genetic kinship. It would have to come from our experience living in groups. Behaving inclusively toward non-kin is a groupish thing to do.
As Wilson and Sober put it, “A behavior that superficially seems impossible to explain from the evolutionary perspective is in fact easy to explain, once we realize that natural selection operates at the group level as well as at the individual level.”
They continue, “There is selection among genes in the same individual, there is selection among individuals in the same group, and there is selection among groups in the same metapopulation.”
Then they say, “At the behavioral level, it is likely that much of what people have evolved to do is for the benefit of the group.”
And finally, “…we can conclude in general that social norms function largely (although not entirely) to make human groups function as adaptive units, even when their members are not closely related.”
Perhaps the main thing I appreciate about group selectionists is that they honor how complex we humans actually are. There’s so much more to us than kinship math can explain. I appreciate, too, that group selectionists are inclusive, whereas the strict kin selectionists are exclusive. Wilson and Sober are not saying that group selection is the only determinant of human behavior, nor are they saying that it is always the dominant determinant. They argue for “multi-level selection” or MLS. They say that we can make decisions based on our individual interests or the interests of kinship or the interests of our group, or a combination of two or three of those at once.
While MLS helps a lot in explaining human behavior after the fact, MLS means that predicting human behavior in advance is far more difficult than what strict kin selection would lead us to believe. And in mass society, human behavior gets especially complex because we can be members of many different groups at the same time, groups based on religion, race, gender, income level, political party, sexual preference, and so on. Then to make things even more complicated, the interests of those different groups might clash and we have to decide which of our groups we’re going to stand with as our primary commitment, at least for the moment.
Wilson and Sober have got me convinced that evolution has made our very operating system groupist. But I like to give the final, deciding vote to Darwin, who argued in favor of group selection in The Descent of Man:
It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.
Then Darwin concludes:
There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.
Why make such a big deal about group selection? Taken as a whole, the subject is a difficult study, so why make the effort? One reason is what group selection says about the impact of external threat.
Wilson and Sober explain that, “it is the competition between our groups that has supercharged our cooperation within our groups.” In other words, what increases internal cooperation within a group more than anything else is an increase in the external threat against that group.
So we live on a seesaw. The more threat our group is under the more cooperative we get inside our groups to defend ourselves. But the more safety, security, and ease we’re experiencing, the more we feel free to be competitive with each other within our groups. I call this the principle of together-against. And I find myself wishing again that human togetherness were a stand-alone. I hate that it’s so dependent on the againstness of competition.
Yet, could there be something hopeful in this? Here we are facing extinction, which is our biggest threat ever. Shouldn’t that wake us up, pull us together, and get us cooperating like never before? Isn’t that what group selection would predict? What’s the problem? Why isn’t that happening?
I think it’s because the threat of extinction is not a tribal threat. It’s not a human threat. Extinction is a thing. It’s a pattern of events. And we’re not designed to respond to this kind of objective danger with the subjective urgency we would if a neighboring tribe were poised to attack.
Sebastian Junger, in his book War, gives us a striking illustration of the together-against principle. From June 2007 through June 2008, Junger embedded himself with a platoon of twenty soldiers in a ramshackle outpost on the top of a mountain in Afghanistan. The post was named Restrepo after a beloved medic who was killed in action. The mountain was at the edge of the Korengal Valley, which was the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, and thus about the most dangerous posting in the US military. They might engage in as many as seven firefights in a single day. They could come under attack at any time without warning. The bullets traveled so fast you wouldn’t hear the crack of the enemy rifles or the snap of the round until after it had passed you by, or hit you.
So we’re talking about severe external threat. And what was the response of these guys? Rigorous cooperation. None of the business books I’ve read on team-building has ever come close to describing this level of team commitment.
These soldiers merged into a fierce togetherness: “There was no such thing as personal safety out there; what happened to you happened to everyone.” There was, as Junger describes it, a group discipline that you followed no matter what:
Margins were so small and errors potentially so catastrophic that every soldier had a kind of de facto authority to reprimand others—in some cases even officers. And because combat can hinge on the most absurd details, there was virtually nothing in a soldier’s daily routine that fell outside the group’s purview. Whether you tied your shoes or cleaned your weapon or drank enough water or secured your night vision gear were all matters of public concern and so were open to public scrutiny. Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened suddenly—and out there, everything happened suddenly—the guy with the loose laces couldn’t be counted on to keep to his feet at a crucial moment. It was the other man’s life he was risking, not just his own.
This level of discipline brought with it a kind of transcendence: “The attention to detail at a base like Restrepo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice; the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences.”
And Junger makes it clear how the intensity of the external threat was the key to the intensity of the soldiers’ internal cooperation:
Around me the men are eating MREs and talking about their plans in the military, about the troubles in Third Platoon, about how everything fell apart once the fighting stopped. Friends started arguing and a sour discontent crept through the company that was almost as threatening to their mission as the enemy. The lull was much harder on group dynamics than combat and caught everyone by surprise, even the commanders.
Junger says that under these demanding conditions you would give your life for a guy you didn’t even like personally. The Army knows that under fire, soldiers are fighting for their comrades way more than for their country. Maybe you’re not biological kin, but you’re virtual kin, you’re survival brothers.
Some of the guys told Junger they didn’t know how they could go home and fit back into conventional society after this deployment. Tough guys laugh at the word “bonding,” but these soldiers were experiencing bonding at a level they had never known before, not with family, not with anybody. And they might never have such intense relationships again for the rest of their lives. So when soldiers come home, Junger says, it’s not just PTSD that we need to attend to, but also the crash they suffer when they come down from the incomparable high of combat.
What’s the cure for the bloody nature of human togetherness? How about the Golden Rule? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That sounds good. Imagine if everyone followed it how sweet the world would be.
Except that can’t happen because there’s a fundamental problem with this rule. It comes down to us from tribal times. In the context of the Bible, the Rule reads: Do unto others (within your tribe) as you would have them do unto you.
Other exhortations are similar in what’s understood but not stated: Love your neighbor (within your tribe) as yourself. Thou shalt not kill (within your tribe.)
I call this the tribal parentheses. The purpose of the Golden Rule was to keep peace within the tribe and to strengthen internal cooperation so the tribe would be better prepared to handle external threats. The Golden Rule did not transcend the bloody boundary between tribes because outside the boundary this rule did not apply.
George W. Bush made a big deal about being a born-again Christian when he was running for president. So when he took our country into the Iraq War, there were protestors who attacked him, saying things like: “You claim to be a Christian, so you should follow the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But troops under your command are killing hundreds of thousands of people, including women, children, and old people. How can you justify that in light of your professed faith? You’re a hypocrite!”
It always seemed to me that Bush was dumbfounded by that charge. He did not see himself as a hypocrite, and he was right. He had a much better understanding of the Bible than the protestors did. Killing an enemy is—in the tribal context—perfectly moral. The Golden Rule has an evil twin, the Bloody Rule, which says, “Kill outsiders whenever necessary to protect your own.” Given that fundamentalist Christians absolutely do not want to include fundamentalist Muslims in the Golden Rule and vice versa, how is this rule supposed to save us?
I remember a Sunday morning in church when I was a teenager and bored with the sermon. I started looking around at the congregation and fell into a reverie: Oh. I see how this works. Our sins are not sins. We’re Presbyterians and we’re God’s favorites. If we make a mistake and do wrong, we’re forgiven, because we’re members of this church, the right church. Methodists and Lutherans are pretty close to us, so maybe they can be forgiven sometimes. But Catholics, well, they’re so different from us what with crossing themselves and their incense and their cannibalistic communion, how can their misdeeds ever be forgiven? And Jews, they’re so far beyond different that we don’t need to think about them at all.
I had never heard anyone in my church say such things out loud, but tribal antagonism was clearly present under the surface.
The Golden Rule of the Bible was forged with tribal lead. It does not oppose tribalism, it belongs to tribalism. So it’s evolution’s rule.
Jesus was broadly inclusive, but still he had a boundary. Anyone on the other side of the line he drew, he condemned. For example, in Mark 16:16 he said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”
And if that’s not scary enough, he made the fate of outsiders more explicit in Matthew 13: 49–50, where he said: “So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
I don’t remember reading a single passage in the New Testament that says if you put love at the center of your life, if you’re committed to compassion and the welfare of others, if you perform good deeds diligently and daily, you will be saved even if you don’t become a confessed believer in Christ.
The Gospel makes clear that it’s not enough to live by love. You have to be an official member of Christ’s tribe. And in our time, the fundamentalists who claim to be the only true Christians, are using Christianity as a label for their tribal identity rather than as a commitment to a loving way of life. So someone who actually lives Christ’s message of compassion, but does not swear loyalty to Christ is lost, while someone who does evil, as long as he has taken the oath of fealty, will be saved.
Jesus was a tribal guy not a kinship guy. Except, he was not just a tribal guy. He was complicated and contradictory. We see this in the familiar story from the Bible which starts when a lawyer challenges Jesus with the question, “And who is my neighbor?”
And Jesus answering said, “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
“And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
“And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
“But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
“And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
“And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.”
Then Jesus asked the lawyer, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?”
The lawyer replied, “He that shewed mercy on him.”
And Jesus said, “Go, and do thou likewise.”
Samaritans, being a different people, were reviled by the Jews of that time. They were not considered neighbors in the sense of being insiders or included under the umbrella of tribal protection.
So Jesus in that moment wasn’t telling a cute story extolling a random act of kindness. He was taking a radical trans-tribal stand. I wish I could have been there to see the reactions of his listeners, a very tribal people. How shocked were they to hear him say they should extend their love and care to people from other tribes? How hard was it for them to accept this teaching?
How hard is it still today? In our common parlance, the phrase “good Samaritan” has come to mean a stranger who helps you out. It’s lost the original meaning of coming to the aid of someone who by virtue of being on the other side of a tribal divide is your enemy. And that’s a profound loss. Because this story, it seems to me, of all the stories in the tribal Bible, is the one that’s most different, and most subversive, and the one we’d most need to follow if we really wanted to get serious about saving ourselves.
Sometimes I like to imagine that the real Jesus, in his heart of hearts, was trans-tribal, and that none of those verses where he damns people were really his own words but were slipped in later on by his chroniclers who were not as enlightened as he was and dragged his gospel back down into the tribal mud. Or if it was true that, having grown up in a tribal culture, Jesus did condemn nonbelievers and meant it, then I would hope that as he grew older, had he not been crucified, he would have become more and more trans-tribal, maturing his gospel until it became one of pure nurturance transcending boundaries.
The story of the Good Samaritan makes me look again at the Golden Rule, and what I see now is how so very many people want that rule to be trans-tribal. And in wanting this, they’re breaking with kin selection and group selection both.
How did we become capable of such evolutionary blasphemy? I have no proof, but here’s my guess. When evolution gave us social cooperation, it was just giving us a tool to enhance competition. But as we developed our skill with this tool, we got to know it intimately. Of course, we appreciated the competitive advantage it gave us, but then something more happened. We fell in love with cooperation just for itself. And wanted to make it our home.
Is this just a fluke? Evolution certainly didn’t intend for this to happen. Maybe it’s something sweeter. Maybe this is the mischief of grace.
