I am going to question a common belief today. Inspired, as so often, by my baby daughter Miru, I started questioning the idea that babies don't share. When looking up the exact title of this article on Google (a lazy man's approach to tapping into humanity's body of shared knowledge), I found only one blog article from 2006 - confirming that this is what our experts think. We read lines like this:
"So basically what I'm saying is that there's no chance on earth than an 8-month-old should be able to share. A child that age isn't even remotely close to being able to understand the concept."
So why don't babies share? Because they don't have the concept. Apparently sharing, unlike for example appropriating random things in one's environment by putting the in the mouth, requires a concept. Fair enough, but what about tribal people, like the Awá, who seem to share the fruit of their land as a matter of course, naturally, people who haven't developed the conceptual tokenry of Western grammar to express the concept of "I" am sharing "this" with "you". And what about animals? Bonobo's have been observed to share food with strangers. (the finding of the Duke University experiment is extremely interesting, so I decided to share it here, although the sight of the metal cage makes me sad) But you don't need to be a great ape to share. The famous primatologist Frans de Waal wrote about "Attitudinal reciprocity in food sharing among brown capuchin monkeys". The study suggests a mediating role of memory and establishes that sharing is not mere automatic reciprocity between affiliates but determined by memory and social attitudes. I think it's safe to assume these little fellers don't have a "concept" of sharing, yet they clearly share. This tells me that in order to understand our own species, we might need to adapt a broader perspective. So, what if sharing doesn't really depend on the ability to "understand the concept"? What if it lies deeper within us, and the assumption that the need to master a highly sophisticated conceptual framework in order to share, is so blatantly wrong, that we fail to notice? Of course sharing is the most natural thing to do. From an evolutionary perspective, sharing has many advantages, from simple short-term group survival to complex social bonding. I think we need to take sharing at face value, without making the assumption that the infant primate is for example programmed in any way (for example to be "selfish"). To oversimplify and assume that all its endeavors should be reduced to a pressing one physical one (the literal incorporation of food into its body) is bad and biased science. Perhaps there are other instincts that can't be reduced to the so-called "selfish" one of taking from one's surroundings the energy to survive. Who knows? What if we take the idea by the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty of a "body schema" and ask if the bodies of others (siblings, parents) could be a part of that? Why not? We are still talking about the pre-conceptual infant who allegedly isn't able to share. The internal landscape of her "body schema" could as well include extremities and organs that are not connected to her brain by direct neuronal links, but rather by the empathic perception of her relatives. There's nothing esoteric about that. Sure, this "empathic perception" could be explained away as "mere" instinct, but that doesn't disqualify it. It is what it is: emotional attachment and connectedness. Sometimes I give my baby daughter Miru a piece of fruit (usually a plum or a peach), which she chews on, but then puts it into my mouth, when I smile at her and indicate I'm hungry by opening that mouth. I believe that my mouth is part of her extended body schema. At ten months, she puts the fruit into my mouth, with the greatest precision you can expect given her still developing hand-eye coordination. Perhaps she doesn't have the concept of her "own mouth" either and just puts the fruit in the nearest mouth available, because she has just mastered the link food-mouth. "But that's not sharing", certain scientists, who seem to be on a mission to disenchant our world, would say. "That's mere instinct." Does it matter? Come on, what if we just start sharing, and develop those concepts post hoc, when some journalist with some sense of style wishes to write about it? We, as humanity, had a rough childhood full of violence. We were killing each other even before we had a "concept" of self and other. When we grew up, we developed all the concepts we liked, and with them, we could "prove" human nature to be whatever we liked. Hurrah! Which concepts have survived the longest, which notions had the strongest impact, or: which grammar does best support the dominant economic system? There you go. Baby's don't share. Because you need a concept for that. And we need the concept of concepts to tell ourselves that human nature is whatever fits the dominant story most conveniently. Or do we? What if we adopt an open-minded attitude about the complexity of the social skills of all animals, from fish to capuchin monkeys to bonobos and our own offspring? Wouldn't this set us up for some amazing re-discoveries, of our own "language older than words", in which sharing with others is more natural than depriving others?