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The Righteous Mind
Part I. Chapter One - Where Does Morality Come From? - Continued
p14 [Richard] ... Shweder is a psychological anthropologist who had lived and worked in Orissa, a state on the east coast of India. He had found large differences in how Oriyans... and Americans thought about personality and individuality, and these differences led to corresponding differences in how they thought about morality. Shweder quoted the anthropologist Clifford Geertz on how unusual Westerners are in thinking about people as discrete individuals:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.
Shweder offered a simple idea to explain why the self differs so much across cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of the individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual. The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment. [I would have said that the Protestant Reformation set the stage for this change and that the Enlightenment was simply a later stage in the process along with the Industrial Revolution.] The individualistic answer largely vanquished the sociocentric approach in the twentieth century as individual rights expanded rapidly, consumer cultures spread, and the Western world reacted with horror to the evils perpetrated by the ultrasociocentric fascist and communist empires. (European nations with strong social safety nets are not sociocentric on this definition. They just do a very good job of protecting indivduals from the vicissitudes of life.)
...
This is the mess you get when you attempt to gloss what we’ve been dealing with in Faust, The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus (to name just a few) in a single paragraph. Oh, and The Birth of Tragedy, too.
But, this doesn’t affect the validity of Shweder’s insight into the differences in these societies -- just how, exactly, it came about and why. And what it all means.
p22 ... I had replicated Turiel’s findings using Turiel’s methods on people like me... but had confirmed Shweder’s claim that Turiel’s theory didn’t travel well. The moral domain varied across nations and social classes. For most of the people in any study, the moral domain extended well beyond issues of harm and fairness.
In this experiment, Haidt discovered a moral division across societies with the upper classes holding individualistic values while the common man continued to hold sociocentric values... this is very similar to what Dostoyevsky was seeing in Russia in the second half or the 19th century. This distinction in values is thought provoking. Enough so that I’m going to interrupt this with some musings.
It seems to me that this has probably always been a class distinction. The nobility (however that is defined in a particular society) has always had individualistic values. You might be tempted to think that they are simply sociocentric on a smaller scale, the scale of a House or dynasty for example, but then you remember the deadly competition within great noble families. Power is always a game of individuals.
Then there’s that distinction between officers and men that I’ve talked about before. The officer, especially the commanding officer, is always the individual leading -- with luck -- the sociocentric corp of men. This is (usually) like the distinction between nobility and commoner writ small.
And finally we come to Japan in the Pacific War. The failure (in military terms) I’ve written about before -- the eagerness of pilots and even admirals to die unnecessarily -- are symptoms of a diseased sociocentric value system. The great historical leaders of Japan were individualistic (and megalomaniac) which let them survive and learn from their mistakes. Even in a sociocentric setting like Imperial Japan, there is a place for individualistic values.
...
p24 ... The biggest surprise [in the study] was that so many subjects tried to invent victims. [To justify their moral judgements.]...
...
... Yet even when subjects recognized that their victim claims were bogus, they still refused to say that the act was OK. Instead, they kept searching for another victim. They said things like “I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t think of a reason why.” They seemed to be morally dumbfounded -- rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.
p25 These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
I had found evidence for Hume’s claim. I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalistic approach that dominated moral psychology...
...
p26 ... I concluded... that:
If morality doesn’t come primarily from reasoning, then that leaves some combination of innateness and social learning as the most likely candidates. In the rest of this book I’ll try to explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture). We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.
Zen Physics
Part I. Chapter One - Where Does Morality Come From? - Continued
p14 [Richard] ... Shweder is a psychological anthropologist who had lived and worked in Orissa, a state on the east coast of India. He had found large differences in how Oriyans... and Americans thought about personality and individuality, and these differences led to corresponding differences in how they thought about morality. Shweder quoted the anthropologist Clifford Geertz on how unusual Westerners are in thinking about people as discrete individuals:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.
Shweder offered a simple idea to explain why the self differs so much across cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of the individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual. The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment. [I would have said that the Protestant Reformation set the stage for this change and that the Enlightenment was simply a later stage in the process along with the Industrial Revolution.] The individualistic answer largely vanquished the sociocentric approach in the twentieth century as individual rights expanded rapidly, consumer cultures spread, and the Western world reacted with horror to the evils perpetrated by the ultrasociocentric fascist and communist empires. (European nations with strong social safety nets are not sociocentric on this definition. They just do a very good job of protecting indivduals from the vicissitudes of life.)
...
This is the mess you get when you attempt to gloss what we’ve been dealing with in Faust, The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus (to name just a few) in a single paragraph. Oh, and The Birth of Tragedy, too.
But, this doesn’t affect the validity of Shweder’s insight into the differences in these societies -- just how, exactly, it came about and why. And what it all means.
p22 ... I had replicated Turiel’s findings using Turiel’s methods on people like me... but had confirmed Shweder’s claim that Turiel’s theory didn’t travel well. The moral domain varied across nations and social classes. For most of the people in any study, the moral domain extended well beyond issues of harm and fairness.
In this experiment, Haidt discovered a moral division across societies with the upper classes holding individualistic values while the common man continued to hold sociocentric values... this is very similar to what Dostoyevsky was seeing in Russia in the second half or the 19th century. This distinction in values is thought provoking. Enough so that I’m going to interrupt this with some musings.
It seems to me that this has probably always been a class distinction. The nobility (however that is defined in a particular society) has always had individualistic values. You might be tempted to think that they are simply sociocentric on a smaller scale, the scale of a House or dynasty for example, but then you remember the deadly competition within great noble families. Power is always a game of individuals.
Then there’s that distinction between officers and men that I’ve talked about before. The officer, especially the commanding officer, is always the individual leading -- with luck -- the sociocentric corp of men. This is (usually) like the distinction between nobility and commoner writ small.
And finally we come to Japan in the Pacific War. The failure (in military terms) I’ve written about before -- the eagerness of pilots and even admirals to die unnecessarily -- are symptoms of a diseased sociocentric value system. The great historical leaders of Japan were individualistic (and megalomaniac) which let them survive and learn from their mistakes. Even in a sociocentric setting like Imperial Japan, there is a place for individualistic values.
...
p24 ... The biggest surprise [in the study] was that so many subjects tried to invent victims. [To justify their moral judgements.]...
...
... Yet even when subjects recognized that their victim claims were bogus, they still refused to say that the act was OK. Instead, they kept searching for another victim. They said things like “I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t think of a reason why.” They seemed to be morally dumbfounded -- rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.
p25 These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
I had found evidence for Hume’s claim. I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalistic approach that dominated moral psychology...
...
p26 ... I concluded... that:
- The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life.
- People sometimes have gut feelings -- particularly about disgust and disrespect -- that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
- Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it.
If morality doesn’t come primarily from reasoning, then that leaves some combination of innateness and social learning as the most likely candidates. In the rest of this book I’ll try to explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture). We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.
Zen Physics
p96 So here we are: brains in conversation, trying to understand and come to terms with death. We want to know what it will involve, what it will feel like, what will happen after the last shallow breath and feeble heartbeat, after the sheet is drawn over our still features. Of this much we can be certain: within a matter of minutes, at some future time, our brains will become terminally starved of oxygen and will cease to function. All of the memories they so recently held, together with the power to integrate two selves -- you and I -- will be lost. Put this way, it sounds catastrophic. It sounds hopeless, terrifying, terrible. But how will it really be for us when the time comes?
Now you can see why he had to go into such detail about our dependence on the brain. There follows some observations on what death looks like from outside.
Our great difficulty in thinking about death is that we can see it only in others, never in ourselves...But our own death will be special and unique, because we shall be part of it, inside it, the one who actually dies. And as experienced, rather than observed, death is a very different proposition.
p98 Witnesses regularly report that in the last days or hours of life, a dying person will appear serenely calm and at peace with the world, and even, on occasions, extraordinarily joyful and elated. [This is what we’ve read about in The Brothers K. and elsewhere, but I can’t say I’ve witnessed this myself. But then, hospital deaths are probably the ones the least likely to be like this.] And there are the reassuring testimonies, too, of people who have been through near-death experiences in which reference is often made to almost indescribably blissful sensations. The final passage leading to death is evidently, in the great majority of cases, not at all unpleasant...
...
The terrible thing about death, then, is not the actual experience that awaits us -- we all know what it is like to lose consciousness -- but the angst and feeling of insecurity it instills in us now... [I’ve argued this about death being no different than losing consciousness myself, but I wonder now. As I’ve said before, I’m not “aware” of losing consciousness. I’m aware of dreaming, but dreaming is not really an unconscious state. (I also have to point out that, as he's shown himself, we make up -- even in dreams sometimes -- explanations to fill in the gaps of our conscious experiences. Recalled near death experiences could be the conscious mind creatively filling in the gap after the fact. The way noises can work themselves into your dreams just before you wake up.) If we are nothing but our brains, then dreaming would not seem to be an option after death. It is still true, of course, that we also would not be aware of not dreaming, so it almost comes to the same thing, except for the notion that this is something that happens to us all the time.] ...Have general anesthesia, go comatose, faint, or just fall into a deep, dreamless sleep... [science] asks, and where are you? You are nowhere, because in such situations the brain temporarily stops generating the feeling of being someone. The brain makes you, it dissolves you, it brings you back again. And, as psychology and neurology have emphatically shown, when the brain’s workings are altered or impaired, the sense of self they give rise to is correspondingly changed or diminished so that you become no longer the person you were...
p99 What most of us instinctively hope for is to be able to continue, after we die, as the person we are now. We may be happy to accept a change of scenery and circumstances, but our overwhelming desire is to survive death with the current selves intact….
[I’m skipping the entertaining retelling of the story of the immortal Struldbruggs, from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, who all end up “permanently and unpleasantly senile -- and are universally despised.”]
...
p104 …it is no overstatement to say that the prime biological function of the self is to be afraid of death. Only by being so contrived can the self play its crucial survival role.
“Self” here is more or less equivalent with what Nietzsche meant by “individuation.” It's what sets us apart from nature.
This seems to put us in a difficult position. Awareness of self and awareness of mortality effectively go hand in hand. Self and the death-fear almost certainly came into existence together, both during the evolution of the human race and during the evolution of each human being from birth to adulthood. [And this was also true in the story of Adam and Eve.] They are inextricable. And, as a consequence, only together can they disappear. Nothing that ‘we’ -- our selves -- can say or do or think will quell the terror of dying. The self can never come to terms with its own extinction. And yet, having said this, the situation is far from hopeless. In fact, we now hold the key to the solution of our problem: to understand what lies beyond death we need only understand what lies beyond self.
...At the beginning of our lives, we are all, from a subjective standpoint, equal and undifferentiated. A newborn does not and cannot distinguish itself from the world around it -- there is no self, no person, no firm sense of boundary. [Again, this is a pre-individuation state of "nature."] Only we, as mature selves looking on, make a distinction between the latent individual and his surroundings. [This could be in the other book talking about the individualistic vs sociocentric perspective.] Even during childhood, perhaps until late adolescence, the feeling of selfhood is not completely well defined. One indication of this is that young people can be remarkably stoic and even sanguine in the face of impending death, a fact that shines through from the deeply moving, uplifting statements that many children [Echo in Doctor Faustus, Ilyusha and Zossima’s brother in The Brothers K.] make when faced with terminal illness. It is only as we age that we start to think more and more of the particular brain and self we “own” as having a special, privileged status - of being a unique, treasured possession that we are desperate not to lose. Increasingly we become, in the most basic sense of the word, selfish...
...
p106 In physics, the classical mechanics of Newton provides a perfectly workable model for most everyday applications. Only in exceptional situations, for example at very high relative speeds or in very strong gravitational fields, does the Newtonian approximation break down and need to be replaced by the more precise formulations of Einstein. A parallel exists with our conception of the self. In most ordinary circumstances the self approximates well to the Cartesian ideal of a fixed ego, both from an objective and a subjective point of view. But as conditions deviate increasingly from the norm, it becomes necessary to switch to a new, more realistic conception of the self as a dynamic process subject to continuous and unpredictable change.
...Despite the startling progress made by neurology in uncovering the mechanisms of the brain, as a society we have not yet moved on from the body-soul dualism of Rene Descartes. This leaves us as nonplussed as the classical physicists were at the end of the nineteenth century when they were confronted with observations -- such as the constancy of the speed of light -- that their theories were unable to explain. The old generation of physicists invented the ether. We cling to the idea of the rock-solid self, the indestructible ego, and the possibility of a spirit that will carry away our true essence at the moment of death...
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p108 ...there is absolutely no difference whatever between, on the one hand, losing all your memories and gaining a new set during life [as with the people in the case studies earlier where a person has total amnesia] and, on the other hand, the death of one human being being followed by the birth of another.
p109 If this argument is valid, and I firmly believe that it is, [back to this in a moment] then from the reported experiences of people who have had unusual and extreme subjective experiences during life we can begin to build a picture of what the experience of physical death is like. And, in broad outline, it is remarkably simple, straightforward, and familiar. In brief: the act of dying is like falling asleep, the effect of dying is to forget all about being one particular person, and the sequel to dying is the gradual laying down of new memories in a new brain, which will define another particular person. What is crucial is that, from the subjective point of view, although one set of memories (and life circumstances) is completely replaced by another, and one brain by another, there is no cessation of experience, of consciousness, of being. One story ends and, in the wink of an eye as felt from within, another story begins.
...
p110 Still, you may argue: “I accept all this...But if, as you claim, we -- our inner selves -- die when our brains die, then surely that’s it. We can’t somehow become one of these new yous because there’s nothing to transfer over to the next person in line.”
And this also is perfectly true. There is indeed nothing about “us” -- our selves -- that can pass into the future for the simple reason, as we have seen, that there is nothing substantial about us during life... There is no direct connection between person A who dies and person B who follows. Whether we are talking about total amnesia or death, nothing of the old person translates to the new... All that is relevant is that, subjectively, after death, the feeling of being continues -- a feeling that, as a new individual condenses, becomes once again the feeling of being a person.
...
I have a reservation about this, but I also don’t get how he can assert this without a cosmogonic theory to explain the mechanism of self transference. And, back to my previous note, he seems to want us to believe he's finally being open with us -- not arguing a position he's about to refute -- but I'm not sure this is entirely true. If he doesn't get more pantheistic by the end I will have been wrong about this.
p111 To be a person is just to have the feeling of being part of an ongoing story, to experience being within a narrative. But what needs to be appreciated is that any narrative will do. While we are in the midst of one particular story we naturally don’t want that story to end; we dread the approach of the final chapter, the final paragraph, the final line...
This sounds like my theory of God as story teller, without actually quite being the same thing. I can't recall how close he gets later on.
p113 Consider the actor who studies his part so well that he feels himself to have taken on a new personality. Play Othello well enough, and in some sense for a while you are Othello (or, rather, Shakespeare thinking about Othello!) [I had to include this because it reminds me of the story from On the Move of one of Sacks’ relatives, an actress, who lost her own identity to dementia but was still able to assume the role of her best characters. This adds yet another wrinkle to what a “self” really is.] And there are many well-documented instances of twins apparently having sensed when their co-twin was unwell or in danger. On such occasions, it is as if the walls separating one self from another have, for a short while, been breached, allowing the awareness of the individuals involved to become shared, overlapped, or merged. More disturbing cases are on record, involving schizophrenics, who seemed to experience directly what another person was thinking... In such cases it is almost as if the resident self has been displaced or become merely a mirror for reflecting the consciousness of an outsider. Finally, there are numerous examples of the differences between people disappearing almost completely, both subjectively and objectively, when mobs, gangs, or mass movements form. How easily, for instance, the individual’s sense of personal identity was submerged and melded with terrifying effect in the all-pervading, tribal identity of the Volk (Nation) of Nazi Germany.
...
p114 ... A useful analogy is to think of a chain of volcanic islands in the middle of the ocean. At surface level, the islands appear completely separate and distinct. But at a deeper level, under the ocean, it becomes clear that the islands are part of a single mass and have a common origin -- their individuality is an illusion.
...
p115 So, reincarnation? Yes and no. Death defines the ultimate limits of selves and exposes how fragile, artificial, and essentially unimportant these creations of the living human brain really are. Will you live again? Once more, it is the present self-in-charge that wants to know. And perhaps the best, most reassuring answer we can give it is that death is like a spring cleaning of the mind, a replacement of body and brain -- the opportunity to start again and see the world through a fresh pair of eyes. You will live again. But it will seem, as always, as if it were for the first time.
I’m not entirely happy with what he’s presented here (in particular that he makes these assertions without any cosmology or cosmogony to back it up. Though that volcanic island analogy would be excellent for illustrating how a pantheistic cosmogony could justify this statement.) However, the next, and final, paragraph is encouraging.
People often wonder: Is there a purpose to life? Are we here for a reason? Or are we trivial bystanders -- brief, tiny specs of awareness in a universe so vast and ancient that it is wholly indifferent to our presence? In seeking the answers to these questions we shall need to broaden the scope of our inquiry, beyond brain science, to include two seemingly very disparate worldview: those of modern physics and of mysticism. This will lead us to consider more deeply the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the cosmos as a whole. And so, eventually, we shall come back to look at ourselves -- but perhaps in a new light, not as frail individuals limited by small, uncertain lives, but as eternal participants in a much greater adventure that extends throughout time and space.
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