In his fourteenth chapter Moffett covers one of my hobby horses, though I’m sure that’s not why he did it: The Great Chain of Being. What’s that:
We see our society and those of other people as falling into a hierarchy along with other living things, a notion codified in the Middle Ages as the Great Chain of Being. Typically the royal We surmounts the chain (surpassed only by God and the angels). Other humans follow in a descending order, some of them, Aristotle announced, “as much inferior to their fellows...as beasts are to men.” This hierarchy continues its plumet through the natural world, with “some animals,” as Orwell wryly wrote in Animal Farm, “more equal than others.”
The scale wasn’t fashioned in an ancient Greek ivory tower; people intuited the universe this way before words were scratched on parchment. More than likely it’s a basic feature of our psychology. Researcher shows that children think of people as superior to animals, and of outsiders as closer than their own group to animals. Furthermore the proneness of hunter-gatherers and tribal peoples to describe themselves as human suggests this type of thinking is typical even among societies that are small and have much in common with their neighbors (far more in common than you, with your wider knowledge of the world, likely share with a Tibetan yak herder today). Their use of epithets meaning nonhuman or animal also suggests those people felt entitled to treat at least some outsiders categorically as other species, an outlook that would naturally affect their relationships. [pp. 185-186]
Moffett is correct, the Great Chain IS fundamental to our way of conceptualizing the world and there is a significant literature on the subject [1].
What’s important here, and it seems obvious now that Moffett has pointed it out, is that the Great Chain is linked to the psychological systems that organize social behavior. We think of the social Other as some kind of creature lower on the chain than we are, something Moffett discusses on the following pages. Earlier Moffett had observed it only takes a tenth of a second for us assess a person’s face in terms of “emotional state, sex, race, and ... ethnicity and society, too” (p. 170. Psychologists have recently shown that people make a determination about whether or not something is animate or inanimate – a basic ‘break point’ on the Great chain – in only 250 milliseconds [2]. So, we use the Great Chain to make a quick and dirty assessment of other beings and we use it, at greater leisure, as a way of organizing the world.
Moffett goes on to observe, “Male macaques readily associate troop members with fruit and foreign monkeys with spiders in a simian version of the Implicit Association Test”, thus suggesting: “our ranking of societies and ethnic groups in the Great Chain emerged out of the dominance hierarchy that organizes the relationships of individuals within the societies of many animals” (p. 191). I can offer some suggestively similar examples from the behavior of chimpanzees raised among humans.
Consider Vicki, perhaps the first chimpanzee to be raised among humans. As a youngster she was given the task of sorting photographs into two piles, “human” and “animal.” She placed her own photograph in the human pile while she put her chimpanzee father’s picture went into the animal pile (Eugene Linden, Apes, Men, and Language, 1974, p. 50). Was she expressing aggression against her father? Possibly, but not likely. Her father was a chimpanzee and so she placed his picture in the pile for animals, where it belonged. He looked like other animals, more or less. But why did she think her picture belonged in the pile with humans? After all, she didn’t look like humans, and least not as humans judge these things.
Lucy is another chimpanzee who was raised among humans (Temerlin, “My Daughter Lucy”, Psychology Today 9, 1975: 103). When she reached puberty she made sexual advances toward traveling salesmen and masturbated while looking at pictures of nude men in Playgirl, showing particular interest in their penises. Washoe, raised by Allen and Beatrice Gardner and taught the rudiments of Ameslan (American Sign Language), referred to other chimpanzees as “black bugs” when she first came in contact with conspecifics after years of life among humans (Linden, p. 10).
These chimpanzees, in a sense, “thought” of themselves as people. They were used to social interaction with human beings, not with other chimpanzees. Thus we might interpret Vicki’s two piles of photographs as “appropriate social other” and “inappropriate social other” rather than as “human” and “animal.” The fact that the physical resemblance between chimpanzee and chimpanzee is greater than that between human and chimpanzee is overridden by the fact that, for these apes, there is no social resemblance between themselves and other chimpanzees while such social resemblance does hold with humans. Social structure trumps physical appearances as a way of organizing the world.
More later.
References
[1] I’ve got a post that lays this out, The Great Chain of Being as Conceptual Structure (August 10, 2011), with references: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/08/great-chain-of-being-as-conceptual.html.
I’ve got a good many posts on the general topic of ontological cognition: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ontological%20cognition.
I’ve collected a number of those into a working paper, Ontological Cognition, a Working Paper, November 12, 39 pp.: https://www.academia.edu/7931749/Ontological_Cognition.
[2] See my post, Quick takes: detect animate vs. inanimate in 250 msec, November 29, 2019, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/11/quick-takes-detect-animate-vs-inanimate.html.
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Reading the Human Swarm, a sporadic series about Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.
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