Through the Looking Glass, The Search for Human Nature

 Around the world, one of the most common stories we tell are stories about animals who have human characteristics and speak languages like humans. Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books are a great example of this tradition. We love to anthropomorphize, which is to project human characteristics onto animals, machines, and even inert objects like chess pieces. But in our world, the human world,we know the rules are different. In our world, “Rules rule.” In the animal world dominance rules, because their world is strictly based on the biological inheritance of acquired traits, and acquired traits are the ones that are passed on by successful reproducers.

 Non-human animals act mostly by instinct.  They don’t share rules, they don’t teach rules, they don’t follow rules, and they don’t enforce rules. Any so-called exceptions to this usually involve humans laboriously teaching animals some simple rules such as a sign language. Can the same be said for any  animal in the absence of human intervention?

I have found  the ideas of  famous Victorian author,  Lewis Carroll,  of  "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass" fame, useful in what follows. I’ve always been a big fan of the Alice  books.  They were a childhood favourite, and I’ve read and reread them, then passed on my love, by reading them out loud to my youngest son.    In Carroll's second book, as you may have already guessed,  Alice begins her new adventure by passing through a looking glass.  The world on the other side of the looking glass looks the same as Alice’s fictional “real world”, but some  things outside  the room turn out to be radically changed.  In Alice’s “real” world there is a chessboard in a room, but  in the looking-glass world, that chessboard,  the room and the house  are now situated on a gigantic chessboard; and by entering the looking-glass world, Alice literally becomes a pawn that must move from one place to another as part of an ongoing game of chess.

The most powerful pieces in the game of chess are the two opposing queens.  The first person that Alice meets in the looking-glass world is the  Red Queen.  It is the Red Queen who informs Alice that it is not only possible to believe in impossible things, she recommends that it become a daily habit to  believe in as many impossible things as you can.  Perhaps this is to prepare both Alice and the reader for more to come, for the looking-glass world has very bizarre rules:  you must run as fast as you can to stay in the same place;  it is possible to  feel pain before getting hurt, instead of after;  and, according to one of the Looking-Glass world’s most famous inhabitants, Humpty Dumpty, a word can mean whatever he wants it to mean.

 Carroll picked up on an interesting fact about mirrors - there is a difference in the rules in the two worlds.  What is right handed in the real world ends up being left handed in a looking-glass world.  So he took that thought and created a fictional looking-glass world, where all human rules have changed, excepting the rules of chess; it’s only those rules that are the same in both worlds;  after all, one could argue that it's above all the chess board that is visible in both worlds at the same time.

After Alice attempts her half of a conversation with Humpty Dumpty, he scornfully states, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”  Note, that if this were true throughout looking-glass world, there would be no shared meanings, no shared rules, and no right or wrong.

 Without a mental commons, a shared understanding of norms, there can be no conception of  institutions, and practices that are universally followed and respected within a society, independently of the identity of those who practice them.  It is a fact, that where there is no commons, there is no truth, no language, no morality, and only the struggle for power.

This is my central thesis.  Humans share understanding about rules.  By doing so they can honour countless qualities, countless ways of achieving excellence in addition to physical strength.  With every other animal species, dominance and prestige are equivalent. The animal world has real physical limits, but humans surpass those limits with our ability to share rules and use our collective imagination.  It is by first developing normative systems, based on our ability to imagine and agree on common rules, that the first humans opened the  gap between humans and other animals and created a distinctly human nature.

                                                  II

 In nature there seems to be only one rule, in effect - "Might Makes Right" - but even the concept of “Right”  doesn’t mean anything here if meaning only refers to physical things and behaviour.   “Right”, then,  is just what is the case, it is what anybody can get away with, and there isn’t any normativity to it.

Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, “My name means the shape I am.” He seems displeased at Alice’s name because, he says, it doesn’t mean anything.  In language, words are most often arbitrary, they have no intrinsic connection to what they refer to.  Alice could just have easily been called Mary by her parents, but the name Humpty Dumpty does seem to reflect his physical shape,  even in the way the alliteration rolls off one’s tongue in saying it. This points to a difference between animal and human communication.  Human language is made up of mostly arbitrary units called words, that can be used in an endless variety of combinations.  Animal communication seems to be much more intimately linked to the animal’s physical state.

Since Darwin’s Origins, the temptation on the part of evolutionists is to see human “rules” as simply variations on Darwinian “rules” of natural selection.  Richard Dawkins, the geneticist author of The Selfish Gene, invented the concept of “memes” as viral ideas that are replicated culturally, analogously to replicating genes.  But “memes”  seems more of a looking-glass concept to me,  as if ideas have intentions, and can somehow execute strategies all by themselves, like the chess pieces and playing cards in Alice in Wonderland.  “Selfish Gene”, “memes”, “functional design”  - these are all anthropomorphic metaphors for things happening in nature.

Words, rules, and language are abstractions.  Animal vocalizations are more closely tied to physical reality, more like the connection between Humpty Dumpty’s shape and his name.  That connection to the physical is attenuated in human language, since our use  of language seems to have so much more freedom and independence from physical reality.

 Whenever we think about human language, the infinite - the absence of all limits - is lurking in the background. The way I see it, there is no actual infinity because there are always limits wherever you go.  I know this is controversial to say, because most mathematicians  insist that there are actual infinities.  But, for the sake of argument let’s say there is no actual infinity.  Well then, how do we know about infinity if there is no actual infinity?  I say it’s because infinity is really a useful metaphor, a conception of the mind; and, it was a conception that only became understandable through language.  Language seems to have virtually infinite generativity so it is a model for infinity. That’s how attenuated language is from physical reality.

 In sharp contrast, animal communication is tightly linked to physical states and capabilities.  A lion’s deep roar in the dark of night tells everyone listening who’s the boss.  A smaller, younger lion, if he roars at the same time, is only going to advertise his vulnerability.  Animal vocalization is linked to physical states, and a lion’s roar is a signal of dominance that is hard to fake. This idea, called the “Handicap Principle”,   is the brainchild Amotz Zahavi, an Israeli Zoologist.

A male songbird’s beautiful song sung while other male birds are hard at work looking for worms, tells prospective mates and rivals that this guy can handicap himself by singing all the time, because he has abilities in excess of what is needed to survive, and therefore that he is an attractive mate.

In animal communication, the signal is closely tied to the animal’s physical state because the more effective the signal is in  establishing and maintaining  dominance, the more likely that animal will be reproductively successful. That is why truth is not needed in animal communication.  “All these signals amplify the ability of the observer to spot superiority or defects in the animals that carry them.”   Weaker or inferior animals are not able to fake these signals because they are somehow deficient in the physical characteristics that are needed to produce the reliable signal.  A large mature lion has a roar that cannot be duplicated by younger or smaller lions.  An alpha male gorilla can thump his chest with a  deep resonance that cannot be faked by younger, smaller, males. These signals act as implicit threats that take the place of physical fighting.  They communicate to weaker rivals not to bother trying, and they save the dominant from the physical risk of fighting.  Natural selection encourages reliable signals, because dominant animals who are most able to produce these signals are more successful at reproduction.

 The Zahavis study a middle-eastern bird called “Babblers”  that live in groups that nest in desert thorn bushes, and practice a form of altruism by the collective feeding of nestlings in a communal nest, volunteers guarding the colony, and the collective mobbing of predators.  But this animal form of altruism is very different from human altruism.  It is tightly linked to dominance.  Male babblers compete for the privilege of guarding the flock.  The dominant male, the alpha,  will push aside his closest rival when he tries to take on guard duty, but he doesn’t bother less dominant babblers who volunteer.  Zahavi argues that animal altruism is a reliable signal,  like animal vocalizations, an implicit threat that signals to less dominant rivals to back off, rather than get involved in a fight over dominance, which they would be sure to lose.

The dominant babbler has what is known as prestige, respect from other babblers that allows him to keep others as his partners and to control his own group without having to resort to fighting.  According to the Zahavis, in babblers there is no separation between dominance and prestige. “Increased prestige for one partner means a loss of prestige for another.” Prestige is a “zero-sum game”. “An individual’s prestige is reflected in, indeed defined by - the respect accorded him or by others… one can even view altruistic acts as implied or surrogate threats, since the prestige the altruist gains allows him or her to achieve what others gain by threats.”

What I find so fascinating about the Zahavi’s explanation of babbler altruism, is its obvious difference from human altruism.  In humans neither altruism, nor prestige need be a zero-sum game.  First of all, there are many ways of going about gaining prestige, so prestige can be independent of physical dominance, nor is there any limit to the ways that we could go about  helping others. Think of it like the Greek concept of eudaimonia. There are many ways to  flourish.  We are able to exalt in creative endeavors most diverse, exactly because these diverse ways can be independent of competition for physical dominance.

 It is this relentless Darwinian competition for the most offspring that limits non-human animals to dependence on reliable signals like vocalization and other signs of dominance.  Humans avoid this rigid dependence,  simply by embracing and sharing rules.  Rules are infinitely generative because they can operate via our imaginations on imagined situations that are not immediately present.  By the miracle of shared grammar and meanings language allows humans to talk about situations that are unseen and not present. Somebody can be talking about Douglas Adam’s whimsical image of “the restaurant at the end of the Universe”, and we understand what he means, even though no one has ever been there, or even thought about the idea before. The units of language are manipulable and interchangeable.  They can be generated in almost any combination.   They can be used independently of physical situations that they are about.  Once humans agreed to share the same rules and meanings, this virtual world opened up to us.

 But there is an important cost, because as Zahevi points out, “human language has no component that guarantees its reliability and prevents cheating.”  This is an extremely important point.  Take a moment to let it sink in , because it’s the reason that there is no Platonic Sun-God that illuminates the truth and shines forth in the darkness. There is a  price to language, and that is our commitment to tell the truth and counter lies and misinformation.  With the development of language, humans took over the conscious task of ensuring reliability from a largely unconscious nature.  That’s why we need truth and animals don’t.

  When we made communication easier with language, we also made it easier to deceive and mislead with language.  Subsequently we needed to develop the many and various modes of inquiry.  But dwelling in specialized modes of inquiry is also no guarantee of the truth, for inquiry can proceed in a bubble, untouched and uncorrected by those outside.

That’s why we understand truth to be objective, to be independent of our beliefs and our desires.  By holding to this belief in truth’s objectivity we honour truth over individuals.  When we follow norms we honour rules and roles over particular individuals.  This is sometimes called “Rule of Law”.  According to the Rule of Law, everyone is subject to the law and no one is above the law.  Rules  matter.  Following rules creates the vital difference between dominance and prestige in humans.

Without truth as a normative system, it doesn’t take much to go back to the state of nature. If the dominant human male calls evidence that contradicts or implicates him “fake news”, and there are no independent commonly agreed standards to appeal to against his claims, we are back in the state of nature, without anything like truth or morality.  Like Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall - things are in a precarious position, where the destructive consequences to our society can go beyond what is repairable.