14. Fictional species
Tribal stories are the nuclear power of the human psyche. They’re gripping, momentous—and deadly.
But in the beginning, before we had those stories, we had gossip, and it was good. We talked endlessly about each other and this gift of gab is what first gave us the ability to weave ourselves into stable, enduring groups.
Gossip was a big step up from the kind of bonding chimps do. I once got to spend an hour with a young chimp named Pancho. He lived with his trainer, a fourteen-year-old boy named Ty, at Coarsegold in the Sierra foothills. I went up there to see the brand-new zoo outside of town where they put the people in mobile cages and drove them through three large animal enclosures. The lazy lions ignored us but the hyper monkeys thought our cage was a big toy and climbed all over it. After my drive-through, I was wandering around the open area when I ran into Pancho panhandling for a Sno-Cone in front of the snack bar. I would have been happy to buy him one, but Ty said he’d had his quota of sugar for the day, so we sat down on a log for a bit of chimpanzee talk in the form of a hands-on grooming session. I started picking through the hair on Pancho’s arms searching for bugs. I cleared away dried leaf fragments, found a tiny crawling insect and terminated it, and was congratulating myself on my skill set, when I happened to glance up at Pancho. There was a look of bliss on his face.
When I finished my scan of his body and was done grooming him, he was eager to return the favor but he found me disappointing. I wasn’t nearly as hairy as he was and I was mostly covered by my shirt and pants. He went through the hair on my head in detail. I’m glad to say I wasn’t buggy. Next, he noticed a bit of sleep in the corner of my right eye, and with Ty saying, “Carefully, carefully,” he flicked it out with his heavy-duty fingernail. Then having done all he could do, he started begging me for a Sno-Cone.
It was a sweet, sweet time. I still get a shiver thinking of it.
And that bliss? I’d seen it before. In humans engaged in gossip. Humans I myself was engaged in gossip with. And if there had been a mirror handy I might have seen that bliss on my own face.
Why is gossip so potent? Because during our early days, as Robin Dunbar says in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, it was simply our most important instrument of togetherness. And that makes sense. How could human society ever have developed without gossip? If way back when, we had all taken a vow of silence like monks in a monastery we couldn’t have advanced like we did. We were social animals living in a social web, so we needed every bit of social information we could get our hands on to help us make smart decisions about who to trust and who to watch out for. We talked about our neighbors and our relationships constantly so we’d know where we stood in our tribe and so we could pull our tribe together in cooperative projects. Gossip in this context is not a flighty waste of time, it’s serious survival business.
Dunbar says gossip played a key role in the evolution of the size of human groups. With grooming, because it’s hands-on, usually you only have one chimp grooming one other chimp. Sometimes there might be two on one. But with language, with gossip, you can have four, five, six, or many more humans involved in simultaneous bonding.
Dunbar says that while chimps may search for food solo or in very small groups, they identify with a community of forty to fifty. But humans, in our hunter-gatherer days, while we lived in bands of around thirty or so, identified as part of a larger clan of about 150, maybe up to 200. It was language, in the form of gossip, that allowed us that increase in size through our larger-scale bonding ability. And what was the value of that increase? More eyes on the lookout for predators, more people pooling their experience and wisdom to help the group stay strong, and more of us to defend the group in case of an attack.
What’s interesting about 150, now called the “Dunbar number,” is that, according to Dunbar, it’s more or less the largest number of people you can know in any personal way. It’s the largest number where you can know key things about the relationships of those people with each other. It’s the boundary of your core gossip realm. Beyond the level of the clan you might have a tribe of 1,500 to 2,500 individuals or more who spoke the same language as you, and you might be able to recognize many of them, but you wouldn’t necessarily know much about what kind of person they were or exactly how they fit into the overall scheme of the tribe.
Gossip allowed us to live in bigger groups, yet, crucially, it set an upper limit to the size of those groups. A limit we massively surpass in modern society, which is why we can’t make fierce egalitarianism work anymore.
Dunbar says he believes that language, which has been fundamental to our success, evolved because it supported and improved our gossip habit. Eventually, though, we learned how to go beyond snatches of gossip and started telling longer-form stories, taking our listeners from inciting incidents through a series of conflicts into a satisfying resolution. We learned how to work with character arc: “He was a rowdy and unruly child, but we took him in hand and over time he became one of our best hunters and a credit to the tribe.” These stories, recounting the lives of real people, taught moral lessons and thus improved the quality and resilience of our relationships.
But then at some point we took the fateful step beyond talking about real people and actual events. We began to make stuff up. That’s when we became a fictional species, or rather the fictional species, since we’re the only one.
And we used this ability to make a major advance in social bonding. We invented stories about made-up people, and this storytelling helped us imagine our way into the hearts and minds of others. As we deepened our empathy for fictional people, we deepened our ability to care about real people. This made our relationships richer and more robust. It made us more committed to each other, and it strengthened our group when we had to fight our enemies.
But empathy could be dangerous. What if we tuned in too deeply to the needs, wants, feelings, and fears of people from other tribes? What if we saw ourselves reflected in them? What if we wanted to include those folks in our circle of care and concern? That could put our tribal way of life in jeopardy, because tribalism demands fierce boundaries. We have to be prepared to kill outsiders as necessary. If we dissolved our tribal boundaries and turned ourselves into a jellylike global mass of trans-tribal humans, we’d have no idea how to make such a society work, so we’d be putting ourselves out of business.
From evolution’s point of view, the only value of empathic spillover into other tribes is for times when we want to build an alliance with another tribe to benefit ourselves. But even then we can’t allow ourselves to get too free with our empathy, because we need to be able to switch back to attack in an instant when the alliance is no longer working for us.
So as we ramped up empathy, we had to ramp up antipathy. As we increased our powers of internal togetherness, we also had to increase our powers of external againstness in equal measure. We used our fictional ability not just to pull our own tribe together, but to set it apart from other tribes. For example, by creating customs no one else had, or inventing a flattering origin story just for our tribe, or dreaming up a superhero ancestor to increase tribal pride, or devising a god of our own who chose our tribe as his favorite.
We kept developing the story of our tribe until it was no longer just a tale told around the campfire at night. It became so encompassing we could actually live inside it. It became our world. It made us feel very deeply held, much more so than any chimpanzee has ever felt in its troop.
So now we lived in two realities at once. Our social reality was the glue that held our tribe together, but we needed it to work in partnership with real reality. It didn’t matter if our origin stories were fantastical or if the gods we made up were bizarre, it didn’t matter how crazy we got around the edges, as long as we could manage to stay in touch with real reality enough to practice our core discipline of survival, then we were okay.
But what if a tribe allowed fiction to invade that core and corrupt it? What if people got the idea into their heads that nutritious roots and berries were invented by the devil and should be shunned, or that poisonous plants had magic powers and were good to eat? That tribe would be gone overnight. What if elders started teaching children unreal lessons? What if they threw away their fire-starting tools, their bows and drills, and taught that fire could only be started with a mystical incantation and only when the gods were happy with us? That tribe would regress into the rigors of a pre-fire life. And once you deleted that hard-won knowledge from group memory, it might take generations for the group to rediscover how to tame fire, if they ever did.
Once we got good at establishing our own identity in contrast to the identities of other tribes, we turned that contrast into a value judgment. Now we weren’t just different, we were better. We turned us into good people and them into bad people, even though we were really all just basic humans running on the same operating system. But when we imagined that we were better than everyone else, we felt more deserving, which gave us a big ego boost and made us feel more motivated to fight for our tribe.
Edward Evans-Pritchard, a British anthropologist, described this dynamic in a comment he made about the Nuer people he studied in the southern part of Sudan in 1930: “That each Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbor is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which indeed they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society but only equals who consider themselves God’s noblest creation. Their respect for one another contrasts with their contempt for all other peoples.”
From value judgments, we went on to take the next big step in the arms race of tribal stories. We invented sacredness. We decided we weren’t just better, we were holy. We weren’t just good people, we were demigods. Our enemies weren’t just bad people, they were demons.
And just that quickly we opened the door to unrestrained slaughter. We were now prepared to go nuclear on each other, because if our enemies were less than us, if they were actually less than human, and worse, if they were dangerously demonic, that made them an existential threat, and so if we engaged in no-limit violence against them, even pre-emptively, that counted as righteous action.
In the very moment we turned our enemies into imagined demons, we turned ourselves demonic for real.
As bloody as our tribal way of life has been, if we focus only on the quantitative bottom line, namely the total number of humans populating the earth, it’s been a grand success. But our numbers have not just soared, they’ve mushroomed out of control, changing the rules of the game we’re in. Actually reversing the rules. What we’ve done in the past is exactly the wrong thing to do going forward. From now on, we need to identify with our species first, not our tribe. We need to be trans-tribal. That’s what we need, but what have we got?
Paranoia.
It’s inherent in our tribalism. If we believe that only the people in our own tribe are trustworthy, that means every other person in every other tribe is to be feared. This was bad enough in our hunter-gatherer days, when our worlds were smaller and we were only in contact with a limited number of other tribes. But now we’re in contact with a global population of billions. If, apart from our own group, however we define that, everybody else on the face of the earth is our enemy, either currently or potentially in the future, that’s a whole hell of a lot of people. And if enemies and possible enemies make up the great, great majority of our species, why would we fight to save it?
We need to flip our script and take a revolutionary leap forward and become species-oriented. But instead, what’s the strategy we’re following?
Regression.
When we feel threatened, our first impulse is to retreat even deeper into our tribal fiction, because it feels like security, it feels like home. The idea of a trans-tribal society is a pale, intellectual vision, while tribalism is a vivid, visceral compulsion rooted deep in our genes. Which means we’ll never fight for our species in the same fiercely instinctive way we fight for our tribes.
And regression answers the puzzle of why large numbers of people are able to vote eagerly against their own best interests. And why they’ll stick with a political leader who pushes policies that make them poorer and make their lives harder. And why they remain desperately loyal to leaders who hurt them. It’s not stupidity. There’s a simple rule at play: When you get scared, go more tribal. Obey the ancient drive to belong no matter what you have to sacrifice to do that.
So we’re set up for defeat. And by what?
A paradox.
Belonging to our tribe is more important to us than survival, because for most of our history, tribal belonging has been the first requirement for survival.
What feels best to us is now what’s worst for us. If we indulge ourselves in unrestrained tribalism, which is built into our DNA, and which has been the key to our survival, our species will die—and every last one of our tribes with it.
The pain of facing extinction is too much for most people, so it’s no wonder our mass societies are slipping their moorings from real reality to an astonishing degree. Our tribal psyches, despite the hopeful brilliance of our big brains, are quite capable of trapping us inside a dumbed-down, dangerously explosive, self-defeating fiction. Our psyches are capable of walling us off from the truth, and doing so with the kind of denial that’s so adamantine it can withstand pretty much any attempt by anybody to break through.
And maybe it feels like we’ve only recently made a sudden shift into a post-fact era, but our tribes have been living inside fictions for millennia. And it’s long been the case in human society that a lie counts as the truth if we need it to make our tribal story work. It doesn’t matter if we know we’re telling ourselves a lie. It doesn’t matter if our whole story is a lie. It doesn’t matter if that story is self-destructive. If we believe we need it, if we believe it to be our salvation, we’ll grab it and hold onto it, ardently, doggedly, grimly, until it kills us.
And so it’s come to this: Our tribal stories now have the power to incinerate our species—a species we all belong to but have never really bonded with.
