The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene

Abstract

In The Bridge to Humanity, Walter Goldschmidt couples the economy, discipline, and precision of haiku with metaphoric evocation to propel argument and evidence toward a scientific foundation for a moral sense. Goldschmidt's marshalling of empirical evidence from anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and psychology in support of these arguments trumps the ideological assumptions of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology or ecology with both reasoning and data. Healthy public policies would build on the motivational forces of human behavior because affect hunger begins with problems in the care of infants, goes on to the traumas of adolescence, and ends with the loneliness that exacerbates the pains of old age.

The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene. Walter Goldschmidt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 164 pp.

In The Bridge to Humanity, Walter Goldschmidt couples the economy, discipline, and precision of haiku with metaphoric evocation to propel argument and evidence toward a scientific foundation for a moral sense.

Natural selection favors the evolution of beauty and ferocity among all life forms as well as emotions that pit one individual against another to the extent that these things enhance chances of self-perpetuation. A metaphor for this process is "the selfish gene."

Mammals share a physiological need for the affection of others to properly develop. What made us human is the selective advantage that flexibility conferred on groups whose members could be more committed to serving group interests than replicating themselves-"affect hunger."

Everything human takes place in the "gap between the encoded genetic instruction and behavioral performance" (p. 18). In that fissure is culture. We learn culture because of an inborn necessity to please those who are trying to teach. The individuals and groups that could not transcend the first competitive evolutionary imperative with cooperation have long since perished, unable to be sufficiently responsive to changing conditions of time and space.

Love is strong positive emotional attachment between two people. One source is sexual attraction derived from the combative competitiveness we share with all life. Another is the physical gratification of nurturing and being nurtured derived from the generosity that makes us adaptable and human. The two kinds of love are distinct, the results of different evolutionary processes. To conflate them, as Sigmund Freud did, is misleading.

Allowing us to share thoughts and enhancing our abilities to plan and arrange, language allowed us to achieve the material base for greater biological success and population, but it could not insure consensus about how to organize. We could see and talk about the effects of technical innovations such as fletching arrows, but we could not show the effects of social innovations. "Humans then could not invent and agree to social solutions to demographic complexities that their technical innovations had made possible" (p. 39, emphasis in original).

The linear "engineer's logic" of language does not let us share our lifelong hunger for approval and affection that lets us learn language and culture. Starting about forty thousand years ago at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, we began to share emotions-not ideas about emotions, but emotions themselves-via ritual. This purely cultural innovation initiates the exponential curve of our development in successively shorter-by-half intervals to the cave art of Europe 20,000 years ago to the first agriculture 10,000 years ago to the first states 5,000 years ago to classical Greece 2,500 years ago.

An ancient combative sexual individuality is the yang to a more recent yin urge for unity and communion in our evolutionary history. Emerging with culture is the yearning for parental love that allows us our adaptive flexibility at the price of genetic certainty. Our biologically given mammalian affect hunger allows us to learn the related thought processes of language and fabrication while ritual allows us to share feelings and to build sociability. These are rooted in affect hunger. The selfish gene makes us living things; affect hunger makes us human.

Goldschmidt's marshalling of empirical evidence from anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and psychology in support of these arguments trumps the ideological assumptions of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology or ecology with both reasoning and data. He shows us why a four-field anthropology is important for understanding the human condition. Providing a model of scientific thought, he suggests that when we disconfirm our assumptions we should change our paradigms rather than abandoning the inquiry, as was the case with Freud in particular and culture and personality studies in general.

Healthy public policies would build on the motivational forces of human behavior because affect hunger "begins with problems in the care of infants, goes on to the traumas of adolescence, and ends with the loneliness that exacerbates the pains of old age. It has to do with the quality of justice and the availability of opportunity" (p. 151).

Finally, Goldschmidt concludes: "There is perhaps no better way to evaluate the quality of a culture than to learn how the people gratify their affect hunger and the degree to which the society enables them to do so. There is no better measure of a person than to learn how he seeks to gratify, or wants to be able to gratify, his hunger for affect" (p. 138).

The book should be required for all who are or want to become anthropologists as an example of the grandeur and scope of our discipline and to remind us of the kind of enterprise to which we should all be contributing.