Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
I have often argued that cultural group selection through migration and assimilation favors Lockean liberal regimes. Human beings "vote with their feet" in that they tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, and more just societies. And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice. Beginning in the 18th century, classical liberal regimes based on Lockean political thought--like Great Britain and the United States--have attracted immigrants because of the prosperity, peace, and justice that liberal regimes promote.
This explains why John Locke argued for England having a policy of open borders and general naturalization of immigrants. Some people objected to Locke's position by claiming that immigrants would not be assimilated into English society. Locke responded by saying that once immigrants are naturalized,
they are then in interest as much our own people as any. The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror's days and came over with him. For 'tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners (1997, 325).
If immigrants do not speak English, that will impede their assimilation into English culture, but their children will speak English and thus become "perfect Englishmen." After all, most Englishmen are descended from foreign ancestors.
Notice also that contrary to the claims of the illiberal nationalists, Lockean liberalism can recognize the importance of the national identities that distinguish one people from another, because here Locke recognizes the cultural identity of the English people as a distinct nation rooted in the English language and other cultural traditions that have emerged from the cultural history of England.
Evolutionary theorists--such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson--have seen that Locke was right about immigration, and that cultural group selection working through selective migration and assimilation has favored the spread of Lockean liberal culture around the world (Boyd & Richerson 2009; Richerson & Boyd 2008). This confirms what I have argued in various posts about the evolutionary history of Lockean liberalism as symbolic niche construction.
But against this, Nicholas Wade warns--in his new book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations--that when immigrants fail to assimilate into their new society, they create a cultural diversity that weakens the social cohesion necessary for any stable social order.
Social cohesion is inevitably weakened by any influx of people who don't share the socially bonding attributes of the residents, such as language, religion, and ethnicity. And the weakening of social cohesion is deeply feared, even if at a level that many people cannot articulate, because it undermines the strength of a society and hence the chances of its members' survival (173).
Here Wade repeats one of the primary arguments made by nationalist conservatives like Yoram Hazony and J.D. Vance for why immigration needs to be severely restricted.
But where's the evidence that most immigrants cannot or will not assimilate and therefore threaten social cohesion? Wade's only evidence for this is a study by Robert Putnam (2007). Putnam wanted to study how the cultural diversity in the United States caused by immigration might affect "social capital" (defined as social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness). He collected survey data from interviews of people living in 41 very different communities ranging from large cities like Los Angeles and Boston to small towns and rural areas like Yakima, Washington, and rural South Dakota. People were asked "Do you trust the people in your neighborhood?" He found that people living in ethnically homogeneous communities (like Lewiston, Maine) were more trusting of their neighbors than were people living in ethnically heterogeneous communities (like San Francisco). He also found that people in ethnically diverse communities were less likely to volunteer to work on community projects than were people in ethnically homogeneous communities.
Putnam summarized his conclusions in a passage quoted by Wade:
Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. . . . Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us (Putnam 2007:150-151; Wade 2025:174).
But notice Putnam's qualification suggested by the phrase "at least in the short run." In fact, much of Putnam's paper is devoted to arguing that in the long run, "successful immigrant societies have overcome . . . fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities" (137).
Wade casually dismisses this side of Putnam's argument: "Though Putnam expressed the hope that in the long run the negative effects of diversity would disappear, his work provided a frank and rare description of the formidable problems raised by immigration" (174). But Putnam didn't just express the "hope" that this could be done, because he surveyed some of the evidence from the history of American immigration during the period of almost open borders--from around 1820 to around 1920--that showed immigrants assimilating into American society. Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics, Russian Jews, and others were integrated into an American society that had once been a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)-dominated society. In the short run, the first generation of immigrants tended to "hunker down" in their own cultural enclaves, set apart from the dominant American culture. But in the long run, the children and grandchildren of these first-generation immigrants assimilated into American culture or into a new more expansive American identity that could include Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish Americans, and other hyphenated Americans.
Wade concedes that the many European immigrants--Irish, German, Southern, and Eastern Europeans--who arrived in America before World War I "assimilated, at least by the second generation, to their new community," and consequently there was "a high degree of cohesion" (179, 209). "But cohesion has ebbed significantly over the last half century," Wade claims. "Rising and more visible gaps in wealth, high fluxes of immigration with poor assimilation, and the advent of identity politics have stretched and torn the social fabric" (209). Wade thus implies that over the past fifty years, the children of immigrants are no longer assimilating into American culture as they did a hundred years ago.
But Wade offers no evidence for this claim. And in fact, there is lots of evidence against it. For example, Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (2022, 2024) have used historical US Census data to show that the socioeconomic assimilation of immigrants through upward mobility is just as possible for immigrants today as it was in the early 20th century. In the late 19th and early 20th century, sons born to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution (the income level below which 25 percent of individuals earn) rose to the 40th percentile as adults on average. Most children of immigrants performed much better as adult earners--with children of immigrant Portuguese or Italian parents reaching the 60th percentile as adults. A hundred years later, we see the same pattern. Sons (or daughters) born in 1980 to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution reach just above the 45th percentile (for sons) and 40th percentile (for daughters) as adults. Children of immigrant parents do better than this. Children of parents from Hong Kong, China, and India reach, on average, almost the 65th percentile as adults. The second-generation of immigrants continue to assimilate into the American middle-class culture.
The most radical form of assimilation of immigrants is intermarriage across ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries (Drouhot and Nee 2019:181). Intermarriage rates--immigrants marrying native Americans with different ethnic, racial, and religious identities--have been rising steadily since the 1980s in the United States. Few Americans today remember the days in the 1950s when young men and women were expected to marry within their ethnic, racial, and religious groups.
Previously, I have written about the importance of assimilation through intermarriage for the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization that has made America a multiethnic nation--or what Frederick Douglass called "the composite nation."
In his earlier book--A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History--Wade argued that while "races are a way station on the path through which evolution generates new species. . . . the forces of differentiation seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage" (71).
But now there's another question at issue here: what exactly is motivating these immigrants to undertake the extraordinary sacrifices that come with their efforts to immigrate to the United States, Canada, and the European nation-states? Wade's answer is that they are attracted by "Western culture," which can be a "common culture" for "people of all ethnicities and cultures" (210). But he doesn't specify the meaning of that "Western culture" that attracts so many immigrants.
Wade does point, however, to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have called the "inclusive institutions" achieved first in the British Glorious Revolution of 1688--overturning the "extractive institutions" of the oppressive regimes that had dominated human history for so long--as the highest development of Western culture (Wade 2014:148, 193-196; Wade 2025:98-100). Those "inclusive institutions"--impartial rule of law, property rights, personal freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, and limited government--sound like Lockean liberalism to me.
So when immigrants "vote with their feet" for Western culture, they're voting for the Lockean liberal social order. That's what I would identify as evolutionary group selection for freedom through migration and assimilation.
REFERENCES
Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2022. Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success. New York: PublicAffairs.
Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2024. "Immigrants and Their Children Assimilate into U.S. Society and the U.S. Economy, Both in the Past and Today." PNAS Nexus, pgae344.
Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown Publishing Group.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson. 2009. "Voting With Your Feet: Payoff Biased Migration and the Evolution of Group Beneficial Behavior." Journal of Theoretical Biology 257:331-339.
Drouhot, Lucas, and Victor Nee. 2019. "Assimilation and the Second Generation in Europe and America: Blending and Segregating Social Dynamics Between Immigrants and Natives." Annual Review of Sociology 45:177-199.
Locke, John. 1997. Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, Robert. 2007. " E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 John Skytte Prize Lecture." Scandinavian Political Studies 30:137-174.
Richerson, Peter, and Robert Boyd. 2008. "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values." In Paul Zak, ed, Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, 107-141. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wade, Nicholas. 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. New York: Penguin Press.
Wade, Nicholas. 2025. The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations. New York: Harper.
Ngogo Chimpanzees from the Western Group Attacking the Central Group
As I have indicated in previous posts, evolutionary anthropologists studying the evolution of war and peace have been divided into Hobbesians who believe that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were naturally violent and warlike and Rousseauans who believe that hunter-gatherers were naturally peaceful. But in setting up this debate as Hobbes versus Rousseau, they have overlooked the position of Locke. This is a serious mistake, because the weight of the evidence and argumentation on this issue today is on the side of Locke's account of the state of nature as a state of peace that tended to become a state of war. It seems now that while Hobbes was partly right and partly wrong about the state of nature, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.
THE GOMBE CHIMPANZEES
I have also indicated, how this debate extends to chimpanzees. The Hobbesians see chimpanzees as showing an evolved propensity to war, and the clearest evidence for this is the chimpanzee civil war that Jane Goodall observed in Gombe in the 1970s. At the beginning of 1973, she and her colleagues noticed that the chimps had formed two separate communities--the northern or Kasakela community, based on the valleys of the Kakombe and Kasakela rivers, and the southern or Kahama community, based on the valley of the Kahama river. By early 1974, they saw the first of a series of attacks by the Kasakela community on the Kahama community, which led over four years to the complete annihilation of the Kahama community, which allowed the Kasakela chimps to expand their territory over the area once claimed by the Kahama chimps. Since human beings are closely related to chimps phylogenetically--chimps and humans evolved from a shared common ancestor some 5-6 million years ago--chimpanzee war could show the evolutionary roots of the human propensity to war.
But the Rousseauans insist that in normal circumstances, chimpanzees are naturally peaceful, and they explain the Four-Year War in Gombe as provoked by the abnormal circumstances created by human impacts on the chimps--particularly, their being fed bananas at Goodall's camp. During her first two years at Gombe, Goodall was frustrated by her failure to closely observe the chimps because if she attempted to follow them, they ran away from her. She spent a lot of her time sitting on a hill trying to see the chimps through binoculars. But then in the summer of 1962, she discovered that if she set out bananas every day, the chimps would crowd into her camp. Soon they were eating 30, 40, or even 60 bananas per day.
Fighting over the bananas caused increased aggression among the chimps. They even threw rocks at humans who got too close. Goodall was shocked by the violence that came from competition for bananas. Eventually, she tried to lower the violence by restricting the supply of bananas. This did reduce the violence. But it also drastically reduced the nutritional benefits that the chimps had gained from the bananas. Some of Goodall's Rousseauan critics--particularly, R. Brian Ferguson (2023)--have argued that the restriction of the banana feeding created the frustration that prompted the violence of the Four Year War. When Kasakela males sought food in the southern areas of their range, Kahama males chased them away. But when Kahama chimps came into Goodall's camp, they were always fed bananas. So it's not surprising that the Kasakela chimps developed a deep animosity toward the Kahama chimps, although they had once belonged to the same community.
THE NGOGO CHIMPANZEES
Now we have a new report--in the journal Science--of a long-running chimpanzee civil war that has divided the Ngogo chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda (Sandel et al. 2026). The scientists who have studied this group since 1995 have never fed them bananas or any other food. So artificial provisioning cannot be a factor in explaining their violence.
The Ngogo group is the largest group of chimpanzees ever studied by scientists. The size has increased from 118 individuals in 1998 to 201 in 2016. The number of mature males (over 12 years old) has fluctuated around 40 individuals.
The Ngogo chimpanzees range over a large territory, which they have expanded through war with their neighbors. From 1999 to 2008, they ranged over a territory of about 29 square kilometers (18 square miles). During this time, they engaged in intensive border patrols, particularly along their northeastern border. In 2009, they engaged in numerous lethal attacks on their neighbors to the northeast, which allowed them to expand their territory, adding about 6 square kilometers (3.7 square miles) to their territory. This seemed to confirm the "resource acquisition hypothesis" for explaining chimpanzee warfare as adaptive for territorial expansion (Mitani, Watts, and Amsler 2010).
Prior to 2015, the Ngogo chimpanzees belonged to a single group, although there was a social substructure of two to four "clusters" that could be identified each year. They were generally divided into a Western cluster and a Central cluster, but this cluster membership was fluid, because individuals could move freely between these clusters. But then on June 24, 2015, when members of the Western and Central clusters approached each other near the center of their territory, the Western chimpanzees ran away, and the Central chimpanzees chased them. For at least six weeks, the two groups avoided one another, which had never previously been observed.
In 2016, the Western males started territorial patrols directed toward the Central chimpanzees. In 2017, what was once the center of a shared territory became a border. In 2018, the Western group initiated lethal attacks on the Central group. These aggressive attacks by the Western group have continued up to the present. Remarkably, the Western group is smaller than the Central group. In 2018, the Western group had a population of 83 (including 10 adult males and 22 adult females), while the Central group had a population of 107 (including 30 adult males and 39 adult females). The death toll from the war drove the population of the Central group down to 80 in 2024.
This Ngogo civil war differs from the Gombe civil war in one striking way. At Gombe, the larger group (the Kasakela chimps) attacked and defeated the smaller group (the Kahama chimps). This led some primatologists like Richard Wrangham to develop the "imbalance-of-power hypothesis"--that larger groups (particularly, in the number of adult males) will attack smaller groups. The Ngogo civil war is evidence against that hypothesis.
Actually, the scientists who have studied the Ngogo civil war have not been able to agree on any alternative hypothesis for explaining the war. Some of them have wondered, however, whether shifting social bonds could explain the rupture that led to the war. In 2014, five adult males died, perhaps because of disease. Dr. Aaron Sandel, one of the leaders of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, has suggested that these five individuals might have been social bridges that held the Ngogo groups together into one community. So that the contingency of their deaths in one year created the conditions for the polarization of the community that then led to the war.
Similarly, if Abraham Lincoln had died before or shortly after the beginning of the American Civil War, the history of that war would probably have been radically altered. Or if Thomas Crooks had assassinated Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, American politics might be very different from what it is today. America might be less polarized. And perhaps there would have been no war with Iran. Such unpredictable contingencies often determine the history of war and politics.
INNER DEMONS, BETTER ANGELS, AND LOCKEAN LIBERAL NICHE CONSTRUCTION
So what, if anything, does the history of chimpanzee wars teach us about the evolutionary history of human war and peace? How we answer that question may depend a lot on whether we think humans are more closely related to chimpanzees or to bonobos.
Chimpanzees seem to be far more aggressive and violent than are bonobos. Male chimps attack females and other males. Sometimes these attacks are lethal. Male chimps also form coalitions with other males to assert a male dominance hierarchy over females and other males. These male coalitions also patrol the borders of their community, and they can launch attacks against other communities--even to the point of annihilating the whole community in war.
By contrast, bonobos have never been observed to engage in lethal attacks on other bonobos. Female bonobos seem to be dominant over males. And the females form coalitions with one another to attack males and mediate their conflicts. In contrast to chimps, bonobo communities have never been observed to go to war with one another. Bonobos from different communities can interact with one another peacefully. All of this peacemaking depends on mutually pleasurable bisexual lovemaking--rubbing their genitals together--females with other females and with males. This is why the bonobos have been dubbed the "hippie apes" who "make love not war."
Comparing human beings with these two ape species in working out the evolutionary links between the three species has provoked a debate among evolutionary biologists and social scientists. The Hobbesian scientists argue that human beings are closer to chimps, which shows that the human state of nature was a state of war. The Rousseauean scientists argue that human beings are closer to bonobos, which shows that the human state of nature was a state of peace.
In my posts on bonobos and the human state of nature, I have argued that Locke's account of the state of nature is closer to the truth than either Hobbes' or Rousseau's, and that evolved human nature combines the natural propensities of both chimps and bonobos. As Steven Pinker would say, our human nature has both Inner Demons and Better Angels. Lockean liberalism constructs a cultural niche of social institutions, mental attitudes, and moral traditions that tame the Inner Demons while eliciting the Better Angels to motivate voluntary cooperation and nonviolent relationships.
But in contrasting bonobos and chimpanzees, we should not assume that bonobos are utterly peaceful. That bonobos are often aggressive in their attacks on one another is made clear in new research by Maud Mouginot and her colleagues (Mouginot et al. 2024).
The message from this study as reported in the press--as in Carl Zimmer's report for the New York Times--is that "male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do." That would seem to deny the common view that chimps are far more aggressive than bonobos. But if you read the article carefully, you will see that the story is much more complicated than that.
Mouginot and her colleagues employed what scientists studying animal behavior call the "focal-animal sampling" method (Altman 1974). All occurrences of specified actions of an individual, or specified group of individuals, are recorded for a pre-determined period of time.
For their study, they had all-day focal follow data for 14 chimpanzee adult males from two communities in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania and 12 bonobo adult males from three communities in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They had recorded hundreds of aggressive dyadic interactions, including contact aggression (physical contact such as hit, pull, bite, kick, or jump-on) and non-contact aggression (such as charge and chase). They had also recorded whether the focal-male was the aggressor or the victim and whether he was interacting with another male or with a female.
They wanted to use this data to test the "self-domestication hypothesis" of Brian Hare and Richard Wrangham, who have suggested that bonobos evolved to be less aggressive than chimpanzees just as dogs evolved to be less aggressive than wolves. Humans selected less aggressive (or friendlier) wolves to become their companions, and over time, wolves evolved into dogs through domestication by human selection. Similarly, if female bonobos formed coalitions to punish aggressive males, and if females preferred to mate with less aggressive males, which would tend to produce less aggressive offspring, bonobos could have been self-domesticated for being less aggressive or friendlier to one another (Hare, Wobber, and Wrangham 2012).
Moreover, Hare and Wrangham have also suggested that humans could have undergone a similar process of evolution by self-domestication to be less aggressive or friendlier towards individuals within their community (Hare 2017; Hare and Woods 2020; Wrangham 2019). I have extended this idea of human self-domestication to explain the evolution of Lockean liberalism and the bourgeois virtues as symbolic niche-construction.
What Mouginot and her colleagues have found does not deny the self-domestication hypothesis of Hare and Wrangham, although it might require some refinement in the theory. They found that there was a higher rate of male-male contact aggression among bonobos than chimpanzees. And in both species, the more aggressive males had higher mating success. But they found no evidence to contradict the observation that bonobos never kill other bonobos, while chimpanzees do kill other chimpanzees in fighting both within and between communities.
One possible explanation for why bonobo males engage in more non-lethal aggression with other males than do chimpanzee males is that since bonobo females prevent males from forming coalitions, bonobo males can attack other males without suffering reprisals from male coalitions.
As Hare told Carl Zimmer, the one dramatic difference in aggressiveness between the two species remains: "Chimpanzees murder, and bonobos don't."
Frances White, one of the leading scientists studying bonobos in the wild, has explained that in the wild bonobo females serve a policing function, in that they intervene in fights to moderate conflicts through impartial mediation, because they benefit from living in a stable social order that is not disrupted by violence.
She has also observed that bonobos--like all primates--show a range of personality types, so that some individuals have more violent temperaments than others, and consequently the occurrence of violence can depend on the contingency of whether there are such violent individuals in the group. She said that many of the deaths of the males comes from "testosterone poisoning"--young males vigorously displaying their virility in the forest canopy can kill themselves by slamming into a tree.
She has also said that if dominant males are grouped together in zoos without females who can moderate their male conflicts, then nasty fighting is likely to break out. She has explained then that what the females are doing in the wild groups in pacifying conflicts is "niche construction"--behavior that creates a social environment in which stable and peaceful cooperation is adaptive.
In most of evolutionary theory, we think of organisms as carrying genes, and the inheritance of these genes by the next generation depends on organisms surviving and reproducing according to chance and natural selection in their environments. But there is another process of evolution that arises from organisms changing their environments, which modifies the natural selection pressures in their environments. This is evolutionary niche construction (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003). Among many animals, evolutionary niche construction includes the transmission of culturally learned traditions. And among human beings, it includes the transmission of culturally learned symbolic systems such as art, science, religion, and philosophy.
I have suggested that the history of classical liberalism is evolutionary niche construction, and that this is a big part of Pinker's argument: the history of classical liberal philosophy has created a cultural moral environment of liberalism in which peaceful cooperation and declining violence are adaptive. (This is what Deirdre McCloskey would identify as the work of rhetorical entrepreneurs in the marketplace of ideas who have used moral persuasion to create a liberal culture that honors the bourgeois virtues.)
As Pinker argues, human nature is a mixture of Inner Demons and Better Angels. Human beings are innately predisposed to violence by their Inner Demons, but the expression of those predispositions is not "hydraulic"--that is, a drive that must necessarily be satisfied--but "strategic"--that is, a propensity that is responsive to environmental triggers. Classical liberalism constructs a cultural niche of social institutions, mental attitudes, and moral traditions that tend to elicit the Better Angels to motivate voluntary cooperation and nonviolent relationships.
In this way, human nature constrains and enables but does not determine human culture and individual judgment. Within the constraints of human nature as a mixture of Inner Demons and Better Angels, classical liberalism can foster those cultural traditions and individual judgments that limit the Inner Demons and channel the Better Angels towards a system of liberty and voluntarism.
REFERENCES
Altman, Jeanne. 1974. "Observational Study of Behavior: Sampling Methods." Behaviour 48: 227-65.
Ferguson, R. Brian. 2023. Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Goodall, Jane. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hare, Brian. 2017. "Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality." Annual Review of Psychology 68: 155-86.
Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods. 2020. Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity. New York: Random House.
Hare, Brian, V. Wobber, and Richard Wrangham. 2012. "The Self-Domestication Hypothesis: Evolution of Bonobo Psychology Is Due to Selection Against Aggression." Animal Behaviour 83: 573-85.
Mitani, John C., David P. Watts, and Sylvia J. Amsler. 2010. "Lethal Intergroup Aggression Leads to Territorial Expansion in Wild Chimpanzees." Current Biology 20:R507-R508.
Odling-Smee, F., Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman. 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton University Press.
Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin Books.
Sandel, Aaron A. et al. 2026. "Lethal Conflict After Group Fission in Wild Chimpanzees." Science 392(9 April):216-220.
Wrangham, Richard. 2019. The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. New York: Pantheon Books.
Zimmer, Carl. 2024. "No 'Hippie Ape': Bonobos Are Often Aggressive, Study Finds." The New York Times, April 12.
Leonard Bernstein Conducts Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on Christmas Day 1989 in Berlin. The "Ode to Freedom" Movement Begins 57 Minutes into the Performance.
Ever since its premiere in 1824, Beethoven's 9th Symphony has deeply moved many millions of listeners. It is widely considered one of the best symphonies ever composed, and some would say it is the greatest. Can the social bonding theory of music explain the powerful appeal of this symphony?
Now, as I have indicated, no one claims that social bonding is the only function of music. Even if social bonding was the original evolutionary function of music, once music has emerged, it can serve many different functions for different people in different circumstances. But still if this theory is correct, we should expect that music often does have a social bonding effect for many people. And that does seem to be true for Beethoven's 9th. After all, the "Ode to Joy" explicitly invokes the brotherhood of all humanity--a universal social bonding. Moreover, Beethoven's 9th has a long political history of being used as a musical anthem by which people can mark their membership in a national or multinational community. Esteban Buch has covered this history in his book Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History (2003).
ANTHEMS AS MARKERS FOR SOCIAL MEMBERSHIP
That Beethoven's music can serve as a national or even international anthem that binds people together was asserted by Marcelo Lehninger in his conducting of the performance I heard in Grand Rapids. He began by speaking to the audience. He said that we needed to hear this music because "in these divisive times," we "need the message of brotherhood."
He then began the concert by conducting the orchestra in playing the Star-Spangled Banner, which is customary for the opening night of a new concert season. In 1931, the U. S. Congress passed a resolution to recognize this as the official national anthem for the United States. Previously, My Country 'Tis of Thee and America the Beautiful had been two other informally accepted national anthems, and they are still often sung as if they were the national anthem. This national anthem is a hymn (sacred or profane) sung by a chorus of people celebrating the unity of America. Even when there's a solo singer, many in the audience will sing along.
The Francis Scott Key's lyrics for the Star-Spangled Banner were inspired in 1814 by his seeing the U.S. flag flying triumphantly over Fort McHenry after a night of bombardment by the British Royal Navy in the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812, which was a sign that the British had failed to destroy the fort. So here the flag as a symbol of victory in battle represents America.
My Country 'Tis of Thee (or America) has the same melody as God Save the King, the British national anthem, but for the American song, the only king is God himself ("Great God, our king"). And this American anthem celebrates America as the land of liberty or freedom:
My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing: land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring!
So this anthem for America could be called An Ode to Freedom.
America the Beautiful is also sung as if it were the national anthem.
O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!
Here there are three interconnected themes for unifying America into one people: the natural beauty of the American countryside, God's grace for America, and the brotherhood of Americans within the borders of America ("from sea to shining sea").
Similarly, in the fourth movement of the 9th Symphony, the chorus of mankind celebrates its unity--proclaiming "All men will become brothers." But here the brotherhood is universal.
We have to wonder: Can music really do that? Can music make us believe in the myth of a nation--or even the whole world--speaking with a single choral voice? And if so, what is the unifying theme through which millions or even billions of people can be one people? If "Joy" is the theme, does that have any clear meaning? Is "Freedom" a better theme with a clearer meaning? Or is the intellectual meaning of the lyrics unimportant as long as the music creates an emotional experience of social bonding? To have that emotional experience must the music have the sacred aura of a hymn that requires religious belief? Or can we enjoy the religious feelings of a patriotic hymn without believing any religious doctrines?
I have argued that a natural desire for social membership in an imagined community is part of our evolved human nature. It's an imagined community because it's a symbolic niche construction of our minds that we create by consenting to it, by agreeing to its reality. Singing an anthem is one way that we imagine ourselves as belonging to such a community. It's like a password or shibboleth.
In composing his 9th Symphony, Beethoven was building on a tradition that began in the 18th century. George Frederic Handel composed anthems for chorus and orchestra for the Hanoverian kings of England. The most memorable one--Zadok the Priest for the coronation of George II in 1727--used a revised biblical verse from the First Kings (1:39-40) about the coronation of Solomon:
Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king. And all the people rejoiced and said: God save the King! Long live the King! God save the King! May the King live for ever. Amen. Hallelujah.
The Priest and the Prophet anoint the King. And then the people collectively rejoice and pray for the King.
But the first true national anthem for the British became popular in 1745--God Save the King--when it was sung in support of George II after his defeat at the Battle of Prestonpans by the army of Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of King James II and the Jacobite claimant to the British throne. It was a prayer from the people asking God to give the King victory over Charles.
God save our gracious King! Long live our noble King! God save the King! Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us, God save the King!
O Lord our God arise Scatter his enemies And make them fall Confound their politics Frustrate their knavish tricks On thee our hopes we fix God save us all
Thy choicest gifts in store, On him be pleased to pour; Long may he reign. May he defend our laws, And ever give us cause, To sing with heart and voice, God save the King!
God Save the King begins with the same biblical phrase as Zadok the Priest, but now it is a prayer by "us" the people, asking God for the victory and safety of "our" King. The people ask for divine protection in the face of a political and military threat not only to the King but to the whole community. Instead of the Stuart doctrine of divine right, the people suggest a contract between ruler and ruled: the people will be loyal to him only as long as he defends "our laws" and "ever give us cause, with heart and voice to sing, God save the King."
The God of Battles answered the people's prayer by giving George II victory over the Jacobites in the Battle of Culloden in 1746, which ended the Jacobite rising of 1745. This is what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven," in which divine providence is decided on the battlefield.
Two years ago, I wrote about the importance of such choral hymns for the coronation of King Charles III and how Charles transformed the Coronation Liturgy into a Lockean liberal proclamation of individual liberty, religious toleration, and popular consent to government, which was open not only to people of all faiths but also to atheists.
BEETHOVEN'S PATRIOTIC MUSIC
In 1803, Beethoven composed piano variations on God Save the King and Rule Britannia. In 1813, he arranged God Save the King for soloist and unison chorus with an instrumental trio. In his notebook, he wrote: "I must give the English some notion of the blessing they have in their God Save the King (Buch, 73). This was part of Beethoven's patriotic action in supporting the English and their allies who were fighting against Napoleon's invading armies.
The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) became one of the deadliest series of wars in human history--with a death toll of over 4 million human beings. In 1803, Beethoven began work on a symphony that would eventually become the Eroica symphony, but in 1803 he called it Bonaparte, because he saw Napoleon as a heroic leader and liberator who was spreading the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment. But then, on December 2, 1804, Napoleon entered the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, and in the presence of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France by placing the Charlemagne Crown on his head.
When Beethoven heard this news, he complained to his student Ferdinand Ries: "So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man! Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition. He will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!" He then took up the title page of the symphony, ripped it in two, and threw it to the floor (Swafford, 2014, 384).
That Beethoven was right about Napoleon being a tyrant who would suppress all human rights soon became clear. A few months after Napoleon's crowning himself Emperor, the French government issued an "Imperial Catechism" and directed the Church to teach this new catechism, which included these responses:
Q. Why are we obligated to all of these duties to our Emperor?
A. First, because God, who created empires and distributes them according to His will, in heaping on our Emperor gifts, both in peace and war, has established him as our sovereign and rendered him the minister of His power and image on earth. To honor and serve our Emperor is thus to honor and serve God himself.
Q. What should one think of those who fail in their duty to the Emperor?
A. According to the Apostle Saint Paul, they would be resisting the order established by God Himself, and would render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.
Q. What is forbidden to us by the Fourth Commandment?
A. We are forbidden to be disobedient to our superiors, to injure them, or to speak ill of them (Swafford, 2014, 385-86).
In his biography of Beethoven, Jan Swafford has shown that Beethoven was a man of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment who looked forward to a world ruled by reason, science, and the rights of man, which explains why he was so disgusted with Napoleon's tyrannical denial of freedom and human rights. When Immanuel Kant asked the question "What Is Enlightenment?" he answered: Saper aude! Dare to know! "Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of Enlightenment." Similarly, Beethoven wrote: "Only art and science can raise men to the level of gods." When one of his colleagues wrote on a score, "Finished with the help of God," Beethoven wrote under it, "O Man, help yourself!" Beethoven also resolved: "To do good wherever we can, to love liberty above all things, and never to deny truth though it be at the throne itself." Swafford observed that while Beethoven "never quite spelled out those ideals in words," those Enlightenment ideals "would be found in his music, and in the lyrics he chose to embody in music--above all, An die Freude" (Swafford, 2014, 47-50, 54, 129, 306, 853).
This explains why Beethoven composed music in 1813 celebrating the victory of the Duke of Wellington leading allied troops against Napoleon's army on June 21, 1813, near the Spanish village of Victoria. A few months later, Beethoven composed Wellington's Victory, or The Battle of Vittoria--often referred to as the "Battle Symphony."
This also explains why Beethoven became a composer of official state music for the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), which was a series of international diplomatic meetings in Vienna to develop a plan for restoring peace and order to Europe after the fall of Napoleon. The Congress was chaired by Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, who called the Congress's plan "The Concert of Europe." Friedrich von Gentz, the Congress's secretary described the purpose of the plan: "By their geographic situation, through their customs, their laws, their needs, their way of life and their culture, the states of this continent, taken as a whole, constitute a great political federation that has--and rightly--been called the European Republic." This echoed Immanuel Kant's proposal for a federation of European states that would enforce international peace and human rights (Buch, 2003, 76).
In 1814, Beethoven premiered his opera Fidelio, a revised version of Leonore, which had originally appeared in 1805. Fidelio became so popular in Vienna that it had multiple performance, including a performance before an audience of political and diplomatic dignitaries in Vienna for the Congress.
In the opera, Fidelio is actually Lenore, a noblewoman disguised as a boy who plots to free her husband Florestan from prison where he is being held as a political prisoner and a victim of political tyranny. The opera becomes a hymn to freedom and liberation from tyranny.
After Leonore persuades a prison guard to allow the prisoners to walk in the courtyard for a few moments, the prisoners enjoy the open air and sunlight and talk about their hope that they will someday go free. The chorus of prisoners sing about freedom (Freiheit), shouting : "O freedom, freedom, will you return?"
Later, we see Florestan alone in a dark dungeon. He murmurs about his cruel fortune. But then he has an ecstatic vision of Leonore as an angel who leads him to freedom. Zur Freiheit!--"To Freedom!"--he cries over and over in spine-chilling high notes.
When Leonore finally succeeds in freeing Florestan, the two of them sing beautiful arias about the "inexpressible joy" (O namenlose Freude) they feel in being reunited as husband and wife. In celebrating the happiness or joy that comes from conjugal love, the chorus sings a line from Schiller's Ode to Joy: "Happy he whom Heaven has granted/To be loved by such a wife!"
Fidelio thus suggests that freedom is the precondition of joy because we must be free to pursue joy.
At the Congress of Vienna, Fidelio was generally seen as a celebration of the defeat of the Napoleonic armies and as an allegory for a Europe liberated from tyrannical conquest.
Beethoven encouraged this interpretation of his music. During the early months of the Congress, he composed The Glorious Moment, a cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra that was a musical representation of this European Moment that was announced in the opening statement:
Europe is risen! Europe is risen!
And the times in their headlong rush,
The chorus of peoples and former centuries,
Look on in amazement!
This European Moment was universalized in the repeated phrase: "In the peaceful union of brothers/Liberated mankind itself embraces!" Thus, the "chorus of peoples" invokes the freedom and brotherhood of mankind in the glorious European moment.
Here Beethoven's political music representing the Enlightenment vision of international peace, liberty, and brotherhood anticipated what he would do in 1824 in the 9th Symphony's Ode to Joy.
THE NINTH SYMPHONY
In his program notes for the GRSO's performance of the 9th Symphony, John Varineau suggests that "the first three movements can be heard as a search for that ultimate expression signifying the fellowship of humanity that we hear in the fourth." He then explains:
The last movement begins in chaos with the woodwinds and brass. The cellos and basses, imitating an operatic baritone, demand to know what is going on. The orchestra tentatively suggests the first movement. No! Then the second. No! The third? No! The cello and basses then suggest the answer with the famous tune.
That famous tune is taken mostly from Friedrich Schiller's poem Ode to Joy, except for the first few lines added by Beethoven (indicated by italics). Here's the English translation:
O friends, not these sounds! Let us sing more cheerful songs, More songs full of joy! Joy! Joy!
(1) Joy, beautiful spark of divinity, Daughter from Elysium, Fire-inspired we tread Within thy sanctuary. Thy magic power re-unites All that custom has divided, All men become brothers, Under the sway of thy gentle wings.
(2) Whoever has been lucky enough to become a friend to a friend, Or has won A true and loving wife, All who can call at least one soul theirs, Join our song of praise; But those who cannot must creep tearfully Away from our circle.
(3) All creatures drinks in joy At nature's breast. Good and Evil Alike taste of her gift; She gave us kisses and the fruit of the vine, A true friend even in death. Even the worm can feel sexual desire, And the cherub stands before God!
(4) Gladly, like the heavenly bodies Which He sent on their courses Through the splendor of the firmament; Thus, brothers, you should run your race, Like a hero going to victory!
(5) You millions, I embrace you. This kiss is for all the world! Brothers, above the starry canopy There must dwell a loving Father. Do you bow before him, you millions? World, do you sense your creator? Seek Him above the canopy of stars;
Above the stars must He dwell.
When the baritone soloist first shouted "Oh friends, not these sounds!", that was the first time that a singing voice had entered a symphony. The search for "more joyful sounds" requires a combination of instrumental and vocal music--a choral symphony.
The baritone identifies all the members of the orchestra and the singers as his friends. And throughout the Ode, "friends" (Freunde) and "joy" (Freude) are linked, which is underscored in German by the similarity of the two German words. Originally, Schiller wrote his Ode as a tribute to his close friend Christian Gottfried Korner.
But then the poem expands to include all forms of love or social bonding, including not only friendship but also conjugal love, brotherly love, love of God ("the cherub stands before God"), and God's love for His creatures ("a loving Father"). Joy, it seems, is found in love. And the most joyful sounds are the music of love.
Joy is first identified as the "beautiful spark of divinity, / Daughter from Elysium," the afterlife in Greek mythology. But then this image of joy as a supernatural infusion is followed in the third stanza with the claim that joy comes from natural longings. "Every creature drinks in joy at nature's breast," and even the worm feels something like joy in his sexual desire.
How can the pursuit of joy be both natural and supernatural? Could it be a natural desire for happiness that can never be fully satisfied in this life because it's really a desire for the supernatural happiness of eternal bliss with God in Heaven?
That was C. S. Lewis's primary argument for the existence of God: the desire for Joy points to God as the supernatural object that will satisfy that desire. We all desire whatever we think will make us fully happy or joyful. But then when we possess the object of our desire, we discover that it does not give us Joy. Lewis wrote: "A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim, water exists to do it. So if I find within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most likely explanation is that I was made for another world."
"I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it." That was C. S. Lewis's claim in Mere Christianity that he had rational arguments for showing how the weight of the evidence supported Christianity. In the Reason/Revelation debate, Lewis thought that Reason could prove, or at least render probable, the truth of Christian Revelation.
I have responded to Lewis by arguing that while there is an evolved natural desire for religious transcendence, or for what Lewis calls "Joy," the existence of this desire provides no evidence for the real existence of the supernatural object--God--that would satisfy this desire. In the Reason/Revelation debate, neither side can conclusively refute the other. But the debate must continue because this is the deepest debate that human beings can have--the debate over whether the highest good for human beings is earthly happiness or Joy in the natural world that we can experience, or whether that highest good can only be found in the eternal happiness or Joy of Heaven.
The "Ode to Joy" is not clearly on one side or the other in this debate. The last stanza does lean towards Revelation's vision of heavenly happiness: "Do you bow down before Him, you millions?/Do you sense your Creator, O world?/Seek Him above the canopy of stars!/He must dwell beyond the stars." And yet this could also be intimating my position--that while many people will feel a natural desire for religious Joy in Heaven with God, the natural reality of this desire does not prove the supernatural reality of the Heavenly Joy that is sought. Notice that the Ode speaks of people seeking God, but it does not say that they will surely find what they seek.
If Fidelio is correct in suggesting that freedom is the precondition of joy because we need to be free to pursue joy, that should apply here. Only in a free society are we free to openly debate Reason and Revelation in arguing about whether our natural desire for happiness or joy can be satisfied in this life, or whether it points to a Heavenly Joy. As I have indicated in my posts on Lewis, he was free to debate these issues in the Oxford Socratic Club, and other venues, where religious believers debated atheists and agnostics, because he lived in a modern liberal society that secured freedom of thought and speech. In an illiberal closed society, this would not have been possible. As I have indicated, Lewis understood this, and that's why he was a Lockean liberal who rejected theocracy as a form of tyranny, who believed that government should not have the power to legally enforce Christian orthodoxy, and who thought the only proper aim of government was to secure individual liberty from legal interference except when necessary to prevent harm to others.
THE POLITICAL RECEPTION OF THE ODE TO JOY
The many attempts to adopt Beethoven's Ode to Joy as an anthem for a political community or political ideology are often confusing because of their implausible appropriations of the music. For example, as planned by Joseph Goebbel, Hitler's birthday in 1937 was celebrated with a performance of the Ninth Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler with the Berlin Philharmonic. This was repeated in 1942. Some of the Nazi cultural leaders said that Beethoven and Wagner were the two poles of truly German music that had been united in the personality of Adolf Hitler. But in 1938, Hanns Eisler, a famous German-Austrian composer and a communist anti-Nazi, ridiculed the idea that the Ninth Symphony was pro-Nazi: "All men become brothers, with the exception of all the peoples whose lands we want to annex, with the exception of the Jews, the Blacks, and a great many others to boot" (Buch, 2003, 205-209).
The same absurd adoption of the Ode to Joy as an anthem for a racist regime occurred in 1974 when Ian Smith's white supremacist government in Rhodesia adopted the Ode to Joy as a national anthem to replace God Save the Queen. A music critic for the Rhodesian Herald wrote that he was "stupefied" by the "plagiarism" for "local nationalistic ends" of music with "supra-national associations" and "indissolubly linked with ideas on the brotherhood of mankind" (Buch, 2003, 243-47).
A more credible appropriation of the Ode to Joy as a political anthem occurred in 1972 when a purely instrumental version of the opening melody of the Ode to Joy was adopted by the Council of Europe as the anthem of Europe. In 1985, it was adopted by the European Union.
Anthem of the European Union
It's hard to imagine that an instrumental Ode to Joy without the singing can ever have the power of the original. After all, Beethoven's baritone soloist was clear that a "more joyful sound" would have to be a song rather than a purely instrumental melody. Moreover, it's not clear that this music has the emotional power to bind the European nations into one multinational community.
If the people of Europe were to sing an anthem that would express their membership in the European Community, what would be the words for that song? Generally, national anthems tell stories about the heroic historical events that have made the nation great. What heroic story could a European anthem tell? Could the lyrics of the Ode to Joy--perhaps slightly altered--tell that European story?
One answer to those questions came on Christmas Day in 1989 in Berlin when Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that was broadcast by satellite transmission to countries around the world. Bernstein made one change in the Ode to Joy: he replaced Freude with Freiheit. In a program note for the concert, he wrote:
There is apparently conjecture that Schiller may have produced a second sketch of his poem, Ode to Joy, which carried the title Ode to Freedom. Most researchers today are of the opinion, however, that this rumor is a fraud originated by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Whether true or not, I believe that this is a heaven-sent moment when we should sing the word "Freedom" wherever the score reads "Joy." If there ever were a historical moment in which one can neglect the theoretical discussions of academics in the name of human freedom, this is it. And I believe that Beethoven would have given us his blessing! Let freedom live!" (Buch, 2003, 261-62).
The "historical moment" was the first year of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism that began with mass protests against communist rule across Eastern Europe. In November of 1988, Estonia became the first Soviet Republic to declare its independence from Moscow. Others followed. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. It had been built in 1961 to keep people in communist East Berlin from running away to freedom in West Berlin. Once the Berlin Wall came down, it became clear that East and West Germany would eventually be reunified under the rule of a liberal democratic government.
Thus, in the fall of 1989, it seemed that the Cold War was coming to an end, and that the "Free World" had defeated communism. In the journal The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed "The End of History": history as the human search for the fully satisfying social order had come to an end, he argued, because most people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the best social order because it secures the freedom that allows human beings to pursue their happiness. Fukuyama's article provoked an international debate over whether his argument was correct.
Apparently, Bernstein agreed with Fukuyama that 1989 was the "historical moment" for celebrating the triumph of freedom. And if I am right about the message of Fidelio, Bernstein was justified in thinking that Beethoven would have given his blessing to turning the Ode to Joy into an Ode to Freedom because freedom is the precondition for joy.
So we see that music really can bind human beings into a social order--perhaps even a global social order--particularly when the theme of that music is the universal human longing for freedom.
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