How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [102]
Morality most likely evolved in these tiny bands of 100 to 200 people as a form of reciprocal altruism, or I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine. But as Lincoln noted, men are not angels. There are cheaters. Individuals defect from social contracts. Reciprocal altruism, in the long run, only works when you know who will cooperate and who will defect. In these small groups, cooperation is regulated through a complex feedback loop of communication among members of the community. (This also helps to explain why people in big cities can get away with being rude, inconsiderate, and uncooperative—they are anonymous and thus not subject to the normal checks and balances that come with seeing the same people every day.) In order to play the game of reciprocation you need to know whose back needs scratching and who you will trust to scratch yours. This information is gathered through telling stories about other people, better known as gossip. From an anthropologist’s perspective, gossip is a tool of social control through communicating cultural norms, as Jerome Barkow observed: “Reputation is determined by gossip, and the casual conversations of others affect one’s relative standing and one’s acceptability as a mate or as a partner in social exchange. In Euro-American society, gossiping may at times be publicly disvalued and disowned, but it remains a favorite pastime, as it no doubt is in all human societies.”
The etymology of the word gossip, in fact, is enlightening. The root stem is godsib, or god and sib, and meant “akin or related.” Its early use, as traced through the Oxford English Dictionary, included “one who has contracted spiritual affinity with another,” “a godfather or godmother,” “a sponsor,” and “applied to a woman’s female friends invited to be present at a birth” (where they would gossip). (In one of its earliest uses in 1386, for example, Chaucer wrote: “A womman may in no lasse synne assemblen with hire godsib, than with hire owene flesshly brother.”) The word then mutated into talk surrounding those who are akin or related to us, and eventually to “one who delights in idle talk,” as we employ it today. Not surprisingly, we are especially interested in gossiping about the activities of others that most affect our inclusive fitness. that is, our reproductive success, the reproductive success of our relatives, and the reciprocation of those around us. Normal gossip is about relatives, close friends, and those in our immediate sphere of influence in the community, plus members of the community or society who are high ranking or have high social status. It is here where we find our favorite subjects of gossip—sex, generosity, cheating, aggression, violence, social status and standings, births and deaths, political and religious commitments, physical and psychological health, and the various nuances of human relations, particularly friendships and alliances. Gossip is the stuff of which not only soap operas but also grand operas are made. But why, in our culture, do we gossip about total strangers, namely celebrities? The probable reason is that the mass media make these figures so familiar to us that they seem like relatives, friends, and members of our community. Why would anyone care with whom Princess Diana slept or what her status was in the royal family? Because our Pleistocene brains are being tricked into thinking that Princess Diana is someone we personally know and care about.
FROM MORALITY TO RELIGION
What has all this to do