The Evolution of Reason

Man, we have now reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason scarcely existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction… Our sensations are here to attract us, or to deter us, our memories to warn or encourage us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain our behavior, so that on the whole we may prosper and our days be long in the land.

William James, “Talks to Teachers,” 1902

In other words, the human mind did not evolve because the ability to devise complex philosophical systems promoted our survival.

Group Affection and Group Aversion

In every region of the modern world, where tribes still exist as independent entities, we find two opposite dispositions at work – one being group affection, which holds together the members of a community, and group aversion, which keeps competing, evolving societies apart. These opposite dispositions are not confined to human societies; they are to be seen at work in the communities into which all social animals are divided. We may assume, therefore, that in the very earliest stages of man’s evolution, even in his simian stages, “human nature” was already converted into an instrument for securing group isolation.

Sir Arthur Keith, 1947

Consequences; Good and Evil, Part II – A World of Euthyphros

Euthyphro appears in one of the dialogs of Socrates as a man so cocksure he knew the difference between good and evil that he was prosecuting his own father for murder. Socrates, using his well known dialectic technique, revealed to both Euthyphro and his listeners that he really didn’t have a clue. It turned out he had no logical basis for his certainty in matters of morality. No one has really come any closer to providing one in the ensuing two and a half millennia, and yet, if the daily flood of moral denunciations and ostentatious public piety on the Internet are any indication, there are more Euthyphros about than ever before.

We flatter ourselves about our unique ability to reason, but it doesn’t quite live up to the hype. In fact, our intellects are blunt tools. Normally, we respond to our environments emotionally, like other animals. By “emotionally” I don’t mean “hysterically.” I merely mean we act according to innate predispositions and preconceived notions that have little if any connection with intelligent thought. We really have little choice in the matter. It’s the way we’re programmed to interact with others of our species. If we tried to apply logical thought to each such interaction, we would be as awkward as someone who tried to apply logical thought to each step in walking. Our perceptions of good and evil are part of this mental software, and we perceive them as absolutes, just as other animals do. Why? Because they work best that way, or at least they did at the time our morality evolved. There weren’t a whole lot of philosophers around in those days, and morality didn’t promote our survival as something relative we had to stop and carefully think about each time we applied it. It promoted our survival as an imperative, as an absolute. Today we still experience it as in imperative and an absolute, as something having a real, objective existence of its own outside of ourselves. In fact, it really doesn’t.

This wasn’t a problem 100,000 years ago. Today, it is potentially a big problem. We have experienced vast social changes in a time that is very short when measured on an evolutionary timescale. Our mental software has had no chance to evolve in response to the changes. It is no longer clear that the way in which we perceive good and evil and act according to those perceptions promotes our survival. In fact, in the context of our current societies, “moral” behavior may well be self-destructive. Assuming we decide survival is still a worthy goal, we can no longer afford to be as self-assured as Euthyphro.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that we are programmed to have a dual moral code. I have already mentioned it in earlier posts as the Amity – Enmity Complex. As Sir Arthur Keith put it,

The process which secures the evolution of an isolated group of humanity is a combination of two principles which at first sight seem incompatible – namely, cooperation with competition. So far as concerns the internal affairs of a local group, the warm emotional spirit of amity, sympathy, loyalty, and of mutual help prevails; but so far as concerns external affairs – its attitude towards surrounding groups – an opposite spirit is dominant: one of antagonism, of suspicion, distrust, contempt, or of open enmity.

Hate is as intrinsic to our moral universe as love. But the result of hate directed against “out-groups” containing tens or hundreds of millions of members armed with modern weapons is quite different than that of hate directed against a small neighboring clan armed with sticks and stones. If the “other” is another country, the result may be a general war in which tens of millions of citizens on either side who have been inoffensively living their lives are marshaled into armies to kill each other, or slaughtered by bombing raids on their cities, or overrun by the enemy and subjected to all the familiar horrors of war. If the “other” is another social class, the result may be the murder of 100 million “bourgeoisie,” and, as we have seen in the case of Russia and Cambodia, the annihilation of a large percentage of the most intelligent and productive citizens, effectively resulting in national decapitation. If the “other” is another ethnic group, the result may be a Holocaust. If the “other” is another religious sect, the results may be the indiscriminate slaughter and devastation of another Crusade or Jihad, not to mention the butchery of hundreds of thousands of “witches.”

Sometimes, shaken by all this devastation, we try to adjust our moral systems, creating new “evils” to combat the old ones. Irrational hatred of Jews becomes the evil of anti-Semitism. Irrational hatred of other races becomes the evil of racism. Irrational hatred of those who seem to be better off than ourselves becomes the evil of class warfare. Irrational hatred of other religious groups becomes the evil of bigotry. The creation of all these new “evils” as a way to combat irrational hatred of specific out-groups is like trying to behead the hydra. In the end, the hatred is natural. It will always seek an object, and, if one is put out of bounds, it will find a new one. We must stop treating symptoms. Instead, we need to grasp the nature of the disease itself. We must come to grips with the reality that it is our nature to hate as much as it is our nature to love. We must understand the fundamental behavioral traits which give rise to hate and control them, because hate no longer promotes our survival, it threatens it. In a world full of nuclear weapons the stakes are getting higher every day.

If you’re looking for corroborating data, visit some Internet forums. You won’t find many disinterested philosophers. Rather, you’ll find lots of people whose “points of view” are easily recognizable as corresponding to some familiar ideological dogma. They are all busily demonizing people who subscribe to dogmas different from their own, with posts and comments that commonly call the moral virtue of their opponents into question, even as they rush for the moral high ground themselves. Take a look at what any one of these specimens says about any given ideologically loaded topic, that is, any topic that happens to part of the ideological box they live in in one fashion or another, and you will find that you can predict with very high accuracy what their opinion will be on any other topic that happens also to be a part of that particular box. This does not bespeak independent, logical thought. Rather, it is characteristic of a species with a hard-wired predisposition to adopt a dual moral code, and which happens to be intelligent enough to distinguish in-groups and out-groups in terms of ideas as well as more mundane features such as facial features and smell.

If we want to survive, we will probably have to learn to do a better job of controlling these behavioral traits. It won’t be easy. One finds some of the most intelligent thinkers around, people who reject the existence of supernatural beings and who accept the hypothesis that morality is an evolved characteristic without a quibble, turning around and, virtually in the next breath, referring to morality as if it were a real, objective thing, universally applicable not only to themselves, but to others as well. Take, for example, Richard Dawkins. In chapter 6 of his recently published book, “The God Delusion,” he explicitly accepts the evolutionary roots of morality. In the very next chapter, he turns around and presents the moral Zeitgeist, a version of morality that changes with the times, but which Dawkins otherwise endows with all the characteristics of an objective moral code and an absolute legitimacy that transcends anything that could properly apply to the subjective trait he describes in the previous chapter. He treats religious believers with all the animosity normally reserved for an out-group, and, at least in my opinion, happens to suffer from a rather commonplace variant of European anti-Americanism. You can read the book and see if you detect the tell-tale symptoms yourself. If a man as brilliant as Dawkins can’t escape the moral treadmill, things don’t look too promising for the rest of us. Still, I suspect it would behoove us to continue groping for a solution.

What might that solution look like? The problem is extremely complex, and I have no infallible nostrums. However, the solution will certainly not take the form of amoral behavior, or failure to act consistently according to a fixed moral code. However, it will need to be a moral code that, while compatible with the kind of creature we are, will promote our survival, rather than our self-destruction. It will also need to be one for which even Euthyphro could provide a rational justification. We will consider what such a code might look like in a later post.

Scientific Conformity

This New York Times science column linked by Instapundit gets it about right on scientific conformity.

As the author notes:

The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.”

Of course, conformity among environmentalists is the current cause célèbre, but I see the same thing going on in the response of the scientific mainstream to “cold fusion.” Despite the intriguing results of recent experiments at SPAWAR by seemingly competent and credible researchers, I continue to hear deprecating remarks by other scientists who probably haven’t read a research paper on cold fusion in the last five years.

Scientific conformity can have unfortunate results. For example, the DOE recently stood up ARPA-E, its version of the military’s DARPA. It received a generous chunk of change ($400M) to fund “high risk, high payoff” research. The solicitation for research proposals for this money hit the street some time ago, and the proposals are already in and are currently being reviewed. I may be pleasantly surprised, but I suspect no cold fusion research will be funded. If not, I hope the cold fusion community screams bloody murder, and someone in Washington listens.

Well, let’s wait and see.

German Anti-Americanism Watch: A Tale of Two Articles

I have to laugh in spite of myself when I read two recent Spiegel articles by German “objective journalist” Gregor Peter Schmitz side by side. In the first, entitled “Germans are America Fans Again,” Schmitz cites a Pew Research poll according to which 64% of Germans have a positive attitude towards the US, as opposed to 31% in the last year of the Bush Administration. Obama’s approval rating is an astounding 93%. So far, so good. After all, German America bashers have always told us that negative attitudes there about the US were “all about Bush.”

But wait! The very next day, we find Schmitz busily reinforcing quasi-racist German stereotypes of Americans in a ludicrously biased article about the Gates affair. We don’t have to wait until the end of Schmitz’ latest fairy tale to find out what the “moral” of the story will be. He spoon-feeds it to his readers in the opening section with the unctuous observation that researchers in Gates’ W.E.B. Du Bois Institute have continued to warn us that, “while open racism in the United States is largely taboo, the hidden variety is still the rule.”

Schmitz’ description of how the affair went down is an admirable example of typical Spiegelesque “modification” of reality to fit the narrative. This involves carefully tip-toeing along the borderline between blatant lies and mere “poetic license.” Here is his version:

The policeman asked for identification, Gates looked for it and, perhaps after raising a protest, showed it. The policeman asked more questions, insistently, at which Gates asked for his name and service number. When the officer didn’t answer, Gates asked, “Are you refusing to answer me while you’re a white policeman and I’m a black man?” Things went back and forth, became louder, one word led to the next, and then the reports of what happened diverge. One thing is clear: The policeman arrested Gates in front of his own house for “disorderly conduct,” meaning resistance against state power (Staatsgewalt).

Of course, Schmitz knows that his German readers aren’t likely to read the police report of the affair, which gives an entirely different version of events. An excerpt, written by Officer Crowley, who made the arrest:

As I stood in plain view of this man, later identified as Gates, I asked if he would step out onto the porch and speak with me. He replied, “No, I will not.” He then demanded to know who I was. I told him that I was “Sgt. Crowley from the Cambridge Police” and that I was “investigating a report of a break in progress” at the residence. While I was making this statement, Gates opened the front door and exclaimed, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” I then asked Gates if there was anyone else in the residence. While yelling, he told me that it was none of my business, and accused me of being a racist police officer.” … Gates then turned on me that I had no idea who I was “messing” with and that I had not heard the last of it.”… Gates again asked for my name, which I began to provide. Gates began to yell over my spoken words by accusing me of being a racist police officer and leveling threats he wasn’t someone to mess with. Gates continued to yell at me. I told Gates that I was leaving the residence and that if he had any other questions regarding the matter, I would speak to him outside the residence… My reason for wanting to leave the residence was that Gates was yelling very loud and the acoustic of the kitchen and foyer were making it difficult for me to transmit pertinent information to ECC or other responding units. His reply was, “ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” …as I descended the stairs to the sidewalk, Gates continued to yell at me, accusing me of racial bias and continued to tell me that I had not heard the last of him. Due to the tumultuous manner Gates had exhibited in his residence as well as his continuous tumultuous behavior outside the residence, in view of the public, I warned Gates that he was becoming disorderly. Gates ignored my warning and continued to yell, which drew the attention of both the police officers and citizens, who appeared surprised and alarmed by Gates’ outburst.

And so on. There were many witnesses to the affair, including numerous officers who were not white. None of them has disputed Officer Crowley’s version. Obama obviously realizes it’s accurate, because he’s in full damage control mode, furiously rowing back on his comment “that the Cambridge police acted stupidly,” and inviting Gates and Crowley to the White House for a propaganda photo op. There was definitely racial profiling going on here, but by Gates, not Officer Crowley. Needless to say, Schmitz is still playing dumb. After all, he has to play to the quasi-racist anti-American stereotypes of his newly baptized “pro-American” audience. Continuing with his pious morality play, he lugubriously informs us that,

“This brings back memories that are easily repressed in the Age of Obama: Of black fellow students at Harvard who tell of how security often required them to show identification on the university grounds. Of a female friend in Harvard Law School who came from a simple black family in Philadelphia, and hardly dared to report to classes in the elite university. Of the fact that even in the U Street clubs in Washington the lines in front of the clubs are still often divided according to race – even though almost everyone in the district voted for Obama.”

Coming from a German, this is really enough to choke a camel. I regularly work with talented young black professors who have received government research grants. I know for a fact that they’re favored in getting those grants, because I’ve personally taken part in the selection process. They aren’t chosen over more qualified whites, but they’re invariably given the benefit of the doubt if the competition is close. As for the U Street clubs, I don’t frequent them myself, and suspect the many German tourists one encounters around the Mall don’t get up there very often either. If they did, I strongly suspect they’d find that Schmitz’ yarn is complete bullshit. I challenge him or anyone else to document racial prejudice at the clubs.

Meanwhile, as Schmitz sheds crocodile tears over race relations in the US, things aren’t exactly rosy back home. I’ve personally read the caveat “For Germans Only!” in German classified ads for apartments. I personally know of Russian acquaintances who have called about apartments and been rejected, and then learned that the apartment was available when a native speaker with no accent called the same number. Walk the streets in any large city in Germany and you’ll see plenty of black people. Where are the black university professors in Germany? Where are the black CEO’s in Germany? Where are the influential black politicians in Germany? For that matter, where does one find representatives of Muslim or any other minorities in important positions in Germany, other than in sports or entertainment? How is it that it never occurs to Herr Schmitz’ colleagues to chronicle the pervasive racism in German society, when they’re obviously so concerned about any apparent occurrence of it in America, whether bogus or not? Articles about racism there in the mainstream media are as rare as hen’s teeth.

So you think German anti-Americanism has disappeared in the brave new world of Obama? Dream on!

Red Flag: Israeli Fighters Over Nevada

F-22 Raptor

Helian Unbound military correspondents in Las Vegas report sighting a couple of stately AWACS planes, which often fly in the exercises, as well as a bevy of the snazzy new F-22 Raptors.

NPR, Israel, and the “Progressive” Narrative

On my way to work this morning, I happened to turn on NPR in the middle of a story about the miseries of Bedouins, who were apparently being forced to live near an unsanitary dump. Bedouins exist in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, much of north Africa, and a host of other countries, but I knew with virtually absolute certainty which country was the scene of these unfortunate events. Surely, you, too, can guess unless you’ve been asleep for the last 40 years. Of course! It was Israel.

NPR, in common with the BBC, its big cousin on the other side of the pond, promotes the “progressive” narrative. At this point in time, one of the slats in this particular dogmatic box happens to be hatred of Israel. As a result, the Bedouin story was “news” because it cast Israel in a negative light. If it had happened in any other country not on the current list of “progressive” bad guys, it would not have been “news.”

If you want to fact check me on this, just follow the “news” at the NPR or BBC websites for a week or so. You’ll see the same pattern repeated over and over. In modern parlance, this is referred to as “objective journalism.”

Consequences: Good and Evil, Part I

Good and Evil. They are only real within our minds, impossible to extract from a thicket of emotions and predispositions. They are inseparable from our consciousness. They are subjective, but they are real, they exist. It is impossible to set them aside for detached, objective analysis because they are a part of us. Studying them is like trying to study a raging whirlpool when you are caught in the middle of it. Their existence predates that of our species by millions of years, and they first evolved in minds incapable of even attempting to understand or second guess them. We have inherited them from our hominid ancestors, and experience them as absolutes, just as other animals do. They defy understanding because they are part of us, can never be “turned off,” and so are not subject to cool, logical analysis from a distance. We cannot think about them without feeling them in the background, insisting, “Yes, we do exist outside of your mind, yes, we are real, yes, we are absolute, yes, we are universally valid.” It is easy enough to understand morality and why it exists. It is much more difficult, once we do understand it, to come up with logically supportable, objective reasons why we really “should” do anything at all. Obviously, we cannot deal with the topic of human moral behavior and all its ramifications in a single post. We will make a start.

To begin, let us consider why morality exists to begin with. As with everything else I will write on the subject, what I write here are hypotheses. Some of the hypotheses will be “stronger” than others, depending on how much supporting information is available to back them up. When it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of morality, it seems to me the hypotheses presented here are very strong in that respect, but certainly not complete. To confirm them, we must understand the fundamental physical processes in the brain that result in consciousness, including consciousness of what we perceive as right and wrong, and how those processes are affected by what we experience. Such knowledge is not beyond our reach, and I am confident we will acquire it as long as we remain free to search and inquire.

My first and basic hypothesis, then, is that morality is an evolved characteristic. As I pointed out in an earlier post, it is not difficult to understand why it evolved; “We all have desires. However, others desire the same things. A state of affairs in which each individual laid claim to the same scarce resources, and was willing to battle all others to the death to acquire them would not be conducive to our survival. On the other hand, if something in the consciousness of the individuals in a group caused them to share the available resources according to rules familiar to all, derived from certain fundamental principles, it would enhance the chances that the individuals in the group would survive. It would give them an advantage over others not possessing the same quality.”

The concept of morality as an evolved characteristic, hard-wired in our brains, appeared shortly after Darwin published “The Origin of Species.” Indeed, Jean Meslier had suggested that our concepts of good and evil existed as a result of natural causes more than a century earlier; “The law that compels man not to harm himself, is inherent in the nature of a sensible being, who, no matter how he came into this world, or what can be his fate in another, is compelled by his very nature to seek his welfare and to shun evil, to love pleasure and to fear pain.”

Much more could be said about the reasons for the hypothesis that morality evolved. Those reasons have been set forth convincingly and in great detail by many writers more capable than me. For example, copious supporting evidence as well as citations of much related work by others may be found in the works of Robert Ardrey and Sir Arthur Keith. In particular, see “A New Theory of Human Evolution” by the latter. For more than a hundred years after Darwin published his theory, these thinkers were largely ignored by those whose minds were closed by blind faith in religious or ideological verities. It’s encouraging to note that, as these religious and dogmatic blinders have weakened and frayed, a little light has begun to trickle through. Forty years ago the very mention of human nature based on innate predispositions was politically incorrect. Today, it is accepted almost as a commonplace.

What, then, are the consequences? If morality, like everything else about us, exists because it has evolved, the theological basis for good and evil disappears. If they did not come from God, then the basis for claiming that they are absolute and have an objective existence independent of the human mind disappears as well. If we accept the hypothesis, then morality is subjective. If human beings ceased to exist, then human notions of good and evil would cease to exist with them. In later posts, we will examine the implications of these conclusions.

The Conservative Narrative of Yesteryear: Observations of a Monday Morning Quarterback

Europe in 1848

We have already observed that the form of nationalism, which reposes on the basis of a common language, is, from the nature of that basis, aggressive in its tendencies.

Not much of a stretch there. They were referring to German nationalism.

…the supremacy of race is not the principle on which the Austrian empire has been built up, or can be maintained.

The Austrian Empire collapsed into pieces determined on the basis of nationality 70 years later. As for Italy, scene of some of the year’s most spectacular revolutionary eruptions, the editors were not sanguine about its population’s readiness for self-rule, and, like our own conservatives in the cold war, suggested that “anti-Communist” dictators were needed to save it from the forces of darkness:

No men have less political sagacity than the modern Italians, and it is the singular mixture of indolence and vanity of which the national character is compounded that has ever kept them in ignorance of political science, and which, on the downfall of their absolute governments, has exposed them to the seduction of French democracy, and plunged them into excesses that disgrace the name of Cristendom… The Socialist and Communistic party (my emphasis) – in other words, the Italian “liberals” – dreaded, above all things, the quiet establishment of a limited monarchy.

Referring to the murder of one of the Pope’s ministers, the staunchly Protestant editors of the Quarterly plead for the temporal government of the Pope!

With him fell the temporal government of the Pope – the last hope of social order.

(!)

On the possibility of intervention in Italy by Britain’s ally, Russia, to “restore order”:

What if Russia, who has hitherto been a watchful though inactive observer of these transactions, should, under such circumstances, offer herself as an ally… to the King of Naples? Is our Foreign Secretary prepared to advise his sovereign to unite in such an event, her fleet to that of France, and aid the spoliation of our ally?

Apparently so. Five years later the Russian ally had become the enemy in the Crimean War. Moving on to the question of Italian unity:

We are well aware of the cry for an Italy, one and indivisible, but that vision is older than the Treaties of Vienna themselves, and does not seem, even after all the efforts and all the successes of the Italian revolutionists, to be one jot more rational or more feasible than it originally was.

In fact, a dozen years later, the final unification of Italy was all but complete, although the capital could not be moved to Rome until 1871.

…the great powers who guaranteed the Treaty of Westphalia (ending the 30 Years War in 1648) had thereby indirectly declared the political unity of Germany to be inconsistent with the general interests of Europe… It was thus necessary… to avoid establishing in the heart of Germany, and in the person of any one of its members (German states) a State whose power of aggression would be out of all proportion to the means of resistance which the combined action of the other States could present.

That certainly would have sounded prophetic in 1940.

The fall of the throne of the Bourbons in France was, in a great degree, the penalty which they paid for having assisted the British colonists in North America, in violation of the law of nations, to emancipate themselves from the mother country.

I wonder when they finally stopped bitching about it?

It is to be hoped, however, that after the pursuit of German Unity shall have been abandoned, it will have served, like the pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone, to produce indirect results of more value to the German people, than any which could have been directly achieved by the success of the experiments in the Frankfort Laboratory.

German unification, like Italian unification, was a reality less than a quarter of a century later. In retrospect, it seems they were inevitable. Yet the writers for the Quarterly were not stupid men. They were the best and the brightest that conservative thought had to offer in their day. The moral of the story? Perhaps that we are all fallible, and should not be too quick to accept popular certainties. Reality has a bad habit of intruding and making the certainties of yesterday the mockeries of tomorrow.

In a later post, we will consider whether the “liberals” of 1848 fared any better.

Unclench Your Fist or We Will Get Vewy, Vewy Angwy!

Another “progressive” fantasy slams up against the brick wall of reality. Hillary borrows Sarah’s “pit bull with lipstick” schtick.

Update: The mullahs are impressed.