The origins of guilt: Darwin and Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) believed that the capacity for guilt varies between individuals and among human populations. He also believed that this variability had, in part, a heritable basis.

Humans are motivated to act correctly by either shame or guilt. We feel shame after acting wrongly in the presence of others. We feel guilt even when no one else sees us acting wrongful or even when we merely think about committing a wrongful act. To varying degrees, all humans seem to have some capacity for both shame and guilt. Most cultures, however, rely primarily on shame and only a minority rely primarily on guilt. In the literature, the distinction between the two is presented as one between non-Western and Western cultures or between collectivistic and individualistic cultures. The capacity for guilt thus seems to be strongest in populations of Northwest European descent.

From the time of Charles Darwin onward, this subject has attracted the interest of several thinkers. How have they explained the origins of shame and guilt?

Charles Darwin

Darwin speculated that shame originated from a universal desire to "save face," which was initially concern about one's personal appearance:

We have seen that in all parts of the world persons who feel shame for some moral delinquency, are apt to avert, bend down, or hide their faces, independently of any thought about their personal appearance. [...] And as the face is the part of the body which is most regarded, it is intelligible that any one ashamed of his personal appearance would desire to conceal this part of his body. The habit, having been thus acquired, would naturally be carried on when shame from strictly moral causes was felt; and it is not easy otherwise to see why under these circumstances there should be a desire to hide the face more than any other part of the body. (Darwin, 1872, p. 123)

Shame, however, is not the same as guilt, and Darwin took care to distinguish between the two when discussing how and why people blush:

With respect to blushing from strictly moral causes, we meet with the same fundamental principle as before, namely, regard for the opinion of others. It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush. "I blush," says Dr. Burgess, "in the presence of my accusers." It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face. A man may feel thoroughly ashamed at having told a small falsehood, without blushing; but if he even suspects that he is detected he will instantly blush, especially if detected by one whom he reveres. (Darwin, 1872, p. 126)

With respect to real shame from moral delinquencies, we can perceive why it is not guilt, but the thought that others think us guilty, which raises a blush. A man reflecting on a crime committed in solitude, and stung by his conscience, does not blush; yet he will blush under the vivid recollection of a detected fault, or of one committed in the presence of others, the degree of blushing being closely related to the feeling of regard for those who have detected, witnessed, or suspected his fault. Breaches of conventional rules of conduct, if they are rigidly insisted on by our equals or superiors, often cause more intense blushes even than a detected crime, and an act which is really criminal, if not blamed by our equals, hardly raises a tinge of colour on our cheeks. (Darwin, 1872, p. 130)

Darwin saw guilt as being not only less universal but also more recent in origin:

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts, and "not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us." (Darwin, 1936[1888], p. 492)

A few lines further on, he suggested that this kind of mental discipline is "more or less strongly inherited":

There is not the least inherent improbability, as it seems to me, in virtuous tendencies being more or less strongly inherited; for, not to mention the various dispositions and habits transmitted by many of our domestic animals to their offspring, I have heard of authentic cases in which a desire to steal and a tendency to lie appeared to run in families of the upper ranks: and as stealing is a rare crime in the wealthy classes, we can hardly account by accidental coincidence for the tendency occurring in two or three members of the same family. If bad tendencies are transmitted, it is probable that good ones are likewise transmitted. (Darwin, 1936[1888], p. 492)

Has the capacity for guilt been more strongly selected in some human populations than in others? Darwin does not address this question, other than to add:

Except through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the various races of mankind. (Darwin, 1936[1888], p. 493)

Sigmund Freud

In his work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud argued that guilt was initially a fear of discipline by close kin, particularly one's father. Only later was this fear broadened to include fear of discipline by non-kin, this change being related to the development of larger human communities:

When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then [...] there is inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate. (Freud, 1962, pp. 79-80)

Guilt and shame are two means by which social rules are enforced in large communities where most interactions are no longer with close kin. Shame is enforced by external supervision, i.e., by other people who witness a wrongful act. Guilt is enforced by internal supervision, i.e., by one's conscience, which Freud called the super-ego:

We have also learned how the severity of the super-ego -- the demands of conscience -- is to be understood. It is simply a continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which it has succeeded and which it has in part replaced (Freud, 1962, p. 74)

As the super-ego took over from paternal supervision and discipline, it became not only more important but also more hardwired:

A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt. At this point, too, the fear of being found out comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts. It is true that the seriousness of the situation from a real point of view has passed away, for the new authority, the super-ego, has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt in the fact that fundamentally things remain as they were at the beginning. The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world. (Freud, 1962, p. 72)

The translation is awkward (the original was in German), but he seems to be referring to the heritability of traits that have proven their adaptiveness over time, i.e., "genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted." This heritable component seems to be a capacity, or a willingness, to identify social rules and comply with them, the actual rules being non-innate, i.e., "softwired." This notion of an innate, heritable component comes up again a few pages later:

Experience shows, however, that the severity of the super-ego which a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has himself met with. The severity of the former seems to be independent of that of the latter. A child who has been very leniently brought up can acquire a very strict conscience. But it would also be wrong to exaggerate this independence; it is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does also exert a strong influence on the formation of the child's super-ego. What it amounts to is that in the formation of the super-ego and the emergence of a conscience innate constitutional factors and influences from the real environment act in combination. This is not at all surprising; on the contrary, it is a universal aetiological condition for all such processes. (Freud, 1962, p. 77)

Freud also argued that people differ in their capacity for guilt. In a footnote to the above passage, he explained that the super-ego emerged through "gradual transitions" and thus exists to varying degrees in different people: "[...] it is not merely a question of the existence of the super-ego but of its relative strength and sphere of influence" (Freud, 1962, p. 72). Some individuals are thus extremely guilt-prone:

For the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is its [the conscience's] behavior, so that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness. (Freud, 1962, pp. 73-74)

These statements may seem surprising. Didn't Freud believe that neuroses are due to learned inhibitions and that we ought to overcome our inhibitions? Here, however, he argues that both the inhibition of behavior and the expectation of inhibition are instinctual. There has thus been a co-evolution between the internal control mechanism (the super-ego) and human desires (the ego):

The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same things as the severity of the conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way, the assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the demands of the super-ego. The fear of this critical agency [...] the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic super-ego; it is a portion, that is to say, of the instinct toward internal destruction present in the ego [...] (Freud, 1962, p. 83)

When this control mechanism enters into conflict with human desires, the result is a "conflict between the two primal instincts" (Freud, 1962, p. 84).

We must distinguish between the real Freud and the one of undergrad courses. The latter Freud has become a mouthpiece for beliefs, like rejection of biological determinism and rejection of inhibitions, that did not become dominant until after his death. The real Freud believed that mental and behavioral traits have a substantial heritable basis, as did most scholars of his day. By emphasizing the importance of both nature and nurture, he was in fact taking a very middle-of-the-road position ... for his time. The middle ground would not shift toward environmental determinism until later, with growing interest in the findings of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and subsequent efforts by the Boasian school of anthropology to explain human behavior in terms of cultural conditioning.

To be continued

References

Darwin, C. (1936) [1888]. The Descent of Man and Selection in relation to Sex. reprint of 2nd ed., The Modern Library, New York: Random House.

Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: Murray.

Freud, S. (1962[1930]). Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton

The origins of Northwest European guilt culture

 

Ruth Benedict first made the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures” (source). Pervasive feelings of guilt are part of a behavioral package that enabled Northwest Europeans to adapt to complex social environments where kinship is less important and where rules of correct behavior must be obeyed with a minimum of surveillance. Is this pervasive guilt relatively recent, going back only half a millennium? Or is it much older?

 

As societies grew larger and more complex, it became necessary to interact with people who were less closely related. This new social environment was made to work by extending to non-kin the sort of conduct (trust, empathy, desire to cooperate, etc.) previously reserved for kin. To this end, language was manipulated: people would call each other “brother” and “sister” even when not from the same family. They also became more attuned to enforcement of correct behavior, either through external controls (shame) or through internal controls (guilt).

Shame is the primary means of behavioral control in most societies. If you are seen breaking a social rule, you will feel shame, and this feeling will be reinforced by what people say and do (gossiping, malicious looks, spitting, ostracism, etc.). Shame is much less effective if you break a rule without being seen or if you merely think about breaking a rule.

Guilt is more important in European societies, particularly those of Northwest European origin. It operates even when you act alone or merely think about breaking a rule. Behavior can thus be regulated in all possible situations with a minimum of surveillance.

The anthropologist Ruth Benedict describes how guilt differs from shame:

True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous. In either case, it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. In a nation where honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilt though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feeling of guilt may actually be relieved by confessing his sin. (Benedict, 1946, p. 223)

The high level of guilt in Western societies is often attributed to various traumatic events like the Holocaust, the assassination of JFK, the heritage of black slavery, the dispossession of the American Indian, and so on. Actually, a pervasive sense of guilt can be normal and even healthy. As Baumeister et al. (1994) explain:

Guilt serves various relationship-enhancing functions, including motivating people to treat partners well and avoid transgressions, minimizing inequities and enabling less powerful partners to get their way, and redistributing emotional distress.

Historically, guilt has proven to be a useful adaptation, being part of a larger behavioral package that has enabled Northwest Europeans to adapt to a social environment where kinship matters less and individualism matters more. This package is widely believed to have come together over the last thousand years, with increased reliance on guilt going back only half a millennium. The conventional view among historians may be summarized as follows:

11th century onward – Throughout Western Europe, states pacified social relations by imposing the death penalty for murder and other acts of personal violence. People no longer had to rely as much on kinsmen for protection of life and property (see previous post).

14th century – The Black Death created a widespread labor shortage that increased labor mobility and led to the dissolution of feudalism. The rural population was no longer bound to the land in static communities of closely related individuals.

16th century onward – Most of Northwest Europe converted to Protestantism, which emphasized the individual’s relationship with God. Faith became interiorized, and behavior became regulated more through the workings of private conscience and less through acts of public worship. Guilt also assumed more importance because it could no longer be routinely purged through confession (Carroll, 1981).

16th century onward – The market economy expanded beyond the marketplace at the expense of domestic modes of production. Instead of growing their own food, making their own clothes, and manufacturing their own wares, families increasingly sold what they made and bought what they needed. The family ceased to be the main organizing principle of economic and social relations (Seccombe, 1992).

This conventional view is not wholly false. From the 11th century to the 20th, the individual became more and more important in Northwest Europe while kinship became less and less so. Meanwhile, the same region broke away from Catholicism to create a more individualistic and guilt-based version of Christianity.

Of course, we are left with the question as to why these changes happened more readily there than elsewhere. Moreover, if we go back to the beginning of the past millennium, we still see a tendency towards greater individualism and looser kinship ties. The market economy was already replacing kinship as the main organizing principle of society:

Recent work on thirteenth century manorial documents has uncovered a very extensive land market from at least the middle of the thirteenth century. There is rapidly accumulating evidence of the buying and selling of pieces of land by non-kin; the idea that land passed down in the family is now increasingly regarded as a fiction. Whether in Suffolk, Huntingdonshire, the Eastern Midlands, Berkshire or elsewhere, the evidence suggests that the supposedly free and the unfree were buying and selling land.

[…] It appears probable that in many areas of England in the period before the Black Death up to half of the adult population were primarily hired laborers. It was not parents and children who formed the basic unit of production, but parents with or without hired labor. This was only made possible by the widespread use of money. The work of Kosminsky and Postan has shown that commutation of labor services for cash was widespread by the middle of the twelfth century. Cash penetrated almost every relationship; selling, mortgaging and lending are apparent in many of the documents. Most objects, from labor to rights in all kinds of property, were marketable and had a price. Production was often for exchange rather than for use. (Macfarlane, 1978a)

Individualism was strong even within the nuclear family:

Probably from Anglo-Saxon times – and certainly from the thirteenth century – children had no automatic rights in a parent’s property. A child could be disinherited; there is no ‘family property’, nemo est heres viventis (no one is the heir of a living person). Maitland documents this in detail, showing that from at least the thirteenth century parents could leave their property to whom they liked – and by gift, sale or will disinherit all their children if they so wished. (Macfarlane, 2012)

This was before the Black Death and thus barely fits into the conventional timeline of the origins of individualism. Does the picture change if we go further back in time?

Anglo-Saxon times and earlier

Family structures

Further back, before the last thousand years, the evidence becomes sparser. Nonetheless, we still see signs of weaker kinship ties and greater individualism in Northwest Europe:

Most family systems take as their basic premise that the group is more important than the individual. This is both caused by and reflected in their way of conceiving how people are related to each other, how kinship is passed on or what anthropologists call 'descent'. The majority of societies are what is known as 'unilineal', that is, they trace their ancestors or descendants through one gender alone, usually male, but sometimes female. This allows them to form into 'descent groups' of relatives. This is the case, for instance, in most of China, India and Africa and it was the breakdown of these larger 'corporate' groups that Weber thought marked out the West.

In contrast, if we inspect our own thoughts about the family, we will probably find that they show that, unusually, we operate in what is known as an 'ego-focused' cognatic system. This is a way of tracing relatives simultaneously through the male and female lines and of taking as the point of departure the individual who is tracing the relatives. This is part of a European-wide system (with a few variations). What is most striking, is that in England, as in much of Europe, this system of reckoning kin has remained practically unchanged since at least the seventh century. […]

Such a system already predisposes a society towards flexibility, networks and the concept of the individual as more important than the group. Indeed, there are no groups, just ego-centred networks of people. Each individual's kin (except brothers or sisters) is different. This is a central underpinning of an individualistic way of looking at the world. Already, by the Anglo-Saxon period, the movement away from strong family blocks, Weber's de-familization of society, had begun to occur. (Macfarlane, 1992, pp. 173-174; see also hbd* chick here and here)

The antiquity of these flexible family structures is supported by the antiquity of a related phenomenon: the Western European marriage pattern. West of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, marriage has long had the following characteristics:

- relatively late marriage for men and women

- many people who never marry

- neolocality (children leave the family household to form new households)

- high circulation of non-kin among different households (typically young people sent out as servants) (Hajnal, 1965; ICA, 2013).

This pattern used to be attributed to the effects of the Black Death, but recent historical work has challenged this view, as in this study of marriage between 1252 and 1478 in an English community:

The average age at first marriage in the Lincolnshire Fenland before the Black Death would be 24 years for the woman and 32 years for the man. The wife would die one year before her husband and the marriage would last for about 13 years. The couple could have six children, if their fertility was higher than average, of whom, judging by pedigrees, perhaps three would survive to become adults. After the Black Death the mean age would be 27 for the woman and 32 for the man. The husband would die three years before his wife and the marriage would last about 12 years. Again the couple could have six children, of whom perhaps three would survive to become adult. (Hallam, 1985, p. 66)

Hallam (1985, p. 56) also points to evidence of late marriage in 9th-century France. On the estates of the Abbey of St Germain-des-Prés near Paris, about 16.3% of all adults were unmarried. In Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, the figure was 11.5%. Seccombe (1992, p. 94) cites a 9th-century survey of the Church of St Victor of Marseille, where both men and women appear to have married in their mid to late twenties. Going even farther back, Seccombe (1992, p. 94) cites the description by Tacitus (56-117) of Germanic women being “not hurried into marriage [and] as old and as full-grown as the men [who were] slow to mate.”

Guilt

In Anglo-Saxon England, guilt already existed as a major means of behavioral control. The English abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (955-1010) described it as a special kind of shame where the witnesses to the wrongful act are divine entities or spirits of the dead:

He who cannot because of shame confess his faults to one man, then it must shame him before the heaven-dwellers and the earth-dwellers and the hell-dwellers, and the shame for him will be endless. (Bedingfield, 2002, p. 80)

This argument comes up repeatedly in Anglo-Saxon literature, where it forms a ‘penitential motif’:

The motif runs: it is better to be shamed for one's sins before one man (the confessor) in this life than to be shamed before God and before all angels and before all men and before all devils at the Last Judgement. (Godden, 1973)

Guilt thus played a major role in English culture at least as far back as Anglo-Saxon times. Furthermore, it seems to have been indigenous:

One particularly interesting fact that emerges is the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon character of the motif. Not only did it circulate widely in Old English writings but the only two Latin works in which I have been able to find it were written by Anglo-Saxons — Alcuin and Boniface. Moreover an important element of the motif, the notion of three hosts present at the Last Judgement, is itself characteristic of Anglo-Saxon writers: the usual representation of the Last Judgement in continental works (as in Alcuin's letter) has the angels and all mankind present, and sometimes the devil as prosecutor, but not the whole host of devils, whereas the concept of the three hosts, as in Boniface's homily, is very common in Old English writings generally. (Godden, 1973)

Frantzen (1983) argues that the penitential tradition first developed in Anglo-Saxon England and then was exported to the continent in the 8th century. It is thus inaccurate to see this guilt culture as something that Christianity introduced into Northwest Europe. Instead, an indigenous guilt culture seems to have modified the historical development of Western Catholic Christianity, eventually giving rise to Protestantism.

A possibly earlier witness to Anglo-Saxon guilt is the epic poem The Song of Beowulf. The hero’s “dark thoughts” come from private fears of having broken some rule, as opposed to shame over a publicly known wrongdoing:

That was sorrow to the good man's soul, greatest of griefs to the heart. The wise man thought that, breaking established law, he had bitterly angered God, the Lord everlasting. His breast was troubled within by dark thoughts, as was not his wont. The Song of Beowulf, 90

With Beowulf, we are entering the transition between paganism and Christianity. Indeed, a pagan underlay is already visible in the above quote by Aelfric. Why should Christians worry about their wrongdoings being witnessed by “hell-dwellers”? The word ‘hell’ seems to be used in the old pagan sense (abode of the dead) rather than in the newer Christian sense (place of damnation). 

Conclusion

Clearly, the last thousand years have seen Northwest Europeans become increasingly individualistic and guilt-driven. Nonetheless, this behavioral trajectory began long before the timeline of the last millennium. In fact, it seems to have begun before the dawn of history.

It looks as though Northwest Europeans had already become pre-adapted to conditions that would arise much later. They would thus be better able to exploit the potential of later social environments, in particular the market economy. 

This raises questions of how and why. How did Northwest Europeans initially make the transition to more complex social relations? Why did they adopt a mode of socialization that was so different from that of other complex societies? And why the greater reliance on guilt as a means of regulating behavior?

 

To be cont’d

References

Anon. (1900). The Song of Beowulf, London: J.M. Dent & Sons.

Baumeister, R.F., A.M. Stillwell, and T.F. Heatherton. (1994). Guilt: An interpersonal approach, Psychological Bulletin, 115, 243-267.

Bedingfield, M.D. (2002). The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England, The Boydell Press.

Benedict, R. (1946 [2005]). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture, First Mariner Books.

Carroll, J. (1981). The role of guilt in the formation of modern society: England 1350-1800, The British Journal of Sociology, 32, 459-503.

Frantzen, A.J. (1983). The literature of penance in Anglo-Saxon England, New Brunswick (N.J.): Rutgers University Press.

Godden, M.R. (1973). An Old English penitential motif, Anglo-Saxon England, 2, 221-239.

Hajnal, John (1965). European marriage pattern in historical perspective. In D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley. Population in History. Arnold, London.

Hallam, H.E. (1985). Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252-1478, Population Studies, 39, 55-69. 

ICA (2013). Research Themes – Marriage Patterns, Institutions for Collective Action

http://www.collective-action.info/_THE_MarriagePatterns_EMP 

Macfarlane, A. (1978a). The origins of English individualism: Some surprises, Theory and society: renewal and critique in social theory, 6, 255-277.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Origins_HI.pdf

Macfarlane, A. (1978b). The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition, Oxford: Blackwell. 

Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism, Proceedings of the British Academy, 82, 171-199.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/On_Individualism.pdf 

Macfarlane, A. (2012). The invention of the modern world. Chapter 8: Family, friendship and population, The Fortnightly Review, Spring-Summer serial

http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/07/invention-8/ 

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe, London: Verso.

Origins of Northwest European guilt culture. Part II

 

Reconstructed Mesolithic roundhouse near Northumberland, Great Britain (source: Andrew Curtis)

 

At different times and in different regions, humans have entered larger social environments that are no longer limited to close kin. Because there is less interaction with any one person and more interaction with non-kin, correct behavior can no longer be enforced by the to and fro of family relationships. A moral code develops, with rules enforced by ostracism and shaming.

In Northwest Europe, the moral code is also enforced by guilt—a form of self-shaming where the wrongdoer inflicts self-punishment even when he or she is the sole witness to the wrongdoing. There is also a high degree of empathy; the wrongdoer literally feels the pain of the person who has been wronged.

When did this guilt culture emerge? Historians usually link it to the rise of Protestantism, the expansion of the market economy, and the emancipation of the individual from the kin group, all of which happened—or are said to have happened—over the last thousand years. Yet there is compelling evidence for an earlier time frame. At the dawn of history, the peoples along the North Sea and the Baltic already had relatively loose kinship ties, a tendency toward prolonged celibacy, and a high level of circulation of non-kin individuals between households.

This behavioral package would enable them to exploit the potential of later historical developments, particularly the rise of the market economy. Back then, however, its usefulness was far from obvious. The future seemed to belong to other peoples, and not to these barbarians on the edge of the known world.

So how did this package come into being so long before modernity? And why? At first, I thought the cause was the introduction of agriculture to Northwest Europe. Only farming can create a population density that is high enough for people to enlarge their circle of interaction beyond that of close kin. Previously, there was only hunting and gathering, and hunter-gatherers were just small bands of closely related individuals. That kind of social setting has little need for either shame or guilt, a good example being the Inuit of northern Canada:

That is, in the past, the individual was expected and encouraged to do what he wanted, and thus had little guilt over most acts. In fact, there was so little censure, overtly, that one could do whatever one could get away with. But there was always the shame — concern with what people would think. What guilt existed was very archaic and related to oral incorporation and “bad mother” fears. Taboo-breaking was always a problem but at least one was not “guilty,” but simply inappropriate in his acts. That is, one had to suffer the shame of exposing one’s inappropriate acts to the spirits as one’s inappropriate social acts would be noted and subtly censured by friends. (Hippler, 1973)

In these simple societies, “guilt” was little more than fear of retaliation, either from living people or from spirits. In both cases, there was no real empathy with the person who had been wronged. Mental anguish was produced by fear and not by any feeling of the other person’s pain. 

The first complex societies of Northwest Europe

I was therefore surprised to learn that the first complex societies of Northwest Europe were hunter-gatherers, or rather hunter-fisher-gatherers:

The societies of the last hunters (and fishers and gatherers) of northern Europe appear to have evolved quickly toward increasing complexity in the period prior to the spread of agriculture. Complexity is defined by greater diversity (more things) and integration (more connections). Advances in technology, settlement, and subsistence are preserved in the archaeological record. During this period technology developed toward greater efficiency in transport, tools, and food procurement. Settlements were generally larger, more enduring, and more differentiated in the Mesolithic than in the preceding Paleolithic. Food procurement was both more specialized and more diversified-specialized in terms of the technology and organization of foraging activities, and diversified in terms of the numbers and kinds of species and habitats exploited. (Price, 1991)

We like to see hunter-gatherers as beautiful losers who were steamrollered out of existence by much savvier and more numerous farming peoples. In reality, from around 8,500 BP, these hunter-fisher-gatherers of the North Sea and the Baltic began to achieve ever higher levels of population density and social complexity that would put them on a par with farming peoples farther south. They were thus able to stop the advance of farming for two to three thousand years:

After a rapid spread across Central Europe, […] farming communities came to a halt in the North European Plain, leaving the coastal areas of the North Sea occupied by hunter-gatherers. […]

This could not have been due to ecological conditions. The frontier extends across a uniform geographical area, and the soils of southern Scandinavia are, in many places, light, fertile, and favorable for cultivation […]. The reason for the delay must be sought in the late Mesolithic communities of the region. Although regional differences exist […], hunter-gatherers in the southern Baltic region are likely to have had a greater population density than central European foragers […], larger and more permanent settlements […], and a complex economic pattern involving specialized extraction camps, seasonal scheduling, and seasonally intensive use of specific resources […] (Zvelebil and Dolukhanov, 1991)

These North Sea and Baltic peoples were semi-sedentary. Most of them lived from spring to fall in large coastal agglomerations where they fished, sealed, and collected shellfish. They then dispersed to small inland hunting stations (Price, 1991). Johansen (2006) has argued for a higher degree of mobility: “a number of small groups rotating between sites on a seasonal basis within a confined territory, but perhaps periodically aggregating at key localities.” Bang-Andersen (1996) states: “In certain areas such as the seaboard of central West Norway, particularly resource-rich marine and terrestrial environments may have made it possible to stay within restricted parts of the region all the year round on a diffuse sedentary basis.” Most areas, however, had “a permanent or semi-permanent base camp on the coast, a certain number of extended extraction sites for seasonal hunting, gathering and fishing activities, a larger amount of transitory sites, and an almost indefinite number of special purpose sites or single-activity loci.”

It was in the coastal agglomerations that Northwest Europeans began to develop social relations in a setting where most people were not close kin. Unlike farming communities, there seems to have been a continual demographic turnover, with people spending part of the year in small bands and then regrouping in much larger settlements. It was perhaps this fluid environment that made guilt more effective than shame, since shaming works to the extent that one continues to interact with those who have witnessed the shameful act.

But this raises another question. How did guilt become so dominant within these populations? What is to stop some individuals from exploiting the guilt proneness of others while feeling no guilt themselves? This free-rider dilemma may have been resolved in part by identifying such individuals and ostracizing them. It may also be that these semi-sedentary communities were conducive to evolution of altruistic behavior, as described by Maynard Smith’s haystack model (Wikipedia, 2013). According to this model, guilt-prone individuals are at a disadvantage within any one community and will thus become fewer and fewer with each generation. If, however, a community has a high proportion of guilt-prone individuals, it will have an advantage over other communities and thus expand in numbers at their expense. And if these communities disperse and regroup on a regular basis, the overall proportion of guilt-prone individuals will increase over time. 

Conclusion

History is not always what we think it to be. This is not just because of bad data. There is also the way we imagine the stages of human progress, i.e., hunting and gathering, farming and, finally, modern industrial society. Each stage led to the next, and it was ultimately farming that prepared us for the modern world.

In reality, it was the hunter-fisher-gatherers of the North Sea and the Baltic who led the way to behavioral modernity, i.e., individualism, reduced emphasis on kinship, and the market as the main organizing principle of social and economic life. Their mode of subsistence was not wiped out by agriculture, unless one sees fishing as a kind of farming. They not only survived, but also went on to create what we now call the Western World. Not bad for a bunch of losers. 

In a recent post, hbd* chick (2013) has shown how these societies were the locomotive of sustained economic growth within Europe long before Europeans began to expand their trade to Africa and the New World. She quotes a study by Greer (2013):

By 1200 Western Europe has a GDP per capita higher than most parts of the world, but (with two exceptions) by 1500 this number stops increasing. In both data sets the two exceptions are Netherlands and Great Britain. These North Sea economies experienced sustained GDP per capita growth for six straight centuries. The North Sea begins to diverge from the rest of Europe long before the ‘West’ begins its more famous split from ‘the rest.’

[…] we can pin point the beginning of this ‘little divergence’ with greater detail. In 1348 Holland’s GDP per capita was $876. England’s was $777. In less than 60 years time Holland’s jumps to $1,245 and England’s to 1090. The North Sea’s revolutionary divergence started at this time. 

We can go farther back to the steady expansion of North Sea trade from the 7th century onward (Callmer, 2002). There were external influences here and there, but most of this growth seems to have been endogenous, the main external influence being an international context that made trade more and more profitable. The rest—mindset, behavior, culture—was locally supplied.

 

References

Bang-Andersen, S. (1996). Coast/Inland Relations in the Mesolithic of Southern Norway, World Archaeology, 27, 427-443.

Callmer, (2002). North–European trading centres and the early medieval craftsman. Craftsmen at Åhus, North-Eastern Scania, Sweden ca. AD 750-850+, UppSkrastudier 6 (Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Ser. in 8, no. 39), 133-158.
http://www.uppakra.se/backup/docs/uppakra6/11_Callmer_U6.pdf 

Greer, T. (2013). Another look at the ‘Rise of the West’ - but with better numbers, November 20

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.ca/2013/11/another-look-at-rise-of-west-but-with.html

Hbd *chick (2013). Going Dutch, November 29

https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/going-dutch/ 

Hippler, A.E. (1973). Some observations on witchcraft: the case of the Aivilik Eskimos, Arctic, 26, 198-207.

http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic26-3-198.pdf 

Johansen, K.L. (2006). Settlement and land use at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Southern Scandinavia, Journal of Danish Archaeology, 14, 201-223.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0108464X.2006.10590118#.UqtWBPaA2po

Price, T.D. (1991). The Mesolithic of Northern Europe, Annual Review of Anthropology, 20, 211-233.

http://www.cas.umt.edu/departments/anthropology/courses/anth254/documents/annurev.an.TDouglasPrice1991MseolithicNEurope.pdf

Wikipedia (2013). Group selection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#The_haystack_model_and_trait_groups 

Zvelebil, M. and P. Dolukhanov. (1991). The transition to farming in Eastern and Northern Europe, Journal of World Prehistory, 5, 233-278.

A fruitful encounter

 

Original Sin, by Michiel Coxie (1499-1592). Did the Christian doctrine of original sin create the guilt cultures of Northwest Europe? Or did the arrow of causality run the other way? (source: Wikicommons)

 

By definition, gene-culture co-evolution is reciprocal. Genes and culture are both in the driver's seat. This point is crucial because there is a tendency to overreact to cultural determinism and to forget that culture does matter, even to the point of influencing the makeup of our gene pool. Through culture, humans have directed their own evolution.

Take the ability to digest lactose, commonly called milk sugar. Among early humans, only babies could digest it because only they made the enzyme that breaks it down. This enzyme was lost as one grew up, with the result that milk consumption would cause indigestion, abdominal gas, and diarrhea. This is still the case in humans from much of Africa and Asia.

Then some cultures began to domesticate cattle, initially for meat. In times of famine, they turned to milk, and those who could better tolerate it had better chances of survival. So there was now natural selection for individuals who could produce the necessary enzyme not only in childhood but in adulthood as well.

The resulting evolutionary change was both genetic and cultural. With more and more adults being able to digest milk, it became possible to develop various dairy products, like cheese, and use milk as an ingredient in a wide range of foods. It also became possible to select for cattle that produce more and better milk (Beja-Pereira et al., 2003). A new way of life developed and thus brought about even more selection for this enzyme.

In sum, a genetic change can open up new paths for culture to follow and thereby create new paths for genes to follow. But that isn't all. The same situation can develop even when no genetic change has taken place, at least not initially. We see this, for instance, when a culture spreads out of one population and into another. The gene-culture interaction is new even though neither party to the interaction is new.

 

A fruitful encounter

One specific example is the encounter between Christianity and the guilt cultures of Northwest Europe, which differ from the shame cultures that prevail elsewhere. The difference is a major one. In a shame culture, your wrongdoings are punished only when witnessed by someone from your community. In a guilt culture, they are punished even when there is no witness, other than the one inside your head.

Guilt culture is commonly attributed to the Christian doctrine of original sin, and more specifically to the radicalization of this doctrine under Protestantism (see Note 1). Yet neither of these presumed causes really lines up with the presumed effect.

For one thing, it's doubtful whether this doctrine was even known to early Christians in the Middle East. True, Paul did write that humans had lost their immortality because of Adam's sin:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned. Romans 5.12

This belief also appears in the Talmud, but it was never understood there as meaning that people are sinful because they inherit Adam's burden of sin. The Jewish view, like the later Muslim one, has been that people are sinful because they are imperfect beings. This was probably also the view of early Christians. Even today, Eastern Christians reject the doctrine of original sin, preferring the term "ancestral sin":

In the Orthodox Christian understanding, they explicitly deny that humanity inherited guilt from anyone. Rather, they maintain that we inherit our fallen nature. While humanity does bear the consequences of the original, or first, sin, humanity does not bear the personal guilt associated with this sin. (Original sin, 2014)

It was among Western Christians—Roman Catholics and, later, Protestants—that original sin developed into a doctrine. We see this in the writings of Irenaeus (2nd century) and Augustine (354-430), who identified the original sin as concupiscence, i.e., ardent, sensual longing. Protestantism is then said to have radicalized this doctrine, as seen in the Augsburg Confession of Lutheranism:

It is also taught among us that since the fall of Adam all men who are born according to the course of nature are conceived and born in sin. That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers' wombs and are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. Moreover, this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin and condemns to the eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through Baptism and the Holy Spirit. 

But this radicalization was already under way before Protestantism. An English Catholic, Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), was the one who first separated original sin from concupiscence and defined it as "privation of the righteousness that every man ought to possess" (Original sin, 2014). Within Western Christendom, pre-Protestant England was likewise the epicenter of an intense penitential tradition that dated back at least to Anglo-Saxon times (Frantzen 1983). This tradition can be summed up as follows: "it is better to be shamed for one's sins before one man (the confessor) in this life than to be shamed before God and before all angels and before all men and before all devils at the Last Judgement" (Godden, 1973). The English abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (955-1010) described the need to do penance for all shameful acts, even those that are witnessed solely by spirits of the dead: 

He who cannot because of shame confess his faults to one man, then it must shame him before the heaven-dwellers and the earth-dwellers and the hell-dwellers, and the shame for him will be endless. (Bedingfield, 2002, p. 80)

Conclusion

As evidenced by the doctrine of original sin and the penitential tradition, Northwest European guilt culture was not a product of Christianity in general or of Protestantism in particular. It seems to have its origins in pre-existing tendencies that were absorbed into the new spiritual environment, much like the Christmas tree and other formerly pagan traditions. It thus grew steadily more important as the geocenter of Christianity moved steadily west and north.

This is not to belittle Christianity’s role. The new faith created ideological, social, and physical structures that were better at enforcing moral norms than anything beforehand. These norms may have had pagan antecedents, but they were now being enforced much more thoroughly.

We see this in the Medieval Synthesis that took hold from the 11th century onward, when Church and State joined forces to defend the Christian world: externally, through military campaigns against Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy, and the Middle East; and internally, through vigorous efforts to pacify social relations, either by increased use of capital punishment or by the Pax Dei—a Church-led movement to limit the scope of war in feudal society (Peace and Truce of God, 2014). Finally, guilt culture was strengthened through confession of one's sins, particularly after this practice became mandatory with the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). All wrongdoings had to be atoned at least once a year, however private or personal they might be (Sacrament of Penance, 2014).

Medieval Christian culture favored the survival and reproduction of people who previously would not have survived and reproduced. Conversely, by criminalizing personal violence, particularly in cases where the offender felt no guilt or remorse, this culture was now eliminating people for behavior that had once been admired.

It is often believed that Europe took off from the 15th century onward, when it expanded into Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Actually, the takeoff began earlier, particularly during this period when Church and State teamed up to lay a new basis for social relations. It was this new moral order that enabled Europe to get ahead (Frost, 2012). As Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote, no advanced society can develop where men have no "other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal." 

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [The Leviathan, 13]

Note

Missionaries, for example, point to the relationship between Christianity and guilt culture:

There is a lack of a sense of sin in African thinking for many reasons: (1) there is a belief that God and the ancestors are unconcerned about private and public morality. People believe more in this life than the next life; (2) there is more of a shame-culture than a guilt-culture. People are more afraid of public opinion than of God; and (3) there is a focus on communal living where people look at who caused a problem. (Tittley, 2001)

See also Lebra (1971) and Carroll (1981).

 

References

Bedingfield, M.D. (2002). The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England, The Boydell Press. 

Beja-Pereira A., G. Luikart, P.R. England, et al. (2003). Gene-culture coevolution between cattle milk protein genes and human lactase genes, Nature Genetics, 35, 311-313.

http://www.bioquest.org/summer2007/sessionA/ng1263.pdf 

Carroll, J. (1981). The role of guilt in the formation of modern society: England 1350-1800, The British Journal of Sociology, 32, 459-503.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/590129?uid=3739448&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21104745207513 

Frost, P. (2012). On global inequality, Evo and Proud, August 25

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2012/08/on-global-inequality.html

Frantzen, A.J. (1983). The literature of penance in Anglo-Saxon England, New Brunswick (N.J.): Rutgers University Press.

Godden, M.R. (1973). An Old English penitential motif, Anglo-Saxon England, 2, 221-239.

Hobbes, T. (2010). The Leviathan. Peterborough: Broadview Press. 

Lebra, T.S. (1971). The social mechanism of guilt and shame: the Japanese case, Anthropological Quarterly, 44, 241-255.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3316971?uid=3739448&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21104745207513 

Original Sin. (2014). Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin 

Peace and Truce of God. (2014). Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God 

Sacrament of Penance. (2014). Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrament_of_Penance_(Catholic_Church)  

Tittley, M. (2001). Book summary of The Primal Vision: Christian Presence amid African Religion, by John V. Taylor, SCM Press, 1963.

http://www.ymresourcer.com/Summaries.php