1107 human sociality
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Human Sociality
from Richard Ostrofsky
of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed)www.secthoughts.com
July-August, 2011
Last month I wrote about modern knowledge as an assault on traditional
and common-sense thinking. "Most disturbing of all . . . ," I wrote, "are thefindings of neuropsychology. Cartesian dualism is dead. We are not
conscious, more-or-less rational minds, made in the image of God . . .
Rather, our minds, our consciousness, our whole sense of what we are, is
a construct of the workings of our primate brains." Largely unconscious,as I should have added. Now I want to expand on that point a little,
especially as it bears on the problem of human sociality our "unsocial
sociability," in Kant's famous comment. Accepting that our line divergedabout 6 million years ago from that of the chimpanzees, and evolved a
very different body, brain and lifestyle since that time, what kind of
animals are we now? How does human sociality work?We are social animals in fact, ultra-social ones as anthropologists
now say but not in any of the ways that ants and sheep and wolves are
social. Though capable of almost robotic cooperation like the ants, of
herding behavior and contagion of emotion like sheep or cattle, of hunting
and fighting in packs like wolves, of status seeking and competition formates like very many species, we are capable too of a stubborn
individualism that sometimes sets us outside of, or against the groups weform. Collectively, communally, we build up our physical and cognitive
environment to a complexity no other animal can match; and by such
means, we dominate the planet for the time being, at any rate.Many features of human sociality are obvious to everyone: our gift for
symbolic representation and virtuosity at communication and language;
our knack not just for the use of tools, but for their manufacture anddesign; the protracted juvenile phase, and post-reproductive phase of a
human lifespan, allowing time for cultural learning and teaching. Other
features are subtler only recently noticed and studied by psychologists,anthropologists and other students of human biology the palette ofphysiological affects (as they are called) that recombine into the more
familiar emotions; the crucial role of shame affect and emotion in human
sociality; the innate moral sensibilities (studied by Jonathan Haidt), thephenomena of groupthink (studied by Irving Janis), etc.
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All our hominid cousins (orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees) are
curious, imitative and social animals. Yet in human biology, these traits
have taken a remarkable turn. While other hominids camouflage thedirection of their interest by ringing the pupil of the eye with a dark
pigment, we 'telegraph' our attention by ringing the pupil with a coloured
iris on a white background, to make a sign easily followed by others. Wepoint at the things that interest us not just with our index fingers, but with
our gaze.
All our hominid and simian cousins are imitative creatures. ("Monkeysee, monkey do," is proverbial.) But a chimp's imitation (for example) is
highly concrete and situational. As Michael Tomasello has pointed out, the
12 or 13 month old child already imitates at a level that is not observed in
chimps at any age, nor in any other non-human creature. Our babies seemto copy not just a behavior itself, but the attitude and intention behind that
behavior. They imitate in a triangular pattern known as 'joint engagement,'
looking back and forth between the person they are engaged with and an
object of that person's attention. They follow finger-pointing and eagerlypoint themselves. They follow the glance of others with their own.
As the African proverb says, "It takes a village to raise a child." Unlikethe chimpanzees and every other known mammal, we pass our babies
around to family and friends to be admired and cooed at by them, and
initiated as social creatures in the process. Women in hunting-and-
gathering tribes commonly suckle each other's babies. Nearly all culturesorganize groups of children under non-parental adults for advanced
socialization and training.
Alan Fiske has argued that humans in all cultures use just fourfundamental models, often in combination, to organize most aspects of our
sociality: Three of them Community Sharing, Hierarchical Ranking, and
Market Pricing are self-explanatory. In Equality Matching relationships(the fourth model) people keep track of a balance or difference amongst
the players, restoring the balance as required. Common examples include
turn-taking, equal-share distribution of food, and all tit-for-tat reciprocityfrom baby-sitting pools to blood feuds. To Fiske's four I would suggest
adding Open Conflict as the default pattern of our social behavior, when
nothing better can be arranged.
Though the idea is not scientifically respectable as yet, many have feltand I would argue that human groups and organizations actually have
composite minds (of a sort) that strongly influence our individual thoughts
and behaviors. I am writing a paper now to develop this notion, hoping togive precise and technical meaning to the very widespread conviction
(which I share) that our present-day globalizing society is collectively
insane.