The Science of Discworld II

‘respect’ them and their teachings. By then, humiliation had become its own reward, at both ends of the instrument of torture (see Small Gods ), and humans had been selected for obedience to authority.
    Indeed, Stanley Milgram’s book Obedience to Authority shows just how obedient we are, by using the authority of a white laboratory coat to force people to torture other people, remotely. The other people were actually actors, responding to ‘mild’, ‘strong’ and ‘excruciating’ pain – or so the experimental subject was led to believe – with the appropriate actions. Milgram’s book shows how human beings invented authority and obedience, both very elvish sentiments. That ingredient in the story of our evolution explains Adolf Eichmann as well as Einstein: we won’t go any deeper into that issue here, because we’ve already covered it in The Privileged Ape and Figments of Reality .
    A few people refused Milgram’s instructions, though, and these mavericks have always been generated either by experience (some of the refusers had survived concentration camps, or had been otherwise tortured themselves) or by the Make-a-Human kit itself. Many of these kits generate a few mavericks, and we are optimistic about the Western one that uses Hollywood films to laud resistance to authority. But perhaps that comes only by working through the right genetics and the right home background.
    Many of these ancient rituals have become empty now. Jews use circumcision to test the parents’ commitment, rather than that of the baby, who has no choice. Jack was the Boston foreskin collector in the early 1960s; it was a very good source of the living human skin samples that he needed for his research on pigment cells in the skin. He saw a lot of parents, many of whom went very pale and a few of whom fainted: more men did that than women. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah is very daunting to the child, in prospect, though, as with circumcision, nobody fails it – not any more. But people did fail in the past, with serious consequences. For example in the ghettos, where only a third of the population married, the mothers of the ‘best’ girlschose only the boys who performed their Bar Mitzvah best. This would account for the kind of verbal success that the Jewish faction of many Western populations has achieved. Another explanation, that Jews were permitted verbal abilities only because land- or property-owning was denied them, is a contextual constraint within which they had to live. Why they were good enough verbally to succeed despite that constraint is the interesting question, and Bar Mitzvah competition and selection of breeders is a persuasive answer.
    Gypsy populations provide a possible counterexample, though, with very little testing of young men before marriage, which frequently takes place at ages that other cultures consider to be pre-pubertal. The few gypsies who have been successful in Western cultures have not been primarily verbally successful. Music provides a good contrast, with gypsies excelling in dance while classical composers and instrumental soloists are often Jewish. Of course, gypsies also share our common selective ancestry, if we’re right about puberty rites being ancestral and effectively universal.
    The other great apes don’t torture their children for ritual purposes, and the other hominids like Neanderthals probably didn’t either. So they haven’t produced a civilisation. Sorry, but that which does not kill us does appear to have made us strong.
    There is another story that we now tell, about what happened to the young men around the time when people were inventing agriculture, which explains barbaric societies. Don’t get us wrong here: we don’t mean that torturing adolescents is barbaric. It’s not, from the tribal point of view. It is an entirely proper way to get them accepted into the tribe. ‘We’ve done it ever since god-on-high made the world, and to prove it, here’s the holy circumcision-knife we’ve always used.’ No, from the tribal point of view, the barbarians that we have in mind are awful; they don’t have any rules or traditions … Even the Manky tribe, over that way a couple of miles, is better than them; at least the Mankies have traditions, even if they are different from ours. And we’ve stolen some of their women, and they have the most amazing tricks