The Evolution of Agency – Part 5
Threats to the evolution of agency.
Continuing this series of essays, we’ll explore the evolutionary origins of human agency, the key steps in that development, and the need for society to uphold the types of social arrangements that made the development of human agency possible in the first place. Michael Tomasello, in his book The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans, summarizes the history of the evolution of human agency this way:
[W]hen Nature cannot predict important future contingencies in the environment, so to speak, her solution is to equip the individual to pursue certain goals flexibly by assessing the immediate situations and then choosing the best thing to do (see Veissière et al., 2019). From the individual agent’s point of view, this often means making a decision in the face of one or another type of uncertainty (or, as a special case, one or another type of risk). In principle, many different things may cause an agent to experience uncertainty in its ecological niche, including many different aspects of the physical environment. But, according to my hypothesis, the most important cause of decision-making uncertainties for agentive organisms is other creatures. More specifically:
• For reptiles, most of the uncertainties arise from the behavior of insect prey, successful pursuit of which requires flexible decision-making (which is also sometimes required for successful escape from predators).
• For mammals, most of the new uncertainties arise from the behavior of group mate conspecifics [members of the same species] who compete with them for food, creating pressure to make “better” (more efficient) decisions.
• For great apes, most of the new uncertainties arise again from the behavior of group mate conspecifics, but because of their common preference for clumped and difficult-to-access resources, they compete in especially intense ways, creating pressure both to predict the behavior of competitors more accurately and to correct poor decisions before behavioral execution.
• For humans, most of the new uncertainties arise from the challenging behavior of collaborative partners or groups as they attempt to coordinate with them to obtain resources or carry out other complex activities, requiring a whole host of new social-cognitive skills and motivations, as well as new forms of social decision-making and self-regulation.
Coordinating with other individuals toward shared goals requires taking others’ role and perspective on things, leading to perspectival and ultimately to objective cognitive representations, accompanied by recursively structured inferences. And interacting with others in all kinds of shared agencies requires individuals to respect one another as equal participants and to trust one another in the “agreements” that they make …
In his previous book, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, Tomasello writes that the progress that grew from mathematics to the Industrial Revolution and beyond, is the result of this dynamic:
[T]he traditional notion of culture as something apart from biology and evolution will not do. Human culture is the form of social organization that arose in the human lineage in response to specific adaptive challenges. Its most distinctive characteristic is its high degree (and new forms) of cooperation … [V]irtually all of humans’ most remarkable achievements— from steam engines to higher mathematics— are based on the unique ways in which individuals are able to coordinate with one another cooperatively, both in the moment and over cultural-historical time.
Regarding the evolution of a human capacity for an objective perspective (I quoted in the previous essay):
[A]s they evolved into fully cultural beings, modern humans came to perceive and understand the world not just in terms of individual perspectives on things but in terms of the objective situation that was independent of any individual perspective. And they came to understand their group mates not just in terms of their responsibilities to one another but also in terms of their obligations to uphold the collective normative standards agreed to by everyone in the group. Modern humans came to inhabit an objective-normative world. The key cognitive advance creating this objective-normative world is the ability to distinguish between subjective perspectives or beliefs, on the one hand, and the objective situation or reality, on the other. Great apes do not make this distinction … Normative rationality thus means adapting one’s individual agency to “objective” facts and values as they inhere in collective cultural experiences.
As Tomasello writes in his book Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, this tendency toward objectivity led to the development of moral theories based not on might makes right, but on appeals to objective, universally applicable moral principles:
[J]ust as conventional norms codified the right and wrong way of doing things in instrumental activities, moral norms codified the right and wrong way of treating other people morally. Because the collective intentionality and cultural common ground of modern humans created a kind of “objective” perspective on things, modern human morality came to be characterized as objective right and wrong.
Sadly, as explored in a previous essay, the worldview espoused by various authors popular on college campuses today explicitly reject objectivity, when the concept of objectivity is one of the most valuable results of the evolution of human agency.
And as we explored in another previous essay, today, too often, children are coddled by parents who see too much danger in letting their children develop the independence necessary to internalize responsibility. This modern trend cuts again prior centuries of collective wisdom that recognized humans should be held to a higher standard of responsibility much earlier in life, as befits their uniquely human capacity for agency. As Tomasello writes in his book Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny:
In the eyes of many cultural institutions and traditions, across many centuries and societies, children’s sixth or seventh birthday heralds their entry into the “age of reason.” In British common law, this is the first age at which a child may commit a crime. In the Catholic Church, this is the age at which a child may first take communion. In cultures requiring formal education, this is the age at which a child is ready for serious instruction in literacy and numeracy. And in traditional societies, this is the age at which a child is first given important independent tasks such as tending a flock, gathering firewood, or delivering a message (Rogoff et al. 1975). Overall, children of this age have become, from a cognitive point of view, mostly reasonable— beings with whom one may reason, and expect a reasonable response in return— and they have become, from a social point of view, mostly responsible— beings whom one may hold accountable, and expect to hold themselves accountable, for their beliefs and actions. The result is nascent “persons,” who have taken a giant first step toward internalizing the culture’s norms of rationality and morality, making them for the first time capable of and indeed responsible for normatively self- regulating their own beliefs and actions.
Whereas modern trends tend to condone, or tolerate, irresponsibility, as Tomasello writes in his book Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, human agency developed amidst incentives to find cooperative partners who would not just take for themselves, but who demonstrated responsible behavior to their wider community:
An essential part of the process of obligate collaborative foraging was partner choice. Individuals who were cognitively or otherwise incompetent at collaboration— for example, those incapable of forming a joint goal with others— were not chosen repeatedly as partners, and this meant no food. Likewise, individuals who were socially or morally uncooperative in their collaborative interactions with others— for example, those who tried to hog all the spoils— were also avoided as regular partners and so were doomed. The upshot was that there was strong and active social selection for cooperatively competent and motivated individuals.
Yet today, as explored in a previous essay series, too many fathers are revealing themselves as “incapable of forming a joint goal with others” by abandoning their families and denying children the vast benefits of a two-parent family. And, as also explored in a previous essay, too many others are “trying to hog all the spoils” by dropping out of the labor force and relying on government benefit programs.
As Tomasello writes in his book Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny:
Whereas great apes could abstract common features across exemplars and form an abstract representation of a set of entities, early humans could not only do this but also see the same entity from different perspectives, under different descriptions (for example, as stick and as tool), both at the same time. This form of cognitive representation is responsible for much of the remarkable flexibility and power of human conceptual activity.
Yet today, as explored in a yet another previous essay, intellectual movements popular on college campuses embrace inflexible worldviews that are intolerant of other perspectives, and based on the false view that there is only one cause for things (like disparities among people grouped by race) that in fact have many potential causes.
As Tomasello writes in his book Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny:
Early human individuals who were socially selected for collaborative foraging related to others in some new ways. Most important, they had strong cooperative motives, both to work together with others toward cooperative goals and to feel sympathy for and to help others who were, or might be, their partners. If an individual depended on a partner for foraging success, then it made good evolutionary sense to help him whenever necessary to make sure he was in good shape for future outings … [A]s two individuals collaborated repeatedly with one another in a particular foraging context, they developed a common-ground understanding of the way that each role needed to be played for joint success, what we may call role- specific ideals (for example, in hunting antelopes the chaser must do x, and the spearer must do y). These ideals were impartial in the sense that they specified what either of us must do to fulfill the role “properly,” in a way that ensured our joint success. All of these things together led to a collaborative attitude: because we both are needed for success, and we are interchangeable in our roles (each of which have mutually known and impartial standards of performance), we are equally deserving of the spoils. This is in contrast to cheats or free riders, who are not deserving of the spoils.
Again, contrast that with today, when, as explored in previous essays, free riders proliferate on the tides of increasing waves of government benefit programs.
As Tomasello writes in Becoming Human:
As part of this joint [societal] commitment, the would-be partners also could pledge, implicitly, that whichever of them might renege on the commitment would be deserving of censure; so the deviant, if she wanted to stay in good cooperative standing, would actually join with the partner in condemning herself (internalized into a sense of guilt), in a kind of we > me morality.
Yet today, public censure and personal feelings of guilt for reneging on commitments (as when, for example, fathers abandon their children) is discouraged, or reluctantly pursued.
As Tomasello writes in Becoming Human:
[E]veryone agrees that the prosocial behavior of children approaching school age, as well as that of school-age children themselves, is strongly influenced by adult socialization, teaching, and social norms. There is much that older children need to learn to become good cooperators in society, and most of what they learn comes from adults.
Yet today, as explored in previous essays, adults who should know better are failing to apply appropriate consequences to disruptive behavior by children, and lowering standards for their educational development.
The next time you evaluate a public policy, or a school board’s decision, or a parenting method, you would do well to consider whether and how it comports with what we know about how human agency came to be in the first place, lest society fall back to our pre-human sensibilities. It would do us good as a society if more people recognized the need to reinforce, rather than oppose, the factors out of which grew our human agency. Otherwise, we might end up squandering the millennia of evolutionary progress that’s placed us in the most promising times of human history -- and which could become more promising still if we kept the course.
This concludes this series of essays on the evolution of human agency.