Frans de Waal on Political Apes, Science Communication, and Building a Cooperative Society | The Primate Diaries, Scientific American Blog Network

cool interview on some themes that I find really interesting. Namely the relationship we have with the inherent qualities of our nature as primates and the flexible changing nature of culture. or in other words what do they mean when they say that ‘the roots of politics are older than humanity.’

one particular question i the interview seemed to frame what I found interesting and framed my interest into the two views of human nature as one side viewing humans as ever combative, violent and power seeking while the other notes the seemingly contradictory cooperative and altruistic behavior

Johnson: Where does Peter Kropotkin fit into this history of animal behavior?

De Waal: Ah, Kropotkin. That’s much earlier, of course. Kropotkin was a naturalist, he was also a prince, and an anarchist. He was many things. Kropotkin believed that the roots of solidarity and cooperation could be found in nature. He argued that survival of the fittest could result, not only by competing with others, but also by cooperating with others. He was inspired by his research in Siberia where animals experience very harsh conditions and where cooperating was essential to survival.

In that sense he was very different from Thomas Henry Huxley. Kropotkin loved Darwin but he opposed Huxley because the latter presented a very narrow view of Darwinism, one that is still with us today. The modern day Huxley is Richard Dawkinswho is also a combative atheist, like Huxley was, and who portrays nature as a field of combat where the strongest wins and where everything is regulated by self-interest. Huxley couldn’t imagine how morality could have evolved, even though Darwin himself wrote extensively on the topic. So Huxley was a much more pessimistic and narrow-minded Darwinist. Kropotkin opposed him for that reason because Kropotkin saw a great deal of cooperation in nature just as Darwin had.

but why is it important to know our "roots" and the way we behave and interact in the natural world before we had technology oozing from every pore of our society? becuase as noted by De Waal this should help you better understand the environment in which our biology is most familiar with

 You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society. Of course, I’m not saying that you can derive moral rules from nature – that’s deriving an ought from an is, as the philosophers say – but you do need to know what kind of animals we are if you want to design a stable society. 

also there was some interesting commentary on American culture from De Waals who originally hails from Holland and only recently gained citizenship

When I came to this country I was struck by the amount of violence on TV and in the movies. It was a much higher level of violence than I was used to but people seemed very comfortable with it. Then there’s the puritanism, this extreme obsession Americans have with sex. There’s not less sex in American society than in European society, but people are more obsessed with it. As soon as there’s a naked breast on TV half of the U.S. faints apparently and need to write their senators about it. But, on the other hand, people are very helpful and less jealous of your success. Holland is a very small country, an egalitarian country, where if you want to be successful you have to hide your ambition. That’s also true for Japan. In the U.S. if you’re successful it’s appreciated, even rewarded. In that sense they’re much more generous than many European countries are. But then if you don’t mention what you have done in your life people in the U.S. think you’ve done nothing. It’s a very different way of operating in the two societies.

on the our sense of fairness and equality which has been show to be remarkably similar in higher primates we can draw parallels to our own political and cultural landscape

I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed and that’s why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits. The anger we have towards Wall Street is probably a very old primate reaction that relates to cooperation. If you are a cooperative animal you need to watch what you get. If you, or even a whole community, invest in something but then a few individuals receive a much larger return, it’s not a good arrangement. If it happens consistently, it’s time to look for an arrangement that is more beneficial. That’s why we’re so sensitive to how rewards are being divided.

Johnson: You would argue, then, that a sense of fairness and equality is an innate feature of our species. How does that get sidelined? Is it beaten out of people through propaganda?

De Waal: Yes, to some degree that is happening. You justify the inequalities by saying some people are just better and smarter than others and the strong should survive and the poor can die off.
Johnson: That sounds nearly identical to what Herbert Spencer said in the nineteenth century; that the poor were a drag on a nations economy and should die off.
De Waal: Yes, he claimed it would be better if they died because he thought that’s what happens in nature. This view came to be called Social Darwinism, though this is really a misnomer because Darwin himself rejected it. I have two problems with that whole viewpoint which is so popular among conservatives in the United States. They claim you need to organize a society based on competition because the strong will advance and the weak, well, that’s their problem. They assume that the way natural selection operates is the way that society should be structured. I’m not sure that society should be structured along the lines of natural selection. So that’s the first problem.
The second problem is the assumption that nature is purely driven by competitive processes. Darwin himself understood that this was not the case when he wrote that “struggle for existence” needed to be taken in a very broad sense. It may mean that an individual has a better immune system than another and that’s why they survived to leave more offspring. Instead of direct combat, which is the terminology that Spencer and Huxley used, it is more about who is smarter, who detects the predator earlier, who has better ears and eyes, etc. All of these things play a role, it is not necessarily combat between individuals. The conservative view of how nature operates and how we need to apply that to society is extremely distorted. It is a very deficient ideology in my opinion.

and on the future he notes

Johnson: Given all of the problems that we face today as a species, are you hopeful?
De Waal: I’m hopeful about most of the issues except for the environment. I’m hopeful about the social issues. I think we can handle six billion people, or whatever it’s going to be, because of the increasing integration in the world community. But as far as the environment is concerned, I am becoming pessimistic because I do not see anybody stepping up and taking the long view approach. It seems like we’re stuck in a tragedy of the commons where everyone is trying to contribute as little as possible to get out of this situation. On issues such as global warming and the deterioration of the environment, I just don’t see the steps taken that need to be taken at this point. But if we can solve these problems I think we have a chance.