147. Righteous Mind - XIX. Moral entropy

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The Righteous Mind   

Chapter Twelve - Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively? - Continued

The Left’s Blind Spot: Moral Capital
p288 My own intellectual life narrative has had two turning points. In chapter 5 I recounted the first one, in India, in which my mind opened to the existence of the broader [sociocentric] moralities described by Richard Shweder... 

[In 2005, I believe, he visits a used-book store in New York] As I scanned the shelves, one book jumped out at me... Conservatism. It was a volume of readings edited by the historian Jerry Muller... I didn’t realize it until years later, but Muller’s essay was my second turning point.

p289 Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a “transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.” Christians who look to the Bible as a guide for legislation, like Muslims who want to live under sharia, are examples of orthodoxy. [Zossima in The Brothers K. would be an even better example.] They want their society to match an externally ordained moral order, so they advocate change, sometimes radical change. This can put them at odds with true conservatives, who see radical change as dangerous.

Muller next distinguished conservatism from the counter-Enlightenment. It is true that most resistance to the Enlightenment can be said to have been conservative, by definition (i.e., clerics and aristocrats were trying to conserve the old order). But modern conservatism, Muller asserts, finds its origins within the main currents of Enlightenment thinking, when men such as David Hume and Edmund Burke tried to develop a reasoned, pragmatic, and essentially utilitarian critique of the Enlightenment project. Here’s the line that quite literally floored me: [He had to sit on the floor of the store and continue reading.]

What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.

As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science. It followed, therefore, that as an atheist and a scientist, I was obligated to be a liberal. But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings the greatest happiness given local circumstances. Could it be? Was there a kind of conservatism that could compete against liberalism in the court of social science? Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?

Now I'm floored. Imagine me with my mouth hanging open in shock. I can’t believe he didn’t discover Burkean conservatism until so late. This, to use one of his (even wilder than my) wild metaphors, is like taking lessons from some amazing downhill skier and then discovering that at the bottom of the hill the only way he knows to stop is by running into a tree. Burkean conservatism was the political reaction to the wheels-coming-off-the-cart aspect of the French Revolution and to the liberal ideology of Mary Shelley’s parents (Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin). I’ve been a Burkean conservative since about 1971, plus or minus a year.

I’m going to hold off on, not one but, two tangents related to Burkean conservatism until the end of the chapter. 


p290 I kept reading. Muller went through... the core beliefs of conservatism. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought...). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes...). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder (yes...).

There is also a very important aspect of caution, in the sense that ecologists are cautious about intervening in a natural ecosystem they don’t fully understand. Human societies are complex and you can’t just make random changes, like snipping random branches of a bush, without running the risk of unintended consequences. 


...As I continued to read the writings of... Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century... [and] Friedrich Hayek [Wiki identifies him with "Classical liberalism," which seems to be the same thing] and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, [Wiki identifies Sowell as writing from both "a conservative and a classical liberal perspective"]  I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital...

The term social capital swept through the social sciences in the 1990s, jumping into the broader public vocabulary after Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone. Capital, in economics, refers to the resources that allow a person or firm to produce goods or services. There’s financial capital (money in the bank), physical capital... [tools and factories], and human capital... [labor]. When everything is equal, a firm with more of any kind of capital will outcompete a firm with less.

Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties. When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors... 

He supports this with the example of ultra-Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants which he has mentioned before. Unfortunately, this is a good example of how social capital benefits the merchant community but not of how it gives an advantage to any particular firm. An Amish construction firm would have been a much better example. 

p291 Everyone loves social capital... But now... let’s think about a school, a commune, a corporation, or even a whole nation that wants to improve moral behavior. Let’s set aside problems of moral diversity and just specify the goal as increasing the “output” of prosocial behaviors and decreasing the “output” of antisocial behaviors, however the group defines those terms. To achieve almost any moral vision, you’d probably want high levels of social capital. (it’s hard to imagine how anomie and distrust could be beneficial.) But will linking people together into healthy, trusting relationships be enough to improve the ethical profile of the group?

If you believe that people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed, then yes, that may be sufficient. But conservatives generally take a very different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions. [I’m not so sure about “nations” here as they are such a recent innovation.] People who hold this “constrained” view are therefore very concerned about the health and integrity of these “outside-the-mind” coordination devices. Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. [And keep the guillotine busy.] Without them, social capital will rapidly decay.

This is the Burke/Wollstonecraft&Godwin debate in a nutshell. 


p292 If you are a member of a WEIRD society... Having a concept such as social capital is helpful because it forces you to see the relationships within which these... [individuals] are embedded, and which makes those people more productive. I propose that we take this approach one step further. To understand the miracle of moral communities that grow beyond the bounds of kinship we must look not just at people, and not just at the relationships among people, but at the complete environment [ecology] within which those relationships are embedded, and which makes those people more virtuous (however they themselves define that term). It takes a great deal of outside-the-mind stuff to support a moral community.

...on a small island or in a small town, you typically don’t need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city... if you only lock the bike frame, your wheels may get stolen. [And the seat] Being small, isolated, or morally homogenous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community... (Whether you’d trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain’s settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)

...we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community. More specifically, moral capital refers to

the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.

...
[A thought experiment involving a commune]
p293 ...A commune that valued self-expression over conformity and that prized the virtue of tolerance over the virtue of loyalty might be more attractive to outsiders, and this could indeed be an advantage in recruiting new members, but it would have lower moral capital than a commune that valued conformity and loyalty. The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure.

Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as nations, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense... many nations are failures as moral communities, particularly corrupt nations where dictators and elites run the country for their own benefit... 

I wish he had some support for this. I’m not sure that would really be the biggest threat to a nation’s moral capital.

I really like the term moral entropy. 


...High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix. 

p294 ...if you... do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist [and Arab Spring] revolutions usually end up in despotism. [or even worse, in failed states.] ...I believe that liberalism... is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly,.. [While] conservatives... fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.


A Yin And Two Yangs

In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang refer to any pair of contrasting or seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent. Night and day are not enemies, nor are hot and cold, summer and winter, male and female. We need both, often in a shifting or alternating balance. John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

The philosopher Bertrand Russell saw the same dynamic at work throughout Western intellectual history: “From 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.” ...

It is clear that each party to this dispute -- as to all that persist through long periods of time -- is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
...
[I’m going to skip a bunch here as this is mostly review. He calls “Liberal Wisdom” Yin and shows its role in limiting the abuses of corporations. (And he stresses that corporations are superorganism and that only government can restrain them.) There’s also a discussion of “externalities” -- “the costs (or benefits) incurred by third parties who did not agree to the transaction causing the cost (benefit)”. Lead pollution from leaded gasoline, fertilizer runoff from fields being examples.

He then calls “Libertarian Wisdom” Yang #1 and shows how too much control, or the elimination of markets -- as with healthcare in the US -- can lead to negative unintended consequences like high costs for goods and services where there is no real competition. Ayn Rand... I mean libertarians, are very alive to this issue and so are useful in addressing or preventing problems like this. 

(Note 68. See Cosmides and Tooby 2006 on how organizing labor along Marxist or socialist principles, which assumes that people will cooperate in large groups, usually runs afoul of moral psychology. People do not cooperated well in large groups when they perceive that many others are free riding. Therefore, communist or heavily socialist nations often resort to increasing application of threats and force to compel cooperation. Five-year plans rarely work as well as the invisible hand.)

Finally, there’s Yang #2, “Social Conservative Wisdom.” “A more positive way to describe conservatives is to say that their broader moral matrix allows them to detect threats to moral capital that liberals cannot perceive.”]
...
p307 ...John Lennon captured a common liberal dream in his haunting song “Imagine.” Image if there were no countries, and no religion too. If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then the world would “be as one.” It’s a vision of heaven for liberals, but conservatives believe it would quickly descend into hell. I think conservatives are on to something.

...We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital.
...
Adam Smith argued... that patriotism and parochialism are good things because they lead people to exert themselves to improve the things they can improve:

p308 That wisdom which contrived the system of human affections . . . seems to have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing the principle attention of each individual to that particular portion of it, which was most within the sphere both of his abilities and of his understanding.

Now that’s Durkheimian utilitarianism. It’s utilitarianism done by somebody who understands human groupishness.
...
[In a study, Robert] Putnam’s survey was able to distinguish two different kinds of social capital: bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities, while bonding capital refers to trust within groups. Putnam found that diversity reduced both kinds of social capital. Here’s his conclusion:

Diverstiy seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie and social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to “hunker down” -- that is, to pull in like a turtle.

...What Putnam calls turtling is the exact opposite of what I have called hiving.

p309 On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.


Toward More Civil Politics
...in the ancient Middle East, where monotheism first took root, the metaphor of war was more common than the metaphor of balance [yin and yang]. The third-century Persian prophet Mani preached that the visible world is the battleground between the forces of light (absolute goodness) and the forces of darkness (absolute evil). Human beings are the frontline in the battle; we contain both good and evil, and we each must pick one side and fight for it. 

p310 Mani’s preaching developed into Manicaeism, a religion that spread throughout the Middle East and influenced Western thinking. [See also Augustine of Hippo, who was originally a Manicaean. He also relates to much of the philosophy of the monks and fathers in The Brothers K., I can't recall if I linked to him there. And to bring us all the way back to Henry Ryecroft, Augustine is the origin of many of the ideas that got the Port Royal Jansenists in so much trouble with the Church.] If you think about politics in a Manichaean way, then compromise is a sin. God and the devil don’t issue many bipartisan proclamations, and neither should you.

The Roman Catholic Church has had a problem with Manicaeism because it establishes a second god. The Church would rather fudge the origin of evil from a “good” god than deal with an evil co-God. Ivan’s “visitor” in The Brothers K., also did a wonderful job of showing the co-dependence of good and evil. Which brings us back to a yin and yang situation. 

...
[I’m skipping the contemporary political discussion... mostly. Here he’s talking about how America is becoming polarized,]
(Note 75. See Pildes 2011 for an up-to-date review of the many factors that have contributed to our “hyperpolarized” state. Pildes argues that the political realignment, along with other historical trends, fully explains the rise in polarization. He therefore asserts that nothing can be done to reverse it. I disagree... I prefer to follow Herbst 2010, who points out that civility and incivility are strategies that are used when they achieve desired results. There are many things we can do to reduce the payoff for incivility. See www.CivilPolitics.org.)

p311 ...In 1976, only 27 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties”  -- counties that voted either Democratic or Republican by a margin of 20 percent or more. But the number has risen steadily... Our counties and towns are becoming increasingly segregated into “lifestyle enclaves,” in which ways of voting, eating, working, and worshiping are increasingly aligned...

“Landslide counties” and “lifestyle enclaves” may not be good for national unity, but they do show that we are turning the melting pot into new tribes, that Durkheimian rules are shaping 21st century America. 


...We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong... everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
...


In Sum
p312 ...People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals... [And vice-versa.]

Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix...


And finally to my conservatism related tangents. 

Regime change
One of the ironic aspects of US foreign policy in this century has been the Republican fondness for regime change. Even prior to Iraq, there were glaring examples (such as Somalia) of failed states. Of the Humpty Dumpty effect that can result when we interfere with the governing of other countries. A true conservative would be alive to this possibility, but the Republican party was not. To the extent that there was any voice of caution it came from the left. And this was repeated with the Arab Spring, with similar, very predictable results. (And in the case of Libya it was even Europe, not America, leading the way.) I think it can be argued that the more moderate factions of the Republican Party lost what little political capital they had within the party when they went along with Bush2’s adventure in Iraq. 


San Francisco city planning and zoning
The local angle, when it comes to city planning, is just as strange. San Francisco progressives have pursue, for at least 40 years, a conservative agenda to keep the city as much the same as possible. They used government authority and limited the liberty of property owners in this cause, which is typical liberal behavior, but their goals were conservative.

By thwarting the natural action of markets, they (inadvertently) created a scarcity of residential units resulting in a situation similar to Aspen, where increasingly only the wealthy can live in the city locals had so carefully preserved for themselves. And, as Haidt would have predicted, now that the city is having to deal with serious, unanticipated consequences, the progressives here are seeking to double-down (limiting the construction of more units for the few people who can actually afford new housing) rather than doubting their policies and looking for new compromises to get what everyone wants. The irony of the left creating an urban environment where many of them can no longer afford to live, is a brilliant counterpoint to the irony of the right increasing international instability and threats to our national interest -- while also losing control of their political party to an extremest faction.

Edmund Burke would read this and just sigh. 


And that's it for Zen Physics and The Righteous Mind. I have no idea what's going to be next, so there will be a holiday... I mean a break. 

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138. Righteous Mind - X. Liberty/oppression

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The Righteous Mind   

Chapter Eight - The Conservative Advantage

I keep thinking I’m going to hit chapters that are just unnecessary additions to what’s already been said, but then I get this which is incredibly full of interesting content. I may have to split this into a couple posts.  

...
p158 [Results of an early study Haidt and some associates did on the Moral Foundations Theory] ...Everyone -- left, right, and center -- says that concerns about compassion, cruelty, fairness, and injustice are relevant to their judgments about right and wrong. Yet... Liberals say that these issues are a bit more relevant to morality than do conservatives.

p159 But when we look at the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, the story is quite different. Liberals largely reject these considerations. They show such a large gap between these foundations versus the Care and Fairness foundations that we might say, as shorthand, that liberals have a two-foundation morality... We can say, as shorthand, that conservatives have a five-foundation morality...
...
p160 [They do a much bigger study] ...we always find the same basic pattern... Liberals value Care and Fairness for more than the other three foundations; conservatives endorse all five foundations more or less equally.

p161 We’ve found this basic difference no matter how we ask the questions. For example, in one study we asked people which traits would make them more or less likely to choose a particular breed of dog as a pet...
...
p162 We found that people want dogs that fit their own moral matrices. Liberals want dogs that are gentle (i.e., that fit with the values of the Care foundation) and relate to their owners as equals (Fairness as equality). Conservatives, on the other hand, want dogs that are loyal (Loyalty) and obedient (Authority). (The Sanctity item showed no partisan tilt; both sides prefer clean dogs.)
...
p163 [Even in EEG studies] Liberal brains showed more surprise, compared to conservative brains, in response to sentences that rejected Care and Fairness concerns. They also showed more surprise in response to sentences that endorsed... [the other foundations] In other words, when people choose the labels “liberal” or “conservative,” they are not just choosing to endorse different values on questionnaires. Within the first half second after hearing a statement, partisan brains are already reacting differently. These initial flashes of neural activity are the elephant, leaning slightly, which then causes their riders to reason differently, search for different kinds of evidence, and reach different conclusions. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.


What Makes People Vote Republican?
...
p164 The key idea in the essay [by Haidt with this title written in the summer of 2008 when Obama was running against McCain] was that there are two radically different approaches to the challenge of creating a society in which unrelated people can live together peacefully. One approach was exemplified by John Stuart Mill, the other by the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim. I describe Mill’s vision like this: [He's quoting himself here so I went with a sanserif font]

First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit, All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Mill’s vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other’s rights and band together voluntarily... to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.

p165 ...I then contrasted Mill’s vision with Durkheim’s:

Now imagine a society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that “man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.” A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-groups.

Wow. Dostoyevsky (from the grave) says “Amen!” 


p166 ...I... showed how the American left fails to understand conservatives and the religious right because it cannot see a Durkheimian world as anything other than a moral abomination. A Durkheimian world is usually hierarchical, punitive, and religious. It places limits on people’s autonomy and it endorses traditions, often including traditional gender roles. For liberals, such a vision must be combated, not respected.

(Note 18. I learned to see the Durkheimian vision not just from reading Durkheim but from working with Richard Shweder and from living in India, as I described in chapter 5. I later discovered that much of the Durkheimian vision could be credited to the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke as well.) 

I’m surprised it’s taken so long for Burke to be mentioned.


If your moral matrix rest entirely on the Care and Fairness foundation, then it’s hard to hear the sacred overtones in America’s unofficial motto: E pluribus unum (from many, one). By “sacred” I mean... the ability to endow ideas, objects, and events with infinite value, particularly those ideas... that bind a group together into a single entity. The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. (Note 20. Of course, it’s much easier in ethnically homogeneous nations with long histories and one language, such as the Nordic countries. This may be one reason those nations are far more liberal and secular than the United States. See further discussion in chapter 12.) Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.
...


What I Had Missed
...
He gets a huge -- mostly negative -- response from the public. I’m going to try to skip this but may have to return and back-fill. 


p169 These emails were overflowing with moral content, yet I had a hard time categorizing that content using Moral Foundations Theory. Much of it was related to fairness, but this kind of fairness had nothing to do with equality. It was the fairness of the Protestant work ethic and the Hindu law of karma: People should reap what they sow. People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.

This... made me realize that I... had done a poor job of capturing conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equity. People should get what they deserve, based on what they have done. We had assumed that equality and proportionality were both part of the Fairness foundation, but the questions we used to measure this foundation were mostly about equality and equal rights. We therefore found that liberals cared more about fairness, and that’s what had made these economic conservatives so angry at me. They believed that liberals don’t give a damn about fairness (as proportionality).

It’s cold today and I’m working in a cafe with a door that does not have an automatic door closer. About half the people who come in or go out don’t bother to close the door behind them, and it takes less than a minute for the small cafe to fill with cold air. I find this makes me irrationally eager to see the conservative point of view expressed above: People who fail to close the door behind them do not deserve any of the benefits of civic or social services supported by my tax dollars. Plus they should be beaten by the police. 


Are proportionality and equality two different expressions of the some underlying cognitive module, as we had been assuming? Are they both related to reciprocal altruism... It’s easy to explain why people care about proportionality and are so keen to catch cheaters. That follows directly from Triver’s analysis of how we gain by exchanging favors with reliable partners. But what about equality? Are liberal concerns about political and economic equality really related to reciprocal altruism? Is the passionate anger people feel toward bullies and oppressors the same as the anger they feel toward cheaters?

I looked into what was known about the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers, and found a strong argument for splitting apart these two kinds of fairness. The desire for equality seems to be more closely related to the psychology of liberty and oppression than to the psychology of reciprocity and exchange... we added a provisional sixth foundation -- Liberty/oppression. (Note 25. ... Our decision to modify the list of moral foundations was also influenced by a “challenge”... asking people to criticize Moral Foundation Theory and propose additional foundations. Strong arguments came in for liberty. Additional candidates that we are still investigating include honesty, Property/ownership, and Waste/inefficiency. The sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, is provisional in that we... have not yet carried out the rigorous testing that went into our research on the original five foundations... ) We also decided to revise our thinking about fairness to place more emphasis on proportionality....


The Liberty/Oppression Foundation

This sounds like a brilliant concept for a non-profit that would appeal to (pull money out of the pockets of) nearly everyone. Sorry. 

p170 In the last chapter I suggested that humans are, like our primate ancestors, innately equipped to live in dominance hierarchies that can be quite brutal. But if that’s true, then how come nomadic hunter-gatherers are always egalitarian? There’s no hierarchy (as least among the adult males), there’s no chief, and the norms of the group actively encourage sharing resources, particularly meat. The archaeological evidence supports this view, indicating that our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands of mobile hunter-gatherers. Hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture or domesticate animals and become more sedentary. These changes create much more private property and much larger group sizes. They also put an end to equality. The best land and a share of everything people produce typically get dominated by a chief, leader, or elite class (who take some of their wealth with them to the grave for easy interpretation by later archaeologists). So were our minds “structured in advance of experience” for hierarchy or for equality?

...the anthropologist Christopher Boehm... In his book Hierarchy in the Forest... concluded that human beings are innately hierarchical, but that at some point during the last million years our ancestors underwent a “political transition” that allowed them to live as egalitarians by banding together to rein in, punish, or kill any would-be alpha males who tried to dominate the group.

Alpha male chimps are not truly leaders of their groups. They perform some public services, such as mediating conflicts. But most of the time they are better described as bullies who take what they want. Yet even among chimpanzees, it sometimes happens that subordinates gang up to take down alphas, occasionally going as far as to kill them. Alphas male chimps must therefore know their limits and have enough political skill to cultivate a few allies and stave off rebellion.

I would think the alpha also plays an important role in defending the pack’s territory. 


p171 Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between the alpha (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tools and weapon types. Once early humans had developed spears, anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language, and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations, then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group.

Boehm’s claim is that at some point during the last half-million years, well after the advent of language, our ancestors created the first true moral communities. In these communities, people used gossip to identify behavior they didn’t like, particularly the aggressive, dominating behaviors of would-be alpha males. On the rare occasions when gossip wasn’t enough to bring them into line, they had the ability to use weapons to take them down...
...
p172 It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls: “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar to Marx’s dream of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”) [It also explains the American obsession with owning serious firearms.] The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperating among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!”

For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted as bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of deviants) coevolved.

The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called “self-domestication.” Just as animal breeders can create tamer, gentler creatures by selective breeding for those traits, our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them.

The Liberty/oppression foundation, I propose, evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others. The original triggers therefore include signs of attempted domination. Anything that suggests the aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this form of righteous anger, which is sometimes called reactance. (That’s the feeling you get when an authority tells you you can’t do something and you feel yourself wanting to do it even more strongly.) ...

p173 The Liberty foundation obviously operates in tension with the Authority foundation. We all recognize some kinds of authority as legitimate in some contexts, but we are also wary of those who claim to be leaders unless they have first earned our trust. We’re vigilant for signs that they’ve crossed the line into self-aggrandizement and tyranny. 

This is where the Occupy people could find common ground with the Tea Party people. Not that that would be a good thing. 


Not sure where this goes... Aside from accounts of Greek and Roman enslavement of defeated enemies, I’ve only read one article about the supply side of the slave trade, and this was a long time ago, about the African end of the trade that brought slaves to the Americas. As I recall, the trade started in subsistence African villages where the village leaders could trade their extra mouths to feed for sorely needed goods.  If the article discussed how it was decided who was to become an export commodity, I don’t recall it. But with the ideas we’ve just read in mind, one can speculate.

Tyrannical alphas would be one option. Alpha wanna-bes would be a second option. And finally, anyone viewed as “deviant” by the community. 


It also occurs to me that Haidt could use questions about how a community should make a decision like this to identify equality loving liberals and proportionality loving conservatives. My guess is that liberals would opt for a lottery system which would be “fair” to everyone as individuals; whereas conservatives would prefer more of a blackballing system which would eliminate individuals who contributed the least to the community.


The Liberty foundation supports the moral matrix of revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” everywhere. The American Declaration of Independence is a long enumeration of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute Tyranny over these states.” The document begins with the claim that “all men are created equal” and ends with a stirring pledge of unity: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The French revolutionaries, similarly, had to call for fraternité and égalité if they were going to entice commoners to join them in their regicidal quest for liberté.

The flag of my state, Virginia, celebrates assassination... It’s a bizarre flag, unless you understand the Liberty/oppression foundation. The flag shows virtue (embodied as a woman) standing on the chest of a dead king, with the motto Sic semper tyrannis (“Thus always to tyrants”). That was the rallying cry said to have been shouted by Marcus Brutus as he and his co-conspirators murdered Julius Caesar for acting like an alpha male. John Wilkes Booth shouted it from the center stage at Ford’s Theatre moments after shooting Abraham Lincoln (whom Southerners perceived to be a tyrant who prevented them from declaring independence).

p174 Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries. It just somehow feels like the right thing to do, and these feelings seem far removed from Triver’s reciprocal altruism and tit for tat. This is not fairness. This is Boehm’s political transition and reverse dominance.
If the original triggers of this foundation include bullies and tyrants, the current triggers include almost anything that is perceived as imposing illegitimate restraints on one’s liberty, including government (from the perspective of the American right). [The extreme -- anarchist -- left is about the same.] In 1993, when Timothy McVeigh was arrested a few hours after he blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City... he was wearing a T-shirt that said Sic semper tyrannis...

...the urge to band together to oppose oppression and replace it with political equality seem to be at least as prevalent on the left. For example, one liberal reader of my “Republicans” essay stated Boehm’s thesis precisely:

The enemy of society to a Liberal is someone who abuses their power (Authority) and still demands, and in some cases forces, others to “respect” them anyway. . . . A Liberal authority is someone or something that earns society’s respect through making things happen that unify society and suppress its enemy. {Emphasis added.}

p175 It’s not just the accumulation and abuse of political power that activates the anger of the Liberty/oppression foundation; the current triggers can expand to encompass the accumulation of wealth, which helps to explain the pervasive dislike of capitalism on the far left. For example, one liberal reader explained to me, “Capitalism is, in the end, predatory -- a moral society will be socialist, i.e., people will help each other.” [This is, of course Goethe’s position at the end of Faust and Dostoyevsky would certainly agree. (Ford Madox Ford is a trickier case in that in Parade’s End the Tietjen’s family wealth is founded on the coal trade. But I’m pretty sure Christopher would at least be sympathetic to a very Tory version of this point of view).]
...
The hatred of oppression is found on both sides of the political spectrum. The difference seems to be that for liberals -- who are more universalistic and who rely more heavily upon the Care/harm foundation -- the Liberty/oppression foundation is employed in the service of underdogs, victims, and powerless groups everywhere. It leads liberals (but not others) to sacralize equal rights. Liberals sometimes go beyond equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system. This may be why the left usually favors higher taxes on the rich, high levels of services provided to the poor, and sometimes a guaranteed minimum income for everyone. 

Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial -- concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity. For them, the Liberty/oppression foundation and the hatred of tyranny supports many of the tenets of economic conservatism: don’t tread on me (with your liberal nanny state and its high taxes), don’t tread on my business (with your oppressive regulations), and don’t tread on my nation (with your United Nations and your sovereignty-reducing international treaties).

p176 American conservatives, therefore, sacralize the word liberty, not the word equality. This unites them politically with libertarians... [Jerry Falwell’s] Liberty [University] students are generally pro-authority. They favor traditional patriarchal families. But they oppose domination and control by a secular government, particularly a liberal government that will (they fear) use its power to redistribute wealth...

This is probably a good place to break. We sill resume with, Fairness As Proportionality tomorrow. 

Jump to Next: Righteous Mind - XI. Positive and negative liberty

34. Doctor Faustus - chapters XXXII-III

Jump to Introduction + Chronology

Jump back to Previous: Doctor Faustus - chapter XXX

[Inez Rodde marries Professor Dr. Helmut Institoris. Clarissa Rodde leaves Munich to pursue her stage career. And, with an empty nest, Frau Senator Rodde moves to Pfeiffering and establishes herself in a building across the courtyard from Adrian.

We learn rather a lot about Inez establishing herself in full blown, south German bourgeois respectability... except for her lover on the side (Rudi Schwerdtfeger) and a Spanish-exotic friend, Frau Natalie Knoterich with a weakness for morphine. She even presents her husband with daughters -- that he even fathered. Zeitblom becomes the confidant of both Rudi and Inez, which is tricky since Inez needs to be reassured of her grip on Rudi while Rudi feels trapped in an indiscretion he never wanted (once again, it is Inez who seduces Rudi). Poor Serenus is indeed having a nasty Great War.

And that is chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

p336 The time of which I write was for us Germans an era of national collapse, of capitulation, of uprisings due to exhaustion, of helpless surrender into the hands of strangers. The time in which I write, which must serve me to set down these recollections here in my silence and solitude, this time has a horrible swollen belly, it carries in its womb a national catastrophe compared with which the defeat in those earlier days seems a moderate misfortune, the sensible liquidation of an unsuccessful enterprise. Even an ignominious issue remains something other and more normal than the judgement that now hangs over us, such as once fell on Sodom and Gomorrah; such as the first time we had not after all invoked.

That it approaches, that it long since became inevitable: of that I cannot believe anybody still cherishes the smallest doubt... it becomes sheer horror, so it seems to me, when everybody knows and everybody is bound to silence, while we read the truth from each other in eyes that stare or else shun a meeting.

...The invasion of France, long recognized as a possibility, has come, a technical and military feat of the first, or rather of an altogether unique order, prepared with the fullest deliberation, in which we could less prevent the enemy since we did not dare concentrate our defense at the single point of landing, being uncertain whether or not to regard it as one among many further attacks at points we could not guess. [The Brits played Hitler like a violin] Vain and fatal were our hesitations... for days now a battle has been raging for the Norman city of Caen -- a struggle which probably, if our fears see truly, is already the opening of the way to the French capital, [as near as I can tell, no one (despite what Montgomery said later) planned the strategy that sucked all the German armored strength into a battle for Caen and freed the American 3rd Army to flank, surround, and, combined with Commonwealth and Polish forces, destroy the German army in France] that Paris to which in the New Order the role of European Luna Park and house of mirth was assigned, and where now, scarcely held in check by the combined strength of the German and French police, resistance is boldly raising its head.

p337 [A review of reverses on the Italian and Eastern Fronts with a mention of the V-1 attacks on England] No stopping them? My soul, think not of it! Do not venture to measure what it would mean if in this our uniquely frightful extremity the dam should break, as it is on the point of doing, and there were no more hold against the boundless hatred that we have fanned to flame among peoples round us! True, by the destruction of our cities from the air, Germany has long since become a theatre of war; but it still remains for it to become so in the most actual sense, a sense that we cannot and may not conceive. Our propaganda even has a strange way of warning the foe against the wounding of our soil, the sacred German soil, as against a horrible crime. . . . The sacred German soil! As though there were anything still sacred about it, as though it were not long since deconsecrate over and over again, through uncounted crimes against law and justice and morally and de facto laid open to judgement and enforcement! Let it come! Nothing more remains to hope, to wish, to will. The cry for peace with the Anglo-Saxon, the offer to continue alone the war against the Sarmatic flood, the demand that some part of the condition of unconditional surrender be remitted, in other words that they treat with us -- but with whom? All that is nothing but eye-wash: the demand of a regime which will not understand, even today seems not to understand, that its staff is broken, that it must disappear, laden with the curse of having made itself, us, Germany, the Reich, I go further and say all that is German, intolerable to the world.

p338 ...As for the background of my actual narrative, up to the point whither I have brought it, I have characterized it at the beginning of this chapter in the phrase “into the hands of strangers.” “It is frightening to fall into the hands of strangers” : this sentence and the bitter truth of it I thought through and suffered through, often, in those days of collapse and surrender. For as a German, despite a universalistic shading which my relation to the world takes on through my Catholic tradition, I cherish a lively feeling for the national type, the characteristic life-idiom of my country, so to speak, its idea, the way it asserts itself as a facet of the human, against other no doubt equally justifiable variations of the same, and can so assert itself only by a certain outward manifestation, sustained by a nation standing erect on its feet. The unexampled horror of a decisive military defeat overwhelms this idea, physically refutes it, by imposing an ideology foreign to it -- and in the first instance bound up with words, with the way we express ourselves. Handed over utterly into the power of this foreign ideology, one feels with all one’s being that just because it is foreign it bodes no good. The beaten French tasted this awful experience in 1870, when their negotiators, seeking to soften the conditions of the victors, priced very high the renown, “la gloire,” ensuing from the entry of our troops into Paris. But the German statesmen answered them that the word gloire or any equivalent for it did not occur in our vocabulary. They talked about it in hushed voices, in the French Chamber. Anxiously they tried to comprehend what it meant to surrender at discretion to a foe whose conceptions did not embrace the idea of gloire.

I’m not sure I understand this. Honor was certainly a German as well as a French virtue. And both the Germans and French had suffered, repeatedly, in their honor during the ebb and flow of the Napoleonic Wars. Jena and Auerstadt were a devastating blow to the Prussian self-esteem while both 1814 and 1815 saw victorious enemy armies -- lots of them -- marching through Paris.

p339 Often and often I thought of it, when the Jacobin-Puritan [??] virtue jargon, which four years long had disputed the war propaganda of the “agreed peace,” [??] became the current language of victory. I saw it confirmed that it is only a step from capitulation to pure abdication and the suggestion to the conqueror that he would please take over the conduct of the defeated country according to his own ideas, since for its own part it did not know what to do. Such impulses France knew, forty-seven years before, [1871] and they were not strange to us now. Still they are rejected. The defeated must continue somehow to be responsible for themselves; outside leading-strings are there only for the purpose of preventing Revolution which fills the vacuum after the departure of the old authority from going to extremes and endangering the bourgeois order of things for the victors. Thus in 1918 the continuation of the blockade after we laid down our arms in the west served to control the German Revolution, to keep it on bourgeois-democratic rails and prevent it from degenerating into the Russian proletarian. Thus bourgeois imperialism, crowned with the laurels of victory, could not do enough to warn against “anarchy”; not firmly enough reject all dealing with workmen’s and soldier’s councils and bodies of that kind, not clearly enough protest that only with a settled Germany could peace be signed and only such would get enough to eat.  

What we had for a government followed this paternal lead, held with the National Assembly against dictatorship of the proletariat and meekly waved away the advances of the Soviets, even when they concerned grain-deliveries. Not to my entire satisfaction, I may add. As a moderate man and son of culture I have indeed a natural horror of radical revolution and the dictatorship of the lower classes, which I find it hard, owing to my tradition, to envisage otherwise than in the image of anarchy and mob rule -- in short, of the destruction of culture. But when I recall the grotesque anecdote about the two saviours of European civilization, the German and the Italian, both of them in the pay of finance capital, walking together through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where they certainly did not belong, and one of them saying to the other that all these “glorious art treasures” would have been destroyed by Bolshevism if heaven had not prevented it by raising them up -- when I recall all this, then my notions about classes and masses take on another colour, and the dictatorship of the proletariat begins to seem to me, a German burgher, an ideal situation compared with the now possible one of the dictatorship of the scum of the earth. Bolshevism to my knowledge has never destroyed any works of art. That was far more within the sphere of activity of those who assert that they are protecting us from it. There did not lack much for their zeal in destroying the things of the spirit -- a zeal that is entirely foreign to the masses -- to have made sacrifice of the works of the hero of these pages, Adrian Leverkuhn. For there is no doubt that their triumph and the historical sanction to regulate this world according to their beastly will would have destroyed his life-work and his immortality.

p340 Twenty-six years ago [1918] it was revulsion against the self-righteous blandishments of the rhetorical burgher and “son of the revolution,” which proved stronger in my heart than the fear of disorder, and made me want just what he did not: that my conquered country should turn towards its brother in tribulation, towards Russia. I was ready to put up with the social revolution -- yes, to agree to it -- which would arise from such comradery. The Russian Revolution shook me. There was no doubt in my mind of the historical superiority of its principles over those of the powers which set their foot on our necks.

Since then history has taught me to regard with other eyes our conquerors of that day, who will shortly conquer us again in alliance with the revolution of the East. It is true that certain strata of bourgeois democracy seemed and seem today ripe for what I termed the dictatorship of the scum: willing to make common cause with it to linger out their privileges. Still, leaders have arisen, who like myself, who am a son of humanism, saw in this dictatorship the ultimate that can or may be laid upon humanity and moved their world to a life-and-death struggle against it. Not enough can these men be thanked, and it shows that the democracy of the western lands, in all the anachronistic state of their institutions through the passage of time, all the rigidity of their conceptions of freedom in resisting the new and inevitable, is after all essentially in the line of human progress, of goodwill to the improvement of society and its renewal, alteration, rejuvenation; it shows that western democracy is after all capable, by its own nature, of a transition into conditions more justified of life.

All this by the way. What I want to recall here in this biography is the loss of authority of the monarchic military state, so long the form and habit of our life; it was far advanced as defeat approached and now with defeat it is complete. Its collapse and abdication result in a situation of permanent hunger and want, progressive depreciation of the currency, progressive laxity and loose speculation, a certain regrettable and unearned dispensing of civilian freedom from the restrain, the degeneration of a national structure so long held together by discipline into debating groups of masterless citizens. Such a very gratifying sight that is not, and no deduction can be made from the word “painful” when I use it here to characterize the impressions I got as a purely passive observer from the gatherings of certain “Councils of Intellectual Workers” then springing up in Munich hotels. If I were a novel writer, I could make out of my tortured recollections a most lively picture of such a futile and flagitious assemblage. There was a writer of belles-lettres, who spoke, not without charm, even with a sybaritic and dimpling relish, on the theme of “Revolution and Love of Humanity,” and unloosed a free discussion -- all too free, diffuse, and confused -- by such misbegotten types as only see the light at moments like this: lunatics, dreamers, clowns, flibbertigibbets and fly-by-nights, plotters and small-time philosophers [that could be Foucault over in the corner]. There were speeches for and against love of human kind, for and against the authorities, for and against the people. A little girl spoke a piece, a common soldier was with difficulty prevented from reading to the end a manuscript that began “Dear citizens and citizenesses!” and would doubtless have gone on the whole night, an angry student launched an embittered invective against all the previous speakers, without vouchsafing to the assemblage a single positive expression of opinion -- and so on...

[At this time Adrian is going through a particularly bad period of ill health, or of sea-maid pains. In fact Adrian here goes into disturbing detail about the sea-maid which forces us to recall the offer Mephisto once made to him in passing. We are to see Adrian’s pains as reflecting the condition of the nation. Rudolf confides to Adrian (of all people) about his unwanted intimacy with Inez while continuing to beg for his violin concerto that he desires Adrian to write just for him.]

I resisted commenting on the political science above, but now is perhaps the time -- though I’m still waiting for a better opportunity to talk about national socialism.

The political state of Germany at the conclusion of the Great War involves the discussion (from the previous blog) of the Optimistic vs Pessimistic views of Man as a political creature, which dates back to the French Revolution (and as I’ve made clear before, I come down on the Burkian conservative side). Today we live in a world littered with failed states (Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya). People keep forgetting this, but it is the responsibility of the victor to leave some form of order behind. In the historical norm of conquest, this was a given -- though there are of course problems with occupation and conquest as well.

The German Reich was a strange beast: a particularly antiquated dynasty (the Habsburgs were even worse than the Hohenzollerns) mated with a particularly lively bourgeoisie. Almost a century of Darwinian migrations had resulted in a population especially passive and willing to be lead. And then the patriarchal figure of the Kaiser was removed and they were left to their own devices.

When the Japanese Shogunate fell late in the 19th century, traditional Japanese regional powers reasserted themselves and a new order was quickly established. I’m not aware of any German tendency to reassert regional power after 1918. Nationalism seems to have been a done deal by that time. The presence of France and the United States at the table (speaking figuratively) that determined the fate of Germany and Austria probably ruled out the substitution of another royal house to rule nations seemingly content, to that point, with that political arrangement. A good Burkian would have suggested that policy as the least disturbing to the previous order -- and I’m sure the British government must have wished for it even if they were not so bold as to argue for it. That the British Royal family (now Windsor, but still Hanoverian by blood) had some ideas, maybe even some relatives in the wings willing to step into the Kaiser’s shoes, I also don’t doubt. Now there’s a historical “What if?” to ponder. But, alas, this was a democratic age... except for all the times when it wasn’t.

Jump to Next: Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXII