Murder for the Common Good

From the rise and fall of civilizations to the rise and fall of corporations, humans have long studied what makes us great and from the heights of greatness what makes us stumble and fall, it turns out it may have all started with a murder.

What was it that started humans down a path of forming civilizations? What moved us from small bands of hunter gatherers roving the savannah, looking for our next meal to putting down roots, establishing settlements, with the division of labor, which turned into cities and grew into nations? What caused us to start cooperating collectively which enabled the rise of these cities and nations? And when civilizations decline are there any common explanations? Do parallels to these events, the rise of fall of civilizations carry over to the modern day? What if any are the parallels to the rise of fall of corporations and other economic enterprises?  Though the answers to these questions are multifaceted and complex, and no one cause can be clearly pointed to, the way humans treated each other from our very beginnings had a role to play. And while that treatment was certainly not uniform, how we treated each other, showing respect and enabling dignity had an impact. 

Let me tell you an apocryphal story. Travel back with me to a time period deep into the mist of humanity’s distant past. A small group of hunters were gathered together, somewhat apart from the others of the larger group. They were nervous, for they were plotting, their eyes darted back and forth as they ascertained that they were not yet spotted. They were plotting something that none of them had ever considered before. Over time one of the younger members of the larger group had matured, growing big and strong, but something was amiss with this young hunter gatherer. Increasingly he had shown through his actions a tendency to most severely bully others, the men, women and even the children, and it got worse and worse until his actions and demands could only be described as terrorizing the larger group. Because he was a big and strong person, he sought to lead the group, and even though he was many times wrong about important things that were critical to the survival of the group, he demanded that his path be the one that the group always followed. Anyone else who tried to get the group to do things differently was bullied by this person or his immediate kin, sometimes to the point where they were at risk for an injury. And any injury during this time period had the potential of being a death sentence.

The other hunter gatherers at first tolerated the bad and often bizarre behavior for each knew that their survival, and the survival of their offspring, depended on staying with the group for if anyone were forced out on their own death was sure to follow. This insistent leader had some supporters, mostly his close kin, so he did not stand completely alone. And yet the other hunter gatherers of the group felt threatened day-to-day until they decided as a group to take collective action, for none of them was strong enough on their own. The insistent leader lay in the best spot by the edge of the fire sleeping deeply, for he had eaten his full from that day’s hunt, putting his own needs first, above all the others. And even though there was some hesitation on their part, the hunter gatherers, all ten of them felt that they had no choice, they grabbed their spears and together as a group thrust them into the sleeping leader, wounding and then killing him. No one knew which one of them had delivered the killing blow. They retrieved their spears and formed a circle protecting each other for they were unsure if the man’s kin would set upon them. But no counter-attack occurred for the kin also knew that their relative was troubled and further they knew they could not survive without the support of the larger tribe. As a group the tribe breathed a sigh of relief. 

Today we look back in horror at how those with mental illness were treated by society not all that long ago. In past times, mental health problems meant incarceration in state hospitals which provided little treatment and were like prisons. In severe cases brutal lobotomies with icepicks shoved under the eye and into the brain were not uncommon. State hospitals were often run by anatomists – people looking for the physical causes of mental illness. When a patient in a state hospital died their body became the property of the state and was dissected, as a specimen, with the anatomist researcher looking for physical causes of their symptoms.

With the advent of psychotropic drug treatments many state hospitals were emptied out and today most people with serious mental health issues are treated in community hospitals and half-way houses with psychotherapy and medication. Unfortunately, today our prisons contain many people with mental health problems who receive little or no treatment. The 3 largest providers of mental health services in the USA are all prisons in three of the largest metropolitan areas, New York (Rikers Island), Chicago’s Cook Country Jail and the Los Angeles Jail. While the state hospitals have been largely emptied, there are not sufficient community services for those with mental issues in the community. As a result, many remain homeless, impoverished and have little opportunities to receive the treatment they need. While many but not all of the most serious psychoses are amenable to treatment, and with proper treatment people afflicted can often lead productive and satisfying lives, our track record in terms of treating those with mental illnesses is not great, but in our distant past the options were even more limited.

As told in the story above, before the rise of city-states, nation-states or the collection of taxes enabling public works for the common good, the ability of a society to deal with severe mental illness was very limited. With early humans surviving as hunter gatherers or doing limited farming, there were of course no psychologists, no medical doctors, no medical institutions into which a mentally ill person could be committed. Those who committed acts that the majority viewed as out-of-bounds could not be remanded to a court system, sent to prison, or attempts made at rehabilitation. While the notion of not murdering others has been around for a very long time, well before the rise of organized religions and nation-states, it is clear that in certain circumstances murder was utilized by the group to deal with problematic individuals. If we go back far enough, if a tribal group was faced with a dangerous deviant, and among the worst would be a psychopath, a person willing to bully others, a seeker of risk, with no empathy or morality and hence no limit on their negative behaviors, among the few actions that could be taken was capital punishment. And that is what appeared to have happened when you look at the fossil records and cave paintings is that more social tribal members, those willing to work cooperatively with others, would as a group attack the social deviant and eliminate that person. It was murder for the common good. Psychopathy is still largely a non-treatable condition.

Even today hunter gatherer tribes still use capital punishment as a method to eliminate bullies and Christopher Boehm, based on his research states that humans have been picking out certain types of deviants, such as psychopaths and eliminating them over thousands of generations. Over time this elimination of bullies, psychopaths and others who are socially unacceptable members of the tribe from the gene pool is hypothesized to have created a kind of self-domestication among humans with traits such as cooperative social interactions coming to the fore and leading to more breeding success and hence more prevalence among humans.   

He writes, “Near the Altamira district of Spain we have several unique paintings with groups obviously killing individuals. The best one shows, to the right, ten men evocatively holding their bows over their heads; the impression is one of assertive jubilation. A moderate distance behind and to the left lies a man on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking out of his body or on the ground. A few other paintings are similar, but with fewer executioners and fewer matching arrows.” (Boehm, Christopher. Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects, Minding Nature 10.2 – pp23-29.)

Ten bows, ten arrows in victim, Remigia, Castellón, Spain

This tendency to select for socially acceptable characteristics among your tribe members may go back much further than even the cave art would suggest. A 430,000-year-old skull of a likely 20-year old male, that predates homo sapiens and even Neanderthals has been found in a cave in northern Spain, which when reconstructed had two holes on the left side of the forehead. The injury when examined forensically suggests that the injury was intentional, made by blows of some kind of weapon, occurred prior to death and was a mortal injury. (Quam, Rolf. PLOS One, 2015) This suggests that murder, carried out for whatever purpose, is not a new characteristic found only in modern humans but goes back into the deepest evolutionary roots from which we sprang.

Self-Domestication

Self-domestication among humans is the notion that by self-selecting for desirable qualities that over time we shaped our own evolution. This evolution not only changed our behaviors it changed our physiology.

In 1959 Dmitry K. Belyaev, began a long-term attempt to domesticate wild foxes (Vulpes vulpes). Each generation of foxes born was selected for tameness, in terms of how they interacted with human. After almost 50 generations, a relatively short time span in evolutionary terms, just about all of the foxes born now seem enjoy human contact. The foxes have taken on some dog-like characteristics both behaviorally and physically. The experiment showed just show powerful selection for certain characteristics and how quickly changes of behavior in a population driven by domestication can occur.