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THE ANIMAL AND THE THINKER

Instinct, Reason and the Dance of Our Divided Selves

John Duncan

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To my friends and colleagues in science for 50 years of keeping me on my toes

my family on the farm for showing me the many sides of life and my family in Cambridge for everything

Introduction

Pan and Spock

Who are we?

Along the rim of a leaf on a sallow bush sits the caterpillar of an eyed hawkmoth. Its shape and colouring make it hard to spot in this position on the leaf. Its only real tasks are to stay in a safe place and to eat, though periodically there is something new: its hard skin is now too small for its expanding bulk, and it goes through a crisis as its skin splits, it wriggles free, and a new, larger skin is ready underneath. The life of the caterpillar is very simple, and it is run by a correspondingly simple nervous system. As far as I know, nobody has counted the neurons in a hawkmoth caterpillar but, based on what we know of other insects, it will be in the range of tens to hundreds of thousands.

In her living room sits a teenage girl doing her physics homework. Her mother comes in from work and says hello; the girl glances up and smiles but, honestly, right now she just wants to get on with the physics. She finds this part of her schoolwork fascinating, and over the past few months, she has come to realise this is not just intellectual engagement; she loves physics, and, peculiarly, though she is also good at French, she despises learning French vocabulary. Of course, she does not just love

physics. Periodically her eyes stray to her phone, wondering what her friends will say about the boy who was looking at her in class. She is hoping that her little brother will not materialise to annoy her, and also hoping that he was not picked on again at school. From the next room she hears the TV news, perhaps about wildfires, perhaps a Congressional hearing, perhaps war in Ukraine. Right now she would really like to ignore all this and stay with the clean world of her equations. In her head are around a hundred billion neurons, and as Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin told us in the 2009 film, It’s Complicated.

Any glance at the news shows just how complicated it is. Here are a few headlines:

‘My Southport shop was looted by rioters, then saved by strangers.’ In Southport, UK , Chanaka Balasuriya tells how his grocery store was destroyed by far-right rioters – then put back together by volunteers from his local community.

‘Principal resigns after Florida students shown Michelangelo statue.’ Parents in Florida complained that an art class showing Michelangelo’s David was pornographic. Principal Hope Carrasquilla resigned after being given an ultimatum to resign or be fired.

‘Met Police: Women and children failed by “boys’ club”, review finds.’ A ‘blistering review’ found racism, misogyny and homophobia to be rife in London’s police force.

‘Man City v Liverpool: I should become more selfish – Jack Grealish.’ Transferred to the fabulously wealthy Manchester City for £100m, the football star explains his first-day nerves, fearing judgement from his new team-mates.

‘Ukraine war: “My city’s being shelled, but mum won’t believe me”.’ Oleksandra, a Russian woman living in Ukraine, explains how hard it is to speak to her mother back home, who refuses to believe that her daughter is in danger.

‘Army officer completes remarkable solo South Pole trek.’ Preet Chandi completes her solo trek to the South Pole. She says she wanted to do it ‘for people who don’t fit a certain image’.1

Or you can glance over the comments posted under songs on YouTube. Under Tom Petty’s 1989 song ‘Running Down a Dream’ can be found this piece of high art, in 68 words capturing love – shared ritual – death – loss – immortality – mystery – the power of music:

My husband and I would play this song, every Friday night before we went out to our favorite beach bar. He died this week. The day after, I was standing in line at the Target pharmacy, waiting to pick up a prescription. This song came on. I don’t remember ever hearing music in Target before. I think this was his way of contacting me. We were married 58 years.2

Often, in stories like these, it seems human beings make no sense – our rationality and our irrationality, our generosity and our greed, our dissatisfaction and our joy, our ambition and our laziness, our good and our evil, our brilliance and our blinkered half-truths, our ideals and our compromises. Throughout history, thinkers, writers and philosophers have struggled with the great questions of human life. Head and heart. Right and wrong. Freedom and responsibility. Women and men. Democracy and justice. Ambition and fulfilment. The questions are everywhere – in our aspirations, our institutions, our burning beliefs and burning conflicts, our search for a sense of meaning. Who really are we, what do we need and how do our lives work?

Answers require knowledge – in this case, knowledge of ourselves. The knowledge we need, I shall argue, comes from a balance between two sides of ourselves. The two sides have received a good deal of scientific attention but are rarely put

together. On the one hand, we need the science of the reasoning human mind. The science here concerns information processing, and the idea of the brain as a staggeringly powerful, general purpose computer. On the other hand, we need the fundamental laws of animal behaviour, established by the great ethologists of the twentieth century. To understand and manage our lives, we need all the details of both sides – the strengths and weaknesses of the mind as an idea machine, and the elaborate needs and behaviour patterns of the complex human animal.

Reason is not enough

At least since the ancient Greeks, it has been felt that humans should guide their lives by the force of reason. In the fourth century bc , Plato considered reason to be the monarch of the psyche, ruling over its other parts. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas considered that human affairs were governed by natural laws, to be discovered by reason. It is perhaps natural to feel that the power of reason is what sets human beings apart, allowing us, unlike all other animals, to base our thoughts, our choices and our social institutions on understanding and truth. The power of human reason is certainly staggering. As we look around our modern world – cities of concrete and glass, rice fields, microchips, transport networks, communications satellites – it is our own reasoning minds that have built it. Commonly, too, we feel that reason is the key to moral choices and to how we should live our lives. The sense is that somewhere out there are essential laws of right and wrong – an external reality of good and bad choices. When we violate abstract principles of justice, fairness or human rights, or live a trivial and lazy life, we are violating not just human laws, but laws of the universe.

With the establishment of psychology as an experimental science, the mechanics of human reason have come under increasing scrutiny. In the 1940s there was the work of a great German psychologist Karl Duncker, examining detailed protocols of the thought process as his participants struggled to work out how one should direct X-rays to destroy a tumour without harming the surrounding tissue.3 By the 1950s we had the first digital computers, and very much in the spirit of Duncker, the pioneers Allen Newell and Herbert Simon wrote the first problem-solving programs, proving theorems in formal logic in a way strongly reminiscent of human problem solvers.4

I have spent much of my own research life pulling together clues to the nature of human reason from both classical experimental psychology and the rapidly developing field of human neuroscience. There are simple reasoning tests that are often used as measures of ‘intelligence’. Why is it that for some people these tests are trivial, for other people impossible? There are clues from the study of brain damage following stroke and other diseases, with spectacular and often bizarre reasoning deficits produced by damage to the frontal lobes of the brain. In the 1990s ‘cognitive neuroscience’ was born with the opportunity to measure human brain activity using MRI machines, and soon we were using this new technology to investigate brain activity during classical reasoning tests. There is neurophysiology, with recordings of the electrical activity from large populations of neurons, each carrying its own message in the detailed pattern of electrical impulses it sends out. Of course, there is a great deal that is still under debate, but in 50 years, things have moved very far forward. As I explained in a previous book, How Intelligence Happens (2010), I think that in 2025 we have a good outline map of human reason and the brain mechanisms that produce it. With its flexibility and its power, the human reason machine

is certainly fascinating, and it is certainly one pinnacle of the human mind. But if we seek answers to our big human questions, we see that reason alone cannot be enough. It cannot tell us why our hearts melt at a smile from our child, or swell with pride when our country wins gold at the Olympics. I will argue that, taken on its own, reason cannot tell us what is right and what is wrong, what laws we should pass or how we should run our society. Above all, reason cannot tell us ‘the meaning of life’. To explain these things, we need reason plus something more.

Another side

I took an erratic route into psychology. Entering my final year of school, I thought I would be a biologist. My childhood on an English dairy farm had been filled with animals and plants. Thinking that the children should learn how to make their own money, my father put us in charge of rearing pigs; in the mornings, we rushed out to feed them before breakfast, often with slightly disastrous results for the state of my trousers on the school bus. I was fascinated by insects; aged about six, I learned about ants with a surprising pain when I turned over the wrong stone on a disused railway line, and about the orange-tip butterfly by its first arrival in spring in a meadow by the river. With my grandfather, I took early morning walks to count the heifers; I learned how far ahead of the heifer’s thinking you need to be to persuade it through a gate and, meanwhile, my grandfather showed me plants in the hedgerows and taught me some botany. At school, I much preferred biology to the physical sciences, with the chance to lessen the tedium of homework with the interest of living things. In A- level biology, for example, we studied the question of how water travels up from the roots to

the crown of a tree. The trunk is filled with tiny tubes called xylem, but how can the water be lifted up such a long tube? I was taken with a rather elegant experiment in which one saw cut was made three-quarters of the way through a tree trunk at one level, then one higher up, three-quarters of the way through from the other side; there could be no one continuous tube, but the tree still lived. The science was interesting to me, and so was the sawing; helping my father cut firewood was something rather precious to me. I thought this could be my future, and applied to university to study botany.

One evening, however, I was visiting my grandmother, who owned a TV , and we watched a 1940s noir which I have subsequently tracked down as The Dark Past. An escaped convict breaks into a psychiatrist’s home and holds the family hostage. Outside, there is a police siege; inside, the psychiatrist slowly uncovers the forgotten childhood that turned his ‘patient’ to the dark side. Suddenly this seemed even more interesting than xylem, and I promptly changed my application to psychology and physiology, the closest thing that Oxford University offered to a degree in psychiatry.

Of course, at this point I wanted to be a psychiatrist, but soon afterwards I discovered there was more to the mind than The Dark Past. Now that I was going to study psychology, a school friend lent me his copy of Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression – written in 1963 and translated into English in 1966 – and told me that nowadays psychology was not all about serial killers and Freud. Lorenz was one of the fathers of ethology, the science of animal behaviour as a branch of biology, and in his hands, insights into the principles of instinct were used to illuminate deep questions of human life.

I fell into the pages of his book with that thrilled sense of new understanding that is one of the joys of the growing human

mind. In the first chapter, Lorenz is diving off the Florida Keys, observing the fighting displays of coral fish, and I found this so spellbinding that, many years later, I finally put to one side a quite significant reluctance to inhale underwater and learned to dive over the reef myself. Unlike Lorenz, I was rewarded only with a child’s fascination at appearing to swim in an aquarium, with clouds of sparkling fish like swarms of butterflies, rising from the blue depths and swirling up over the side of the multicoloured reef. In the hands of Lorenz, however, this fascination was turned into something different. In On Aggression there are battling stags, hordes of rats held together by a common odour, squabbling ducks and geese, fish and birds of all kinds, a teeming world distilled into simple principles of the instinctive animal mind at work. At the same time, against this teeming background, the book showed how inspired observation of animal behaviour can lead to unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable but compelling insights into ourselves.

Later, I was to discover that Lorenz had also been a Nazi, who had worked as a psychologist with the SS before finally being dispatched to the Russian front. By the time he wrote On Aggression, of course, Lorenz had long renounced his early sympathies. In a later chapter I will come back to the discord we feel when we know that Lorenz the thinker had also, at one time, been Lorenz the Nazi. This discord notwithstanding, the core ideas of Lorenz and his ethological colleagues are essential, I shall argue, to understanding both animal and human minds.

Of course, when I actually reached university, I discovered that the science of the mind has many sides and, as I have said, my life in research has moved far away from this early interest in ethology. This is not to say that the core ideas of On Aggression have lost their force; indeed, if I now turn back to the book after

50 years, I am simply astonished at how much it has continued to mark my views of the human condition – some well-remembered, but some that I have cherished for many decades as my own original thoughts, only now to discover that I first read them in Lorenz, forgot them, then later ‘made them up’ as my own! (In On Aggression, for example, Lorenz the erstwhile Nazi puts forth deep ideas on group conflict and its threat to peace. As this book progresses, we shall see that consistency is not at all a reliable principle of the human mind.)

The same applies to another book that I read as an undergraduate, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s Love and Hate (first published in German in 1970). Eibl-Eibesfeldt had learned from Lorenz and became a long-term colleague, but where Lorenz simply loved watching animals, then generalised his conclusions to the human, Eibl-Eibesfeldt took the human case head on, applying ethological methods and principles to detailed, cross- cultural data on human social behaviour. Once again, looking back at Love and Hate, I am struck by how firmly, 50 years ago, its ideas took root in my mind.

Now, in the current book, I should like to put two things together – the science of human reason, which has occupied so much of my own research life, and the principles of animal behaviour, as developed by Lorenz, Eibl-Eibesfeldt and other giants of ethology. To understand ourselves, I shall argue, we need to know how both sides of our minds work; and when we understand ourselves, we understand much of the puzzle and uncertainty of human life.

Perhaps it is no surprise that, in broad terms, this balance of animal and idea was understood already by Charles Darwin. Here he is in The Descent of Man (1871), discussing the merge of instinct and reason in human morality:

the social instincts which no doubt were acquired by man, as by the lower animals, for the good of the community, will from the first have given to him some wish to aid his fellows, and some feeling of sympathy. Such impulses will have served him at a very early period as a rude rule of right and wrong. But as man gradually advanced in intellectual power and was enabled to trace the more remote consequences of his actions; as he acquired sufficient knowledge to reject baneful customs and superstitions; as he regarded more and more not only the welfare but the happiness of his fellow-men; as from habit, following on beneficial experience, instruction, and example, his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, so as to extend to the men of all races, to the imbecile, the maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals – so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher.5

Pan and Spock

In Greek mythology, Pan was the god of nature, fertility and the wild. Pan has the body and head of a man, but the horns, legs and hooves of a goat. Pan is the animal side of ourselves. He loves music. He is the companion of the nymphs.

In 1966, when Star Trek and the starship Enterprise first arrived on TV screens, viewers were introduced to the pointyeared Spock. Spock, half Vulcan, has the perfect rational mind. He appears to know everything, and when Captain Kirk asks his advice, the answer is complete, balanced and precise. But there is something missing in Spock. Spock does not get humour. Spock would never pump his fist in triumph. Spock’s face is composed. Spock is perfectly rational, but he is only half human.

In Pan and Spock we have human instinct (the ‘animal’ in us) and human reason (the ‘idea[s]’ we create), each with their own urging on how to live our lives, and each with their own essential contribution to our humanity. Both, of course, have been built by millions of years of evolution, but their operating principles are quite different. Spock – our reasoning side – is an elaborate computing machine, marshalling immense banks of knowledge to solve a countless multitude of novel, constantly varying problems. Evolution built the machine, but learning fills it with knowledge of toys, shops, theorems, chess, the big bang – all the knowledge it needs to tell us what will work and what will not as we navigate our way through our modern lives. In contrast to the flexibility of Spock, Pan – our instinctive side – is a heavily innate, ethological set of fixed action patterns and modes of thought, similar in general principle to the instincts of animals from insects to great apes. Across the animal kingdom, complex instincts control how the members of a species interact – in competing for resources, in attracting mates, in caring for the young, in defending the group. We are the same, and in our own, highly social species, Pan contributes elaborate procedures controlling our interactions with the people around us.

Both Spock and Pan are immensely powerful – but both also have profound weaknesses and blind spots. These two voices in our heads live in uneasy truce; sometimes they recommend the same course of action, but very often they are in screaming conflict. Together, they have led humanity to its heights and its crises. It is unwise to ignore either one. It is equally unwise to believe either one. To understand and manage our lives, I shall argue, we need both.

There is an implication in all this. We may think of ourselves as coherent, reasonable people, but this is not what our minds are like. Each person is a patchwork of many things – complex,

competing instincts calling out to be satisfied, ideas that change from one moment to the next, sometimes in agreement, often in conflict. The unified ‘self’ is an illusion. When we understand the operating principles of instinct and reason, we see that there is no self beyond the patchwork. We are creatures of conflict – conflict with others, and conflict with ourselves.

As Spock and Pan work together, furthermore, they have more to struggle with than one another. As they agree and disagree, both are dealing with a world for which neither was prepared. Evolution shaped them, but not evolution in a world like ours. Up to around 10,000 years ago, Homo sapiens lived in small communities of hunter-gatherers. Our social instincts were shaped by the needs of these small communities and the social roles they contained. Our reasoning power was shaped by the problems likely to be encountered in the hunter-gatherer world. Now, we face human concerns at a scale of billions of individuals, and challenges far beyond those of hunter- gatherers. Spock and Pan struggle together to manage life in our modern, global society.

In On Aggression, Lorenz put it like this:

An unprejudiced observer from another planet, looking upon man as he is today, in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which this same intelligence cannot control, would not prophesy long life for the species.6

There are certainly good reasons for this pessimism, but at the same time, the unprejudiced observer would be forced to raise an eyebrow at how well humanity has done so far. On the timescale of evolution, the rapid progression from separate hunter-gatherer communities to today’s globalised society is something quite unique. Our lives are very far from perfect, but as Steven Pinker documents in Enlightenment Now (2018), in major ways they just

keep getting better. The biologist from another planet would likely have said this could never happen. I think it can only happen because, despite their struggles, Spock and Pan find ways to work together.

The voice of Spock

Of course, like thinkers throughout history, I agree that Spock’s power of reason must play a central part in our lives. The science of reason, however, shows that the human Spock is actually not at all like the flawless reasoner of Star Trek. Whatever we do with our minds, it is rarely this (a joke I got from my son many years ago):

Three logicians go into a bar. The barman comes over and asks, ‘Pints all round?’ The first logician says, ‘I don’t know.’ The second one says, ‘I don’t know.’ The third one says, ‘Yes!’

With a little effort we can work out what the third logician concludes from the answers of the first two, but this is definitely not what we usually do when we go into a bar. More than a century after the stories were written, Sherlock Holmes still captures our imagination because he thinks so differently from the bemused, more human Inspector Lestrade. For millennia, humanity has presumed itself to be the pinnacle of reasoning, but as artificial intelligence grows ever more powerful, we increasingly realise how we have overestimated ourselves. Very likely, as artificial systems grow ever more able to integrate vast bodies of knowledge, we will have increasing access to real Spocks, more able than we could ever be to draw the best possible conclusions from the data fed in. I will come back much later to the possibilities for improved social, economic and political decisions – perhaps not here yet, but very obviously close. Meanwhile, we are stuck with

our own, Lestrade version, and in our case, I shall argue, we see a machine that works brilliantly well in some ways, but is all too limited in others. Unlike Sherlock Holmes or the Spock of Star Trek, our real Spock, I shall argue, is simply a generator of ideas. Some of the ideas are excellent, some logical, some even brilliant, but many are just ideas. When reasoning about social issues, in particular, Spock is given to thinking in simple rules that capture just a part of complex, messy social reality and, often, these rules lead him to a very foolish place.

One mistake is to put reason on a pedestal, as the highest essence of our humanity, but it is equally wrong to denigrate reason’s power. It is often felt that reason is a weak or even impotent sovereign, unable to control the impulses of the animal within. In his excellent 2012 book The Righteous Mind, the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that reason simply follows human instinct – instinct tells us what to think, and reason follows behind, providing a glib rationalisation. Often, certainly, we do use Spock to rationalise rather than reason, and Haidt is concerned with moral reasoning, where this may be especially salient. In our daily lives, however, it is obvious that we use the power of Spock in everything that we do, from planning our morning cup of coffee to deriving a proof in geometry. It is not hard to see why philosophers through the ages have seen reason as the sovereign of the mind and the essence of humanity. Indeed, in many ways it is – with reason we see truth in a way that no other animal can remotely approach.

The social lives of human beings, furthermore, are evidently not just a matter of instinct. Human life takes place in the rich context of different cultures, each with its own values, ideas, rituals and economy. Many common themes can be seen across cultures, showing the power of Pan. We need Spock, though, to explain how countless new ideas are attached to instinctive

common themes; how one group follows Jesus and another Allah, both with the same burning certainty; or how one group can believe that women are incapable of rational thought and then, a short hundred years later, can demand equality of the sexes.

The voice of Pan

In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson depicts the tension between the rational, civilised human being – the person we truly aspire to be – and the prowling, uncontrolled animal, knowing nothing but its hungers. In tales of the wolfman, the rational man is a creature of the light, but when the full moon rises, hair sprouts and the animal howls. We fear the animal but, in this book, I argue that the great thinkers of history got it wrong because, focused on human minds and lives, they did not give adequate attention to biology. The story told by Robert Louis Stevenson is only a part of the truth. In our animal side there is the pacing, violent Mr Hyde, but there is much more than this.

The Jekyll and Hyde story finds many adherents. In The Chimp Paradox (2012), Steve Peters argues that it is the thinker who is the ‘real’ human being. The thinker needs to suppress the chimp, a disruptive, often unwanted character who prompts only the simple animal urges of fight, flight, the search for food and the need for a mate. In The Blank Slate (2002), Steven Pinker argues that truly moral behaviour must have reasons for its choices; an animal urge is not a sufficient basis for a moral decision. Aristotle famously praised law as ‘reason free from passion’. In all of this we see Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the human fear of our animal side.

I shall argue that many things are wrong with this view. Pan is

not a simple creature at all, and if you read a little about animal behaviour, you soon see that, despite what I said about the eyed hawkmoth caterpillar, few creatures are that simple. The nervous system of a fish, a rat or even an insect equips it with an elaborate set of behaviour patterns, drawn out by the right eliciting conditions and allowing an equally complex, patterned life to unfold. If this is true of a social insect such as a honeybee, it is even more true of ourselves. As emphasised by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, we have evolved to navigate an astoundingly complex set of social relations, and in our Pan, we have an exquisitely crafted machine to guide us along the way.7

Pan is a sophisticated and complex guide, but his role in our lives is much more important than this. I shall argue that Pan is also essential, providing us with all that is deepest in our aspirations, our tastes, our sympathies and ourselves. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739– 40), the philosopher David Hume argued that reason on its own cannot possibly explain human behaviour. To motivate behaviour, reason needs a starting point, and to provide that starting point we need human desires, preferences and goals.

Suppose I wake up deciding whether to have eggs or pancakes for breakfast. Reason tells me that, if I want eggs, I get out the frying pan, but if I want pancakes, I get out the griddle. It does not tell me which one I feel like this morning, and this argument can always be pushed to a starting point that reason cannot possibly provide.

I find it useful to drive this point home with some extreme atrocity – I tend to use abuse of a child. Spock can tell the abuser, ‘The child will be bitterly frightened and hurt.’ The abuser replies, ‘I don’t care how the child feels.’ Spock can say, ‘The child will grow up distrustful, angry, alone, scarred.’ The abuser replies,

‘I don’t care how the child grows up.’ Spock can say, ‘When children’s lives are destroyed, the fabric of society is eroded.’ The abuser replies, ‘I don’t care about the fabric of society.’ Though moral philosophers struggle with this thought, in my view Hume is correct – ultimately, Spock has to be defeated, because whatever consequences he deduces, the abuser can refuse to recognise their significance. None of this matters to Pan, who is simply what evolution made him. Pan says, ‘My friends and I value children, and if you harm them we will make you suffer.’ There is no more he needs to say; he has given a complete, consistent account of himself and his intentions. Asking him why he thinks this way would be like asking a king penguin why he stands in the Antarctic blizzard protecting his egg on his feet. As Hume put it, ‘a passion is an original existence’, while ‘reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions’8.

Of course, in a sense we all know this. At the end of the 2001 film Legally Blonde, having transformed from sorority airhead to head of her law class, Reese Witherspoon takes to task Aristotle and his characterisation of law as ‘reason free from passion’ – the law, she says, needs both the reason and the passion. A little shockingly, I find myself with Legally Blonde and against Aristotle. Without Pan, we could never explain the essence of who we are and what laws we want. We could never understand why we are moved to offer food to a visitor, or why we throw ourselves into the sea to save an anonymous stranger. Equally, we could never understand our dark side, why Genghis Khan could proclaim, ‘The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.’ Eibl-Eibesfeldt puts it this way: ‘Our rational thought, initially developed as an instrument utilized for survival, has attained tremendous dimensions in the intellectual

realm, but our archaic emotional side continues to be the center of our being.’9

And vitally, I argue, this animal side of ourselves is not just a curiosity, not just a biological remnant. Like other animals, we have instincts that are inconsistent, conflicting, dependent on time and circumstance, and deeply powerful. Like the instincts of other animals, they are built into our nervous systems with their own, spontaneous need to be discharged, and when this happens, they give a sense of rightness. In his masterpiece of thinking on the human condition, Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in Austria in 1946, Viktor Frankl argued that we do not want happiness, we want meaning. It is the animal in us, I shall argue, that gives us the sense that our lives are not just an intellectual puzzle. For Pan, our lives have meaning. The dialogue

It is a mistake to denigrate Pan and promote Spock. It is equally a mistake to denigrate Spock and promote Pan. Human life is a dialogue of these two essential forces in our minds and to manage our lives, we need all the complexity, all the strengths and all the weaknesses of both characters.

Spock and Pan – reason and instinct – work by different rules, and with their partial views of human nature, both can be unsettling. From the perspective of Spock, instinct can seem primitive and unsuited to the needs of civilised life. From the perspective of Pan, reason can seem dry and artificial, at variance with our true selves.

Reactions to On Aggression show the concerns of Spock. In his book, Lorenz argued that aggression between members of a species is extremely widespread in the animal kingdom,

specifically in animals that compete for territory and mates; that it has a critical biological function; and that, like other competitive species, humans have strongly developed, instinctive aggressive behaviour and drives. As we shall see later, he went much farther than this, suggesting that bonds in many animals are cemented, perhaps even dependent on joint aggression to enemies. The conclusions of Lorenz were based on profound analyses of aggression and bonding in many species, from cichlid fish on the reef to a rich variety of birds and mammals, and few could sensibly doubt the strength of the principles he put forward. Still, when it came to humanity, many were unwilling to believe that just the same principles apply to ourselves. Typifying shocked reactions to his book, in the ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, written in 1986, UNESCO assembled a committee of 20 scientists to declare that Lorenz was wrong and that aggression is not built into human nature.

Human instincts – especially the instinct to aggression – often challenge us because they do not show human nature as we should like it to be. Unfortunately, desire is not fact, and I find it impossible to consider the aggressive displays of fish, birds, deer and monkeys, to survey the world around me, and to continue hoping that none of this applies to Homo sapiens. Saki puts this better than I ever could in his story ‘The Toys of Peace’ (published in 1919, three years after his death), in which an (approximately) Edwardian uncle tries to divert his young nephews from the joys of warfare with a collection of toys more morally uplifting than soldiers and dreadnoughts. The children’s adaptation of their new toys is predictable but carried off with Saki’s usual élan, the enacted slaughter of a hundred girls from the Young Women’s Christian Association by the troops of Louis XIV being an especial high point. In the final sentence of the story, faced with the ruins of his re-education programme, the hapless uncle

repines, ‘We have begun too late.’10 Indeed I think they have – by a few million years.

It is often argued that we build aggression into our children by the way we raise them, and certainly, we do not teach them always to lie down and die in the face of opposition. But surely the great majority of our experience as parents is directly the opposite of this. As our children change from babies to toddlers to schoolchildren, we spend immense effort instructing them that they must not bite their sister, or take their younger brother’s toys, or band together with their friends to humiliate an outsider. In another of Saki’s stories from The Toys of Peace and Other Papers collection, ‘The Interlopers’, two lifetime enemies are searching through a forest at night, each hoping that tonight at last they will be able to kill. Coming suddenly through the trees they meet, but there is a pause. As Saki puts it:

Each had a rifle in his hand, each had hate in his heart and murder uppermost in his mind. The chance had come to give full play to the passions of a lifetime. But a man who has been brought up under the code of a restraining civilization cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down his neighbour in cold blood . . . 11

Doubtless the influence of teaching and civilisation can go either way, but surely it restrains at least as often as it encourages the aggressions built into Pan.

Pan is not a saint, often far from it, but he is essential to who we are, and our lives would make no sense without him. Meanwhile, as Spock struggles to accept the darker side of Pan, Pan can find Spock infuriating and irrelevant. I well remember how, as a child, I was told that Jesus thought we should always turn the other cheek, and I just felt, ‘What absolute rubbish.’ I thought this would not work in my playground, and almost

nobody, I imagine, honestly believes that it is never right to stand up and fight. Spock has a bad habit of coming up with ideas that are too simple, and applying them too broadly. Pan, in contrast, is quite content to accept inconsistency; the schoolmate who is an ally on Monday can be happily punched on Tuesday. As we shall see in a later chapter, inconsistency is built deeply into animal behaviour.

While the essence of Pan is fixed in our genes, Spock’s ideas evolve and spread within a single lifetime. Though new ideas often riff on one theme from Pan, often they conflict with another. Perhaps the most obvious example in current Western culture is the growth of political correctness and cancel culture. In line with the thinking of Lorenz – and as I shall be discussing in detail later – Pan uses a complex system of social forces to segregate human beings into us and them. Pan will die for ‘us’, but with almost no encouragement he is ready to turn violently on ‘them’. Within my lifetime, the idea that we should speak of all people equally has seen a spectacular spread. It is a beautiful idea – but it conflicts violently with our ‘them’ mode, and when one person thinks ‘us’ and another ‘them’, we come into conflict not just with ourselves, but with one another.

In 1998, when my 13-year-old son told us he was gay, it was still something to be discussed and coped with – when to tell our parents? How to respond when colleagues casually mentioned ‘playing for the other side’? Not many years later, the culture had changed, and disparagement had changed to acceptance. In a few short years my son could make me immensely happy by looking back and saying, ‘I don’t know what I was fussing about . . . it was just the gay thing.’ The idea that we are all ‘us’ is overwhelmingly generous, and when we can feel it in that spirit, the rules of Spock are backed up by all the flooding warmth of Pan. Once, sitting in a park, I was recounting to a friend the plot of the 2001

Italian film Le Fate Ignoranti (The Ignorant Fairies) – in which a woman discovers that her now deceased husband had been having an affair with another man – and suddenly, overcome by the theme of acceptance, I found I was sobbing, uncontrollably, in public.

But conflict arises when Pan feels that the gays are ‘them’, and Spock tells him to keep quiet about it. I sometimes feel it is like telling a teenager to keep quiet. He may be quiet, but he is sulking in a corner waiting to get back at you when he can. Most parents are aware that there are better ways to deal with a teenager. In the case of Pan, as we shall be seeing, the operating principles of the nervous system mean that it cannot possibly work simply to tell Pan he is wrong – and in any case, actually, he is not. Despite the teachings of Jesus and our modern political correctness, our lives simply cannot do without the distinction of ‘us’ and ‘them’. People are not all equal to us. We need to know and value who we are as individuals, who our friends are, what community we come from. The people around us are not abstract symbols of a common humanity – they are the concrete individual animals we know and love. Common humanity dictates that we should embrace all people but, at the same time, life cannot work without embracing the need to be ourselves.

When I had very small children, I was struck by how completely, in their mental world, desires could trump facts. The child is screaming for chocolate; you explain there is no chocolate in the car, but still the child continues to shout, ‘Give me the chocolate!’ My favourite example came many years ago as I left the building in Cambridge where I work. Just up the road is a nursery school, and in its playground, the trees are protected by metal grilles built around each trunk to perhaps four feet from the ground. As I walked by, I saw two small girls who had managed to throw their ball into the space behind one of these

grilles; there it lay on the ground, thoroughly out of reach, and one girl was firmly instructing it: ‘Ball! Ball! Come out, ball!’

As adults we may not shout for the ball but, still, it is surprisingly easy for us to believe in heavily over-simplified views of human nature, shaped not by experience but by Spock’s cultural or political preferences. It is disturbing when our ideals are questioned, but always, with the tension of Spock and Pan, ideals capture only a part of complex reality.

What is to come

In this book I explain the conflicted world of Pan and Spock, of instinct and reason, of the animal and the thinker. Part I deals with operating principles. It explains the basic science of instinct and reason. In the remainder of the book, we turn to big questions – morality in Part II , ambition in Part III , sex in Part IV , politics in Part V. In each section we see how the basic operating principles of the mind illuminate the conflicts and needs of our half-civilised, half-innate human lives.

Chapter 1 begins with the principles of animal behaviour and the insights of the ethologists. Across the animal kingdom, instincts control behaviour from searching for food to avoiding predators to defending territory to attracting mates to caring for the young. They provide suitable solutions, simple or elaborate, to highly specific situations in the animal’s life. They are often good on complexity and detail. They are weak on escaping from the detail of the moment to see a bigger picture. They are often conflicted, often incoherent and, as Lorenz clearly saw, often they have their own inner demand to be discharged.

Chapter 2 considers how these same principles apply to human instincts. Like a honeybee or a chimpanzee, we have our

own, heavily innate patterns of behaviour and thought, from the facial expressions that communicate greetings, threats, feelings and thoughts in the finest detail, to the elaborate sequences of back-and-forth interplay between parent and child, to the specifically human constructs that we use to speak to, understand and imagine one another. Undoubtedly, the power of Spock gives us immense freedom to reimagine our own lives. At the same time, obviously enough, principles that have regulated animal behaviour throughout evolution do not suddenly stop with us.

In Chapter 3, I turn to the complementary strengths – and complementary weaknesses – of human reason. Reason, I shall argue, is a process of constructing new thoughts from essentially any components. This allows humans to create an infinite variety of social thoughts, beyond the imagination of any other animal – that women must cover their shoulders to approach the Wailing Wall, or that children should not speak until they are spoken to. An essential element in the world of Spock is abstraction – just a few things are selected and sewn together into a thought, while everything else is left out. This makes reason good for extracting rules that apply not just to one detailed situation, but to many situations with related properties. But the power of an abstraction is also its weakness. In an abstract rule, all the specific details of any one situation are left out. When the details matter, Spock tends to miss them – he believes his rule, and while Pan is screaming that Spock has it all wrong, Spock blindly continues to push the rule through. The results are everywhere, from the sterile rules of strict religious observance to the over-simplified culture wars of current Western society. When our thoughts are too simple, our humanity is diminished and our lives feel incomprehensible and wrong.

Like Pan, Spock is also troubled by his own conflicts. As he deliberates, attention is focused on just one part of the bigger

picture, and as context shifts, so does Spock’s focus. Pan calls out competing demands; Spock responds with conflicting ideas, each capturing just a part of complex reality. It’s complicated. Chapters 4 and 5 consider how Pan and Spock work together. In Chapter 4, I look briefly at the brain, and the different bases for Pan and Spock. Pan is based heavily in ancient brain structures, present throughout vertebrate evolution. Spock, in contrast, is something much more recent, best seen in images of the human cerebral cortex at work. Ancient and modern brain structures work together but, within them, Pan and Spock have very different representation. In Chapter 5, I turn to the spread of Spock’s ideas. By much the same principles, I argue, ideas as well as animals evolve, but much faster, and with different mechanisms of generation and selection.

With the basic science in place, in the remainder of the book I turn to the big questions of human life. Part II , ‘Good and Evil’, deals with morality and its hidden but essential partner, friend and enemy. Pan, I shall suggest, brings the gushing sense of oneness when a crowd of a hundred thousand people rocks together to Queen, or when a child hugs a broken parent and says it will be OK . In Chapters 6 and 7, I deal with the bonding of human families and communities, and the instincts in place for mutual support, defence and care. But Pan also gave Genghis Khan the fierce joys of invasion and, today, produces the uncontrolled baying of a soccer crowd. In Chapter 8, I turn from ‘us’ to ‘them’, and the need for battle that runs just as deep as the need to love.

Meanwhile, the rules of Pan for hunter- gatherer societies simply cannot work in the large, urban communities that civilisation has created. To make life possible, we have the rules of Spock. Spock says, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and without this law, civilisation cannot work . . . but everybody knows that the real rule is ‘. . .

except sometimes.’ Simple laws can never capture the full complexity of our lives together, and the law is often an ass – but an ass we could not do without. Chapters 9 and 10 deal with the codification of moral principles, religion and legal systems. Blame, responsibility, free will . . . all these, I argue, are ideas that, like so many of Spock’s over-simplifications, capture a part of reality but at the same time trap us in confusion.

In Part III , ‘Ambition’, I turn to human aspirations and fulfilment. In part, the sense of meaning in our lives comes from the people who matter to us – from the smile of a child or the nod of appreciation from a colleague. But a part too comes from a sense of ourselves and what we can achieve. In Part III, I deal with self-respect – with the need to strive, to take up a challenge, to suffer, to be out on a fierce winter’s morning, peering through the darkness towards the mountain top. The fierce need to strive and succeed is essential to our sense of ourselves . . . at the same time, it can run out of control in a modern, large-scale society. Corporations take on the needs of the individuals within them, striving for more and more billions even though further billions in themselves are pointless. The billions, I argue, are not truly wanted. What is wanted in our small, animal selves is the success.

Part IV is ‘Sex’. In the twenty-first century, some of the most passionately debated social questions concern the roles and relations of men and women. On the one hand, we have the inspiring ideas of feminism and freedom of choice, with the ideal of equal opportunity for all to realise their dreams. On the other, we have the strong influence of the endocrine environment on brain development, and as any parent knows, often to their cost, it is not at all true that we shape our children entirely by the way we bring them up. With his usual penchant for abstraction, Spock may think that any recognition of difference between the sexes threatens equality of opportunity, ‘equal is equal’, but I shall

argue that this is a mistake. Reality as always is more complex than Spock imagines, and to be fulfilled by their lives, I shall argue, men and women need both the Pan and the Spock of their dreams, their nature and their relations.

In Chapter 12, I deal with the difference between equal rights and identical people – the biology that makes male and female different animals, and the culture that gives both the chance to realise their dreams. Chapter 13 deals with sex and sexual attraction, with all their combination of conflicting, often unsettling desires and potential for deep satisfaction and meaning. In Chapter 14, I turn to a fascinating historical study of what happens when men and women really are raised in the same way and with the same expectations, what it tells us about the balance of our conflicting needs and desires, and what it means for our lives today. Once again, the story of twenty-first- century relations between the sexes is the familiar, sometimes screaming dialogue of Spock and Pan, with all its joys and all its challenges.

In Part V, ‘Power’, I turn to politics, and to Winston Churchill’s remark, ‘It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government – except all those other forms that have been tried.’ It is easy to see why democracy is so necessary, but in the conflicting world of Spock and Pan, it is also easy to see why it can’t possibly work that well. For many, ‘democracy’ and ‘the will of the people’ are sovereign in political life – more important, for example, than making things work out well for those people. But in the world of Spock and Pan, there is no real will of the people – for that matter, there is no real will of even a single person. In every head are conflicting voices calling out conflicting commands and, in democracy, the clever leader works out which voice to speak to. The leaders, meanwhile, might ideally be working for the good of the community, but all too obviously, this is often not the dominant element in their thinking. Out-competing the

question of what is best are the burning needs of the individual to dominate, to win and, often, to acquire personal wealth. A better political system might down-weight these needs, but can such a system be found? For this, we need better knowledge in the hands of the electorate – but can that better knowledge ever be provided?

Know thyself

Different though we are, the story of Spock and Pan tells us that we are all in this together. A young girl sits in a garden in Nsukka, Nigeria; perhaps she is reading, perhaps she is dreaming; she will grow up to write luminous fiction and to be loved and hated for her advocacy of women’s pride and freedom. As recounted by Eibl-Eibesfeldt in Human Ethology, in New Guinea, an Eipo man is sitting in the morning with others, warming himself in the sun, carving an arrow. He gets up, goes over to the women’s group, picks up his child and brings it back to the men. For half an hour the child is the centre of attention, kissed, stroked, cuddled, entertained in high-pitched baby talk. In my own life, a young woman is hurrying in the kitchen; she has been out in the winter morning feeding calves, she has urged the boys outside to feed the pigs and made sandwiches for school, and now she wants to have a hot breakfast ready when my father comes in from milking. Our lives and our genes make each one of us unique, and as the girl from Nsukka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, explains so beautifully in her online TED Talk, we each have many stories.12 But in these stories there are always themes, and they are the themes of Spock and Pan, of human ideas built on animal instinct.

In this book, I want to show that the world of Spock and

Pan is exciting for its compelling, often rather simple answers to many of the great questions that puzzle humanity. But it is important too because these answers matter. In putting forward his views on human aggression, Lorenz reminded us of the Delphic oracle and the injunction ‘Know thyself.’ He argued that aggression – especially group aggression – can best be tamed by understanding, not by wishing it away. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker uses ‘Know thyself’ as the heading for an entire section. We would like our lives to be rich, fair, satisfying, safe, vibrant, meaningful, and for our best chance of approaching these ideals, we need understanding of our own nature. As we struggle to create a culture for our global, rapidly changing century, both Spock and Pan have their essential parts to play, and as we take sides in our strident culture wars, we might remember that, very often, these are really wars between different sides of ourselves. Despite the human fear of our animal side, the story of Spock and Pan is not a story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We need Pan to give us our values, our needs, our sense that life has meaning. We need Spock to generate his infinite world of ideas – sometimes great ideas, sometimes not, but with extraordinary flexibility and breadth. The two sides of our minds have quite different strengths, weaknesses, origins and operating principles. Our lives need both; together, I shall argue, they make us who we are.

9780753560921

THE ANIMAL AND THE THINKER

Instinct, Reason and the

Dance of Our Divided Selves

THE ANIMAL AND THE THINKER

THE ANIMAL AND THE THINKER

Instinct, Reason and the Dance of Our Divided Selves

Introduction

Pan and Spock

Who are we?

Reason is not enough

Another side

Pan and Spock

The voice of Spock

The voice of Pan

What is to come

Know thyself

Operating Principles

The animal lovers

Aiming for principles