The social animal
What India is lacking as a nation is the ability to create a shared intentionality and a trustworthy environment
Anthropologists and philosophers from the Darwinian era have struggled with a fundamental question about the schizophrenic nature of humans—as individuals and as groups. Darwin’s law of natural selection advocates that human beings need to be selfish. After all, natural selection favours only those animals who watch out for themselves and their kin by hoarding scarcely available food, or dominating prime land and water resources. The genes of the altruistic individuals who gave up their own food or resources would be, by definition, weeded out as they could not continue to remain the strongest or fittest. This selfish behaviour is discernable even after millions of years of evolution during acute shortages when we tend to watch out only for ourselves and our loved ones. If the shortage is acute enough, then self-preservation even to the exclusion of own progeny is the primal instinct. Thousands of children or siblings sold for material gains are but one testimony of this basic selfish behaviour.
However, humans also display remarkably altruistic and selfless behaviour when working in groups. Soldiers sacrificing themselves for their “tribe" and bystanders leaping into rivers to save someone else’s drowning children are examples when the selfish gene seems to be replaced by an altruistic one.
Research has shown that humans are closest to two other species which share our planet—the chimpanzees and social insects such as bees and termites. We share over 95% of our gene pool with chimpanzees who are, unsurprisingly, remarkably intelligent and can perform many of the intellectual tasks requiring the adroitness of a three-year-old human child. However, while the chimps can trump human infants in several tasks, they fail miserably when it comes to collaborating with each other. Experiments pitting chimps and infants head to head reveal a significant difference. Human kids very quickly learn that they can collaborate with the experimenter and perform better. For example, if the experimenter hid a fruit under three paper cups and pointed towards one of them, the human child “learns" the signal while the chimpanzee cannot. Anthropologists term this faculty “shared intentionality" and, as pointed out by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, this inability to share intention is the reason why we never see two chimpanzees carrying a log.
Humans are also akin to bees, ants and termites but for a very different reason. Like them, we have created social structures that allow distribution of tasks, development of specializations and sophisticated command and trust-based organizational structures that bring greater efficiency as a whole. Bees, for instance, have workers, soldiers, builders and, of course, the queen—and very strong role relationships amongst them. Humans, however, are the only social animals who have the capacity to collaborate with others who are not their siblings. All bees, ants and termites in one hive are siblings. These two characteristics, i.e. shared intentionality and the ability to collaborate with others who are not siblings, is what enabled our species—who at individual levels are neither strong nor very defensible—to completely dominate the planet, pushing every other species into extinction or servitude. Unfortunately, as resources start reducing and parochial interests begin conflicting, that is also what humans are capable of doing to others of their own species.
All sociopolitical governance structures that have evolved over history—whether they are free-ranging democracies or absolute dictatorships (and flavours in between)—are modelled on these two fundamental building blocks. The leadership must create an identity for the tribe, cohort or group they seek to influence and then share their intentionality with them. This group then trusts the environment and begins to work as one large organism where each sub-unit specializes in certain activities, distributes workloads, produces, protects and enhances its sphere of influence. The super group, or nation, is built by sub-groups—tribes and factions—further built by communities, families and finally individuals. The sense of identity to a group, therefore, must subsume the identity to one’s own community and family for a social structure to function well. Armies the world over, from ancient times, are possibly the best examples of how societies band together people who at individual levels are different and forge them into one single unit whose purpose is much larger than each individual’s parochial interests. This process, at the end of which soldiers behave extremely contradictorily to self-preservation instincts, hinges on creating shared intentionality and what is known in the trade as “muscular bonding". Every soldier is put through seemingly mindless hours spent in drills and marching, which on the face of it does little to teach any fighting skill. But this essential military regimen trains a group to operate in unison under a single command until it becomes second nature.
What is true for the military is true for communities and countries as well. Shared intentionality is not simply communication although good communication is an important part. Instead, it is a demonstrable set of identities, rules, covenants and acceptable behaviour that is drilled into the individuals and sub-groups to convert them into a super group.
India is presently going through a period of turmoil. Our youth (or raw recruits) are struggling to find shared intentionality in the form of leaders, symbols, covenants and behaviours they can trust. What they are hearing instead is a cacophony of parochial interests haranguing the deficiency of others. The fact that Indians have what it takes to build themselves into a super group or superpower is indisputable. The basic ingredients, be it sheer intellectual prowess or the ability to collaborate, are skills that Indians possess beyond doubt. What we are lacking as a nation is the ability to create a shared intentionality and a trustworthy environment. And that is where aspiring leaders must prove their mettle. For, as an old army adage preaches, there are no good units or bad units—there are only good leaders or bad ones.
Raghu Raman is a commentator on internal security, member of the www.outstandingspeakersbureau.in and author of Everyman’s War (www.fb.com/everymanswarbook). The views expressed are personal.
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