The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [164]
Likewise, Robinson Crusoe’s life on the desert island was technically fairly straightforward, says Humphrey. ‘It was the arrival of Man Friday on the scene which really made things difficult for Crusoe.’ Humphrey suggested that mankind uses his intellect mainly in social situations. ‘The game of social plot and counter-plot cannot be played merely on the basis of accumulated knowledge, any more than can a game of chess.’ A person must calculate the consequences of his own behaviour and calculate the likely behaviour of others. For that he needed at least a glimpse of his own motives in order to guess the things that were going through others’ minds in similar situations, and it was this need for self-knowledge that drove the increase in conscious awareness.32
As Horace Barlow of Cambridge University has pointed out, the things of which we are conscious are mostly the mental events that concern social actions: we remain unconscious of how we see, walk, hit a tennis ball or write a word. Like a military hierarchy, consciousness operates on a ‘need to know’ policy. ‘I can think of no exception to the rule that one is conscious of what it is possible to report to others and not conscious of what it is not possible to report.’33 John Crook, a psychologist with a special interest in eastern philosophy, has made much the same point: ‘Attention therefore moves cognition into awareness, where it becomes subject to verbal formulation and reporting to others.’34
What Humphrey and Alexander described was essentially a Red Queen chess game. The faster mankind ran – the more intelligent he became – the more he stayed in the same place, because the people over whom he sought psychological dominion were his own relatives, the descendants of the more intelligent people from previous generations. As Pinker and Bloom put it, ‘Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright [sic] malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition.’35
If Tooby and Cosmides are right about mental modules, among the modules that were selected to increase in size by this intellectual chess tournament was the ‘theory of mind’ module, the one that enables us to read each other’s thoughts, together with the means to express our own thoughts through the language modules.36 There is plenty of good evidence for this idea when you look about you. Gossip is one of the most universal of human habits. No conversation between people who know each other well – fellow employees, fellow family members, old friends – ever lingers for long on any topic other than the behaviour, ambitions, motives, frailties and affairs of other absent – or present – members of the group. That is the reason soap opera is the quintessentially effective way to entertain people.37 Nor is this a western habit. Konner wrote of his experience with !Kung San tribesmen,
After two years with the San, I came to think of the Pleistocene epoch of human history (the three million years [sic] during which we evolved) as one interminable marathon encounter group. When we slept in a grass hut in one of their villages, there were many nights when its flimsy walls leaked charged exchanges from the circle around the fire, frank expressions of feeling and contention beginning when the dusk fires were lit and running on until dawn.38
Virtually all novels and plays are about the same subject, even when disguised as history or adventure. If you want to understand human motives read Proust, or Trollope, or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. We are obsessed with others’ minds. ‘Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy,