We’re Lean, Mean Venting Machines

“Gratuitously rude” is how Anthony Lake’s confirmation hearings as nominee for CIA director were described in a recent New Yorker.

NBA coach Pat Riley reportedly fines his players for helping opponents--splayed on the court--to their feet.

“Ultimate fighting,” an alleged sport sometimes described as human cockfighting, is gaining popularity. (It’s man-to-man combat in a cage that prohibits only eye-gouging and biting; choking and head-butting are encouraged.)

Are human beings the only species that takes pleasure in hurting each other? Do nastiness and cruelty have a biological purpose in the survival scheme? Or is meanness just a way to recycle anger, revenge-seeking a tool to gain respect? Are some of us just born nasty?

Humans don’t have the corner on cruelty. Primates, Tarzan’s smiley chimp pal Cheetah notwithstanding, are meanies too.

Frans de Waal, a zoologist and ethologist at Emory University in Atlanta, says greater reasoning power endows primates with the means to be mean.

“You have to be able to understand the consequences of your behavior upon someone else in order to be mean,” says De Waal, author of “Good Natured” (Harvard University Press, 1996), a book that analyzes the moral and sympathetic behavior of animals in evolution. “And to get a kick out of inflicting pain you have to have the capacity to have sympathy.”

De Waal cites numerous examples of primate viciousness in “Good Natured.” There is the community of chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Kenya that attacks deformed polio victims. There is the gruesome practice common among chimps of tearing limbs from live, screaming monkeys. There is the rarer case of interspecies cruelty, like a game perfected by sadistic young chimps that coaxed chickens with bread crumbs within reach so as to jab them with sharp wire, reaping considerable amusement.

“They got so good at it,” De Waal says, “that they coordinated it so one would throw the bread and the other would be the hit man.”

*

Like our primate relatives, we were designed for group living with about 60 to 100 individuals, says Robert M. Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and biologist at Stanford University. But we humans spend most of our lives surrounded by strangers. This gives us a feeling of anonymity (especially when we’re inside cars) that frees us to behave like real louts.

“If a male primate is mean to a female primate, her whole family will come after him,” says Sapolsky, author of “The Trouble With Testosterone” (Scribner, 1997) and “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” (W.H. Freeman, 1994). “We don’t have that sort of accountability in industrial societies.”

But we have evolved like our primate ancestors to be assiduous scorekeepers. When a person has wronged us, says Richard Driscoll, a psychologist in Knoxville, Tenn., we punish them by being mean so they won’t do it again. The same is true with primates but the stakes are higher.

“Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal,” says Sapolsky, who adds that the politic primate is more likely to survive than one who shares indiscriminately or not at all. “If you were as crummy as most of those Republicans were to Lake, no one would share bananas with you. Even in predator attacks, it comes down to defending friends against attackers.”

Fear of attack--whether you are a baboon envisioning yourself as lion hors d’oeuvres or a human with your job on the downsizing chopping block--is a huge source of stress. This fuels a lot of “trickle down” nastiness (read: kick-the-dog catharsis).

“The way you avoid getting ulcers is by giving them to others,” says Sapolsky, who adds that stressed-out lab rats that bite other rats have lower blood pressure than stressed-out rats that don’t have a rat to sink their teeth into.

Taking it out on the individual one rung down the social ladder also explains the “psychopathology of domestic abuse and child abuse,” Sapolsky says.

And some people are just meaner than others. Take the person who is always a jerk to the waiter. Sapolsky speculates that the brute’s neural pathway patterns may have formed in a way that makes them more “frontally disinhibited.” The term describes aggressiveness and inappropriate frankness (think Howard Stern), a symptom associated with disease to the brain’s frontal cortex.

*

Of course, the interplay of biology and environment is a critical part of determining how mean we are. One meanness theory explored by De Waal and supported by Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is the idea that when love and sympathy are wiped out by circumstances, selfishness is twinned with actual glee over others’ misery.

Mills, author of the forthcoming “The Triumph of Meanness: America’s War Against Its Better Self” (Houghton Mifflin), says today’s corporate Darwinism has fostered such circumstances, creating a lifeboat ethic, the notion that the country can’t support everyone and that if you have to shove more vulnerable folks out of the lifeboat for self-preservation, well, so be it.

This has given rise to large groups who revel in seeing people not just punished but humiliated and debased, Mills says. He points to the recent revival of prisoner chain gangs, rap music’s debasement of women and “theater of humiliation” radio and television talk shows that degrade and exploit.