As I remarked in my last essay, Darwin gave an account of our species's muddled and conflict-ridden sociability in his Descent Of Man which is far more realistic and convincing than those of the simple egocentric tradition, flowing from Hobbes's Leviathan, which has been so influential during the Enlightenment. Since our age almost deifies Darwin it may seem strange that this account has been widely neglected. This has probably happened because it is embarrassing in two major ways. It offends both against species-snobbery and against the pride of intellect.
Since he is looking for evolutionary explanations, Darwin considers our great communicativeness, which gives rise to speech, not so much as an intellectual achievement but primarily as a consequence of great natural sociability. Humans are, he says, one of the many species which have evolved a social way of life by learning to enjoy each other's company – indeed, they are perhaps simply the most sociable, the most friendly and cooperative of those species.
Like other social creatures, they hate to be forcibly isolated, they are constantly aware of each other in a way that supplies a continuous background harmony to their lives. That special friendliness, not intellectual curiosity, must have been what made speech possible as they became increasingly eager to understand each other. It thus led to all their more sophisticated achievements.
This does not mean, of course, that they always agree. Like chimpanzees or wolves, they have many other impulses which produce conflict. But, like these other species, they have learnt, during their long experience of living together, many useful ways of arbitrating or defusing those conflicts. And, among these ways, humans have found one very interesting way which is peculiar to them, a way which requires the use of speech. This is morality or conscience. The striking response of human beings to "the short but imperious word ought" or to its local equivalents is, says Darwin, one of their most important differences from other creatures.
This strange sensibility arises, he suggests, out of the much longer time-perspective in which humans are placed by their greater intelligence, a perspective which does not let them forget what they have done after they have injured someone dear to them. He comments, "As soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual", thus reminding them that "the enduring and ever-present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression". Remorse, from which apes probably do not often suffer, must thus have haunted them, gradually leading both to a different kind of conduct and to the articulation of standards.
Though this account starts from an animal context it plainly does not reduce human qualities to those of the other animals. Indeed, it does exceptionally clear justice to the special difficulty and the special achievements of the human situation. It centres on the recognition of conflict – on the clashes of motive which increasing self-knowledge must have gradually revealed to our ancestors as they became more aware of the incoherence between their various wishes.
Other animals too are known to experience these clashes, but as far as we know they only do so briefly. They can usually shift from one mood to another without much overlap. By contrast, human memory is – as Darwin shrewdly points out – not an inert store but a thoroughly active, interfering commentator, continually reminding its owner of things that he would much rather forget. Thanks to it, other people are constantly present to us and mutual influence incessantly flows between us.
Thus, though we often need solitude, in our essence we are not totally separate beings. At heart we are both separate and joined, and the clash between these two conditions is what gives us most of our problems. Other people are continually present with us, mentally if not physically, and we often feel identified with them in various ways. For many of our most valued occupations we need a group (think of actors or orchestral players) and we identify with it. Yet there are also times, as Hobbes so rightly pointed out, when our own individual wishes do rise up and demand absolute precedence. The balancing of these claims, the arbitrating of these conflicts, is always a central business for human cultures.
Our own culture has, during the last three centuries, concentrated mainly on the individualist side of this dialogue for excellent political reasons. But life, with its usual perversity, still remains too complicated to fit in with this simplification. Theorists who have tried to legislate life into greater simplicity, as Hobbes did, often tell us vital psychological truths which we badly need, but we cannot accept them as despots. If we are to grasp and fully use those insights – to ride the Leviathan rather than being ridden by it – we have to put these matters in a wider context where both sides of our nature are more realistically accepted.
This is the last in Mary's series on Hobbes. For her previous blogs on the subject, visit the How to believe series page