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Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 17 Number 3, December 2016 ___________________________________________________________________

Dignity, Evolution & Literary Representation: Dignity as a Common Pool Resource

 By

Dustin Hellberg

Yonsei University

Abstract

This article will examine the concept of dignity in view of recent studies of altruism in human and non-human species in relation to tendencies or patterns found in literary works. Dignity is a fundamental designator of human worth, yet it is vanishingly difficult to define. I propose to connect dignity to literature through studies of altruism, empathy and Elinor Ostrom’s notion of ‘Common-Pool Resources’ (CPR) to see dignity (like altruism or morality) as group-level organizational unit that finds (some of) its representation in artistic and literary practice. Group level and multi-level selection have slowly regained some favor in evolutionary thinking, and my article would offer overlap between the literary and the natural as an interdisciplinary project with larger implications for the sciences and the humanities. Though humans certainly may act for self-gain at the individual level, the far broader tendency in our species is toward prosociality, a tendency in behavior that seems incompatible with strong programs of selection theory operating only at the individual level. What stands out here is the core structure of literary works: They center often enough around agonistic relationships, namely, the thrill of danger or illicit gain or unjustifiable action precisely because these patterns and non-altruistic practices violate our shared sense of dignity (which we are reviled by or even enjoy seeing/reading) which would should mirror group-level organizational patterns. Morality and dignity can trace their ancestry back to empathy and altruism, and these form a lineage through to aesthetic and literary representation as agonistic tensions based on these Common Pool Resources. We see this pattern over and over in literature (and art in general) while perhaps not recognizing that what we are seeing in artistic representation has its foundations in our shared evolutionary history.

 

Keywords: Ostrom, common-pool resources, evolutionary aesthetics, altruism, morality, empathy

 

 

 

…they were small

   And could not hope for help and no help came:

   What their foes like to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

 

            from ‘The Shield of Achilles’

                        W.H. Auden

 

Outline

            I see dignity (in normal day to day interaction and in literary representation) as an emergent property of altruism and empathy in human social and natural evolution. I call it an emergent property because while it stems directly from the properties of altruism and empathy it is entirely distinct from them. In this article I make three claims: That dignity is an emergent property of altruism and empathy and is thus related to our species’ evolutionary heritage, the implication here being that this term is not defined by culturally contingent practice alone; that dignity of this kind can be seen as an evolutionary group-level organization unit; and that dignity is related to what Elinor Ostrom calls ‘common pool resources’. Dignity operates as a social status function in regard to action and conception as they relate to moral and altruistic tendencies in the human species and our representation of these behaviors in, among the many examples, artistic practice. These principles will then be applied to selections from two works of fiction as a means of methodology wherein the interaction of these notions is primarily represented as fields of agonistic tension.[i]

 

A Tendency Toward Dignity

          Dignity is a notoriously hard thing to define despite its presence in daily routine and its necessity for any individual’s sense of pride, self-respect, integrity and autonomy. Many would argue that it is an issue between natural rights and human dignity (Westerman, 2014) and others would see it in a legal perspective (Byk, 2014). We cannot yet quantify it as we can with altruistic behavior. It is vanishingly difficult to pin down and yet when we see dignity, we know it by its empirical example. If Kant was correct when he said, “Empirical principles are wholly incapable of serving as a foundation for moral laws” (1952, 278), then where do the tendencies for moral systems come from? We cannot found a moral system or definition of dignity on math, but if morals and dignity have evolutionary roots, then we should find some patterns or tendencies of their expression in human cultural and social activity.

One difficulty in attempting to trace a lineage of dignity to evolution is that there is no ‘dignity gene’, no strict way of understanding its existence in the same way we assign function to phylogenic traits in animals as fitness in an environment. Even though our principles of fairness or altruism can be paralleled to other primate species (to be discussed later) we can examine these as tendencies only. This is a major limitation on such studies or avenues seeking a broader, synthetic approach to interdisciplinary integration. Throughout this article, when I speak of dignity or evolution or literature, I do so with this in mind: These processes of behavior and representation are a matter of tendency and capacity[ii] because with any evolved pattern we should see variation and tendency. Bats tend to fly at night and orient themselves by echolocation. A mutant in a bat colony might be born deaf (variation) and thus would not be fitted to their environment (poor capacity). If that mutation does not confer some specific advantage to the individual, it will die. If, however, that mutation leads to a survival and reproductive advantage, the mutation will be much more likely to spread and become a common phylogenic trait or behavior. Morality and recognition of the capacity for dignity of individuals in our prosocial species confers upon groups a much stronger cohesive social bond, and this strong social bond (with simultaneous roots in empathy and altruism) is something we experience every day when we step out the door. Other languages and cultures will naturally exhibit slight variations in language and practice for things like morality or dignity, but these will tend to converge in overall practice.[iii] Those wanting to point to languages that do not have a specific term for dignity can simply look to other words in that language that confer either the individual’s humanity or detract from it by dehumanization. The core concept remains.[iv]

 

To say that dignity emerges from morals and altruism can help understand these patterns and tendencies that show up in human behavior as represented in art and aesthetics, much as it has been useful in our understanding in other fields. Mind and consciousness are emergent properties of physical brain states.[v] To say this is not to diminish ‘mind’ at all. Instead, it grants a more complete picture of the regulatory properties that make up what we call ‘the mind’. Similarly, to understand that evolution by natural and sexual selection operates as a set of tendencies in an ateleological fashion, but whose processes are teleological in physical determinants and limitations (e.g. at the chemical and molecular level) as such, is to bring together a set of ideas whose net comprehensiveness is more complete and which gives us better predictive theories. The pattern to see here -and the one I am using- is that the underlying processes by which these examples operate move from simple to complex: mind emerges from the electrochemical, complexity in life emerges from the simple with no discernable goal,  morality and dignity emerge from simpler (though not necessarily simply explained) behaviors like empathy and altruism.[vi] For want of a working definition of dignity, we might say, ‘Dignity is an emergent property, stemming from evolved altruism and empathy patterns, that creates a prosocial status function for human individuals seen as capable of the term by members of that community. Further, dignity can be explained in relation to Ostrom’s Common Pool Resources as a codification in human practice of group level selection theory’. This is needfully long, as any definition of such a complex term would necessitate.

 

Another consideration made here is that while our species’ default tendency is to act out of altruism and to recognize in one another the capacity for dignity (in that we don’t always act out of selfish impulse all the time), certainly, some people do act for purely selfish reasons. These people are given labels such as ‘lacking self-control’, ‘compulsive’ or ‘criminal’ and the like. The problem is that we evolved from hierarchical ancestors (primates that we are) and we are still largely hierarchical in our social arrangements based on status and power. Dignity seems caught between two tendencies. For example, a high ranking male chimp may lose status to another male, conferring on that male more potential reproductive success. A person may, through their actions, lose their capacity to be regarded as a dignified person. This is a social demarcation granted by other members of that group. Status in this case seems more related to sexual selection pressures because the actions of rival male chimps, say X over Y, grants X status and reproductive access at the cost of Y. Dignity, sharing a similar structure, seems more related to group level selection pressures because for X to confer upon Y the status of ‘dignity capable’ comes at the potential cost of X. It would seem to violate individual selection pressures, but it does not violate them at the social and group selection levels.  Morality and dignity capacity recognition most likely evolved as a mediation against intense selfishness at the individual level. It requires a combination of game theory’s ‘tit for tat’ iterative model (similar to the chimp example noted above) with something more comprehensive (and messier) that can also explain altruistic or moral rules of behavior. It is here that the major tensions arise between this more ancient aggressive characteristic and our more recently evolved tendency toward altruism and dignity. Still, humans can act reprehensibly toward one another for any number of reasons. This more negative view of humanity is not entirely wrong, and I feel that it has had a far longer and far wider representation in the annals of philosophy, history and literature. Groups will tend to look at other non-familiar groups with extreme caution while recognizing dignity capacity and morality among members of its own group. As telecommunication and ease of travel slowly opened other cultures to one another, more and more non-familiar groups came face to face. When I say that we recognize the capacity for dignity in someone else, I believe that it is an empathetic and altruistic act precisely because of the frailty of human dignity, as frail a thing as life, whose very fragileness is the very reason we treasure it.

 

Dignity as Emergent Property

 

            I should now like to show the continuity of between empathy, altruism, morality and then show why dignity is an emergent (and surprising property) in our species and our species alone. Later I will show the role of these functions in literary representation. Empathy is common in social species and is not particular only to humans. Empathy is a fairly common activity among members of the same species. Frans de Waal cites evidence for empathy[vii] even in turtles (2013, 5) and relates the concept to physical states by which animals are able to mentally[viii] embody other members of their species. As he says about neuroscientific explorations into empathic states, “Neuroscience offers two basic messages about empathy. The first is that there is no sharp dividing line between human and animal emotions. The second is that empathy runs from body to body” (2013, 137). Empathy thus is a common behavior in many species from elephants (2013, 5), to macaques (2013, 137) to chimpanzees (2013, 27) and bonobos (2013, 127).  We are an empathic species, especially as expressed in physical states and we are remarkably mimetic in our day to day dealings with others. Seeing someone smile is often enough to evoke a smile. Empathy of this sort should be required for the emergence of the more complex behavior of altruism because while I might be able to empathize with another individual through their actions and behavior, it is something quite different for me to actively offer a non-kin individual my help and assistance at a potential cost to me and my well-being. This behavior, altruism, is far less common, showing up in only a few species that we know of.[ix] Altruistic behavior must have its roots therefore in our shared evolutionary heritage extending back into our hunter-gatherer pasts at the group-selection level and such behavioral tendencies would necessarily have demonstrable patterns today.

 

The origins of altruism leading toward moral systems of interaction in our species would require what Michael Tomasello calls ‘second-personal morality’, and he outlines it, saying, “Our proposal will be that, initially, early humans collaborated in joint intentional activities for purely strategic reasons, using others as a kind of ‘social tool’ to further their own interests. interdependent collaborative activities structured by joint intentionality fostered in participants a new kind of cooperative rationality” (2016, 40). What must be made clear is that these new cooperative activities were not wholly new categories of human understanding but were expansions of pre-existing mental states. Were this not the case, there wouldn’t be a nearly universal set of human emotions and interests. Tomasello continues, “They came to understand that particular collaborative activities had role ideals -socially normative standards- that applied to either of them indifferently, which implied a kind of self-other equivalence” (2016, 40). This is an expansion of social roles based on the already constituted mental and emotional ones such as altruism, morality and dignity. 

I do not mean to suggest that our species as a whole is totally altruistic or that individual desires and motivations do not play a primary role in human behavior. It is, however, telling that we live in communities, have cultural practices that reflect a sensitivity to injustice and that almost all literature patterns itself around conflict and potential resolution of conflict.[x] De Waal remarks that “we are social animals: highly cooperative, sensitive to injustice, sometimes warmongering, but mostly peace-loving. A society that ignores these tendencies can’t be optimal. True, we are also incentive-driven animals, focused on status, territory, and food security, so that any society that ignores these those tendencies can’t be optimal either” (2009, 5). De Waal notes that we operate by tendencies toward these behaviors, and we should be able to discern patterns of this activity all around us. Humans, clearly, tend to be far more altruistic to their kin relations. “Human altruism appears to be substantially hard-core when directed at closest relatives, although still to a much lesser degree than in the case of the social insects and colonial invertebrates” (E.O. Wilson 2004, 159). However, this tendency at the individual level does little (here my contention is not against Wilson) to explain just how moral systems began or how we could possibly explain the existence of a social emotion like dignity that extends past kin relations. It is important to note that altruism is, to be clear, not a behavior particular to our species. De Waal cites evidence for altruism in rats (2013, 142), chimps (2013, 120-122) and elephants (2013, 29). That such a complex behavior would show up in these (relatively) unrelated species is astounding.

 

Regarding the comparison of animals to humans -as I seek to do in my article here- de Waal says, “To minimize the complexity of animal behavior without doing the same for human behavior erects an artificial barrier … [I]f two closely related species act the same under similar circumstances, the mental processes behind their behavior is likely the same, too” (2013, 145).[xi] My point here is that we can parallel much complex human behavior with other animals in order to draw out distinctions in our moral capacities which give rise to dignity, based on a generalized moral system in which self-other equivalence is expressed primarily in language. Dignity, too, is one of the core concepts in literary representation, and this tendency toward altruism and morality (at least in smaller groups) could potentially operate as an group-level selection unit favoring those groups whose individuals saw more and more value in one another in self-other equivalence. I am not suggesting that animals have a moral code by which they operate, but some -such as chimps- demonstrate an amazing range of behavior that could easily be defined, as James Harrod does, as spiritual or religious. His article, “The Case for Chimpanzee Religion” (2014) makes just this case, and his “Appendices for Chimpanzee Spirituality: A Concise Synthesis of the Literature” (2004) collects observations from decades of field and laboratory research which shows chimps acting empathetically in birth behavior, toward other species, care of the sick, grandmothering and social reparation. True, some of the cited behaviors are incredibly violent, suggesting murder, genocide and infanticide. My point here is that these patterns aren’t an anthropocentric veil thrown over other species’ behavior. These behaviors are all of ours and work in continuum. Suggestions have been made that without religion, we would have no grounds for moral behavior in human society, but studies like Harrod’s suggest that religion is predated by evolutionary tendencies in behavior by at least several million years. Evolution has equipped us to be a generally moral species and that morality found its later codification in institutions like religion or ethics, not its beginning. We must work against both a vulgar humanism and against a reductive determinism.

 

            Self-other equivalence based on our sociality as a species should thus give rise to normative rules about individual action within the group. What began naturally and conferred survival advantage for groups would -in early human communities- become a way of understanding just how these societies managed to survive. The tendency toward moral activity conferred on subsequent groups those same behaviors passed along genetically and slowly codified the expression of those tendencies in law or decree. To paraphrase David Wilson, Selfish individual persons always beat altruistic persons, while altruistic communities always beat selfish communities. What began as a natural regulative tendency to check individual status-seeking eventually became a regulative ‘rule’ with human groups and communities.  This would seem fairly tautological, but it should be understood that these naturally regulated behaviors (I won’t club your head in so that I can gain an advantage because I might need your help later) particularly suited those individuals to a range of local environments and their danger (other dangerous groups, animals, inclement weather). The key here is that the offspring of the more socially cohesive individuals -if that were a fitness advantage- should tend to show similar patterns of behavior. Turning back to morality in our social species, for something to be immoral requires individual recognition of a violation of another’s person, property or the like. If I don’t see you as an individual of worth and capacity for dignity, then there are no rules governing my action toward you.

 

Morality and dignity attribution coming from self-other equivalence would seem to finally break away from our cousins in the animal kingdom, and though it has intrinsic roots in evolution it has also extrinsic agency in how we treat and are expected to treat one another. Sober and Wilson (1999) define the difference between the sometimes equated notions of altruism and morality, saying that they are related but not always interdependent behavioral or motivational factors.[xii] For Sober and Wilson, moral principles are necessarily general and must “conform to an abstract universalizability criterion” (1999, 238). This aim -as found in Kant’s formulation as well as Rawls’ theory of justice (Sober and Wilson 1999, 237)- creates the particular difference between altruism as a tendency of individual action in a species and the broader tendencies of action in the group. It also helps distinguish dignity from moral systems because the extension of dignity to an individual is not adhering to a decided principle but rather to a person-to-person interaction that has the potential to violate moral codes. Not all altruistic action has to be moral, and not all ascriptions of dignity need to be based on moral preconceptions. Though the burden of proof there would be to show that dignity and morality are only social or cultural constructs.

 

Drawing the distinction between moral and altruistic behavior, Sober and Wilson say, “If moral principles must be general, then it is clear that an individual can have altruistic desires without being motivated by moral principles. This is because altruistic desires are often directed at specific individuals, whereas moral principles, in virtue of their generality, are about no one in particular” (1999, 238). Moral action toward someone else (or toward another species) takes shape from individual instantiations of self-other equivalence which has its roots in empathic understanding –at least between members of a particular species- though in human groups this is only a potential assignation. It’s a recognition of the capacity. While it is true that humans are incredibly mimetic and can empathize with nearly anything, our tendencies toward altruistic individual behavior based on general moral categories did not have to give rise to dignity. Dignity exists as a kind of tension between our sense of ourselves (and others) as autonomous individuals and this tension participates in a shared sense of morals (which can be both natural and acculturated) which should dictate tendencies in our actions. As de Waal notes, we can see at least the beginnings of these systems in our primate cousins: “For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males toward each other to make up after a fight, while removing weapons from their hands. Moreover, high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbitrators to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concern as a sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity” (2013, 20). Clearly, to ignore this evidence in a philosophical or moral system is to miss a whole host of compelling information.

 

            To see how morality might give rise to dignity will require a deviation into an economic theory proposed by Elinor Ostrom in her book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). Ostrom proposes a model for understanding the production and distribution of limited commodities in societies. Previous models that she acknowledges but works around include the ‘tragedy of the commons’, ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ and the ‘logic of collective action’.[xiii] Ostrom wonders how to model individuals accurately as they seek group or community welfare as opposed to individual welfare. The three models just named “are extremely useful for explaining how perfectly rational individuals can produce, under some circumstances, outcomes that are not rational when viewed from the perspective of all those involved” (Ostrom 1990, 6). As she notes, one problem that all of these theories attempt to address is the ‘free rider’ problem. How should a community deal with individuals unwilling or unable to offer specific help in the way of labor or communal activity? With altruism and moral systems of status attribution (discussed in detail later), we see this free rider problem also emerge. If I act altruistically toward members of my group (I am using abstract generals here), what I risk in expending energy and resources for the ‘greater good’ is that someone in the group may contribute nothing at all but still maintain a survival/reproductive advantage by my sacrifices. They get something for nothing.

 

For Ostrom, the metaphoric application of these systems presents a problem of autonomy and how people actually behave in complex social systems. She says, “By referring to natural settings as ‘tragedies of the commons’, ‘collective action problems’, ‘prisoner’s dilemmas’, ‘open-access resources’, or even ‘common-property resources’, the observer frequently wishes to invoke an image of helpless individuals caught in an inexorable process of destroying their own resources” (1990, 8). Parallel this to evolutionary considerations of morality and dignity and we see that while humans have certain natural patterns of behavior that would have us act for individual gain, the very existence of morality and dignity in our species suggests that individual-gain models do not have a full enough picture. Are humans caught in an inexorable process of self-oriented action? One of the backing motivations for our species’ survival has been to act for the group as well as for the self in groups larger than the local family or kin unit. These would have been the foundation for the later more complex social patterns. While kin and family are obviously important, were these the only primary factors in deciding human social interaction, we could not have had even the most meager of villages or communities past the handful of cousins and inter-group marriages that would result from this scenario. Certainly our capacity for hyper-socialization began far back in our Pleistocene past, but those seeds that allowed for great migratory expansion, control of new environmental challenges and the inception of agriculture are all patterned on moral systems of behavior that extend past mere individual interest. 

 

These patterns for self-regulatory behavior in social settings fit nicely into patterns of altruistic and moral behavior precisely because they avoid the tendency of individuals to act purely out of self-interest (which some certainly do) and the Nobel laureate Ostrom lends a more robust theory to explain how non-self-centered action may take place in regards to shared social resources. Ostrom says:

 

To open up the discussion of institutional options for solving commons dilemmas, I want now to present a fifth game in which the herders themselves can make a binding contract to commit themselves to a cooperative strategy that they themselves will work out. To represent this arrangement within a noncooperative framework, additional moves must be overtly included in the game structure.  A binding contract is interpreted within noncooperative game theory as one that is unfailingly enforced  by an external actor –just as we interpreted the penalty posited earlier as being unfailingly enforced by the central authority. (1990, 16)

 

The herders referred to here are a reference to the common metaphor employed to represent common resources such as a communal pasture in which all the local people may graze their livestock. The issue being, how does one regulate such a common pool resource fairly to avoid free-loaders taking more than everyone else or how to explain why someone would do more than their fair share of maintenance or work (minimizing their overall gain) compared to such free-loaders. In Ostrom’s view, the people involved have some autonomy in now they will regulate the resource and resolve potential conflict. She importantly mentions that her theory is one of many potential equations (1990, 16) and further suggests that the way to regulate such conflict resolution over shared resources is by way of an external enforcer (1990, 17). To turn back to morality and dignity, my acting toward you in a moral manner has the potential for severe loss at the individual level. Perhaps I don’t steal your food, but you steal mine. I don’t kill you, but you kill me. I don’t piggyback your wifi, but you piggyback mine.  A general moral system in which we participate at the individual level makes this similar to the ‘free-rider’ problem in that someone who doesn’t participate in the general moral categories is ‘free-riding’ in that community, is potentially injurious to that generally and morally organized system. Individuals who do so risk ostracization or punishment for doing so, but the potential is always there. Why work hard when you can get something for free? Hence a tendency in law or stories or religious myths should (at least in their earlier versions) center around deviations and violations of moral codes or address issues like the problem of evil (which works like the Book of Job actually do not answer).[xiv]  The common-pool resource in this case could be said to be the moral system itself because it is something we all participate in and we must regulate violations of it.

 

Dignity is much the same. If I treat you with dignity -confer upon you that status- and you fail to return the favor, it puts me at a disadvantage. What I freely and altruistically give you, based on prevailing moral systems that evolved into our codified set of rules or laws or literatures, is not necessarily reciprocated and this can put me at a disadvantage. You are free-riding here by refusing to participate in our shared common-pool resource of moral action and dignity capacity recognition. This is the distinction I would like to draw between dignity and morality: Dignity is something given to another human individual. It cannot be self-conferred, and it is particular only to our species as dignity acts in concert with language and moral rules (whether cultural or evolved) and hence is a practice that shares in human cultural activity and human nature. You cannot be dignified by yourself, sitting in an empty room. You cannot perform it, fake it, rehearse it or buy it. It is part of our shared common-pool moral sensibility, and it is a core tendency in our species to be altruistic, empathetic, moral and to grant each other (even passively) the status of dignity or the potential for dignity.[xv] Joseph Carroll, et al. argue that “humans developed a special capacity, dependent on their symbolic and cultural capabilities [and evolved capacities to have these and which led to them, my note], for enforcing altruistic or group-oriented norms. By enforcing these norms, humans succeeded in controlling ‘free riders’ or ‘cheaters’, and they thus made it possible for genuinely altruistic genes” (2010, 205). These norms necessarily reflect a combination of genotypic ‘programming’ that results in a pattern of behavior or set of tendencies that should confer survival and reproductive advantage to the group. Social cohesion is not perfect, of course, and thus this set of group-oriented norms can be wielded against other groups (e.g. us v. them) or even against members of the group in order to further a political or personal agenda (e.g. the divine right of kings). Again, these are tendencies and dispositions only. Carroll continues,  “The selection for altruistic dispositions -and dispositions for enforcing altruistic cultural norms- would have involved a process of gene-culture co-evolution that would snowball in its effect of altering human nature itself” (2010, 505).

 

It is true that social institutions like laws or religion may enforce this or help regulate these systems, much as Ostrom suggests, but since morality and altruism as a tendency in our species clearly existed prior to codified laws or religion, perhaps the regulatory enforcer operating in the majority of human social interaction and behavior are the evolutionary patterns themselves. Carroll is not suggesting that human nature was radically altered. Instead, he means that human nature and human prosocial activity slowly nudged our species toward a reified set of ever more complex prosocial behaviors as these conferred more and more survival and reproductive advantage at the group selection level. Breaking from this into individual-oriented behavior would thus not violate this pattern. Instead, it would simply instantiate a new model of behavior (say, the prisoner’s dilemma). We’re a social species made up of individuals with individual goals who tend to work together, but who also tend to favor kin and ourselves over others. Our gene-culture coevolution finds much of its record in our artistic practices and histories of law, much of which show a kind of evolutionary process, akin to mutation and variation we see in nature.

 

            If this all seems a stretch, a similar extension of Ostrom’s idea into evolution has been undertaken by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson in his book, Does Altruism Exist?[xvi] Wilson points out the extreme sociality of our species as a prosocial behavior that is based on evolution and finds variation in cultural practice. He says, “We sometimes need to remind ourselves how much human social life requires prosociality –people acting on behalf of other people and their groups as a whole. The need for prosociality begins before birth and continues throughout development. Most of our personal attributes that we regard as individual because they can be measured in individuals are the result of development processes that are highly social” (2015, 128-129). Such prosociality -precisely because of its universality- must have an evolutionary root. There is no other way to explain such ubiquitous phenomena that span the human continuum. These phenomena occur even before human beings develop language, further suggesting a genetic or evolved heritable tendency. As Tomasello notes, prelinguistic infants act in prosocial manners long before they have the slightest inkling what it means to be a member of a community, let alone possess the linguistic capacity to understand or express such a thing (2016, 41, 45, 61).

 

Of course, these tendencies are culturally variable to an extent. David Wilson notes, “One of Elinor Ostrom’s most important discoveries was that CPR [common pool resource] groups implement the design principles in different ways that draw upon different motives, norms and social conventions” (2015, 68). The base behavior doesn’t change. It merely varies in how it is expressed in social settings. This accounts for the wide variety of law, religion, social custom and literary and artistic representation as far back into human history as we can see and would account for variations in attitude and definition of dignity from culture to culture. As Wilson says, “We are distinctive in our ability to cooperate in groups of unrelated individuals, in our distinctive forms of cognition that includes symbolic thought, and in our ability to transmit learned information across generations” (2015, 72). Because of our species’ extreme sociality and our ability to express complex symbolic concepts, we should expect to find, using Ostrom and Wilson, that when we turn to literature we shall find complex conflict, conflict resolution and teamwork patterns emerging. This is precisely what we find. Any brief glance at a list of possible plot structures or plot variations (which drive character development) all center on conflict and manners of conflict resolution as both a personal and social force, much like Ostrom’s CPR groups. This pattern and parallel cannot be accidental because as Wilson noted, we are a social species and these activities would be of primary concern to our evolutionary ancestors, a set of traits and behaviors we still find fascinating today, that fascination itself manifested through the long, slow process of evolution. As Wilson notes, “All of these [interactions] can be understood as forms of physical and mental teamwork that resulted from a major evolutionary transaction, which suppressed disruptive forms of within-group selection and made between-group selection the primary evolutionary force” (2015, 73). That moral concerns and dignity seem to be ubiquitous in human cultures, they must have played a regulatory function at the between-group level. Moral groups with dignity recognition capability (which sounds like a new feature on a cell phone) beat out groups lacking these features. In some sense, the good guys won.

 

Literary Representation and Patterns of Dignity

 

            Turning now toward literature as a repository and an examination of dignity, I will look briefly at one classic text, Homer’s Iliad, and one modern short story, Lorrie Moore’s “Agnes of Iowa”. The particular way that dignity is represented in literature centers around agonistic relationships of characters and plots, along with other considerations like the whims of fate (or the gods) and other factors like the various forms of irony. Though the process runs parallel to that of art and aesthetic appreciation, I am going to focus the last part of this article on literature because it is precisely the most abstract of the arts, being both linguistically mimetic and wholly mental, created in language to be shared among members of a social group. It is wholly unlike other forms of aesthetic expression. Dance is mimetic. We see the bodies in motion. It is at least part physical, even in our appreciation of it. Sculpture or painting are at least representationally mimetic in their visual qualities. Even the recitation of a poem or book can be mimetic because there is, right there, someone reciting the work who may use inflection, tone and gesture to indicate mood. Literary texts are strange. They conjure through imagination and experience tandemly. I am not suggesting that these other art forms do not express things like dignity or conflict resolution patterns. I merely want to focus on literary representation of these patterns.

 

The relationship between literary work is empathic in that we will -as readers- necessarily root for or against characters or perceptions or plot points that the author has contrived. Attribution of agency is a key element in storytelling. We don’t like stories where the protagonist is buffeted constantly by random tragedy or random windfall.[xvii] My point here is that an author of literary work creates an empathically mimetic relationship between the reader and the text’s use of characters (or in a poem, the speaker) that an author intends (or discovers in the act of writing, plotting, revising, cursing the air for inspiration, then writing again) by presenting agonistic plots or characters which violate moral categories or which violate our sense of the characters’ dignity. Here, again, that moral sense and capacity for dignity operate like Common Pool Resources, not because morality is limited but because excess and violation is a constant threat. That we are capable of sympathizing and granting the status of dignity to fictional characters or that we are moved by authors we’ve never met should be quite shocking except that it comes so naturally to our species that we don’t even notice the medium through which move and which moves us. Literary creation is a constant flux and manipulation of tensions based on previously explained evolutionary patterns which found themselves codified in human symbolic interaction.

 

This can work in several ways. It might work in reverse by imbuing a particular character with dignity (or seeming dignity)  who may not deserve it (a criminal, ne’er-do-well, etc.) and that generates interest because we (through evolved and social norms) want to see whether that character develops into someone worthy of such dignified status (which we grant them), or whether it was a ruse and that character will be punished as the ‘moral free-loader’ they are (like Iago, for example).[xviii] Or, an author might not grant dignity to a character who -as a decent human being- should deserve it and we read on hoping -in our empathetic way- that they do or do not receive it (like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure). It is very clearly in a constant state of agonistic tensions. “Taking into account not just the representation of characters but the emotional responses of readers, we can identify agonistic structure as a simulated experience of emotionally responsive social interaction. That experience has a clearly defined moral dimension. Agonistic structure precisely mirrors the kind of egalitarian social dynamic documented …  in hunter-gatherers” (Carroll, et al. 2010, 505). Every major plot device and such as the master plots of ‘quest/journey’ and ‘stranger comes to town’ center on agonism of this sort, and most of the other major ones -self-sacrifice, disaster, crime/punishment, murder, rivalry, enmity, recovery/loss of loved one- follow this pattern. Particular cultures are naturally going to have variations on how such agonistic relations are resolved, but the underlying universal here is the central tenet of tension and agonism.[xix] Very often, the primary violation we see in stories is a violation of the character’s dignity. It violates the Common Pool Resource of morality. We empathize with the character, offering our altruistic emotional support of someone for whom the morals of their particular community have failed resulting in their loss of dignity.

 

My idea about the conferring of dignity being a social act is readily evident in literary works about people oppressed by institutions, ideas or failed lives. These characters struggle desperately for recognition of their struggle, hoping that some kind word or action or event will grant their lives and selves this extra level of meaning, or at least alleviate this suspension of their dignity. We are able to give dignity to characters in a poem or novel or story (or notice that theirs has been removed or ruined) precisely because dignity is not something that can be bestowed on itself. In the act of reading and empathizing with a character, we create a moral relationship which is patterned on human activity -which has its roots in our evolutionary past and its extensions into our cultural and aesthetic present- which allows us to assess and define agential relationships of intended action and unintended outcome in the book which then allow us to confer the designation of ‘dignity’ on what we see. “Humans have an innate desire for power and an innate dislike of being dominated” (Carroll, et al. 2010, 505). This is our constant tension in which we live. As aesthetics is a profoundly social practice, why should we be surprised to find that our most important social emotion plays no small role there, as our aesthetic lives are patterned on our human lives which exist in a flux and tension of evolved hierarchical tendencies and our higher moral functions which created our dignity designation precisely against those baser tendencies toward power. Let’s be honest, we like when the underdog wins precisely because most of us are underdogs. We desire power, but with morality and dignity designators, we also understand that when we dominate someone we are violating self-other equivalence which we understand by nature and usually by culture. Groups capable of operating with dignity as a baseline unit of other-orientation in regards to Ostrom’s CPR would have had a singular advantage in group cohesion, unity of purpose and care for individuals in that group as opposed to strangers and non-group persons.

 

It has always been a point of fascination that Homer’s Iliad portrayed the Trojans in a light far more sympathetic than one would imagine from the normally xenophobic Achaeans. In particular, I want to look at the scene between Priam and Achilles, when Priam pleads for Hektor’s body back so he may be buried. In his wrath, Achilles has acted in shocking violation of most systems of treatment of the dead. In Iliad, it is true that the moment a soldier falls, his armor is immediately stripped from him, but this has more to do with the spoils/honor code (τιμη and κλειος)–a kind of zero sum game by which honor comes in killing someone famous or being killed by someone famous (or gathering their armor and other spoils of war, much how women like Briseis and Chryseis are treated). The irony of this system doesn’t seem lost on Homer as he has Achilles spend most of his time in the book sitting in his tent and questioning this very system and culture of honor valuation, until Patroclus is killed which then prompts Achilles’ reentry into the battle. By the time Priam comes to him, the gods have been arguing about Achilles’ abuse of Hektor’s body, and Thetis -Achilles’ mother- is finally sent to bring Achilles back into a more moral course of action. The laws of the gods are transmuted through her to Achilles. It is interesting that Achilles before this point -in his rage and aristeia- has been described as something sub-human, more a force of nature than a human being, an ash-skinned thing apart from his humanity. “A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles./ Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth,/ he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face/ and black ashes settled onto his fresh, clean war-shirt./ Overpowered in all this power, sprawled in the dust, Achilles lay there fallen” (1990, 468). Achilles’ grief is too great, and it removes him from restraints to act within the common-pool sense of morality. He becomes sub-human, vicious and pitiless, equated more with nature than with humanity.

Later on, Priam’s wife recognizes this (1990, 595) and is worried that Achilles will slay Priam when he goes into the camp alone to recover his son’s body  because Achilles is no longer bound by shared moral custom (CPR). When Priam’s grief -his demonstration of his humanity and participation in the common-pool resource of human morality through sympathy- finally pierces Achilles, Achilles then can weep, can become human again, remembering his own father and the two find an accord in their shared humanity (1990, 605). Achilles prior to this had been ‘free-loading’ in the sense of violating general moral codes of conduct about the dead, and the gods’ outrage at this in Homer’s depiction shows it to be of great concern at Homer’s (or any) time. Free-loading in this sense -in the moral sense- is participation without possible retribution. Indeed, Achilles is fully cognizant that his wrath may lead him to again violate the gods’ laws should Priam see Hektor’s body uncared for (1990, 607) and so orders it to be cleaned and prepared, to enter back into the moral dictates of their culture. Interestingly, Achilles in such action finally bestows upon Hektor the status of dignity, and thus Achilles reenters the predominant moral system by the act of bestowing dignity on the fallen Hektor. Priam has asked for it, but in this text, it is up to Achilles to grant this final token. Of course, ancient Greek cultural practice is drastically different from most modern contexts, but the underlying structure outlined earlier in my article seems to show up in Homer’s classic.

 

Turning to a modern and dramatically different story and character, Lorrie Moore’s “Agnes of Iowa” offers a character in Agnes who struggles her whole life for someone to grant her some sense of dignity, some form of recognition as a human being that will give her a sense of purpose. Her name is meant to be demeaning, her job as an educator (and very poor at this), her marriage, her beautiful sister and mother, her attempts to give meaning to life by living in New York, her attempt at an affair with a visiting poet, all of these present case after case in which Agnes recognizes her ineptitude but continues to struggle nonetheless to empty effect. This kind of dignity/morality violation works differently from that in Homer precisely because it is not a matter of the individual free-loading the system. Instead, it is the system of character relationships presented in a series of agonistic failures that push the story forward and incite readers’ sympathy for Agnes, a person of no great merit or talent, but who is a feeling, thinking human being. Here, the system’s failure to allow Agnes to be granted dignity is the main violator. By the end of the story, her identity as even potential recipient of dignity has been so eroded that the character disappears entirely (metaphorically) from the story. Just before the story ends, there is a point of view shift away from Agnes (she has been the viewpoint character the whole time) to her husband Joe, further distancing the reader from her. He makes a funny face to cheer her up (1998, 94), which she then replicates (attempts even here to share in an ironic form of a communal or human system) and it causes them both to laugh, but by this point it is an empty and mirthless kind of joy. She begins coughing (1998, 95), doubling over beneath the level of the café table where they sit. Moore goes on:

 

“Are you okay?” asked Joe, and she nodded. Out of politeness, he looked away, outside where it had suddenly started to rain. Across the street, two people had planted themselves under the window ledge of a Gap store, trying to stay dry, waiting out the downpour, their figures dark and scarecrowish against the lit window display. When he turned back to his wife -his sad young wife- to point this out to her, to show her what was funny to a man firmly in the grip of middle age, she was still bent sideways in her seat, so that her face fell below the line of the table, and he could see only the curve of her heaving back, the fuzzy penumbra of her thin spring sweater, and the garish top of her bright, new, and terrible hair. (1998, 95)

 

The constant movement away from Agnes further removes her from the potential for dignity: husband looking out the window, the people across the street, the disappearance of her face below the table, her personhood (and potential for dignity) reduced to a sweater and a hairstyle. Here, the common pool resource of her potential dignity is stripped away again and again and this works precisely because the reader is compelled to see her as an object of potential dignity now removed, and our empathetic urge moves us to acknowledge that removal. It is not that Agnes has violated any principles which may warrant an unempathetic response from the reader. The common-pool resource of dignity and morality simply have not found Agnes operating within them, since no one is capable (or willing) to grant to Agnes the one thing that would finally make her human: dignity itself. Instead, we see in Agnes just how our moral systems and sense of dignity may well not save us or grant us a sense of purpose. These two forms of agonism are common enough in literature and demonstrate Ostrom’s ideas in a vastly different setting than originally intended.

 

Conclusion

 

I have hoped to connect -even roughly- the idea of dignity to evolutionary ideas and show how these may be found to work in relation to Ostrom’s idea of common-pool resources and then demonstrate these in a small literary sampling. But I offer these ideas here with cautious reservation. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker warns against the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies of viewing human beings through the particular lens of nature. Pinker says, “It would seem to follow that anything we have inherited from this Eden [here meaning evolution, my note] is healthy and proper, so a claim that aggression or rape is ‘natural’ in the sense of having been favored by evolution, is tantamount to saying that it is good … The naturalistic fallacy leads quickly to the moralistic fallacy: that if a trait is moral, it must be found in nature. That is, not only does ‘is’ imply ‘ought’, but ‘ought’ implies ‘is’” (2002, 162). Certainly, no one (within their right mind) would argue that rape is ‘natural’ and therefore okay or that in human cultures that it could be justified (though in some it certainly and outrageously is).[xx] As noted earlier our moral codes evolved into patterns which became iterative as they were transmitted in language through generations, and this iterative feedback loop certainly would have had some influence over human behavior and our dual-tension-divide of wanting power while not wanting to be dominated, culminating in moral systems that must have begun with self-other equivalence which gave rise for the possibility of dignity as a kind of moralistic common-pool resource. I do believe that we can see this pattern of agonistic relation of the individual to the group over and over in literature, and it might well be described as art’s central tenet.

 

I am also keenly aware of potentially confirming my own consequent here. That I see dignity as a capacity granted by others according to the tenets of Common Pool Resources, and then go hunting for evidence of that and that only. Because of the iterative nature of evolutionary patterns reinforcing themselves generation after generation if those patterns prove to have reproductive and survival advantage for the individual and community, it can seem a matter of consequent confirmation. Dignity works as a status function in action and behavior as a tension regulator between individuals and community systems, much like Ostrom’s enforcing principle or regulator. Violations of this are of keen interest to humans as are the struggle for the conferring of dignity in things like employment, family interaction, social groups and even sporting events and celebrity gossip. They’re also the basis for most stories, books, myths and films. “Gossip, celebrity worship, biographies, novels, war stories, and sports are the stuff of modern culture because a state of intense, even obsessive concentration on others has always enhanced survival of individuals and groups (E.O. Wilson 2014, 43). If humans are intensely selfish and at the same time intensely social creatures based on this set of tensions, all we have to do turn our thoughts toward any social or cultural production, and what we will find is exactly this series of agnostic relations. It is, perhaps, so ubiquitous, and so much part of how we see ourselves in relation to those around us, that we fail to see it at all. Going back to Auden, “That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,/ Were axioms to him, who’d never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept,/ Or one could weep because another wept.” We do live in a world where we are hurt if promises aren’t kept, and we are better and more human when we keep our promises, when we can weep simply because another human being, through a violation of their dignity, amid the great crash and quiet of human life, has suffered enough to have wept and we are able to call such loss, as we would their victory, dignified.

 

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