Just like the first line in the Jane’s Addiction song. In fact, during that same summer, the summer of 1966, I became a criminal of the lowest caliber, not just a thief, but an arsonist as well as a kind of pimp. The arson is the only thing that I felt truly guilty about. And that’s the thing that fascinates me now, that I felt rock-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach horrible for weeks after starting a fire, but had no misgivings about the other two; with the theft in particular, I felt absolutely no remorse whatsoever.
I got caught stealing a single peanut from the grocery store. While mom was distracted by my little sister, I pocketed a peanut from a heaping pile of roasted peanuts in a bulk bin in the produce section. When we got back to the car, I pulled it out, started to crack it open, and mom suddenly realized what I had done.
She was livid. She was angrier with me than she had ever been before. She said she was going to take me back into the store and find the store manager and have me give the peanut back to him—in person—and apologize for stealing. I resisted frantically and started balling. The thought of confessing my crime to the store manager, a complete stranger, was terrifying. I distinctly remember trying to reason with her at the time, arguing that there were so many peanuts that taking a single one of them simply didn’t make a difference. And, besides, unlike the other boxed and packaged products for sale in the store, the peanuts were unpackaged and out in the open, clearly available for anyone who wanted one. It was like the always-full bowl of tiny pillow-shaped pastel mints that my grandmother had sitting on the coffee table, free for anyone who had a hankering.
OK, so my five-year-old arguments were nowhere near as articulate as all that. And even if they were, I’m pretty sure my mother wouldn’t have been persuaded. We sat like that in the car for a long time, with her demanding that I take the peanut back, and me pleading desperately through tears. I’m not sure why, but she eventually gave into my sobbing pleas—I suspect it probably had something to do with my one-year-old sister, who, not wanting to be left out, had started crying herself. Whatever the case, she started the car and drove us home.
The arson occurred sometime after the peanut incident, on a weekend when my dad was home and burning some yard waste just outside the backyard fence. I grabbed a stick and plunged it into the heart of the fire until it ignited, and then took it across the alley and tossed it in the tall dry grass alongside the neighbor’s red-stained woven-cedar fence. By the time the fire department put it out, an entire section of the fence was turned to charcoal, along with the lower branches of a crabapple tree and a sizeable portion of the vacant field next door.
But I never got caught. When asked if I knew how the fire started, I lied and blamed it on a couple of older kids I said that I saw in the alley earlier that day. I only sort of made the story up, and my description of the kids was based entirely on the bullies who had tossed my bike in the field and tried to beat me up a few weeks earlier, so my story was coherent and consistent—and the cops seemed to recognize who I was talking about. I was entirely in the clear. No one suspected me. And when I finally came clean several weeks after the incident, my parents didn’t believe me at first. I had to come clean, though. My immature conscience simply couldn’t bear the weight.
My time as a pimp was pretty limited, restricted to one afternoon. It involved Becky, a girl my age who, for a short time, lived two houses down. I convinced Becky to pee in front of me and two of my friends in the backyard sandbox. She felt embarrassed and went home right afterwards, but my friends and I talked about the incident for months.
So, here’s my question. I was completely wracked with guilt about the fire. And although I don’t remember experiencing any actual guilt about Becky, I no longer wanted to play with her because things between us felt a little awkward, something perhaps approaching guilt—at the very least I had the sense that I probably shouldn’t have talked her into the dirty deed. But the shoplifting never bothered me. I was bothered by the fact that my mother was so upset, but not by the act of theft itself. Why? What is it about the peanut that is different from the other two?
The easy answer is that it was just a single peanut. But that doesn’t feel right to me. I suspect that my mother’s reaction wouldn’t have been any different if it had been a more expensive item. And, besides, my five-year-old mind was not developed enough to appreciate the relative worth of things in economic terms. There is something else about this specific act of theft itself, something that makes it qualitatively different from the other two crimes.
Qualitatively different from other kinds of theft, as well. I have stolen a few things since the peanut incident, but never just for the thrill of it like the kleptomaniac couple in the Jane’s Addiction song. Stealing seems morally wrong to me on some level, but, as offenses go, stealing food barely registers, something on par with j-walking or growing cannabis in your backyard garden in Indiana in terms of its triviality. Looking back, I wonder whether I would have felt guilt had I stolen something that wasn’t edible, a plastic toy for example, instead of a peanut.
And the guilt I felt about the fire wasn’t really about the fire itself. Although arson is a property crime, I was too young to fully appreciate the destructive impact of the fire I started. My guilt was not directed at the material damage I caused—which was, all things considered, pretty negligible. And even from my adult perspective, I can’t imagine ever feeling remorse solely for causing property damage. Especially since I now know how insurance companies work.
What I remember most about my experience of the incident at the time was feeling shock and horror at all the commotion the fire caused: neighbors ran over with lengths of garden hose; two fire trucks came with their sirens blasting; the police were there. From my five-year-old point of view, it was a massive spectacle. All of these people were mobilized over something that I did and lied about doing.
And I think that was it. It was the lie part; it was the not-taking-responsibility for the results of my actions, in combination with the trouble I had caused other people, that played most heavily on my conscience. Once I told my parents what I had done, the guilt dissipated quickly. Thinking back on the incident now, from the nostalgic vantage of five and a half decades, only makes me smile—no trace of anything close to guilt or remorse remains.
So, back to my question: why feelings of guilt over the fire, even if the guilt was really more about causing other people trouble and then lying about it than the actual fire, but no feelings of anything approaching guilt for stealing the peanut? Again, to say that it is a matter scope of impact or degree of result—pocketing one tiny peanut versus mobilizing the fire department—doesn’t feel like the whole story. The critical difference seems to me to be one of social impact: the fire affected numerous other people; the peanut was only a problem for my mom.
Perhaps the difference has something to do with the fact that I am a social primate, that I have psychological expectations—call them instincts—that are a result of millions of years of natural selection, most of which occurred in small egalitarian communities where having good relationships with others was a requisite for mutual survival. And despite the fact that civilization has veneered over my egalitarian hunter-gatherer psychology with a thin layer supporting obligatory acquiescence to authority—a layer entirely unrelated to my evolutionary heritage but necessary to keep the consumption machine running smoothly and efficiently—my base morality is, like yours and everyone else’s, Paleolithic in its design.
Think about my feelings of guilt (or lack thereof) in terms of what might be expected of an instinctual morality stitched from a social cloth woven across a quarter million years of life in the context of hunter-gatherer band society. There are distinct features of band society that would seem to be consistent both with my feelings of remorse about the fire and my lack of those feelings for stealing the peanut.
First, modern-day hunter-gatherers have sometimes very elaborate social leveling mechanisms to guard against the undue influence of specific individuals. Any action by an individual that disturbs the relative harmony of the group is a potential threat to group coherence. And any threat to group coherence is a potential threat to survival. By starting the fire, I caused a spectacle that disrupted the normal calm activity of the people in my community. And by lying about it, I further violated my instinctual sense of obligation to the larger group. And, although this might be stretching things a bit, perhaps coming clean and telling my parents about my crime was a way of seeking to repair a psychological rift in my feelings of community connection.
The peanut is much easier to explain in terms my instinctual hunter-gatherer sensibilities. Band society—like the cultures of most other higher primates—operates under powerful norms of reciprocity. This is especially true with respect to food sharing. Some days the hunting or foraging goes well for you, and when it does, you share all the results with everyone else, making sure to divi things up as equitably as possible. On other days, you might come up empty, and on those days one or more of your neighbors will have your back, so you never really have to worry about going hungry. Food is something that is readily available, always shared, and never something that you need to ask for. Seen through the instinctual lens of reciprocity, the massive pile of peanuts in the grocery store obviously meant that I was expected to help myself (and the fact that people have to pay other people for food flies in the face of a quarter million years of our species’ experience).
OK, so my feelings of guilt about the fire can be linked (perhaps) to my instincts regarding my group obligations and my lack of remorse for stealing a peanut can be linked to my evolved expectations regarding reciprocity norms. But what about my brief career as a pimp? How might instinctual morality explain my relative lack of remorse about Becky?
Now that I think about it, probably no need to tease that one out. I suspect the evolutionary connections there are, unfortunately, pretty obvious.
