Bee more, Chimp?

Whilst I digest Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its causes” (thank you Chad Allen Zollinger for the recommendation) and decide if I have anything to add I thought that I would share this post, written some 18 months ago and before discovering Medium, as there is plenty of overlap in the ideas of both books.

Thoughts on The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion by Johnathan Haidt

Sometimes a book just arrives at the right time and having not read anything since, maybe, September (I kind of got into a rut) this one has come out of nowhere.

Following a couple of TED posts on facebook, and the subsequent recommendation for Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, I downloaded the sample to this, his next book, and the intro really sucked me in.

This isn’t a review as such I’m just using the book as a focus for some of the thoughts that it has provoked and stuff that I wanted to say anyway…

Two of the main things that I’ve been banging on about of late are how cultural conditioning is like an accent, we don’t notice our own, and how people believe what they want to believe and then read, watch, whatever to confirm those beliefs.

This latter point links back to a conclusion that I came to years back, that morality is an illusorily topic as it is:

a) Personal and unique to the individual and therefore does not extend to society, and

b) A retrospective justification of a person’s actions or beliefs, not even guiding the individual to whom it would apply

The book is divided into three parts, the first being a discussion on whether it is intuition or reasoning that leads our decision making and it is here that it felt as though Haidt had completed a lot of the research that I would never do into the way that we make our choices in life.

People often mistake me for someone who takes carefully thought-out actions but all of my reasoning is after the fact. I can analyse why I did something, sometimes, but when it comes to the future I tend to have vaguely sketched out fantasies of an ideal state with no real guide of how to get there and no appetite for examining the details of the journey.

This suits me, I have no confidence in reasoning bringing about happiness but I’d assumed that it was a character trait and that other people were a lot more logical.

Apparently the moral theory that had prevalence in the 80’s, when Haidt started out, was that children are born with an intuitive sense of a universal truth, that to harm others is bad, upon which they build their own morality.

Following on from some research comparing responses to morality questions in India and the US he designed some surveys to be carried out in poor and wealthy parts of the States and Brazil and the results showed, unsurprisingly, that morality is based upon more than just the harm principle and heavily influenced by culture, although that can link classes across borders as much as people within them.

He found that people who had received more education were better prepared to discuss the reasoning behind their moral conclusions, that others found their decisions self-evident, and that when people did try to justify their beliefs they often invented additions to the situation so that there could be a victim of some sort.

Sanctity is not something that we think we give much weight to in our post-religious, educated society and so when asked why it was wrong to do things in the privacy of our own home that affect no one else, such as cutting up the American flag or having sex with a dead chicken, the more educated people were searching around for a reason to justify their disgust, looking for a victim, whereas others were happy to just say that it’s wrong and leave it at that.

The harm principle is something that people use to justify their instinctive revulsion, which is not intellectually acceptable to them.

Reasoning can influence our decisions, and he talked of research that showed people making different choices when they know that they will have to justify their actions to others, but that in itself implies that the decisions were based on peer pressure rather than any moral founding.

Even when logic does show the way it is the passions, pride or shame, which guides the conformity, merely replacing the emotion directly inspired by the action with the desire to fit in.

The idea is that reasoning evolved not to help us to make decisions but to help us to justify them to others, a way of maintaining social standing, which is of, perhaps, more evolutionary benefit.

It adds to social cohesion and bonds the community giving it a comparative advantage over more individualistic tribes, all of this working towards an argument developed later for group evolution.

It is certainly my experience that decisions made intellectually are not very convincing.

I was a pretty flaky vegetarian for the first couple of years, especially as my morality allows for finishing off a pizza if no one else is going to eat it. But now I’d always throw it away even though I hate wasting food. The decision is outside of my reasoning and it would take a gargantuan effort to reverse it. Even though I would still consider that I like meat, it feels wrong to eat it.

Looking at it from the other angle, apparently (Descartes Error, Antonio Damasio, as referenced by Haidt) there’s a part of the brain (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) that when damaged leaves the person almost emotionally blank but does not affect their IQ or any powers of reasoning. That leaves them almost incapable of making the simplest of decisions.

Logically that makes perfect sense, how can one pick anything without having assigned some sort of preference to it? What is value but an emotive ranking of one thing over another?

I know things don’t have inherent quality, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a long time ago, but I’d never really put all of the bits together to see that there are decisions that I have made, such as with my mortgage, where I have tried to come to a purely rational decision and the minor epiphany here was that it hampered my decision making by ignoring my preferences.

Haidt even goes so far as to suggest that to make emotionally devoid decisions is a psychopathic trait.

I might be coming to this a bit late but like I said, the appeal of this book had a lot to do with its timing.

Haidt’s theory on how our belief system is built is that there are six moral foundations and we are born with a tendency to value these to varying degrees.

The foundations are Care, Fairness, Freedom, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity and the second part of the book spends a lot of time talking about how the degrees to which we favour each of these affects our politics in the context of the Right / Left divide.

I am not going to go into that in any detail here but there are some interesting conclusions that he comes to, mainly that Democrats almost entirely dismiss the last three foundations as having any importance to morality whereas Republicans value all six at pretty much the same level, although the interpretation is different. So fairness to a Republican would be a very meritocratic society whereas Democrats consider it to mean a more egalitarian one with equal distribution of wealth and resources.

What he then argues is that the fact that Republicans respond to more foundations makes it easier for them to appeal to a larger audience and to understand where their Democrat rivals are coming from, providing a strong advantage in elections.

To be honest I am a little unconvinced by this foundations theory, I would not say that I disagree, it just does not feel complete, but how he develops it further is interesting.

Haidt goes on to talk about how, whilst we are born with a predisposition to favour one foundation over the other, or hold them all at a similar level, this is not a set of hard wired values for life, it merely influences our formative choices.

What we then do is build a Moral Matrix for ourselves based on where these decisions have taken us and the company in which we then find ourselves.

The moral matrix is a continually evolving world view that is influenced by our actions and their effects, which includes the friends we make, the books we read, et.c.

It brings to mind that argument against free will that all actions are predetermined not by some all powerful being that’s worked it out in advance but merely because the sum of all of the influences in our life that have brought us to that moment. Could we ever, really, have made any decisions other than those we did make?

Actually that question for me is irrelevant in terms of free will as the influences are so numerous, subtle and subconscious (there’s an experiment in the book about how smells change people’s responses to morality questions) that actually in defining all of these influences all we are doing is defining the person. If a person’s freedom is limited by their character then that is freedom.

But what I do find interesting is thinking about myself as a continually changing sum of influences, both internal and external.

If you think about walking down a street with someone and then you sit for a drink and talk about what you saw there are always differences. We do not all have the same interests so we are drawn to different people and sights. If each person could directly stream what they are seeing and the two sets of images could be watched side by side then I would expect to see two different films.

The way that we view the world, I believe, is heavily subjective and there is a massive filtration process that goes on between what is in the physical field of vision and what makes it to the brain, certainly the conscious part.

Over time those memories are filtered further through our preferences and interests so that a year later we recall just one situation of note, may not remember the day at all, or may feel that every second is a clear as when it happened.

We have heard of how accurate eye witness accounts are but that is not entirely down to memory loss, it is because we are not all seeing the same thing. In the same way that selective memory is often an unconscious process there is a degree of selective perception too.

One experiment quoted recounts how people were shown a series of pictures depicting kids eating chocolate cake or carrot cake then afterwards looking either happy or sick.

Whatever the weight of evidence, most people came to the conclusion that it was the chocolate cake that made the children ill.

We do this all of the time, ignoring evidence, memories, that don’t fit with our preconceptions.

These things build up to create a perception of the world that in turn determines what we experience, whether we find these streets overbearingly crowded or energetically vital, or empty, and that affects the quality of experience, which again influences our view of life, and so on.

It is a self-confirming circle and it applies even more to the people we meet, who tend to be through other friends or as a direct consequence of a certain situation. Through work or being parents or having travelled somewhere we met people in a similar situation, at the same point in their lives.

Commonality of interest and belief attract us and we introduce each other to people and ideas that confirm and conform to these beliefs.

Furthermore, some of these ideas may be ones that we have rejected or passed over, simply not noticed at other stages in our lives.

This is all natural and healthy and good but it is so subtle and subconscious that we don’t ever really see the true extent to which we are doing it.

It is my opinion that whilst objectivity should be strived for it is, in actuality, out of our reach because we cannot see the matrix that we have built up. The world that each of us experiences is of our own creation.

This sounds very lonely but what I should emphasise is that, by my reckoning, the vast majority of the influences here are cultural and social so there is actually a great bond between us and the people around us; we often seem to know exactly what another is thinking or about to say. The degree to which our universes are unique is simply the level to which people react differently to what is generally considered to be an identical situation. Actually, it is a slightly different experience that they are reacting to.

What I think is important, another thing that I have been ranting about recently, is to recognise that our world views differ, that there is no universal morality or set of values, that right and wrong do not really exist, they need context (morally that is, to argue the result of 1+1 is a whole different discussion).

It seems that in one form or another people have been fighting persecution since at least the renaissance and whilst that, plus censorship, are forms of control probably based in fear and uncertainty, they often work because the foot soldiers have absolute confidence that their world view is correct and as such should be enforced.

We still do it in today’s society and I think that we would do it less if we were more aware of just how subjective our values are.

There have been a few times in my life when my matrix has shown itself, when I have noticed my accent, and a good example would be in my attitude toward arranged marriage.

It is one of things that always gets westerners in regards to Indian culture, although Hardy speaks of it so it wasn’t so long ago that it was common here. Still, in today’s world, in London, which many people tell me is the least friendly, most individualistic place they have ever been, I just could not get the concept. Yes, it is practical, but what about romance? What about one’s freedom as an individual? Does the scale not start at bullying and end in slavery?

Indians can be pretty direct people, happy to ask the most personal of questions to a stranger and that opens the opportunity to discuss such things.

Time after time I tried to explain why I was unmarried in my thirties and enjoyed to travel alone and they tried to explain why they had their whole life planned out at sixteen and accepted their parents wisdom in selecting a partner.

The problem on both sides was that we were each trying to apply our own sets of values, our different understandings of concepts as universal as love (which people experience in greatly differing ways) to alien situations.

We all assumed that our values were intrinsic to human nature because that is what all of our experience told us. It turned out that we were talking about very different things.

Gradually, over time, I began to see this, it sank in.

Here is a quote that I like:

“To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know”

G Spencer-Brown

Personally I would hate to be forced into a marriage but I totally accept that it is, to the right people and carried out in the right way, a beautiful thing.

Another significant moment for me was in discussion with a Chinese guy about freedom and he said something along the lines of,

“You consider yourselves free but in your country children can’t buy alcohol.”

It is true that we do not really want freedom in this country, but we do value some of the liberty that we are permitted very highly. If others have different freedoms, we overlook them and still make comparisons against those that we enjoy.

We value what we have. I have no wish to live in what seems to me a highly authoritarian state any more than I wish an arranged marriage but when you look at the infrastructure development in China, western democracy can seem woefully dysfunctional. The Chinese would not necessarily swop places either (the guy in question had worked in the US).

Do I personally consider that Chinese education brain washes the population? Yes, that is my impression but I have to admit that we are just as culturally programmed over here.

Again I think that there is a positive angle to this.

If the truth is that we are all confined by the horizons of our experience, our moral matrices, then these are, at least, broadening all of the time.

I will come back to group mentality later but one of the problems, the dangers of Groupthink, is that everything looks fine from within.

This is why I am so against censorship, because it enforces groupthink.

With improvements in communication and travel people’s horizons are being widened, traditions, such as the caste system, are being challenged.

People complain about cultural homogenisation but for me the problem is cultural dominance through military or economic pressure.

In every culture there is the beautiful but there are also deep dark secrets.

I always hold London up as an example of where the best of all worlds mix. Maybe that is because I am ignoring inconvenient evidence like the Tottenham riots that I put down to more socio-economic tensions rather than race (but what do I know?) still I believe that the city benefits massively from its diversity and people are more open-minded as a result (no bias there then).

A beautiful part of (my addition to) the matrix theory is the delivery of instant karma. Our actions and attitudes not only affect how others act to us, reap as we sow, smiles are reflected, but they change who we are and how we see the world. If we behave in a kind way then we create a kinder reality to enjoy. Dishonest people become more suspicious of others.

In knowing that we shape our own reality we can deliberately look at things in a different way and take more control over our psychological welfare. Will our own happiness, if you like.

I am not saying that it is easy, or that many have that ability but I do believe that it is within our capability as humans and it is achievable with certain smaller, day to day events.

So the third section of this book talks about how that moral matrix can develop to blind us from seeing things from other people’s point of view and then goes on to cover much the same ground as this TED talk, which is what brought me here in the first place.

It builds the analogy of a hive switch in our brains, releasing oxytocin to take us from seeing the world as individualistic chimps to all-as-one bees under certain conditions so that we can transcend our selfish impulses and work for the group as a whole. This having evolved in order to help us build and bind and out-compete other communities.

Buddhist philosophy is all about loss of ego and becoming one with the universe but meditation is actually quite an unusual trigger of the switch as it tends to be through group activity. This is an account from a WWII soldier:

“Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle … has been the high point of their lives. … Their “I” passes insensibly into a “we,”“my” becomes “our,” and individual fate loses its central importance. … I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. … I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.”

The book opens with JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. The story of human development is a tale of how we have moved from small, nomadic hunting groups to nations of billions (the bond of being Chinese or Indian is as great as any national identity that I have witnessed) and there are times in this ascent when the benefit of the group is not that of the individual.

This loss of self, of ego, is often what is described when people talk about spiritual or religious experience.

Group evolution was widely dismissed as a theory in the sixties and seventies in favour of the selfish gene but according to Haidt the debate has opened up a bit more recently.

He even suggests that this dismissal was a product of a more inwards looking, individualistic society and also takes a chapter to combat some of the claims of the New Atheist movement, saying that religiosity is an essential part of our evolution as a group rather than a redundant inefficiency in our development as an individual.

I should probably read up on genetics at some point as I can recall Fritjof Capra suggesting that there was possibly a swing back in the weighting of nurture over nature in the wake of the genome project and now Haidt is commenting on debate as to whether our empathy towards strangers is a misfiring of a genetic impulse that evolved specifically to aid our relatives or if it is a correctly functioning result of our evolution as group animals.

For the sake of my argument either view works as I rely on empathy and compassion being emotions that we have evolved to enable us to live as social animals and the how is of less importance.

If the story of natural selection is of small mutations providing a species with a comparative advantage then what is the difference really?

We have instincts that help us to function socially, as a group larger than our immediate relations, and we got them through evolution. It is as nations that we came to dominate the world and that we can now afford to live more individualistic lives since we are no longer battling for survival is a purely social development.

The hive mentality is not our usual state but it is something that we can experience when joined together for a common purpose, even in a football stadium or dance club. A great example of the switch between the bee and chimp is when you leave a mosh pit, in which you have been lost in a sea of people moving (sort of) as one, to fight the exact same individuals in the equally intense bundle for the bar.

If we evolved as a social animal, in tribes, it makes sense that we would have this ability to lose ourselves in this way, to benefit our hive.

That is not to say that the loss of responsibility in group mentality has not been manipulated to devastating effect by churches and governments alike over the years, especially by bonding people together against a common enemy, which is essentially what it evolved for.

Tribal behaviour in the form of rioting and hooliganism can be incredibly destructive.

One experiment quoted explains how people showed far more cooperation in a team game having inhaled oxytocin but also how they became more hostile to those members of the opposite team.

He goes on to talk of evidence of how the hormone only enforces feelings of connection to those people with whom the subject of the experiment already feels a bond. It increases what he refers to as in-group harmony but can create greater out-group hostility and he comes to the unfortunate conclusion that the best that we can hope for is sets of highly connected but not necessarily open people living in greater harmony within their specific, exclusive groups.

I would argue that there is nothing in the experiment reported here, set up as it is to introduce the hormone into an already competitive environment, that implies that there need be an outside group for the inside one to obtain that harmony.

Also, that there is nothing about those groups (football teams, for one) that need be genetic in their bond.

I believe (although it doesn’t always feel like it) that the reach of our empathy is spreading, we are becoming more and more open in our societies, gaining greater affinity with people across the globe, why can’t that increased level of connection, oneness, one day encompass all of humanity?

Haidt states that it is Social Capital.

Given research shows how people are prepared to cheat if they believe that they will get away with it there is a cost to society of finding a way to mitigate that temptation.

Social capital is the degree to which people are prepared to trust each other through feelings of comradeship and goodwill. An example given is the diamond industry, where there is a lot of scope for stealing, cheating, but there is an Orthodox Jewish community that relies very heavily on trust within itself and therefore has lower transaction costs because there is no risk of theft.

Social capital, it is suggested, is what holds society together and it has been shown that in very cosmopolitan communities there is far less sense of trust within the population.

Again I think that this is something that can be overcome.

Haidt states that social capital is dependent on having a mono-cultural society but also talks about how all of America came together after the World Trade Centre attack.

In times of peace the US is a deeply divided and partisan country. There are sub communities of New York liberals or deep-south conservatives. There are African, Jewish, Dutch, Latin — Americans. It is one of the most diverse, mongrel societies in the western world but also massively patriotic. People identify with being American as well as connecting to their more specific cultural heritage.

To think 400 years ago that random refugees from Europe would one day form the most powerful nation on the planet would have taken quite a massive leap of the imagination so why can’t that happen globally in a few hundred years from now?

For someone to write a book on psychological evolution and explain how far things have come over a relatively short time span, to argue that genetic evolution has actually sped up in the last 50,000 years when many others have argued that it was exactly then that it became irrelevant due to the prominence of social evolution, and then to say that they can’t see it going much beyond where we are now does not really make any sense to me.

The last 150 years has seen the fastest rate of social, economic and scientific development in the history of humanity so why would we be reaching an end point or plateauing?

Surely the natural extrapolation is that increasing change will take us to new places stranger still than where we are now.

Maybe it’s natural, in explaining how we got here, to forget that we’re still travelling.

Still, I mustn’t knock a book that has made me think and I have enjoyed writing this.

There is a lot in there that I have discarded now but there is a lot that remains and I would be interested to hear what anyone else thinks on any of the subjects.