The Thinking, Walking Biped, part three. Epic Journeys

A lot of the celebrated epic journeys in human history have been on foot. The alpine ice man Ötzi was beginning such a journey when he was shot in the back with an arrow five thousand years ago. These journeys show up in literature and movies a lot. One recent example is the movie Revenant with Leonardo di Caprio.

I will tell you about one such journey you’ve probably never heard about, from the 1959 French movie La Vache et le Prisonnier (the cow and the prisoner). We think of Nazis as keeping prisoners in special camps, such as the one in The Great Escape. But there were so many prisoners of war that the Nazis had to literally “farm out” their prisoners to farms and ranches in the countryside. German farmers, rather than soldiers, kept the prisoners from escaping, which they could not do anyway since their only garments marked them as prisoners. This was the same thing that the American army did with German prisoners in sending them to agricultural work camps in California. I grew up across the street from the ruins of one such work camp in Lindsay, California.

One prisoner in the movie had a brilliant plan. He took a cow from the farm where he was interned, got a map, and decided to walk back to his home in France. The German farmers who watched him did not care very much if he escaped. The only enthusiastic Nazis were the officers. But the prisoner had an excuse: he said he was taking the cow from the farm where he was imprisoned to another farm; that is, it was part of his work to take the cow someplace else. He had one humorous mishap after another until he finally got on the train to Strasbourg. The movie was famous enough in France that many cows were named Marguerite in honor of the cow that helped the man escape.

Many epic journeys are on foot. I tell about more of them later. The more on foot, the more epic the journey.

The Dark Side of Altruism

I have written extensively about altruism, in my Encyclopedia of Evolution, as well as in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released this fall by Prometheus books (for more information, see my website). When animals are nice to other members of their species, they enjoy lots of benefits; nature is not simply “red in tooth and claw,” to use Tennyson’s oft-quoted phrase. Humans are, it appears, the animal species with the most complicated forms of altruism.

But clearly the positive benefits of altruism are not, by themselves, enough to have influenced the evolution of altruism. There is also a dark side to altruism. Animals also exercise violent actions against those who are cheaters in the altruism game. This confers a penalty upon those individuals who do not practice altruism. “Sweet revenge” appears to be as hard-wired in our brains as is friendship and love. And it is not just an instinct; it is a pleasure. It is a pleasure that can more suddenly and completely take over our brains than almost any other passion.

One example of this sudden, mindless zeal against cheaters took place in the aftermath of the European theater of World War II. In an earlier entry, I told about meeting with my cousins in a rural cemetery on Memorial Day weekend, and exchanging some of our uncle’s war stories. Here is one of them.

The Germans had been defeated, and Allied troops, including my uncle Bill when he was a very young adult, fresh off an Oklahoma farm, were escorting German prisoners of war to prisons. All of them were on foot—the Allied guards, and the prisoners. This was, from the viewpoint of the Allied soldiers as well as most of the defeated Germans, a fair thing: once the war ended, there was no more need for killing, and now it was time for justice, which meant the execution, after judgment, of only the men who were most responsible for causing the war. But Bill recognized that one of the prisoners was an SS soldier. The SS soldiers had been trained as Nazi killing machines. For them, the war would not be over until death. They had all just finished eating lunch, and Bill wanted to light up a cigarette as he was, by himself, guarding the prisoners. It was windy. For just a moment—and he knew as soon as he did this that it was unwise—he leaned his rifle against the wall of a building to shelter the match from the wind. That was all of the time it took for the SS soldier to jump up and grab the rifle, with the intention of killing Bill. He grabbed the rifle also. The SS soldier, who was quite large, pushed against Bill, who was quite small, and Bill pushed back; they pushed each other a second time. Bill knew that he could not withstand the strong enemy. So when the SS soldier pushed a third time, Bill moved aside and tripped him. As the SS soldier fell, Bill took another gun out of its holster and shot the SS soldier in the back. He went into a trance, and just kept shooting. It took him awhile to notice that he had used all eight of his bullets, and the gun was going click-click-click. His comrades were now at his side.

Uncle Bill had slipped into a state that the Vikings called “berserk,” which is a term that specifically describes an alternate state of mind, almost dreamlike in quality, which encompasses a warrior in the midst of battle. We use the term loosely today to describe people who are out of control due to anger, but it is a mental state that anyone can slip into, and it clearly provided evolutionary benefits to our ancestors. It is an extreme form of the dark side of altruism. While I do not believe that it is good for us to go berserk, except in extreme situations such as Bill’s, it is clearly beneficial for us to not just promote good and altruistic policies and actions, but also to connect evil and selfish policies and actions with swift and sure punishment, of the appropriate variety. For example, Wall Street executives should not simply be scolded for causing the financial meltdown of 2008; they need the appropriate form of punishment, which is financial.

In extreme situations, such as Bill’s in 1945, there is no time for a trial. But those who execute sweet revenge need to explain their actions. Bill had to explain himself before a military panel. It was clear that he was defending himself and his comrades against an obviously evil enemy. But Bill also had a sense of humor. When a commanding officer asked him why he had used eight bullets, he said, “I didn’t have nine, and seven wasn’t quite enough.”