Ubuntu Is More Than Linux

I've been kind of heads down the last few months doing some very applied work in knowledge graphs. Now that I have some time to come up for air, I want to share a few posts on more abstract scientific and philosophical topics. I'll be posting some new practical tips on Protege, OWL, and integration with LLMs in a few weeks. This one is about an interest I have that I plan to return to one day: the scientific justifications for moral philosophy (DeBellis 2018) (Hauser 2009).

If you work in technology, you probably know Ubuntu as a Linux distribution. But today I learned the name actually comes from an African philosophical concept that roughly means “a person is a person through other persons.” In other words, our humanity is fundamentally tied to the humanity of others. This is more than in inspirational idea, it captures something anthropologists have increasingly come to believe about our evolutionary past.

A Different Picture of Human Nature

For much of the twentieth century, anthropologists hypothesized early human societies as dominated by powerful “alpha males”. A view loosely inspired by studies of primates. In this picture, strong individuals ruled and everyone else followed. But research over the past few decades paints a different picture.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm (Boehm 2001) (Boehm 2011) examined dozens of small-scale hunter-gatherer tribes studied before they discovered agriculture and symbolic language. Also before the tribes had extensive contact with the modern world. Boehm calls these Late Pleistocene Authentic (LPA) tribes because they are the closest examples we can study of tribes who are very similar to our Late Pleistocene ancestors before the invention of farming and symbolic language. I.e., our ancestors who were primarily driven by their genome to a degree that modern humans are not. To the extent that their is an innate human nature, it will be found in such tribes.

What Boehm found was striking: these groups are strongly egalitarian. Rather than celebrating domineering individuals, these societies actively work to prevent anyone from becoming too powerful. Boehm calls this system a “reverse dominance hierarchy.” Instead of one dominant individual controlling the group, the group collectively prevents any one individual from dominating.

How Egalitarianism Is Enforced

This doesn’t mean everyone is identical or that conflict never occurs. Status and prestige still exist. Skilled hunters, wise elders, or gifted storytellers may earn admiration. But strong social norms prevent those advantages from turning into domination. Common “leveling mechanisms” include:

• Mockery and ridicule. A hunter who brags about a kill may be teased mercilessly.

• Obligatory sharing. Food, especially large game, is expected to be shared widely.

• Gossip and criticism. Social pressure keeps behavior within accepted limits.

• Status via altruism. The status of a tribe member is primarily a factor of their altruism and ability to collaborate and cooperate, not their strength or ability to dominate.

• Exile or expulsion. In extreme cases, a persistently aggressive or disruptive individual may be expelled from the group.

Boehm recounts cases where two individuals competing for status in the tribe engage in an altruistic arms race where each individual gives more and more of what they have to the tribe. On the other side, Boehm describes how individuals who repeatedly violated social norms by bullying others, hoarding resources, or exaggerating their accomplishments, were ultimately driven out of the tribe. In a hunter-gatherer environment, exile from the group could easily become a death sentence.

Evolution and Cooperation

The implications are fascinating. If our ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years in societies that valued sharing, punished bullying, and rewarded cooperation, then natural selection may have favored psychological traits such as:

• empathy

• fairness

• sensitivity to reputation

• shame and guilt when violating group norms

In other words, the roots of human morality lie in the collective efforts of small groups to control would-be bullies. This perspective complicates a popular caricature of evolutionary thinking from right wing ideologues. Evolutionary explanations are sometimes portrayed as implying that natural selection only rewards selfish behavior and dominance. But the anthropological evidence suggests something more subtle: cooperation and altruism are a powerful evolutionary strategy.

This also is consistent with work from evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins (Dawkins 1976) (Dawkins 1981), E.O. Wilson (Wilson, 1981) and Robert Trivers (Trivers 2011). The work of these scientists and other Neo-Darwinist biologists (Harmon 2010) illustrate that collaboration and cooperation are pervasive across the animal kingdom, from termites to primates.

Ubuntu and Human Nature

This brings us back to Ubuntu. The underlying idea that our well-being is deeply interconnected with that of others, captures something important about the social environments in which humans evolved.

Our ancestors did not survive as isolated competitors. They survived in tightly interdependent groups where sharing food, caring for children, and supporting one another were essential to survival. Ubuntu, in that sense, is not just a philosophical ideal. It also reflects something very old about what it means to be human. Something that in the last decades we've forgotten as a nation due to being pummeled by propaganda that the "free market" is the solution to every problem, that people are valued based solely on their wealth and that force is the only answer to international problems. As the US continues to launch wars and threaten the world with violence, as we put our heads in the sand and deny the science of climate change, this is something we need to remember if we care about the kind of world we leave to future generations.

Bibliography

Boehm, C., 2001. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, C., 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Dawkins, R., 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. & Ridley, M., 1981. The Natural Selection of Altruism in Altruism and Helping Behavior. San Francisco(CA): Better World Books.

DeBellis, M., 2018. A Universal Moral Grammar (UMG) Ontology. SEMANTiCS 2018 – 14th International Conference on Semantic Systems. Amsterdam, Elsevier. https://www.academia.edu/165019736/A_Universal_Moral_Grammar_UMG_Ontology

Harman, O., 2010. The Price of Altruism George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. New York(New York): W. W. NORTON.

Hauser, M., 2009. Moral Minds. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Trivers, R., 2011. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. New York(New York): Basic Books.

Wilson, E. & Lumsden, C., 1981. Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge(MA): Harvard University Press.