3. Foundations for Trust

We, in the UK, live in a “hostile environment”. This, as government policy introduced in 2012, has amplified distrust, anxiety and fear, and justified the callous persecution of selected minorities. Those initially targeted, were people seeking refuge from life-threatening situations in their home countries, but it extends now to many others. With hostile attitudes and conflict now common, imagining how kindness, generosity, harmony and peace could arise out of them, baffles the brain.

This, in a nutshell, is MacIntyre’s conundrum. How, in a world that is intrinsically competitive, conflictual and hostile, could kind and trusting attitudes have arisen? MacIntyre perceived the answer to lie in the functioning of past cooperative communities that are now lost to us. These are the communities that this chapter seeks to find. For doing this, however, we need to go back a long way in time.

The Drawbacks of Growing Brains

The brain size of early hominins is known to have begun growing by 2.5 million years ago, and possibly earlier.1 This development, in very practical terms, would have caused problems. The growing size of babies’ brains would have increased the risks of giving birth for both mother and child.

The answer that was found by nature was to give birth to babies whose brains were not fully formed. This reduced child-birth risks, but it also committed mothers to intensive periods of care-giving during extending periods of childhood. Children with growing brains needed extra, and reliable, sources of food over extended periods of time, and, being more immature and more vulnerable, they needed more care and more security than before.

This created significant risks. Periods of extended nurturance reduced the number of children a mother could successfully rear during the fertile period of her life, while her illness or injury, or indeed death, threatened failure for the entire effort. Mothers, says Sarah Hrdy in her groundbreaking book Mothers and Others, needed help. Unreliable pair bonding with males, she reasons, would not have been enough.2

Cooperative Breeding

The answer observed in recent mobile forager bands, and accepted widely in anthropological circles, was the necessary existence of cooperative breeding. Cooperative breeding is a social system in which the care of the young is shared between parents and other helpers. Parents, commonly, are the principle caregivers, but others are actively involved as well.

Arrangements such as this are not unusual. Many, although generally a small number of birds, mammals, fish and insects, breed cooperatively. Such systems are fairly common in primates, but not in apes. Seen in this light, cooperative breeding appears to be an option that is naturally available to species in nature.

In the case of our early hominin ancestors who were facing the extra burdens of growing brains, it seems to have been an option that was needed. Cooperative breeding, it has been judged, was the “pre-existing condition” necessary for brain size to continue to increase. Without it the experiment, it is perceived, would have failed.2

That said, this still leaves the question, how, in an environment that is intrinsically hostile, can this system, in any species, succeed?

The Social Hormones

Within breeding systems of all sorts, two hormonal groups serve two key social functions. They are the peptides, primarily oxytocin, and the steroids, primarily testosterone.

The peptides produce nurturing, caring and productive behaviours, that promote cooperation and empathy. The steroids promote self-interest and competition, extending to aggression.6

In natural systems in nature, the peptides are perceived to promote growth, and the steroids are perceived to regulate that growth within sustainable limits. This occurs, it is perceived, within both animals and plants.

Commonly within animal breeding systems, the balance between the two hormonal groups varies by sex. The balance in females favours the peptides, facilitating strong nurturing bonds between a mother and her dependent young.

The balance in males favours the steroids, that do not.

In cooperative breeding social systems these more common characteristics are rearranged.

As Hrdy explains:

• “The inclination to care for infants derives from ancient and fairly universal physiological systems that are normally operational only in mothers. In [species characterised by nurturing males], however, nurturing tendencies get switched on in males as well.”2

These changes are perceived to be triggered by emotional, aromatic and other cues for those in close contact with pregnant females and their subsequent young. As with the females, the males then also become caring, sharing and empathetic.

The effect of this, at the human interpersonal level, has been to enable empathetic, peptidal bonding to be extended beyond the relationship between mother and child. Bonds that built trust developed between father and child, between other caregivers and child, between the two parents, and, eventually, between all adults in the social group.

This effect, initially, would have served two functions. For the child, it would have secured an emotional commitment to its survival and to its flourishing from a number of people. The endearing behaviours of babies and children are perceived to actively encourage these emotional ties, so enhancing the children’s survival chances.

And, for the parents, it enabled them to share the load. In doing so, it would have reduced the risks they needed to take to secure their children’s survival.

Over time other benefits would emerge. Empathetic bonds between caregivers would have enabled them to cooperate and trust in their wider endeavours. These included hunting, and their defence against predators, with these improving their lives and their survival chances as well.

Bonding such as this in apes, and presumably, therefore, in early hominins, is known to be reinforced through physical grooming.3 The release of the endorphin hormones that this stimulates, promotes relaxation, trust and reciprocity. In doing so it would have encouraged further cooperation within these groups, benefitting both them and the children for whom they cared.

Grooming such as this is, however, time consuming, and would have restricted the size of the group able to become bonded in this way. Research nevertheless shows that group size did increase. This suggests that some means of facilitating bonding and trust at the social level, would have been adopted.3

Music, dance and laughter are all activities that activate the endorphins. It seems likely, therefore, that they evolved to stimulate bonding at this social level, and would have done so long before language proper emerged.4

It has indeed been conceived that the trust and shared “intentionality” that these processes produced, would themselves have been essential requirements for allowing and enabling narrative-capable language to develop.5

The Evolution of Common Morality

These observations point to the unlikely conclusion, from our modern standpoint, that for two and a half, and perhaps three million years, our human ancestors lived and thrived in cooperative and trusting, empathically-bonded communities. This is the conclusion to which the evidence now strongly points.

For this to have happened, however, and for these communities to have survived over all this long time, the attitudes of people towards each other, and their consequent behaviour, would need to have been somewhat different than they are today.

The attitudes and behaviours that were adopted and practised would need to have attracted trust, and helped to build, sustain and strengthen the common good. They would need to have been adopted, encouraged and rewarded, also, at the community level. Attributes identified by Hrdy able to do this, are caring, sharing, empathy and intuition.2

Encouraged in children, these behaviours would have strengthened their bonds with adults in their community, resulting in those who were most caring, sharing, empathetic and intuitive, being best looked after when difficulties arose.

Repeated over thousands, even a hundred thousand generations before narrative-capable language emerged, these behaviours would have been progressively reinforced, and become deeply embedded in instinct.

Additionally, over time, the nature of the behaviours would have become more and more refined. However, only with the emergence of language, would they become identifiable as separate concepts. These today, I suggest, are what we refer to as the values of common morality.

Originally, having arisen through experience and become embedded in instinct they would have been beyond questioning. Such questions would only have become possible once the values were crystallised in language as concepts, and exposed to the narratives of reason.

That said, having been honed and tempered in cooperative groups over very long periods of time, they have very strong foundations. As seen in the first chapter, even today, despite the strength of modern narratives of hostility and conflict, not only do these instincts survive, they can emerge strongly to challenge the status quo.

A Continuing Moral Conundrum

The success of cooperatively breeding communities is explained by the altered functioning of the social hormones within them. This being so, they appear to be those sought by MacIntyre for explaining people’s continuing commitment today to the common good. Two problems, however, remain.

One is the perception that our world today somehow is different, and that what worked in the past has no necessary relevance to this world. Today’s morality, it will be said, needs to relate to the conditions in which we live. Seen from this perspective MacIntyre’s musings are irrelevant.

The other is more basic. It contends that the reasoning given does not explain the emergence of cooperative, trusting communities in an intrinsically hostile world. The hormones, seen from this perspective, are a distraction.

The question it asks is, how could, and why would, strongly empathetic peptidal bonds that encourage trust, have themselves come into existence in such a world? It is a fair question.