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Zen Physics
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?
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