What is a human being - exactly?

After reading David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral (2002), not for the first time I wondered about the following aspect of our "being". How is a human being different from an ant hill (apart from the fact that - most - ant hills stay put)? The point is: we are as much a "collective" as an ant hill is. For instance: How are our red blood cells (Erythrocytes) different from worker ants? How are our white blood cells (Leukocytes) different from soldiers ants? How are the bacteria in our gut different from the various species that certain ants cultivate inside their lair? Etcetera.

They killed about 50,000 men in only a few hours

I really like Thomas J. Scheff's Goffman unbound! A new paradigm for social science (2006). However, when I wanted to use from the chapter ‘Masculinity and emotions’ a quote from Hubert Conway Rees as given by Richard Koenigsberg, I got into trouble. Scheff uses it to illustrate that ‘hypermasculine control of emotions’ is not a virtue, but ‘a fatal flaw in character that can lead to violence or at least the taken-for-granted acceptance of violence.’ The following is the quote that Scheff takes from Koenigsberg.

In the following report, British General Rees describes the massacre of his own brigade as they moved toward German lines.
    ‘‘They advanced in line after line, dressed as if on parade and not a man shirked going through the extremely heavy barrage, or facing the machine gun and rifle fire that finally wiped them out. I saw the lines, which advanced in such admirable order melting away under fire. Yet not a man wavered, broke the ranks, or attempted to come back. I have never seen, indeed could never have imagined such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination. The reports from the very few survivors of this marvelous advance bear out what I saw with my own eyes: that hardly a man of ours got to the German Front line.’’

The emphasis is added by Scheff. Unfortunately Koenigsberg is a really bad source for this quote of Rees. In fact, it turns out that the quote is not really of Rees himself at all. In the end the point Scheff wants to make, using this quote, may still stand, but the perspective changes somewhat.

When I tried to find Koenigsberg's original text I initially simply but keywords in Google Book, and only when that did not return the result I had hoped for, looked up Scheff's book's references. Only then I noticed that Scheff had used an online source of Koenigsberg. In itself this is perfectly all right, although I had to Google somewhat before I could locate the article, since Scheff had quoted an index file instead of the article itself, and the index had obviously changed in the years in between.

Finally looking at the article, it turned out that Koenigsberg himself had no reference for the quote! Maybe, this in itself should have been reason enough not to trust Koeningsberg or the quote. After much more Googling, I located the relevant page of Rees’ memoirs, but it was not the source of the quote, and the wording of the event in question was somewhat different:

At the time this barrage really became intense, the last waves of the attack were crossing the trench I was in. I have never seen a finer display of individual and collective bravery than the advance of that brigade. I never saw a man waver from the exact line prescribed for him. Each line disappeared in the thick cloud of dust & smoke which rapidly blotted out the whole area. I can safely pay a tribute also to the bravery of the enemy, whom I saw standing up in their trenches to fire their rifles in a storm of fire. They actually ran a machine gun out into No Mans Land to help repel the attack.
    I saw a few groups of men through gaps in the smoke cloud, but I knew that no troops could hope to get through such a fire. My two staff officers, Piggott and Stirling, were considerably surprised when I stopped the advance of the rest of the machine gun company & certain other small bodies now passing my Headquarters. It was their first experience of a great battle & all that morning they obviously found it difficult to believe that the whole brigade had been destroyed as a fighting unit.

So where did the quote from? As it happens, an online article called ‘The Character Assassination of General Rees’ seems to explain that quite convincing. According to the article, the quote Scheff took from Koenigsberg came from John Laffin's British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One (1988, pp.9-10). However, Laffin had not used Rees own words, but an entry from the War Diary of VIII Corps. The unmodified original of that reads as follows.

He saw the lines which advanced in such admirable order melting away under the fire. Yet not a man wavered, broke the ranks, or attempted to come back. He has never seen, indeed could never have imagined, such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination. The reports he had had from the few survivors of this marvellous advance bear out what he saw with his own eyes, viz., that hardly a man of ours got to the German front line.

Robertson Papers, KCL 1/21/27/2

Laffin has simply changed third person to first person, and changed the attribution from the Robertson Papers to Rees himself.^[1] Rees himself recalls the report that was taken at the time like this.

I went on later to H.Q. VIIIth Corps & gave General Hunter Weston an account of the battle. He put my remarks into his own language & I think that particular report of mine is somewhat more ornate than anything else I have put my name to.

Extract from the memoirs of Brigadier-General Hubert Conway Rees, held at the Imperial War Museum Department of Documents (IWM 77/179/1).

As I already indicated, I expect that in the end Scheff's use of this quote will still fit the point he is trying to make.^[2] Still, the differences between the modified version and the original are not negligible. Also, the ‘ornate’ version of the events, using words that Rees would not have chosen himself, was put into words at the Head Quarter. I would say that it is significant that the adorned version of Rees words came about at a much greater distance from the reality of violence.

In the line following Koenigsberg version of Rees’ story in Scheff’s book, Scheff writes: ‘General Rees apparently didn't explain how he managed to survive when his whole brigade was wiped out.’ While I can sympathise with the emotion that Scheff probably compelled to make that remark, it is most likely very unfair to Rees, and worse, misses the point Scheff himself is trying to make, namely that the preoccupation of these men with suppressing ‘weak’ emotions like fear and shame in favor of showing almost blind obedience and fearless courage leads to poor decision making.

The article ‘The Character Assassination of General Rees’ is persuasive in making the point that Rees did his very best to make the conditions of the attack as favorable for his men as possible, and would probably not have attacked under the conditions present if it had been his call (but it wasn't, he was under orders). That Rees, as Brigadier-General in charge of the attack at this point remained in the trenches was quite unremarkable, and enabled him to stop further attacks when things went bad.

Perhaps inadvertently, Scheff's remark is suggestive of the idea that the officers in command sent their men into a certain death, without themselves running any risk. That is not how I learned my lessons of World War I in school. What I recall of those lessons (and Reeds’ memoirs seems to confirm this) is that in the beginnings of that war officers habitually would lead their troops into battle, in fact to the point that so many officers died, that a serious shortage of officers became a problem. Like their men, the officers were courages to the point of folly. It seems to me that it was precisely because the officers and generals where so good in cultivating ‘tough’ emotions like courage and aggression that they did not succumb to ‘weak’ emotions of unbearable regret and shame after having killed about 50,000 men in only a few hours, and felt therefore no need to change their approach substantially.

The gap in values

What have these countries in common: Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Costa Rica, Finland, Portugal, Thailand? According to Geert Hofstede in these countries men and women are more alike with regard to their values. In fact, in Norway and Sweden the values of men and women are so much alike, that it's apparently hardly possible to predict their sex looking at test scores only.

Most of the world is different in this regard, since in most parts of the world the values of men and women are to a degree different. Examples of countries where the gap between men and women seems to be the largest are Japan, Austria, Venezuela, Mexico. To add one more layer of complexity: globally women share more of their values, regardless of the culture they come from, while men differ the most, depending on their cultural background. But in countries where men have different values then women, the women to an extent adapt their values to the men, becoming in effect more ‘men-like’ (I guess we could call this ‘the Margaret Thatcher effect’).

There is a whole spectrum of values that can be tied to this dimension of more feminine values versus masculine values. In practice it is often risky to isolate a single dimension or set of values from the larger context. For example, in feminine cultures people tend to be more modest. However, modesty is supposed to be a cultural trait of Japan as well, even though Japanese culture tops the scale of masculinity. The explanation is probably that Japanese (men in particular) reserve their boastfulness for specific domains of interaction.

It can be fun though, to look at a trait somewhat in isolation. In one study^[1] researchers looked at the question to what extent the attitudes of female and male heterosexuals and homosexuals in the US and Sweden differentiated between sex and love.

Within each country, sex and love were seen as more different by men then by women. Among men, they were seen as most different by homosexuals and least by married heterosexuals, with single heterosexuals in between. Among women, the order was reversed: Sex and love were seen as most different by married heterosexuals, less by single heterosexuals, and least by lesbians. The perception gap between the sexes was smallest for married couples (who have to accommodate to the partner's attitude), larger for singles, and largest for homosexuals (who do not have to accommodate to the other sex at all). Much larger than the differences between these categories within the countries, however, were the differences between the two countries as a whole: All Swedish groups distinguished much less between sex and love than the corresponding U.S. groups, and there was no overlap between the answers from the two countries in this respect. All groups in the feminine culture, Sweden, came much closer to equating sex with love. ^[2]

Reading Paul McAuley’s Gardens of the Sun (2009) I am greatly impressed with his ability to describe futuristic technology (for example the physics involving new spacecraft or the creation of a new species through genetic technology), which is quite unlike the (mostly very silly) science talk in movies or television series that do SF. However, since I know nothing about fields like physics or molecular biology I cannot judge whether his descriptions would remain as credible as they are when looked at with the eye of an expert. Since McAuley is a biologist by training his story may at least hold with regard to that field, but how about for example his thoughts about the propulsion of space crafts or the construction of habitats in space? I don't know.

Half way his Gardens of the Sun one of the protagonists (Sri) is stimulated to get acquainted with the literature on the functioning of the human brain with regard to emotional control and social relations. While I know almost nothing about neuroscience either, I am not entirely unfamiliar which social psychology. So how did that affect my appreciation of McAuley’s description of Sri’s study into that field?

First of all, Sri’s investigation leads her to conclude that basic emotions like joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise and disgust are mostly expressed within milliseconds, without any intervention of the higher functions of the neocortex. This comes from the field of neuroscience, which currently is very much in development. Sri connects it with the ‘sable tiger hypothesis’, the idea that these emotions are hard wired in this way because that was evolutionary useful when humans were still being hunted by predators. I'm not sure that it is entirely true though, since I've seen counter claims that state that more elaborate cognitive appraisals do play an important role.

Leaving that one aside, Sri considers other emotions, love, guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride, envy, jealousy and ‘... the pleasurable feeling of acceptance by others that the Japanese called amae’ (p. 201). Sri goes on to consider amae.

[Of the higher cognitive functions] amae was the most interesting. Even though there was no word for in Portuguese, English or any of the other major Western languages, it was definitely universal. Sri knew it as the feeling she had after making a successful presentation to her peers. Approval, belonging, being valued (p. 202).

That is not amae as I know it. I would agree that the feeling of belonging is universally important, but that is a different concept. Amae refers specifically to the behavior to appeal to and depend on another's indulgence.^[*] The feeling Sri has after a successful presentation, is not amae, it is pride in the sense of Cooley and Scheff - a feeling that indicates both self respect and acceptance by the group. While I think McAuley is on track when he emphasises belonging, amae is a much more specific concept involving usually hierarchical relations with one person depending on the care and benevolence of another.^[*] So, while the direction of Sri's thought was not necessarily wrong, conflating amae with a sense of belonging or perhaps even interdependence is distracting to say the least. Unfortunately, the references to amae continue for a number of pages.

Almost at the end of the character Sri's exploration of social emotions, McAuley describes an interesting custom specific to the culture of the so called Outers - the people that populate the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in his book. He calls it ‘wanderjahr’ - (a German word that corresponds with ‘journeyman years’ in English) which used to point to an institution practised in the middle ages in Europe - and to some extent still is in Germany. The original institution has to do with an apprentice traveling for a number of years before he would be allowed to make his masterpiece. McAuley has modified the concept to a transition period which all youngs Outers go through, to

...leave home and travel from moon to moon. Supporting themselves with menial jobs, they discovered what excited and engaged them, experienced every variation of Outer culture, and learned how to get along with every kind of person. And because this taught them to be open-minded and tolerant, and made them feel that they belonged not to any single social subgroup or city but to the entire Outer System...

In the book this custom is disrupted by occupation of the moons, leading to maladaptive behavior of the young people affected. The fictitious custom reminded my of an article by Ruth Benedict, in which she reviews some variations between cultures she knew of, regarding the way transitions were dealt with, specifically the transition from the role of a child to that of an adult. One dimension she discusses is the transition from a ‘non-responsible status role’ to a responsible one. In some societies this transition may be very gradual, because in those even as children people are responsible for certain tasks, albeit tasks that are suited to the abilities of their age, and grow slowly into more responsible jobs. Benedict contrasts this with societies were the transition is very sudden, with some youngsters being unable to switch from being dependent to being totally independent. I think McAuley’s ‘wanderjahr’, while fictitious, is also an interesting custom that bridges the transition to adulthood (and some other functions as well), and was pleasantly surprised to find it in an SF novel.