Darwin’s genius was to describe the patterns of behavior we see today—patterns of affection, submissiveness, laughter, and smiling—and to trace those fleeting but precise, efficient, designed behaviors back in evolutionary time to their deeper roots, to the survival and reproduction-related contexts in which they arose. This kind of evolutionary analysis has revealed that the earliest primate smile is a submissive display subordinates use when nearing dominant primates, and fearing a jugular-threatening attack or the forceful backhand of a hairy arm. If this was the end of our search for the origins of the smile, we would be confronting the following conclusion: that the smile has its origins in the attempt to short-circuit threat, that the smile emerges out of a tremulous anxiety about being destroyed, that it is based in the most powerful strategy weaker individuals can resort to—submissiveness. Happiness, by implication, is simply the by-product of our attempts to navigate threats to our existence.
Let’s call this thesis the Woody Allen hypothesis, thanks to his characterization of the intertwinement of suffering, happiness, and love so central to his brilliant movies, captured in the quote below:
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
Of course, Woody Allen works this thesis to hilarious effect in his comedy. I’ll line up with his most impassioned fans to see his latest comedy the first night of release to laugh at the absurdity of human happiness, love, and neurotic suffering. The Woody Allen hypothesis might seem solely the provenance of his comedic imagination, but in actuality this hypothesis—that anxiety and dread lie at the core of human happiness—is a long-standing assumption in the West about the elemental ingredients, the basic molecules, of happiness. This view holds that at the core of our experience of positive emotions are threat and anxiety; our positive emotions are layered on top of, emerge out of, are antidotes to, negative emotions like despair, fear, and anger.
For example, Silvan Tomkins, who helped forge the scientific study of emotion in the early 1960s, argued that positive emotions evident in smiles and laughs emerge with the cessation of negative states, such as anger and fear. As one example, laughter and our sense of amusement emerge out of the termination of anger. Someone angers you, your heart rate rises and your muscles tense, you’re ready to throw a punch, and then in an instant, it’s over, and you are suffused with a feeling of levity and amusement, the antimatter of anger.
One can push this reasoning back further, to earlier intellectual predecessors with farther reach. For Freud, many pleasurable experiences, flights of the imagination—the creation of fiction, unnervingly insightful dreams, or uplifting, perspective-altering jokes—as well as many acts of altruism are really mechanisms that fight off basic human anxieties about our inappropriate sexual urges, or unacceptable inclinations toward aggression and destruction. You write an uplifting piece of fiction or give left-over food to a panhandler: The motive driving those acts is the reduction of neurotic anxiety.
One can forgive Freud these notions in light of the Victorian culture that surrounded him and which was the fertile ground of his theorizing. One finds the Woody Allen thesis in more recent scientific inquiry. Terror management theory, a widely influential theory in social psychology, holds that many noble acts—intellectual creativity, philosophical and spiritual traditions, participation in old cultural forms like collective celebrations or our devotion to artistic and political groups—arise out of an anxiety about our inevitable demise, for these acts convince us of the possibility that we live beyond our own physical death. It is assumed in the study of parent-child attachment that the fundamental emotion that drives attachment processes between parents and children, friends and intimates, is anxiety. It is the dread of being abandoned to the perils of solitude that prompts infant smiles, coos, squeaks, and giggles, which bring parents near, and the touch and intimate, idiosyncratic nicknames and voices of romantic partners.
The Woody Allen hypothesis has deep roots in Judeo-Christian thought about original sin and the fall from grace. Within this framework, human nature is evil, sinful, and decaying. True happiness arises not in the present life but in the escape from the body and its corruptions. Happiness is found in a spiritual state freed from the sins of the flesh, in the afterlife—in communion with God. Happiness arises in the abandonment of the present moment, and when we are free of our earthly desires. In terms more friendly to psychological science: Happiness is to be found only in the quiescence of negative states like greed, anxiety, and anger.
As we conclude our search back in time for a precise understanding of the evolution of that most common of facial displays—the smile—we encounter a different view of the roots of happiness. We have one question left to answer: How did the first primate smile, the silent bared-teeth display, so intertwined with submissiveness, evolve into the Duchenne smile, our display of happiness? We return to Signe Preuschoft’s subtle observations, which help illuminate how the smile was freed from anxiety and defense and became the display it is today.
Specifically, Preuschoft finds that in more hierarchical macaques, such as the rhesus macaque, there is a narrow use of the silent bared-teeth and relaxed open-mouth display. The silent bared-teeth display—the predecessor to our smile—is used only as an appeasement display. In these status-conscious monkeys, the smile is intertwined with anxiety and defense.
There are more egalitarian macaque species, however, such as the Tonkean macaque. In these macaques, hierarchies are flatter and power is equally distributed. This social condition more closely resembles the hierarchies observed in our hominid predecessors and contemporary hunter-gatherers—power differences are reduced, and equality is more pronounced. In egalitarian primates, food sharing is pervasive, alliances among subordinates are common, and social life consists more of negotiation than assertion of force. Preuschoft has found that in less stratified macaques, monkeys put the silent bared-teeth display to many new uses: to reassure, to affiliate, and to reconcile, as well as to appease. This is a standard evolutionary principle—that adaptations such as the silent bared-teeth display are put to new uses in a broader array of contexts to respond adaptively to shifting selection pressures. With the rise of primate equality, the silent bared-teeth display became freed from its one-to-one mapping to fear and submissiveness, and was extended into new social contexts that promote affectionate cooperation and affiliation. This display became a sign of friendly intent, and the trigger of behavioral processes that allow for close proximity and cooperation—grooming, embraces, hand clasping, and the like. In egalitarian primates, the silent bared-teeth display folded into affiliative, pleasurable exchanges.
The physical signature of human happiness is the D smile. The D smile did not originate in contexts that we today think are fast tracks to happiness. The D smile did not originate in experiences of sensory pleasure—Cro-Magnon individuals savoring fresh meat or the ripest of berries. It did not originate in contexts where our hominid predecessors enjoyed shifts upward in social status. The first D smile did not originate in contexts in which one individual enjoyed the accumulation of important resources. In fact, Christopher Boehm has summarized studies of hunter-gatherer hierarchies, and found that they systematically downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity.