Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Zen Physics - VIII. Short Hist. of Phil. in the West
The Righteous Mind
Chapter Three - Elephants Rule
...
p55 In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.” Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feelings that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).
Wundt said that affective reactions are so tightly integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, sometimes even before we know what it is. (Note 8: See LeDoux 1996 on how the amygdala can trigger an emotional reaction to something well before the cerebral cortex has had a chance to process the event.) These flashes occur so rapidly that they precede all other thoughts about the thing we’re looking at. You can feel affective primacy in action the next time you run into someone you haven’t seen in many years. You’ll usually know within a second or two whether you liked or disliked the person, but it can take much longer to remember who the person is or how you know each other.
In 1980 social psychologist Robert Zajonc... revived Wundt’s long-forgotten notion of affective primacy... He did a number of ingenious experiments that asked people to rate arbitrary things such as Japanese pictograms, words in a made-up language, and geometric shapes. It may seem odd to ask people to rate how much they like foreign words and meaningless squiggles, but people can do it because almost everything we look at triggers a tiny flash of affect. More important, Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times. The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the “mere exposure effect,” and it is the basic principle of advertising.
p56 In a landmark article, Zajonc urged psychologists to use a dual-process model in which affect or “feeling” is the first process. It has primacy both because it happens first (it is part of perception and is therefore extremely fast) and because it is more powerful (it is closely linked to motivation, and therefore it strongly influences behavior). The second process -- thinking -- is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation. In other words, thinking is the rider; affect is the elephant. The thinking system is not equipped to lead -- it simply doesn’t have the power to make things happen -- but it can be a useful advisor.
Zajonc said that... affective reactions are so fast and compelling that they act like blinders on a horse: they “reduce the universe of alternatives” available to later thinking. The rider is an attentive servant, always trying to anticipate the elephant’s next move. If the elephant leans even slightly to the left, as though preparing to take a step, the rider looks to the left and starts preparing to assist the elephant on its imminent leftward journey. The rider loses interest in everything off to the right.
...
p59 ...[Alex Todorov] collected photographs of the winners and runners-up in hundreds of elections for the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. He showed people the pairs of photographs from each contest with no information about political party, and he asked them to pick which person seemed more competent. He found that the candidate that people judged more competent was the one who actually won the race about two-thirds of the time. People’s snap judgments of the candidate's physical attractiveness and overall likability were not as good predictors of victory, so these competence judgments were not just based on an overall feeling of positivity. We can have multiple intuitions arising simultaneously, each one processing a different kind of information.
And strangely, when Todorov forced people to make their competence judgments after flashing the pair of pictures on the screen for just a tenth of a second -- not long enough to let their eyes fixate on each image -- their snap judgments of competence predicted the real outcomes just as well. Whatever the brain is doing, it’s doing it instantly, just like when you look at the Muller-Lyer illusion.
...
p61 Moral judgement is not a purely cerebral affair in which we weigh concerns about harm, rights, and justice. It’s a kind of rapid, automatic process more akin to the judgments animals make as they move through the world, feeling themselves drawn toward or away from various things. Moral judgement is mostly done by the elephant.
Psychopaths Reason But Don't Feel
Roughly one in a hundred men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths. [I thought this terminology went out of favor.] Most are not violent, but the ones who are commit nearly half of the most serious crimes... Robert Hare, a leading researcher, defines psychopathy by two sets of features. There’s the usual stuff that psychopaths do -- impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood -- and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack. They feel no compassion, guilt, shame, or even embarrassment, which makes it easy for them to lie, and to hurt family, friends, and animals. [I wish he would compare them with nature in general, but I guess that isn’t Haidt’s interest.]
...
Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others. [Just like nature.] (Note 32 - Brain scanning studies confirm that many emotional areas, including the amygdala and the vmPVC, are much less reactive in psychopaths than in normal people; see Blair 2007; Kiehl 2006. If you hook them up to a skin conductance meter, as in a lie detector test, psychopaths show a normal response to a photograph of a shark with open jaws. But show them a picture of mutilated bodies or suffering children, and the meter doesn’t budge....) The elephant doesn’t respond with the slightest lean to the gravest injustice...
...
Babies Feel But Don’t Reason
p63 Psychologists used to assume that infant minds were blank slates. The world babies enter is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” as William James put it, and they spend the next few years trying to make sense of it all. But when developmental psychologists invented ways to look into infant minds, [you can tell when something surprises them] they found a great deal of writing already on that slate.
...
Using this trick [seeing what surprises babies], psychologists discovered that infants are born with some knowledge of physics and mechanics: they expect that objects will move according to Newton’s laws of motion, and they get startled when psychologists show them scenes that should be physically impossible (such as a toy car seeming to pass through a solid object)...
But when psychologists dug deeper, they found that infants come equipped with innate abilities to understand their social world as well. They understand things like harming and helping.
...
I’m skipping the puppet show with “helping” and “hindering” puppets, but here’s the conclusion.
p64 A few minutes later, the infants saw a new puppet show. This time the climber... decided to cozy up to the hinderer. To the infants, that was the social equivalent of seeing a car pass through a solid box; it made no sense, and the infants stared longer than when the climber decided to cozy up to the helper.
At the end of the experiment, the helper and hinderer puppets were placed on a tray in front of the infants. The infants were much more likely to reach out for the helper... they clearly wanted the nice puppet. The researchers concluded that “the capacity to evaluate individuals on the basis of their social interactions is universal and unlearned.”
...these findings suggest that by six months of age, infants are watching how people behave toward other people, and they are developing a preference for those who are nice rather than those who are mean. In other words, the elephant begins making something like moral judgments during infancy. long before language and reasoning arrive....
...
p65 ... you’ve probably heard of the famous “trolley dilemma” in which the only way you can stop a runaway trolley from killing five people is by pushing one person off a bridge onto the track below.
Philosophers have long disagreed about whether it’s acceptable to harm one person in order to help or save several people. Utilitarianism is the philosophical school that says you should always aim to bring about the greatest total good, even if a few people get hurt along the way, so if there’s really no other way to save those five lives, go ahead and push. Other philosophers believe that we have duties to respect the rights of individuals, and we must not harm people in our pursuit of other goals, even moral goals such as saving lives. This view is known as deontology (from the Greek root that gives us our word duty), Deontologists talk about high moral principles derived and justified by careful reasoning; they would never agree that these principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of gut feelings. But [Joshua] Greene had a hunch that gut feelings were what often drove people to make deontological judgments, whereas utilitarian judgments were more cool and calculating.
I’m skipping his clever experiments.
...
p66 ... the results tell a consistent story: the areas of the brain involved in emotional processing activate immediately, and high activity in these areas correlates with the kind of moral judgments or decisions that people ultimately make.
In an article titled “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” [playing with Kant’s categorical imperative, here] Greene did not know what E. O. Wilson had said about philosophers consulting their “emotive centers” when he wrote his article, but his conclusion was the same as Wilson’s:
We have strong feeling that tell us in clear and uncertain terms that some things simply cannot be done and that other things simply must be done. But it’s not obvious how to make sense of these feelings, and so we, with the help of some especially creative philosophers, make up a rationally appealing story {about rights}.
...
Elephants Are Sometimes Open To Reason
...
p68 When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges.
But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. [TV would seem to play a role here, as well.] The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants... or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants... [and here we see the growth of Islamic State and similar cults.]
Paxton and Greene devise a new version of the incest story study but this time they present the subjects with two supporting arguments for the incest being OK. One argument is weak and one is strong. (I thought they were both rather weak.) The Harvard student subjects at first seemed to agree with me and rejected both arguments to the same degree. But then they altered the experiment by giving subjects two minutes before they could declare their judgments. With the delay, subjects were more tolerant.
p69 ... The delay allowed the rider to think for himself and to decide upon a judgement that for many subjects was contrary to the elephant’s initial inclination.
...
I’m reminded of the est event I attended. After a reasonable amount of time spent with a warm and supportive group of est members, we outsiders were sent away to hear the actual pitch. Then there was a “break” during which several people were signed up and so became insiders. Finally, after the break, we were urged to join... now, no time to lose, offer only good for the next several minutes.
I was only there to see how it worked, so I didn’t feel under any pressure to join the friendly elephants, but I could see that other people were. And of course, once they leaned in the direction of joining, their riders would find abundant justifications for the decision.
...
p71 Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.
Upon further review, I’m now thinking that this elephant and rider analogy is close to, and undoubtedly related to, Persig’s software application running on top of an Operating System; but it isn’t quite the same thing. Persig’s OS has an agenda and it manipulates the application to cooperate in the furthering of that agenda. It doesn’t just passively respond to outside stimuli, it alters the way the application experiences that stimuli.
Though, having said that, since the rider “experiences” the world largely through the affects of the elephant, this may actually come to the same thing. All an application can know about is what the OS chooses to reveal. The application’s reality is Phenomenological. It can have no direct, unmediated knowledge of the thing in itself.
Let’s go back to my personal version of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” our feeling of sexual attraction. It’s possible that our feelings in this regard are shaped by the (peer) elephants around us, but I have my doubts about this. While I know that some women are judged “sexy” by many others, this has no affect at all on my own taste. I’m more comfortable with the theory that this is determined by a gene propagating calculation on the part of my elephant.
What’s really impressive here is how fast this process works. As I think I’ve said before, and this is consistent with what Haidt has said here about how quickly affects are generated, I am often alerted to the presence of what I consider an attractive woman even before I see her. I somehow get a “stop what you’re doing and look to your right” interrupt message even when I’m engaged in reading or writing or whatever. I’ll admit that Haidt could be correct about my (rider) finding visual justifications for whatever it is the elephant is reacting to, though this does seem to be pretty consistent. Even if the attraction is based on obvious physical characteristics, it doesn’t answer the question why my elephant has this particular interest.
My point here is that the Persig idea gives the elephant more of a reasoning facility than does Haidt’s idea. Or maybe I’m wrong about that since Haidt did choose a very smart animal for his analogy.
Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Zen Physics - VII. & Righteous Mind - II.
The Righteous Mind
Chapter Two - The intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail
p33 ... [Antonio] Damasio [in the book Descartes’ Error] had noticed an unusual pattern of symptoms in patients who had suffered brain damage to a specific part of the brain... (abbreviated vmPFC; it’s the region just behind and above the bridge of the nose). Their emotionality dropped nearly to zero. They could look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They retained full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and they showed no deficits in IQ. They even scored well on Kohlberg’s tests of moral reasoning. Yet when it came to making decisions in their personal lives and at work, they made foolish decisions or no decisions at all. They alienated their families and their employers, and their lives fell apart.
Damasio’s interpretation was that gut feelings and bodily reactions were neccessary to think rationally, and that one job of the vmPFC was to integrate those gut feelings into a person’s conscious deliberations. When you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of murdering your parents . . . you can’t even do it, because feelings of horror come rushing in through the vmPFC.
An unfortunate choice of an example given that we have just read The Brothers K. and that the news continues to be filled with accounts of children killing their parents. Almost makes me wonder about Haidt’s relationship with his own parents.
p34 But Damasio’s patients could think about anything, with no filtering or coloring from their emotions. With the vmPFC shut down, every option at every moment felt as good as every other. The only way to make a decision was to examine each option, weighting the pros and cons using conscious, verbal reasoning...
Damasio’s findings were as anti-Platonic as could be. [Here’s the short version of this: according to Plato, the rational “soul” was in the head while the “dreadful but necessary” pleasures, emotions, and senses were in the body. This is... “the ultimate rationalist fantasy -- the passions are and ought only to be the servants of reason...”] Here were people in whom brain damage had essentially shut down communications between the rational soul and the seething passions of the body... No more of those “dreadful but necessary disturbances,” those “foolish counselors” leading the rational soul astray. Yet the result of the separation was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning requires the passions. Jefferson’s model fits better... [“reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers...” with their own spheres of influence. Reason handles “problems that don’t involve people....” The 3rd model is Hume’s, “that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions.”]
If Jefferson’s model were correct, however, then Damasio’s patients should still have fared well in the half of life that was always ruled by the head. Yet the collapse of decision making, even in purely analytic and organizational tasks, was pervasive. The head can’t even do head stuff without the heart. So Hume’s model fit these cases best: when the master (passion) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.
p39 Here the author is doing studies using students as subjects at the University of Virginia to test the Plato vs Hume vs Jefferson views of moral values and reasoning. One of the stories he concocts has to do with voluntary incest between a college age brother and sister. He says a little about the religious background of the subjects but there’s so much that I want to know that he doesn’t mention at all: Were the responses of subjects who had other-sex siblings different than only children or children who only had same-sex siblings? To what extent is this taboo general to the culture and to what extent is it emphasized in families where there are brothers and sisters?
How would the responses differ between Western subjects and South Asian subjects (where “sisterfucker” seems to have the same status “motherfucker” has here)?
Conducting an international study of this using 1st cousins would be even more interesting as marriage between 1st cousins is often encouraged in agricultural societies (to keep farmland in a family).
He was also conducting these studies about a decade after John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire came out as a novel and then a movie. I would like to know how having read or seen that affected the response to this question.
p40 These results supported Hume, not Jefferson or Plato. People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgement people had already made...
I have a problem with the entire methodology here. What is he really testing for? Since he’s included food in the list of areas subject to taboo, let’s consider people exposed to avocados for the first time. Their response will probably be based on what they have been taught, or learned on their own, about any similar looking fruit back home. If there is a relevant cultural taboo, the origin of that taboo, whatever it might be, is irrelevant to the subject’s response. In a study like the ones in this book, subjects are being asked to explain and justify their enculturation, NOT their own free ethical judgments.
p41 Two years before Scott and I ran the dumbfounding studies I read an extraordinary book that psychologists rarely mention: Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, by Howard Margolis, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago. Margolis was trying to understand why people’s beliefs about political issues are often so poorly connected to objective facts, and he hoped that cognitive science could solve the puzzle. Yet Margolis was turned off by the approaches to thinking that were prevalent in the 1980s, most of which used the metaphor of the mind as a computer.
Margolis thought that a better model for studying higher cognition, such as political thinking, was lower cognition, such as vision, which works largely by rapid unconscious pattern matching...
...
p42 [About some relevant studies] ... Findings such as these led Wason to the conclusion that judgement and justification are separate processes. Margolis shared Wason’s view, summarizing the state of affairs like this:
Given the judgement (themselves produced by the non-conscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgements. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.
Margolis proposed that there are two very different kinds of cognitive processes at work when we make judgements and solve problems: "seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” “Seeing-that” is the pattern matching that brains have been doing for hundreds of millions of years...
p43 As brains get larger and more complex, animals begin to show more cognitive sophistication -- making choices (such as where to forage today, and when to fly south) and judgements (such as whether a subordinate chimpanzee showed properly deferential behavior). But in all cases, the basic psychology is pattern matching. It’s the sort of rapid, automatic, and effortless processing that drives our perceptions in the [previously mentioned] Muller-Lyer illusion. You can’t choose whether or not to see the illusion; you’re just “seeing-that” one line is longer than the other. Margolis also called this kind of thinking “intuitive.”
“Reasoning-why,” in contrast, is the process “by which we describe how we think we reach that judgement.” “Reasoning-why” can occur only for creatures that have language and a need to explain themselves to other creatures. “Reasoning-why” is not automatic; it’s conscious, it sometimes feels like work, and it’s easily disrupted by cognitive load. Kohlberg had convinced moral psychologists to study “reasoning-why” and to neglect “seeing-that.”
...
p44 ... We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgement; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgement.
Or to justify an element of our enculturation.
The Rider and the Elephant
... Cognition just refers to information processing, which includes higher cognition (such as conscious reasoning) as well as lower cognition (such as visual perception and memory retrieval).
Emotion is a bit harder to define... Emotions occur is steps, the first of which is to appraise something that just happened based on whether it advanced or hindered your goals. These appraisals are a kind of information processing; they are cognitions...
p45 Emotions are not dumb. Damasio’s patients made terrible decisions because they were deprived of emotional input into their decision making. Emotions are a kind of information processing...
Margolis helped me ditch the emotion-cognition contrast. His work helped me see that moral judgement is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgement. The crucial distinction is between two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning. Moral emotions are one type of moral intuition, but most moral intuitions are more subtle; they don’t rise to the level of emotions... Intuition is the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgements and decisions that we all make every day. [Like in an accident, if you can only do one, should you try to save 5 people or 1 person? He doesn’t add the obvious complications like who the 1 person is.] Only a few of these intuitions come to us embedded in full-blown emotions.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotions, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”)... Automatic processes run the human mind, just as they have been running animal minds for 500 million years, so they’re good at what they do... When human beings evolved the capacity for language and reasoning at some point in the last million years, the brain did not rewire itself to hand over the reins to a new and inexperienced charioteer. Rather, the rider (language-based reasoning) evolved because it did something useful for the elephant.
p46 The rider can do several useful things. It can see further into the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads) and therefor it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It can learn new skills and master new technologies... And, most important, the rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm.
...
p47 We make our first judgements rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgements...
... Other people influence us constantly just by revealing that they like or dislike somebody... Many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass, but the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing, without giving us any reasons or arguments.
How to Win an Argument
p48 The social intuitionist model [above] offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate, You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago:
And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, that speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.
If you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to use... the social intuitionist model to elicit new intuitions, not new rationales.
...
p49 ...If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that persons’ angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way -- deeply and intuitively -- you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
...
I was intending to include the next section of Zen Physics here, but I think this is enough for today.
Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Zen Physics - V. Self or selves
Zen Physics
Chapter 7. Being Someone and Becoming Someone Else
p95 You chose to read this book. It may revolutionize your life, or it may not. But what is certain is that, simply by having absorbed these words -- whether you believe them or not -- you are, in at least some small way, not quite the person you would have been had you decided to do something else instead. This is a physical fact. As a result of processing the ideas about self and consciousness and death that this book has already invoked, your brain has acquired a slightly different atomic and neurophysiological configuration than it would otherwise have done. Therefore, you are not quite the same person you would have been had you never started reading...
The future, on a human scale, is almost totally unpredictable... I know that, in any event, I shall continue to be me because I can never be anyone else (or, to put it another way, even if I did become someone else, in an existential sense I wouldn’t be aware of it and would therefore still think of myself as being me)...
Even if we think we know who we are now, we haven’t a clue who we are going to be tomorrow or next year. Whatever happens you will still think of yourself as being the same person -- a continuation of the “old you.” But you will in fact have changed. You will be composed of different atoms, your body will have aged, your brain will be wired up somewhat differently, and your feelings about the world will have matured and evolved... You are not the same “you” that you were a week ago or even a second ago. You, as a fixed entity, are an illusion that we have been persuaded to believe is real. Personal identity as a constant, enduring thing is a myth... But to grow in understanding we need to move on, both individually and as a society, in the direction of laying less stress on the particular people we think we are -- because being particular is not important. You and I are nobody special. We are simply brains having thoughts...
This segues so well with The Righteous Mind that I’m tempted to start intercutting -- Goat help me.
The Righteous Mind:
Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Pantheon Books, 2012
Introduction
pxiv This book has three parts... Each part presents one major principle of moral psychology.
Part I. is about the moral principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. [I’m jumping into blogging this book (too) because of my intuition about the source of moral law that we will get to surprisingly quickly] If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas -- to justify our actions and to defend the teams we belong to -- then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.
Does this remind you of anything? Like the confused minds in the previous chapters inventing stories to justify knowing things they can’t explain. This is why I’ve decided to inter-cut these two books rather than simply add this new title to the list of books I want to cover. The synergy, in just the first 25 pages I’ve read, is simply too strong.
The central metaphor of these four chapters [Part I.] is that the mind is divided like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning -- the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes -- the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. [I’d like to stress that I’m not making this up or cleverly editing this in time. This is in fact the point I was just making in "122. Zen Physics - V. Self or selves?" and attributing to Robert Pirsig. I really did start reading this book yesterday after finally getting around to checking it out of the library -- it’s the next book on my book club’s reading list.] I developed this metaphor in my last book The Happiness Hypothesis, where I described how the rider and elephant work together, sometimes poorly, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and connection. In this book I’ll use the metaphor to solve puzzles such as why it seems like everyone (else) is a hypocrite and why political partisans are so willing to believe outrageous lies and conspiracy theories...
Part II. is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Secular Western moralities are like cuisines that try to activate just one or two of these receptors -- either concerns about harm and suffering, or concerns about fairness and injustice. But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. I’ll explain where these six taste receptors come from, how they form the basis of the world’s many moral cuisines, and why politicians on the right have a built-in advantage when it comes to cooking meals that voters like.
pxv Part III. is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we even fool ourselves.
But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individuals. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war and genocide.
I find this bee metaphor unfortunate. This would seem to be very similar to the perspective I know from Desmond Morris’s talking about our “pack” nature in The Naked Ape (1967). Not only is talking about primate packs -- or even wolf packs -- closer to human reality, but bringing in true “hive” creatures like bees just confuses things since we are not like that. Maybe there’s a good reason he’s opting for a poorer equivalent, but I can’t imagine what it could be.
Also, be warned, this bit about the advantages of cohesive and cooperative groups sounds like the perfect opening for me to talk about the Warriors basketball team.
Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. [Again, that “new perspective” is far more powerful if you think of primate packs. I continue to reflect on this insight at every election since learning from Morris that we are in actuality choosing a pack leader -- which is why the U.S. President is almost always the taller candidate. (And why the candidacy of Hillary Clinton makes me very nervous. Not because I think she would be any worse than her husband, but because I think voters will hesitate to vote for her, when the time comes, for reasons they will be unable to explain.. that she makes a poor alpha male.)] I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
...
There follows a blessed paragraph where he actually defines his terms. He explains what he means by “liberal” = progressing in San Francisco and in most of the world outside the U.S. He will later do this for other important terms like “empirical.” There is a good side to a more academic book.
pxvi ...the take-home message of the book is ancient. It is the realization that we are all self-righteous hypocrites...
...
pxvii ...I believe that a world without moralism, gossip and judgement would quickly decay into chaos. But if we want to understand ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials, we need to step back, drop the moralism, apply some moral psychology, and analyse the game we’re all playing...
Part I. Chapter One - Where Does Morality Come From?
My favorite thing is to get an unintended insight from a book. While being herded to the understanding of some truth by a clever writer (and both of these authors are like very busy border collies at the moment) can be a pleasure, discovering something the author seems not to see is even sweeter. (Though the author may turn out to be heading to the same place only I’ve jumped over his careful step by step approach... only time will tell here.)
This is going to be tricky because this is a much longer book than I’m willing to transcribe. I’m going to give you the part leading to the insight and then back-fill with the minimum amount of detail leading up to this. Wish me luck.
p13 ...Even if [Elliot] Turiel was right that children lock onto harmfulness as a method for identifying immoral actions, I couldn’t see how kids in the West -- let alone among the Azand, the Ilongot, and the Hua -- could have come to all this purity and pollution stuff on their own. There must be more to moral development than kids constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their pain. There must be something beyond rationalism.
Not only do I disagree with the author about the statement in bold above, I can see this all too well. (The sentence that follows I don't disagree with and it indicates the author has something very different in mind.) In fact, this explains so much about morality and cultural taboos that it is my point of departure for mining this chapter and turning it into something quite different from what the author may have intended.
First I’m going to do my back-filling to make the author’s statement clearer. Then I need to say something about the origin of language. This is going to be fun.
Back-fill
What I skipped in the first 13 pages of the book was the academic inquiry into how children come by their moral judgments. This starts with the nativist vs empiricist debate. The Bible and Darwin argue that morality is native to our minds. John Locke argued that we are blank slates and our morality is nurtured by our families and particular culture.
The third option is rationalism as advocated by Jean Piaget. Piaget argued that kids figure it out for themselves as their minds mature (in predictable ways) over time. “Piaget argued that children’s understanding of morality is... self-constructed as kids play with other kids...” where they learn to, “respect rules, change rules, take turns, and resolve disputes.”
He also says, “Rationalism has a long complex history in philosophy. In this book I’ll use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.
“Piaget’s insights were extended by Lawrence Kohlberg, who revolutionized the study of morality in the 1960s with two key innovations. First, he developed a way to quantify Piaget’s observations that children’s moral reasoning changed over time. He created a set of moral dilemmas that he presented to children of various ages, and he recorded and coded their responses...”
Next, Turiel came along with ways of testing children that didn’t require as much verbal skill. Then the author is exposed, by Alan Fiske, to anthropological studies of a variety of cultures: the Azande of Sudan, the Illongot in the Philippines, and the Hua of New Guinea -- each of whom held very different moral views.
p12 These ethnographies were fascinating, often beautifully written, and intuitively graspable despite the strangeness of their content... And as with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you’re from as where you’re visiting. I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary historical exceptions -- new societies that had found a way to strip down and thin out the thick, all-encompassing moral orders that the anthropologists wrote about.
Nowhere was this thinning more apparent than in our lack of rules about what the anthropologists call “purity” and “pollution.” Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that govern what men and women may eat... Turiel would call these rules social conventions, because the Hua don’t believe that men in other tribes have to follow these rules. But the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talk about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called “a religion of the body.”
p13 But it’s not just hunter-gatherers in rain forests who believe that bodily practices can be moral practices. When I read the Hebrew Bible, I was shocked to discover how much of the book -- one of the sources of Western morality -- was taken up with rules about food, menstruation, sex, skin, and the handling of corpses... many of the rules seemed to follow a[n] emotional logic about avoiding disgust...
And this brings us back to where we started. So now...
On the origin of languages
When the cane sugar business in Hawaii exploded, workers were brought in from all over to harvest the crops. I can’t remember where I got this story, so I can only give you a vague account (and the details really are not important). There were three language groups working together in the fields. At first, the different groups couldn’t understand each other, but eventually, a creole of the three languages evolved that permitted the three, still largely distinct communities, to communicate. Because this all happened in relatively recent times, academics interested in language decided to study how the new language came to be.
They talked to the older people, who were adult workers at the beginning of the process, and discovered that they didn’t really speak the new language. It was only the younger generations who had picked it up, but, just as the psychologists in this book are trying to find out how children come to share their culture’s moral standards, the academics in Hawaii were trying to determine who had taught the new language to the kids. They finally came to the realization that no one had.
While the parents worked in the fields, the kids were parked together under the trees to amuse themselves. They, of course, needed to find a way to communicate, they were at a very flexible stage for learning language, and they had nothing but time on their hands. They took the original three languages -- as best they understood them -- and blended them into something new that their parents never really got the hang of.
Now, let’s go back to that statement in this book that got me going: “I couldn’t see how kids... could have come to all this purity and pollution stuff on their own...” Man! I can see this clear as day.
Here’s the setting (I hope you’ve read Leviticus): a bunch of pre-teen and younger boys sitting under a tree in a land at the east end of the Mediterranean. Aaron’s older sister, Rachel, is having her period. The boys decide she should live in a shack in the backyard until she’s “clean” again. In fact, before she can come back into the house she has to kill a turtledove... wait two turtledoves.
And if anyone touches Rachel (chorus of “Gross!”) they will be unclean for the rest of the day and have to take a bath.
Back in Zen Physics, Darling just said ideas (reading his book, but also, unfortunately for you, reading my commentary) changes the structure of your brain and mind. I can say with absolute certainty I will never think about any cultural taboo the same way again, and I doubt you will be able to either. What if our most deeply held cultural beliefs are simply the nonsense of little boys and girls killing time under trees?
