They Comes a Day: Celebrating Cooperation in A Gathering of Old Men and Horton Hears a Who! Part 2: Punishment
Punishment, game theorists have found, is crucial to maintaining cooperative cohesion within a group, as it diminishes the benefits purely selfish actors can expect to gain from free-riding. It can also serve as a mechanism to lessen the threat of exploitation at the hands of outsiders who might try to join the group in order to take advantage of any established norm of altruism among its members. Flesch writes, “Darwin himself had proposed a way for altruism to evolve through the mechanism of group selection. Groups with altruists do better as a group than groups without. But it was shown in the 1960s that, in fact, such groups would be too easily infiltrated or invaded by nonaltruists” (5). Obviously, identity as a group member becomes a serious matter whenever each member relies on the others, so much so that evolutionary biologists all but ruled out even the possibility of group selection for nearly forty years. This difficulty is reflected in both Horton and Gathering by the characters whose interests aren’t in line with those of the group. Jo-Jo must be encouraged to give up his shirking and call out with the rest of the Whos for acknowledgment of their personhood. Reverend Jameson likewise signals his own selfish motives as he tries to coax Mathu into surrendering himself, saying, “I ain’t got no home if they burn this place down” (54).
Even Candy, the white woman who sends Snookum to call the men together—thus playing a role in Gaines’s novel similar to the one Horton plays in Seuss’s story—turns out to be less motivated by the good of the group than by more personal concerns. Explaining her motives to Mrs. Merle, Candy declares, “I won’t let them touch my people” (17). Of course, Candy is risking less than the men. “Clinton can handle Mapes in court” (16), she says, meaning that with a lawyer she can count on the fair trial Mathu and the other black men can’t. When Mapes shows up, she confesses along with the others, and when he starts beating them one after another, she steps to the front of the line and says, “I’m next” (71)—again, secure in her assumption that she isn’t at risk like the others. Even though she’s never in as much danger, at this point in the novel it still seems she’s behaving altruistically, mixing herself up in trouble she had nothing to do with. However, when the men begin to consider the possibility that they’ve waited long enough, that Fix may not be coming after all, and that it may be time for everyone to put down his gun and let Mathu go with Mapes, Candy refuses to let the men even deliberate the option amongst themselves, revealing that her motives are much more selfish than they originally seemed. “I want you to help me with my own child one day” (176), she says to Mathu. “You’ll die if they put you in that jail. And this place’ll die, too. There’s no reason for this place to be if you’re not here” (177). Since her purpose is merely to save Mathu, it can even be said that she’s free-riding on the cooperation of the other black men; in that sense, she’s almost as exploitative as any other white who treats the blacks like servants. And, like Jameson, she has to be dealt with in order for the collective goals of the group to be achieved.
Experiments that were being conducted around the same time as Gaines was writing Gathering showed that people are willing, even eager to punish others whose behavior strikes them as unfair or exploitative, even when administering that punishment involves incurring some cost to themselves. Like The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the ultimatum game involves two people, one of whom is often a confederate of the researchers, who have to decide on a strategy for interacting with one another. In this case, one of the participants is given a sum of money and told to offer the other participant a cut of it. The only catch is that the second player must accept the cut or neither player gets to keep the money. “It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer,” Flesch writes. “The responder will always come out better by accepting than vetoing” (31). But what the researchers discovered was that a line exists beneath which responders will almost always refuse the cut. “This means they are paying to punish,” Flesch explains. “They are giving up a sure gain in order to punish the selfishness of the proposer” (31). Game theorists call this behavior altruistic punishment because “the punisher’s willingness to pay this cost may be an important part in enforcing norms of fairness” (31). In other words, the punisher is incurring a cost to him or herself in order to ensure that selfish actors don’t have a chance to get a foothold in the larger, cooperative group.
Before considering the role punishment plays in Gathering and Horton, it is important to understand another mechanism that many evolutionary biologists theorize must have been operating for cooperation to have become established in human societies, a process referred to as the handicap principle, or costly signaling. A lone altruist in any group is unlikely to fare well in terms of survival and reproduction. So the question arises as to how the minimum threshold of cooperators in a population was first surmounted. Boyd traces the process along a path from mutualism, or coincidental mutual benefits, to inclusive fitness, whereby organisms help others who are likely to share their genes—usually family members—to reciprocal altruism, a quid pro quo arrangement in which one organism will aid another in anticipation of some future repayment (54-57). But some individuals in some population of organisms in our human ancestry must have benefited from altruism that went beyond familial duty and tit-for-tat bartering. In their classic book The Handicap Principal, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi suggest that altruism serves a function in cooperative species similar to the one served by a peacock’s feathers. Conspecifics have much to gain from accurate assessments of each other’s fitness when choosing mates or allies. Many species have thus evolved methods for signaling their fitness, and as the Zahavis explain, “in order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly” (xiv). A peacock signals his fitness with cumbersome plumage because his ability to survive in spite of the handicap serves as a guarantee of his strength and resourcefulness. Flesch and others find in this idea the key to solving the mystery of how altruism first became established; human altruism is, if anything, even more elaborate than the peacock’s display.
One of the reasons Horton is the one to champion the Whos—aside from his keen hearing—is that he would be the only one in the population of jungle creatures capable of holding all the others at bay for any length of time. It takes “dozens” of the monkeys in the Wickersham family to pose a threat to the elephant, who is several times larger than any of them. Of course, the teaming up of the Wickershams with the big kangaroo and the small kangaroo in her pouch is also a show of cooperation. And their motive can even be called altruistic: “For almost two days you’ve run wild and insisted / On chatting with persons who’ve never existed. / Such carryings-on in our peaceable jungle! / We’ve had quite enough of your bellowing bungle.” Apparently, the kangaroo is concerned that Horton’s behavior is disruptive to the rest of the animals in the jungle, so she’s playing the role of altruistic punisher. This concern, along with our knowledge that no one but Horton can be sure of the Whos’ existence, probably goes a long way toward explaining why we’re content with Horton’s vindication in the end and don’t feel any need to see the monkeys or the kangaroos punished. But before being vindicated Horton endures a great deal of suffering on behalf of the Whos. The picture of the exhausted elephant picking through the field of clovers is only the beginning. Later, as the Wickershams are trying to tie him up so they can steal the clover again, “They beat him! They mauled him! They started to haul / Him into his cage!” Even in the midst of the ill-treatment, though, Horton continues exhorting the mayor of Who-ville to keep trying to gather more voices so the other animals can hear them. As Horton suffers more and more, our estimation of his altruism, and thus his fitness, grows commensurately.
Just as Horton is unique among the jungle animals in his ability to stand up to the others, Mathu is unique among the black men on the Marshall plantation in his willingness to stand up to the whites. Upon first hearing about the gathering and its purpose, one of the men, Chimley, recalls that Mathu had once fought Fix, Beau’s father, the man all the characters fear will be leading a lynch mob after his son’s killer. When Fix once told Mathu to throw away his empty Coke bottle, “Mathu told him he wasn’t nobody’s servant” (30). In not allowing Fix to free-ride on the cooperative habits of his fellow plantation workers, Mathu was sending him the message that he could count on resistance from at least one of the black men. To send that message, Mathu had to be willing to fight, and he had to be willing to suffer the consequences of Fix’s wrath even if he won the fight. Sure enough, when Mathu won, “the white folks wanted to lynch Mathu” (30), and it was only because the sheriff took charge and forbade further reprisals that he escaped hanging. “But that wasn’t the last fight Mathu had on that river with them white people,” Chimley says. The other black men know that Mathu’s fighting back could potentially be to their benefit even more than his. And so when they hear about his latest act of altruistic punishment they’re inspired at last to join his efforts. “If he did it, you know we ought to be there” (30), Chimley’s fishing buddy Mat says to him. “Mathu was the only one we knowed had ever stood up” (31), and now they have a chance to stand up with him.