Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsThe Discrepancy Has CHANGED People!
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2018
[My copy of this book is a paperback, published by Three Rivers Press.]
What this book demonstrates—for me, at least—is that de Waal should continue his study of non-human animals, and cease making comments about the relevance of primatological (and related) research findings for humans; for I find many of the comments that de Waal makes about humans in this book are painful to read. Either cease making comments about humans, or start recognizing the “missing variable” that I briefly discuss in this review.
The deficiency that I perceive in this book, in his comments about humans, is one that is, unfortunately, common in the social science literature: It fails to recognize that a “Discrepancy” began to develop, during the Neolithic (about 12,500 years ago), between (a) the way of life for which humans had become “designed,” prior to the Neolithic (i.e., foraging), and (b) the ways of life that developed during and after the Neolithic; and that this Discrepancy probably had important implications for human behavior since the Neolithic.
I say “probably” because scholars have basically ignored the Discrepancy, with but a few exceptions.
The concept itself goes back over a century, being implicit, e.g., in some of Thorstein Veblen’s writings, including this, in (p. 19) in his 1914 The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts:
But there is no warrant for assuming that each or any of these successive changes in the scheme of institutions affords successively readier, surer or more facile ways and means for the instinctive proclivities to work out their ends, or that this sequence of change is more suitable to the untroubled functioning of these instincts than any phase that has gone before. Indeed, the presumption is the other way.
Then, there is The Hare and the Tortoise: Culture, Biology, and Human Nature (1986), and entire book about the concept. Still more recently is this book, written seven years after de Waal’s book, The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible, by anthropologist Carel van Schaik and historian Kai Michel (2016)—a book that could not, obviously, have influenced de Waal in his writing of The Age of Empathy.
The latter fact is not the only problem with the Discrepancy concept, however: Although the concept is implicit in some of Veblen’s writings, he never developed the concept; although Barash wrote a book about the concept, that book does not take a historical approach; and although the van Shaik-Michel book does take a historical approach, its scope is rather narrow, and the Discrepancy concept (referred to using the term “mismatch” in that book) is not used in a satisfactory manner in their book.
My point here is that because the Discrepancy concept has received so little attention by scholars, it’s not surprising that that concept plays no role in his book. The fact that it does not makes the book disappointing for me, however. And, I would add, I’m convinced that the book would be much more worthwhile than it is—regarding, specifically, de Waal’s comments about “humans”—had de Waal been aware of this concept.
Although little of a definitive nature can be said at present (as I noted earlier) regarding the importance of this concept, it can be said with confidence, e.g., that although the behavior of foragers had both a genetic-instinctual and acquired basis, human behavior during and after the Neolithic began to involve more of the latter, increasingly. The reason? Developments such as the following that began to occur during the Neolithic: (a) agriculture began to displace foraging as a source of sustenance; (b) humans became increasingly sedentary; (c) human groups increased in population size; and (d) social class systems began to develop—along with the exploitation of some by others that is a “feature” of such systems.
Presumably the Discrepancy had—and has—relevance for the changes in institutions, in intellectual developments (e.g., the development of ideologies), in technological developments, etc., over the centuries; and such developments have had implications for the changes in behavior that occurred, with humans, during and after the Neolithic.
An implication of such developments that has relevance for de Waal’s book is that new causal factors were emerging, over the centuries, that were affecting human behavior—so that the behaviors of “civilized” peoples came to deviate in important ways from the behaviors of foragers. I must add, of course, that this fact of new causal factors being added has relevance for social science in general—in that few social science scholars have been aware of this fact, and their research findings have therefore suffered in consequence.
I would recommend that this gap be filled were it not for the (apparent) fact that the “time is almost up” for our species: It appears that our demise, as a species, will arrive “soon”—if not by the unleashing of thermonuclear devices, then global warming, with both of those possibilities being “fruits” of the Discrepancy!