Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Zen Physics XII. Transcendence
The Righteous Mind
Chapter Seven - The Moral Foundations of Politics
p129 Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity. That, at least, is the view long held by many social scientists who accepted the idea that Homo sapiens is really Homo economicus. “Economic man” is a simple creature who makes all of life’s choices like a shopper in a supermarket with plenty of time to compare jars of applesauce. If that’s your view of human nature, then it’s easy to create mathematical models of behavior because there’s really just one principle at work: self-interest. People do whatever gets them the most benefits for the lowest cost.
[There follows a test we take comparing a series of choices that should be equivalent -- as neither costs us more -- but we do feel differently about the options] ...If you found any of the actions in column B worse than their counterparts in column A, then congratulations, you are a human being, not an economist’s fantasy. You have concerns beyond narrow self-interest. You have a working set of moral foundations.
This exercise turned out to be more interesting for me than the author probably intended. I just barely passed as human. I acknowledged that I did indeed consider sticking a sterile hypodermic needle into a child to be worse than into myself (care/harm). I didn’t initially pass the stolen TV test, not because I don’t see that as worse, but because I wouldn’t accept the non-stolen TV either (fairness/cheating). I’ll give him this one, so I pass on two of the five questions.
After that it goes down hill, and this will be explained in the coming pages: I would say something critical about my nation both at home and abroad (loyalty/betrayal). I’m not sure about slapping a male friend or my father (Authority/subversion), with their permission. I would definitely need to be paid to do either. I said I would do both for $100, but I’m not sure that’s really true. I would need to be paid at least $1,000 to attend either of the avant-garde plays (sanctity/degradation), but I’m not sure I would need to be paid more than that to watch the people acting like chimps. If the less degrading play was performed by mimes I would totally fail this one.
A Note on Innateness
p130 It used to be risky for a scientist to assert that anything about human behavior was innate...
...now we know that traits can be innate without being either hardwired or universal. As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired -- flexible and subject to change -- rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.
I get this distinction but "prewired" and "hardwired" are equivalent terms in the world of wiring, as opposed to the world of intellectual metaphors.
...Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter -- be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality -- consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. Marcus’s analogy leads to the best definition of innateness I have ever seen:
p131 Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. . . . “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”
The list of five moral foundations was my first attempt to specify how the righteous mind was “organized in advance of experience.” But Moral Foundations Theory also tries to explain how that first draft gets revised during childhood to produce the diversity of moralities that we find across cultures -- and across the political spectrum.
The Care/Harm Foundation
p132 ...your mind is automatically responsive to certain proportions and patterns that distinguish human children from adults. Cuteness primes us to care, nurture, protect, and interact. It gets the elephant leaning... the Care foundation can be triggered by any child... [infant toys] were designed by a toy company to trigger your Care foundation...
It's good he doesn't have a test here because I would fail it unless he threw in puppies or baby goats.
...
It makes no evolutionary sense for you to care about what happens to my son Max, or a hungry child in a faraway country, or a baby seal. But Darwin doesn’t have to explain why you shed any particular tear. He just has to explain why you have tear ducts in the first place... Darwin must explain the original triggers of each module. The current triggers can change rapidly. We care about violence towards many more classes of victims today than our grandparents did...
p134 Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations...
This is also true for street beggars and is behind many cons.
Bumper stickers are often tribal badges; they advertise the teams we support... The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives...
...but conservative caring is somewhat different -- it is aimed not at animals or at people in other countries but at those who’ve sacrificed for the group. [like veterans] It is not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty.
The Fairness/Cheating Foundation
...
p136 Evolutionary theorists often speak of genes as being “selfish,” meaning that they can only influence an animal to do things that will spread copies of that gene. But one of the most important insights into the origins of morality is that “selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those creatures are selective in their generosity. Altruism toward kin is not a puzzle at all. Altruism toward non-kin, on the other hand, has presented one of the longest-running puzzles in the history of evolutionary thinking. A big step toward its solution came in 1971 when Robert Trivers published his theory of reciprocal altruism.
Trivers noted that evolution could create altruism in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to [just] those who were likely to repay the favor... Trivers proposed that we evolved a set of moral emotions that make us play “tit for tat.” We’re usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we’re selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us.
...The original triggers of Fairness modules are acts of cooperation or selfishness that people show toward us. We feel pleasure, liking, and friendship when people show signs that they can be trusted to reciprocate. We feel anger, contempt, and even sometimes disgust when people try to cheat us or take advantage of us.
The current triggers of the Fairness modules include a great many things that have gotten linked, culturally and politically, to the dynamics of reciprocity and cheating. On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation -- wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden... On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people... and to illegal immigrants...
p138 Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality -- people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.
The Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation
...
[Description of Robbers Cave State Park camp experiment by Muzafer Sherif]]
We all recognize this portrait of boyhood. The male mind appears to be innately tribal -- that is, structured in advance of experience so that boys and men enjoy doing the sorts of things that lead to group cohesion and success in conflicts between groups (including warfare). The virtue of loyalty matters a great deal to both sexes, though the objects of loyalty tend to be teams and coalitions for boys, in contrast to two-person relationships for girls.
Despite some claims by anthropologists in the 1970s, human beings are not the only species that engages in war or kills its own kind. It now appears that chimpanzees guard their territory, raid the territory of rivals, and, if they can pull it off, kill the males of the neighboring group and take their territory and their females. And it now appears that warfare has been a constant feature of human life since long before agriculture and private property. For millions of years, therefore, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions that could fend off challenges and attacks from rival groups. We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not [of] their more individualistic cousins.
p140 Many psychological systems contribute to effective tribalism and success in inter-group competition. The Loyalty/betrayal foundation is just a part of our innate preparation for meeting the adaptive challenge of forming cohesive coalitions. The original trigger for the Loyalty foundation is anything that tells you who is a team player and who is a traitor, particularly when your team is fighting with other teams. But because we love tribalism so much, we seek out ways to form groups and teams that can compete just for the fun of competing. Much of the psychology of sports is about expanding the current triggers of the Loyalty foundation so that people can have the pleasure of binding themselves together to pursue harmless trophies. (A trophy is evidence of victory. The urge to take trophies -- including body parts from slain foes -- is widespread in warfare, occurring even during modern times.)
And, Yes, modern times includes the American side of the Pacific War.
...
The love of loyal teammates is matched by a corresponding hatred of traitors, who are usually considered to be far worse than enemies. The Koran, for example, is full of warnings about duplicity of out-group members, particularly Jews, yet the Koran does not command Muslims to kill Jews. Far worse than a Jew is an apostate... Similarly, in The Inferno, Dante reserves the innermost circle of hell -- and the most excruciating suffering -- for the crime of treachery. Far worse than lust, gluttony, violence, or even heresy is the betrayal of one’s family, team, or nation.
p141 Given such strong links to love and hate, is it any wonder that the Loyalty foundation plays an important role in politics? The left tends toward universalism and away from nationalism, so it often has trouble connecting to voters who rely on the Loyalty foundation, American liberals are often hostile to American foreign policy...
Settembrini, in The Magic Mountain, is an interesting instance of this as his universalism was over-ridden by his Italian nationalism... just like Mussolini. (And since I've written about chapters in advance of publishing, I happen to know that this reference to Mussolini will resonate later.
The Authority/Subversion Foundation
...
p142 The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep that many languages encode it directly. In French... speakers are forced to choose whether they’ll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu)... Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones)... If you’ve ever felt a flash of distaste when a salesperson called you by first name without being invited to do so... then you have experienced the activation of some of the modules that comprise the Authority/subversion foundations.
...
[Submissive displays of chickens, dogs, chimpanzees considered.]
...authority should not be confused with power. Even among chimpanzees, where dominance hierarchies are indeed about raw power and the ability to inflict violence, the alpha male performs some socially beneficial functions, such as taking on the “control role.” He resolves some disputes and suppresses much of the violent conflict that erupts when there is no clear alpha male. As the primatologist Frans de Waal puts it: “Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree.”
p143 This control role is quite visible in human tribes and early civilizations. Many of the earliest legal texts begin by grounding the king’s rule in divine choice, and then they dedicate the king’s authority to providing order and justice...
...
When I began graduate school I subscribed to the common liberal belief that hierarchy = power = exploitation = evil. But when I began to work with Alan Fiske, I discovered that I was wrong. Fiske’s theory of the four basic kinds of social relationships includes one called “Authority Ranking.” Drawing on his fieldwork in Africa, Fiske showed that people who relate to each other in this way have mutual expectations that are more like those of a parent and child than those of a dictator and fearful underlings:
In Authority Ranking, people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are military hierarchies . . . ancestor worship ({including} offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms), {and} monotheistic religious moralities . . . Authority Ranking relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative.
My first thought was the Roman political structure where the Patricians (the word literally means “fathers”) had exactly this relationship with the Plebeians. The result was hundreds of years of class struggle. Though it is worth noting that even after all the revolutions, the Roman upper classes continued to hold this “pastoral” status in the state.
p144 The Authority foundation... is more complex than the other foundations because its modules must look in two directions -- up toward superiors and down toward subordinates. These modules work together to help individuals meet the adaptive challenge of forging beneficial relationships within hierarchies. We are the descendants of the individuals who were best able to play the game -- to rise in status [why would they have to rise in status?] while cultivating the protection of superiors and the allegiance of subordinates.
Here I’m reminded again of Christopher Tietjens and his mourning of the passing of the Tory order. That Tory order was precisely this relationship -- both up and down. This is also why Dostoyevsky was so upset about the freeing of the serfs. America represented a world without an Authority foundation -- all the talk about machinery, in The Brothers K. was misdirection.
The original triggers of some of these modules include patterns of appearance and behavior that indicate higher versus lower rank. Like chimpanzees, people track and remember who is above whom. When people within a hierarchy order act in ways that negate or subvert that order, we feel it instantly, even if we ourselves have not been directly harmed. [Remember one of Pavel’s most annoying characteristics -- to Dostoyevsky -- was his dress and grooming. The dress and housing of the middle classes would also be seen as an affront to the natural (Tory) hierarchy.] If authority is in part about protecting order and fending off chaos, then everyone has a stake in supporting the existing order and in holding people accountable for fulfilling the obligations of their station.
The current triggers of the Authority/subversion foundation, therefore, include anything that is construed as an act of obedience, disobedience, respect, disrespect, submission, or rebellion, with regard to authorities perceived to be legitimate. Current triggers also include acts that are seen to subvert traditions, institutions, or values that are perceived to provide stability. As with the Loyalty foundation, it is much easier for the political right to build on this foundation than it is for the left, which often defines itself in part by its opposition to hierarchy, inequality, and power...
This also explains why I have such a hard time getting riled up by many of the “BlackLivesMatter” cause célèbres.
I'm going to break this chapter in half here and resume it next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment