This new interpretation meant that by nature, today’s hunter-gatherers were prone to try to dominate one another, just like the three species of living apes—and therefore so were the common ancestor and humans all down the evolutionary line. In fact, because this urge to dominate is so intrinsic to humans’ political nature, hunter-gatherers who wish to stay egalitarian have to use not only ostracism and shaming but also ejection from the group and sometimes even capital punishment to hold down power-hungry political upstarts. We must ask, then, why a species so inclined to domination has been motivated to insist that power be shared so equally. And here, I believe, is the answer: Just as all four of the aforementioned species have strong propensities to domination and submission, so do they also naturally resent being dominated.
This is obvious enough in a human hunting band, where upstarts who attempt to dominate others are dealt with so harshly. But it’s also obvious with chimpanzees that have been studied extensively. Both wild and captive males are extremely ambitious politically, and they invariably form political coalitions to try to unseat the alpha male. More striking is the fact that large coalitions can form in the wild to challenge domineering former alphas and run them out of the community. Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal’s studies with captive chimpanzees show that females, too, can band together to partially control their alphas. Captive gorillas, like wild and captive chimpanzees, may attack a dominant silverback they don’t like. And bonobos have relatively small female coalitions that routinely raise the power of female subordinates to a degree that puts females virtually on a par with the individually dominant males in competitive situations.
Because such rebellious behavior is found in all four primate species, the roots of this behavior appear to stretch back at least 7 million years. The common ancestor not only disliked being dominated; it ganged up actively in coalitions to cut down the power of its alphas or would-be alphas. And once we recognize that humans throughout prehistory have had to cope with this tension between attraction to power and desire for social parity, it’s much easier to see why power has always posed such a problem for our species—and why there can be such variety in human expressions of power today.
Nations are so large that it takes considerable concentration of power at the political center just to make them run, and they come, basically, in two brands. At one extreme is a centralized, autocratic government that has so much military or police power that it can impose degrees of political control beyond a chimpanzee alpha male’s wildest dreams. Typically, people ruled in this way—whether in the former Soviet Union or contemporary Iran—are highly ambivalent about the authority above them.
As a practical matter we may, of course, see benefits in having a strong, highly powerful figure govern us, especially when our groups become large and unwieldy. And if those in power are both generous and sensitive to people’s natural inclinations to dislike being dominated, even a strong dictatorship may be popularly accepted as “benign.” The problem with this unguarded approach is that the next strong leader to come along may be a selfish individual with despotic tendencies.
At the other extreme is our American democracy, in which people realize they need to be governed by a central authority but are determined to keep their leaders from accumulating power beyond what is necessary to keep the nation functioning. The basic assumption about human nature is that leaders will just naturally want to aggrandize their power. That’s why all democracies write checks and balances into their constitutions, which curb the power of leaders and guarantee rights to citizens. Democratic nations are never as egalitarian as hunting bands, yet the political dynamics are similar. For instance, just as an arrogant hunter can be deposed as band leader, Richard Nixon’s abuse of power led to his being forced to resign from office.
I do not mean to oversimplify the picture. As psychiatrist Erich Fromm has claimed, people may sometimes appreciate a powerful and even ruthlessly despotic leader. And long before Hitler came to power, sociologist Max Weber argued that people may submit their autonomy to an especially charismatic leader. (Think not only of Hitler but of the revered Japanese emperor Hirohito, a figure like Lenin, and perhaps, to a lesser degree, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.) But of course, many despots are without charisma and use bald coercive force to dominate resentful populations. In such situations, change may come either through violent revolution or, often enough, by historical evolution when a tyrant like Stalin dies.
For the most part, though, human history has rebuffed the claims of those political thinkers, most notably Thomas Hobbes, who have assumed that strong, authoritarian leadership is required to rule our inherently unruly species. Humans became both anatomically and culturally modern at least 45,000 years ago, and it’s a safe bet that the main political behavior we see today in foraging bands—their uniform insistence on keeping their political life reasonably egalitarian—goes even further back than that.
In effect, these egalitarian bands did something very special about the problem of power. They arrived at a largely implicit “social contract,” by which each political actor conceded his or her personal pursuit of dominance in order to remain at political parity with his or her peers. In doing so, hunter-gatherers were able to cooperate effectively because their societies were so small. Similarly, a large national democracy can do its best to vigilantly limit power and uphold civil rights. But just like a hunting band, it must watch carefully for would-be dictators in order to preemptively curb their power if need be and stand up to them decisively if they do get the bit in their teeth.
This theory about our political evolution helps us understand why we are so often ambivalent about power. Our genetic nature makes both its abuse and our counterreactions equally likely. And if these counterreactions don’t come strongly enough and in a timely fashion, this may bode badly for a nation’s citizens, subjecting them to harsh restrictions of their pursuits of liberty and happiness. Indeed, if that nation happens to be a world superpower, this can have disastrous consequences for an entire world of nations.
THE FORGIVENESS INSTINCT
Michael E. McCullough
EARLY ON THE MORNING of October 26, 2001, 25-year-old Chante Mallard was driving home along Interstate 820, just southeast of Fort Worth, Texas, after a long night of partying. Fatigue, combined with the many substances in her bloodstream—alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy—had impaired her judgment and slowed her reaction time. As she rounded the horseshoe-shaped curve to merge onto Route 287, Mallard drove her car straight into a man who had been walking along the dark highway. Gregory Biggs, 37 years old, was catapulted onto the hood of Mallard’s car. His head and upper body went crashing through the windshield and landed on the passenger-side floorboard. His legs remained trapped inside the windshield.
With all of the drugs and the noise and the broken glass, Mallard was so disoriented at first that she didn’t even know that a human being was stuck in her windshield. When she realized what had happened, she stopped the car, got out, and went around to try and help. But as soon as she touched Biggs’s leg, she panicked. In her drug-addled state, she couldn’t figure out what to do next. So with Biggs still immobilized in the windshield, she drove the final mile back to her house, pulled into the garage, and closed the garage door behind her. Mallard let Biggs bleed to death right there in the garage. Over and over, Biggs begged Mallard to help him, but Mallard, a nurse’s aide, insisted there was nothing she could do for him. So she left him to die. Medical examiners would later testify that Biggs would surely have survived the crash had he received prompt medical attention.