The Stalinists were masters of the art. Their arch-villain was Trotsky, who appears in Orwell’s novels, Animal Farm and 1984 as Snowball and Emanuel Goldstein, respectively. He figured largely in the Great Purge Trials of the 1930’s. For example, from the Indictment of the trial of the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” that doomed Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and many other once powerful Bolsheviks in 1938, the arch-villain is identified:

This (the crimes attributed to the bloc) applies first of all to one of the inspirers of the conspiracy, enemy of the people TROTSKY. His connection with the Gestapo was exhaustively proved at the trials of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center in August 1936, and of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre in January 1937.

The investigation has definitely established that TROTSKY has been connected with the German intelligence service since 1921, and with the British Intelligence Service since 1926.

and then the sub-demons are associated with him:

Thus, the accused N. N. Krestinsky, on the direct instruction of enemy of the people TROTSKY, entered into treasonable connections with the German intelligence service in 1921.

The accused K. G. Rakovsky, one of L. TROTSKY’s most intimate and particularly trusted men, has been an agent of the British Intelligence Service since 1924, and of the Japanese intelligence service since 1934.

and so on, and so on. Today, the “progressive” Left, is playing the same game with their foes in the Tea Party movement. In this case, the arch-villain is the John Birch Society. They would have us believe that there are more Birchers behind every Tea Party Bush than there were Reds infesting the halls of government in Joe McCarthy’s most fevered imagination. Examples of the ploy abound. For example, from OpEdNews.com’s “Tea Party Reminiscent of John Birch Society,”

The surge of the Tea Party as a potential shaker and mover of the American political system is reminiscent of a movement from the sixties that became particularly popular in the bellwether state of California. The John Birch Society became active and many grassroots members attached themselves strongly to the national political figure they saw as an agent for change, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

From E.J. Dionne’s “Birch and Barry,”

The reaction to Obama has also radicalized parts of the conservative movement, giving life to conspiracy theories long buried and strains of thinking similar to those espoused by the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups in the 1950s and ’60s.

From the Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia’s “Ohio: Birch Society, Racism, More Tea Party Ugliness,”

CityBeat first wrote about the Springboro Tea Party last month, detailing the agenda for a rally planned Saturday that’s heavy with speakers from the John Birch Society and movies about far-right conspiracy theories.

and so on. Google the connection, and you’ll find the meme repeated like a mantra on the websites of the left. Of course, the Right does exactly the same thing, with such worthies as Marx and Lenin in the leading role as Über-villain. The goal is the same in either case. To arouse the emotions associated with human morality by attempting to connect ones political opponents with some indubitable evil, and then use those emotions as weapons against them.  Of course, many other morally loaded tactics are employed for the same purpose. It’s interesting to consider the matter from first principles.

To begin, what is morality? The answer is that it is a term used to describe innate human behavioral traits that evolved at a time when the relations between human groups bore little or no resemblance to those between the massive political parties, nation states, and other social groups of our own time. “Good” and “evil” are constructs that exist in our imaginations for the sole reason that they promoted our survival in times now long forgotten. They have no other mode of existence, and cannot possibly be “legitimate” as objects in themselves, by virtue of the subjective nature of their existence. However, the modes of political conflict described above positively require them to be legitimate and real, else the arguments predicated on the reality of one’s own good, and one’s opponents evil, evaporate into the mist. In other words, the powerful emotions evoked in this process of mutual villification are fundamentally irrational.  Seen in this light, they emerge as what they really are; manifestations of human behavioral traits that are irrelevant to the goals pursued in terms of the reasons they exist to begin with. By evoking them in modern political struggles, one is not serving a holy cause. Rather, one is manipulating the human emotions associated with morality as political weapons.

To the extent that we consider survival an attractive goal, it would be well for us to finally climb off of this treadmill of morality. In our daily interactions with other human beings, that goal is impossible. We lack the intelligence to routinely substitute rational analysis for emotional response, or for behavior according to “human nature” at that level. However, it is to be hoped that the same is not true of political decisions involving the fate of thousands or millions of people. The history of the last hundred years has provided ample justification for this hope. Time after time, the identification of whole racial, social, or religious groups as “evil” has resulted in mass slaughter. The mayhem is still with us today, and can be expected to continue into the future. It is not to be expected that we will invariably be fortunate enough to be among “the good.” We could just as easily find ourselves among “the evil,” and share the fate suffered by millions of others in recent history. The idea that what happened so recently in such advanced countries as Germany and Russia “can’t happen here” is an illusion.

Under the circumstances, we would be wise to keep the genie of good and evil in its bottle. We should at least make an effort to substitute reason for emotion. In practice, this would imply a conscious decision to limit our judgment of the opinions of others to the categories “true” and “false,” and dispense with “good” and “evil.” As weapons, “good” and “evil” can be highly effective. If we routinely use them against political opponents, we are, in a very real sense, threatening them. They may quite reasonably conclude that they have no alternative but to wield the same weapons as the only effective way of fighting back. It would be better to refrain from using the weapons to begin with. The history of the last hundred years has amply demonstrated what is sure to follow if we don’t.

De Dreu took special interest in parochial altruism, in which people self-sacrifice for the sake of their group or defensively hurt competing groups. He and his colleagues have now fingered oxytocin as a likely neurobiological mechanism that drives how humans regulate intergroup conflict.

Some animal studies had shown that oxytocin encourages protectionist behavior, but this marks the first study to illustrate a similar effect in humans. De Dreu and his colleagues had reasoned that this “dark side” of cooperation makes sense from an adaptive, evolutionary perspective of competing groups.

“We were interested in seeing where oxytocin’s ‘niceness’ breaks down,” De Dreu told LiveScience.

In three experiments involving competing three-person groups in a variation of the prisoner’s dilemma, De Dreu and his associates found that males given a whiff of oxycontin via nasal spray tended to act in the interests of their own group, and that they were affected similarly by oxycontin regardless of their natural tendencies to cooperate.  However, quoting from the article,

But the real twist came during the third experiment involving 79 males, who took either oxytocin or a placebo. Rather than having a certain amount of money to spend, the group decision-makers simply chose whether to cooperate or not cooperate with an outsider group.

That choice led to four possible outcomes, depending on what the outsider group also chose. The two groups received a moderate reward if they both cooperated and a lesser reward if they both chose to not cooperate. But if an outsider group chose to not cooperate, the in-group was better off also not cooperating. Cooperating with outsiders who had chosen not to cooperate led to the worst-case scenario.

Decision-makers under the influence of oxytocin acted protectively by not cooperating with an opposing group, as researchers had predicted. Such noncooperation in the third experiment was considered a preemptive strike or defensive aggression, because the group acted to protect itself against possible harm from the outsiders.

The third experiment also showed that oxytocin encouraged defensive aggression against outsider groups when there was greater fear of such groups, De Dreu explained. Researchers manipulated the fear factor by increasing the financial hurt that outsiders could inflict upon a group.

The article continues,

…the results may have relevance to understanding male-dominated conflicts, ranging from prehistoric hunter-gatherer skirmishes to (modern warfare).

Gee, ya think?  In fact, the existence of the Complex is as obvious as the influence of innate predispositions hard-wired in the brain on human moral behavior in general.  It is also just as uncomfortable a truth to secular and religious ideologues who prefer a version of morality with more legitimacy than an evolved behavioral trait.  As a result, psychologists and a host of other researchers who should know better have managed to studiously ignore its existence for many years.  They were finally forced to begin accepting fundamental truths about the real nature of morality by a rapid series of recent revelations about the brain emanating from neuroscience and related disciplines.  It was only a matter of time before the other shoe would drop. 

One hopes many other researchers will join De Dreu in studying the human behavioral traits associated with hostility and agression directed at “out-groups.”  No aspect of our nature has played a more decisive role in our history, and if we continue to ignore it, we will do so at an ever increasing risk.  Once we finally recognize the existence of these phenomena, perhaps we will also realize that the highly dubious value of attempts to promote the welfare of mankind by finding a “higher morality.”

For those still having trouble seeing the obvious, the “enmity” side of the Complex is once again on display in Kyrgyzstan, where, at last report, 75,000 members of the Uzbek minority were fleeing their homes, and scores were killed and hundreds injured.  It is another data point to add to the many thousands of others that have occurred throughout recorded human history.  One would think it had happened enough by now to convince even the most obtuse among us that human morality is a dangerous nostrum to apply in dealing with the relations between nation states, ethnic groups, political parties, and the other types of social groups of unprecedented size that have emerged very recently in human history. 

Morality is, inevitably, a two edged sword.  For every “good” defended, an “evil” must be identified and defeated.  The identification of those who are “evil” is typically arbitrary, and can quickly change to include those who were previously seen as “good.”  Consider, for example, the Jews in Israel, who were the darlings of the left, and “good” at the time the movie “Exodus” was made, but have now become “evil” for those of the same political persuasion because they are no longer well suited to play the role of “victims” to be “saved.”  Similarly, those who were only considered different a few years ago can quickly be perceived as the evil enemy in response to any number of stimuli in the form of social or political change, heightened competition for resources, ideological and religious propaganda, etc., and, literally overnight, become the victims of bloody witchhunts. 

This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, and is becoming increasingly murderous and destructive.  Is it not high time for us to finally learn to know ourselves and climb off the treadmill?

As his hyperbolic title implies, Navarrette shares the pervasive heartburn on the left over the Arizona immigration law.  In his words,

(Arizona Governor Jan) Brewer just signed SB 1070, a disgraceful anti-immigration and pro-racial-profiling law, to give local and state cops throughout the state the chance to suit up and play border patrol agent. Why shouldn’t she get the chance to suit up and play general?”

In accordance with established precedent, he never bothers to actually quote the sections of the law he finds “anti-immigration” and “pro-racial-profiling.”  There’s good reason for that.  There aren’t any.  In fact, the law specifically prohibits racial profiling.  For example, according to Section 2B,

A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not consider race, color, or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution.

and similar wording appears in Sections 3C and 5D.  One could, of course, claim that the “real” intent of the law is to condone racial profiling in spite of its repeated and explicit rejection thereof if it were impossible for law enforcement officers to reasonably form the suspicion that someone was in the country illegally for any other reason.  However, that claim is nonsense, based as it is on the supposition that nothing in the dress, manner, or behavior of an individual could possibly lead an experienced law enforcement officer to suspect such a thing.

In fact, the idea that SB1070 condones racial profiling is so absurd that no one who has actually read the short, ten page law could rationally make such a claim.  I suspect that’s the reason for the now familiar claim we’ve heard from the likes of Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano that they haven’t actually read the bill.  It gives them an out.

In fact, the Arizona law is pretty lame stuff, and it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss is about unless one realizes that ones opinion concerning it happens to be a litmus test that distinguishes those who live in the ideological box on the left from those who live in the ideological box on the right in this country.  In other words, its something like the Three Chapters controversy, which raised furious passions in the days of the Emperor Justinian, even though no one outside of a seminary could distinguish what it was the two sides were actually fighting about today, or the controversy over whether Communion in both kinds was permissible or not, a question over which a long series of wars were fought, even though not one person in a thousand could explain the difference between the two sides today.  It serves as a similar red flag in our own day, inflaming the passions of the partisans of the two sides, although it is otherwise unlikely to have a significant effect on the inhabitants of Arizona, whether there legally or not.  Hence Mr. Navarrette’s furious pronunciamiento against the “rogue state.”

Once he has put the oppressive tyrants of Arizona in their place with sufficient contempt, Navarrette regales us with accounts of all the wonderful things the Administration is doing to prevent illegal immigration.  For example,

So I can tell you what the border patrol agents on the ground would tell you: The U.S.-Mexico border has never been more fortified. There are now more than 20,000 border patrol agents on the federal payroll. That’s more agents than any other federal enforcement agency, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those agents apprehend people and deport them at a feverish clip. In fact, it was recently announced that the Obama administration deported more people last year than the Bush administration during its final year in office.

Of course, what all these wonderful and praiseworthy efforts have in common is that they are completely ineffective.  Those who are deported “at a feverish clip” merely suffer the inconvenience of having to re-cross the border, taking better care not to get caught the second time around.  Navarrette continues,

If the federal government does take border enforcement seriously, critics might ask: Why are there still people trying to enter the United States illegally? Simple. We can dig a moat, deploy an army, build walls or call in an airstrike, but desperate people will always find a way to go around, under or over any impediment in their path to a better life.

In fact, history provides ample proof of the fact that moats, walls, and airstrikes are not necessary to stop the illegal crossing of borders.  What is required is the political will to stop it, and that will is lacking.  It is cold comfort that the Republicans also lacked that will.  Why compare failures?  Navarrette aims another slap at the Republicans in his closing paragraph:

There’s only one of those (magic bullets for stopping illegal immigration). It involves fining, arresting and prosecuting the employers of illegal immigrants, including people who are, this election year, streaming into fundraisers for McCain, Brewer and other tough-talking Republicans vowing to solve a problem that many of their backers helped create.

I’m on board with that, but it’s all one, really.  We’re only arguing about how to shut the barn door now that the horses have already escaped.  The chances are slim that we’ll even bother.  After all, Navarrette is right about the Republicans.  They’re all talk.  They had eight years to do something about illegal immigration during the Bush administration and accomplished nothing.  As long as the people who keep their campaign coffers full continue to require cheap labor, we can safely assume they will continue to accomplish nothing if they regain power, all their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.  There’s nothing for it, really, but to grin and bear it.

These assertions do not mean I am in favor of allowing mankind to sink into a swamp of amoral behavior, where dog eats dog, and the powers of darkness prevail.  On the contrary, I maintain that, if our goal is to avoid such a world, we are more likely to achieve that goal by applying our weak powers of reason, such as they are, than by relying on the innate behavioral traits of our species associated with morality, which evolved because they performed a function utterly different from maximizing collective well-being in a world anything like the present, and which are, in any case, still poorly understood. 

Consider what has happened when modern human societies have attempted to maximize collective well-being by applying moral rules in the past.  In addition to identifying the “good,” whose well-being is to be maximized, they have invariably identified the “evil,” as well, those “immoral” ones who are seeking to harm the “good,” and must be defeated and, if possible destroyed.  In applying morality to achieve social goals it is not possible to nicely separate “good” and “evil.”  The innate behavioral traits associated with morality must inevitably and invariably include identification of the evil “out-group,” as well as the good “in-group.”  Don’t look believe me?  Just look at the facts; as reflected in the entire recorded history of humanity.  Consider, for example, the Nazis.  Can anyone be naive enough to believe that they were all deliberately attempting to do evil?  On the contrary, they sought to maximize the well-being of the “good,” in this case, the German people, who were believed to be closely related to each other genetically.  We know what happened to their out-group, the Jews.  Another familiar recent example is the Communists.  They sought to maximize the well-being of the proletariat, who, according to theory, would inevitably become a majority in modern societies.  In order for them to achieve the “good,” it was necessary for them to eliminate the “evil,” in the person of the bourgeoisie.  The result was 100 million innocent dead. 

Are things any different at the present time?  Consider the most self-consciously pious ideological type in modern society, the “progressive” liberal.  Think the identification of “evil” out-groups is absent from their world view?  Guess again.  Visit any of their websites and you’ll find furious rants against greedy corporations, members of the tea party movement, Republicans, global warming deniers, etc., etc. 

If we would maximize human well-being, lets attempt to apply reason instead of morality for a change.  I make this suggestion, not because I consider myself more moral or just than others, but because I would prefer to avoid the inconvencience of neighbors who are trying to kill me.  As many who experienced the attentions of  Communists in the Soviet Union, or Nazis in Germany, or were tortured and killed as “heretics” in an earlier day might have testified, that’s an all too frequent negative character trait of the “morally good.”  Turning around and declaring them “morally evil” after the fact is small comfort to the victims.  This is getting old.  It’s time we tried something different.

His latest on the subject was inspired by feedback on a talk he gave at this year’s Ted Conference from, as he puts it, ”literally thousands” of people. It would seem that many of them are no more impressed by Sam’s quest for the holy grail of scientific goodness than I am. In his words,

If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like “well-being” and “misery” are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them. Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of “good” and “evil” are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs.

Well, I’d like to think that not all of those thousands of commenters were caricatures of over-educated, atheistic nihilists.  As Sam describes them, they don’t make a lot of sense.  For example, it is logically impossible to “combat human evil while knowing that our notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are unwarranted” because the statement itself is an admission that the speaker doesn’t know what “human evil” is.  Similarly, one can’t be committed to “making the world a better place” unless he actually knows what he’s talking about when he uses the term “better.”  However, Sam is no more logical than the opposition.  In the same paragraph he implies that good and evil must have a real existence by virtue of the fact that human beings are capable of strong negative emotional responses to practices such as forcing women to wear burqas, or female genital excision.  By that logic, God must exist, too, because otherwise there would have been no one around to create the world.  For that matter, I also have a strongly negative subjective emotional response to liberal “progressives” striking ostentatious poses of public piety.  That doesn’t mean that such people are “really evil.”  It merely means that my subjective identification of “out-groups” is different from Sam’s, a difference that human moral behavior is entirely flexible enough to accommodate.  Sorry, Sam, but human emotional responses are adequately explained as the expression of evolved behavioral traits.  They do not require the existence of real good and real evil.

Sam continues,

First, a disclaimer and non-apology: Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “anti-realism,” “emotivism,” and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful.

Here I can only agree wholeheartedly.  My own thoughts on morality are based on the fundamental hypotheses that

1.  The human behavioral traits associated with morality exist because they have evolved.

2.  They evolved at a time when the nature of human relationships and human societies were much different in many respects from what they are in the modern world.

3.  Good and evil exist only as subjective mental constructs of the mind associated with these behavioral traits.  They have no objective existence independent of their manifestation in the minds of individuals.

Acceptance of these hypotheses requires, at a minimum, knowledge and acceptance of the theory that human beings have evolved as a result of a process of natural selection.  No pre-Darwinian moral philosopher could have understood or appreciated the significance of these fundamental assumptions.  Therefore, until someone can demonstrate that my hypotheses are wrong, it makes no more sense for me to learn everything they had to say about the real existence of good and evil that it would have made for Copernicus and Galileo to learn everything that had ever been written based on the assumption of a geo-centric universe. 

As for the modern effusions of the “experts on ethics,” they have a remarkable aversion to, as E. O. Wilson put it,” laying their cards on the table.”  In other words, they tend to wander off in obscure reasonings about good and evil without bothering to first explain to the rest of us why they believe such categories even exist, and, if they do exist, what the nature of their existence might be.  I have” laid my cards on the table” by setting forth the fundamental assumptions noted above.  They make it possible for others to agree or disagree with me by simply demonstrating that my hypotheses are right or wrong.  To the extent that the “experts” fail to lay their cards on the table in similar fashion, I consider what they have to say on the subject of morality irrelevant, regardless of how many articles they have published on the subject in scholarly journals.

Sam continues with the assertion that one can have a science of morality.  That is certainly true in the sense that one can seek to discover truths about its nature and the reasons for its existence.  One can also use science to examine the legitimacy of moral claims.  Hume realized long ago that good and evil are not objective things, and that one cannot, therefore, demonstrate their existence using reason.  That certainly doesn’t mean one can’t subject the phenomena associated with morality to scientific study.  One cannot, however, use science to create something that doesn’t exist.  If objective good and evil don’t exist to begin with, then they will not magically spring into existence, even if one invokes science until one is blue in the face, any more than God will spring into existence by virtue of the fact that he is subjected to scientific study. 

However, we soon discover that Sam does not refer to a “science of morality” in this limited sense.  In the following paragraphs he claims that the real, objective good consists in maximizing human well-being.  He does so rather subtly, as if embarrassed to make such a claim, but still, he makes the claim.  In his words,

I might claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a wide range of cognitive/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-being entails always having a terrified person locked in one’s basement, waiting to be sacrificed.

Notice that, though their definitions of “well-being” differ, both Sam and the worshipper of Aztec gods in the paragraph above are made to implicitly accept the claim that well-being can be equated with real moral good.  In later paragraphs, Sam confirms the surmise that he equates well-being with the objective good.  For example,

Even if there were ten thousand different ways for groups of human beings to maximally thrive (all trade-offs and personal idiosyncrasies considered), there will be many ways for them not to thrive — and the difference between luxuriating on a peak of the moral landscape and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

For instance, I think that Kant’s Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism).

These are all good questions: Some admit of straightforward answers; others plunge us into moral paradox; none, however, proves that there are no right or wrong answers to questions of human and animal well-being.

What we have then, is a version of Mill’s Utilitarianism with “well-being” substituted for “utility,” but with the added claim that well-being and objective good are actually the same, a claim that Mill, who explicitly rejected claims of “transcendental good” would never have made.  As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, I suspect Mill would have rejected even his own qualified version of Utilitarianism if he’d been able to sit on the shoulders of Darwin, but, unfortunately, he was born a bit too early.  He died some years after publication of “On the Origin of Species,” but before the implications of Darwin’s theory concerning morality had a chance to sink in.

In what follows, Harris addresses the objections to his “scientific morality” from a number of individuals, who all, oddly enough, agree with the notion, at least implicitly, that real objective good exists, and that it can be equated to well-being.  Far from denying that well-being and objective good are the same, they merely quibble about whether one can find adequate metrics to determine scientifically what “well-being” is.  For example, prominent among them is physicist Sean Carroll, whom Harris quotes as saying,

Surely all right-thinking people agree on the primacy of well-being.

Imagine that we are able to quantify precisely some particular mental state that corresponds to a high level of well-being; the exact configuration of neuronal activity in which someone is healthy, in love, and enjoying a hot-fudge sundae. Clearly achieving such a state is a moral good.

More importantly, it’s equally obvious that even right-thinking people don’t really agree about well-being, or how to maximize it.

And from biologist P. Z Myers, again, implicitly accepting the criterion of well-being, but rejecting the possibility of scientifically measuring it.

I don’t think Harris’s criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can’t… Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.

Of course, the elephant in the room that all these comments and counter-comments studiously avoid is the validity of the claims that a) objective good actually exists, and b) objective good can be equated with well being.  In fact, Harris seems to be aware of this, as he belatedly gets around to moving from “is” to “ought” at the end of the article:

So, while it is possible to say that one can’t move from “is” to “ought,” we should be honest about how we get to “is” in the first place. Scientific “is” statements rest on implicit “oughts” all the way down. When I say, “Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen,” I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn’t share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?

This paragraph makes no sense for a variety of reasons.  To begin, the nature of water “is” what it is regardless of the value one assigns to the means of discovering its nature.  That nature does not depend on mental processes going on in the minds of those trying to find out what it is, and it would not change a bit if those minds were living, dead, or never existed to begin with.  Furthermore, the “ought” Harris refers to has nothing to do with a moral “ought.”  It refers to the effectiveness of methods of acquiring knowledge of the nature of water.  In other words, it assumes a goal, and assigns value to the different means of achieving the goal depending on their relative effectiveness.  If someone preferred an approach different from my own to determining the true nature of water, I might conclude they are wrong, but I would not conclude they are immoral. 

The “oughts” related to human morality, on the other hand, are associated with emotional responses in the form of innate predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain.  These “oughts” can vary somewhat depending on education and culture, but display striking commonalities across widely varying societies.  We experience them as absolutes, independent of their effectiveness in achieving one goal or another.  The behavioral traits associated with morality evolved because they promoted our survival in times very different from the present.  They are not relevant to any other purpose one might name, including the well-being of mankind. 

False conclusions can be dangerous.  For example, if we falsely conclude we can fly, and walk off a cliff, we will die.  False conclusions about morality can be far more dangerous.  When the Communists tried to associate morality with their version of the well-being of mankind, they did not succeed in creating a “New Soviet Man” whose moral behavior was infinitely adaptable to suite the purpose they had in mind.  Rather, they unleashed human emotions they did not understand, resulting in the greatest episodes of mass murder and brutality mankind has ever witnessed.  One can rationally discuss whether the “well-being of mankind” is a desirable goal.  Attempting to achieve that goal by tinkering with innate behavioral traits that are as yet poorly understood is to invite disaster once again.

Continuing with Harris’ remarks:

But the consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science’s failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary — because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

Yes, we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science, but we cannot cause the well-being of conscious creatures to be identical with the real, objective good, because the real, objective good doesn’t exist, and one can’t call it into existence by an act of will.  Have the consequences of moral relativism been disastrous?  So what?  Objective good either exists or it doesn’t, and that reality will not be changed one iota by our conclusions regarding the consequences of moral relativism, or our dissatisfaction with the perception that science hasn’t achieved some noble end or other.  One wonders why Harris ever became an atheist.  After all, one can as easily claim that the decline in religious belief has been disastrous because it has deprived many people of a purpose in life.  Should we not, therefore, magically call God back into existence and make him “true,” out of concern for the suffering of these people?  If we conclude that seeing the color red has been disastrous, will it suddenly turn to green to spare our sensitivities? 

Harris doesn’t realize it, but his claim that faith-based religion is a great engine of ignorance and bigotry is itself a manifestation of human moral behavior; namely, out-group identification.  The statement is both untrue and morally loaded on the face of it.  I myself am an atheist, and would be the first to agree that religion is potentially harmful by virtue of the fact that it is not true, but “a great engine of ignorance and bigotry?”  I don’t think so.  On a general level it is simply untrue that religion has never resulted in anything good, and on the individual level, I know a host of firm religious believers who are neither ignorant nor bigots.  Harris’ identification of religious believers as an out-group in this fashion is a manifestation of moral behavior that is entirely similar to the identification of “the bourgeoisie” as an out-group by the Communists, or the Jews as an out-group by the Nazis.  It seems to me the results in those experiments in the creative application of morality did not contribute to the “well-being of mankind.”  Out-group identification is an aspect of human moral behavior that continues to be ignored as an inconvenient truth, but it exists, nevertheless.  To demonstrate that fact to himself, Harris need merely glance around him at Huffpo and take note of the furious ongoing demonization of political opponents.  If he really believes in the fantasy of a “real good” that is identical with human well-being, he might want to consider the fact that the “real evil” must inevitably accompany it.  It always has in the past.  Under the circumstances, Harris would do well to rethink his conclusion that well-being and moral good are identical.  As for the notion of “moral relativism,” I doubt that it even exists, except as a chimera of moral philosophers.  Most, if not all, human beings perceive the moral good as an absolute, because that’s the way in which it has most effectively promoted our survival. 

Continuing with Harris,

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs.

In fact, it is anything but exactly the same.  Is it really so difficult see that “the good” in the sense of a real, objective thing having an independent existence of its own is not the same as ”the good” in the sense of a useful method of finding the truth?  There is no similarity between good defined in terms of usefulness for achieving some preconceived goal, such as discovering truth, and good defined as real objective moral good, having an existence of its own independent of subjective human emotions, yet corresponding to the subjective feeling of Sam Harris and a subset of human beings who think like him.  Are all the recent revelations about the hard-wired origins and emotional nature of human moral behavior really meaningless and irrelevant?  I can understand the reluctance of some people to give up the only objective justification they have for the great joy they derive from virtuous indignation.  Unfortunately, that justification simply doesn’t exist.  There is no such thing as real, objective good, nor is there any such thing as real, objective evil, any more than there is a real, objective God.  By attempting to force them into existence Harris isn’t inaugurating a new science of morality.  He’s inaugurating a new secular religion, complete with an imaginary God of its own.

We humans are characterized by “moral” behavior that distinguishes between “good” in-groups, and “evil” out-groups, a trait that I have elsewhere referred to as the Amity/Enmity Complex.  No aspect of our nature could be so mind-bogglingly obvious, yet the neuroscientists and other experts who specialize in the workings of the human mind have yet to “discover” it.  It happens to be in conflict with ideological myths, particularly prevalent in academia, about the universal brotherhood of mankind.  Earlier generations of so-called experts willfully ignored the abundant evidence regarding the profound influence of innate, “hard-wired” predispositions on human behavior for decades on account of similar myths, until their faces were literally rubbed in the truth by advances in brain imaging techniques and other diagnostic tools.  As long as research in the field is not suppressed, their faces will eventually be rubbed in the truth of the Amity/Enmity Complex as well.  When that happens, I suspect they will see the question of hate speech in a rather different light.

Among other things, they are likely to notice that “hate speech” is only recognized as such when directed at an in-group.  At the time when expressions of anti-American hate reached their most extreme levels in Germany and elsewhere, those who were most active in spewing that hate characterized their vicious diatribes as “objective criticism.”  As one on the receiving end of their hate speech, I found their rationalizations absurd, and yet I don’t doubt they actually believed their own cant.  Americans were an out-group, and therefore, at least in their minds, incapable of being victims of hate speech. 

It is for that reason that attempts by government to censor hate speech, such as the Canadian Human Rights Commission or the “international organization” favored by French foreign minister Kouchner, as noted in an earlier post, are futile.  As intrinsically political organizations they must inevitably be blind to hate speech directed at their political foes, or “out-groups.”  I know of not a single instance of such an organization raising the least objection to the mindless demonization and villification of the United States, even when it was at its most extreme.  The only real antidote to hate speech is free speech.

“Hardwired Behavior” stands out somewhat from the rest of the pack in that the author, Laurence Tancredi, is both a lawyer and a psychiatrist, with expertise in neuroscience thrown in for good measure, and so approaches the subject as one who has seen some of the extremes of human behavior, and has devoted a great deal of thought to the interesting ramifications of our new insights into the workings of the human mind as they relate to our system of justice. Take, for example, the question of moral culpability. Tancredi describes cases in which heinous crimes were committed by people who do not fit the legal definition of criminal insanity, and yet whose actions, at least in his opinion, were motivated by emotional impulses that “trumped rational control.”   He describes the notion that moral choices may be biologically driven as a “revolutionary concept,” which it decidedly is not, at least in terms of the length of time the idea has been around.  Be that as it may, what Tancredi calls the “mad versus bad” distinction inherent in current legal theory is becoming increasingly blurred in the light of our expanding understanding of the mind.  In fact, the very distinction between good and evil has always been a subjective one.  That, however, doesn’t alter the fact that we perceive the distinction as absolute, and, given our nature, have no alternative but to act within the context of moral rules.  Under the circumstances, the notion of moral culpability, whether fiction or not, may be one we cannot dispense with from a legal point of view.

Tancredi is apparently aware of the earlier suppression of the very ideas he presents as such commonplaces.  See, for example, the discussion on pages 21 to 24 of his book under the subheading, “From Mind to Brain:  Completing the Circuit.”  He begins by defining the term “physicalism” in the broad sense of characteristics that are “innate to humankind,” and describes its long intellectual history.  He then suggests that the scientific revolution of the 19th century, with its insistence on intellectual rigor and the scientific method, “…brought about major changes in our perception of morality.  Natural law, or anything resembling a naturally endowed moral sense was discarded as fundamentally wrong.”  This is an absurd yarn, but an interesting one nonetheless.  It amounts to a rationalization of the ideologically motivated suppression of theories of innate behavior, including moral behavior, as something that was done in the name of “science.”  The reality, apparent enough to anyone who cares to go back and look at the source material, amply documented in the books of Robert Ardrey, is that these theories were immediately plausible to a host of scientists, including Darwin himself, that they have actually been not only plausible but obvious, at least since his time, and that they were suppressed, not for any “scientific” reason, but because they flew in the face of preferred ideological narratives that required humans to be other than they actually are.  Look at the nature of the opposition to such ideas 40 or 50 years ago.  That opposition, in the case of Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and many others did not take the form of dispassionate scientific debate.  Almost invariably, it was accompanied by demonization, vilification and ridicule.

That deep lacunae exist in Tancredi’s perception of the nature of this debate is apparent from the statement, “The idea that biology was basic to human behavior and the workings of social groups didn’t reappear in a major way until E. O. Wilson published his book “Sociobiology” in the mid-1970s.”  Thus, with a wave of the hand, the works of the likes of Ardrey and Lorenz are brushed aside as if they never existed.  In fact, as a work of popular science, “Sociobiology” was a mere afterthought to such works as “African Genesis,” “The Territorial Imperative,” and “On Aggression.”  The idea that it was somehow more significant than these earlier works in opening people’s minds could only be taken seriously by navel gazers in the ivory towers of academia.  Wilson is a brilliant thinker whose work has enlightened many.  Ardrey, however, playwright, statistician, and “pop ethologist” that he was, was a greater still.  He took little trouble to jump through all the hoops that would have made him socially acceptable in the hallowed halls of academia, but the man was a genius, with a rare gift for seeing the big picture and revealing it to others.  “African Genesis,” published in 1961, already contained most of his fundamental worldview, and his works are full of accounts of the work of other brilliant scientists, including a host of animal behaviorists whose elegant work can only inspire wonder that so many of the modern workers in the field can somehow never trouble themselves to mention them.  To the extent that Ardrey is mentioned at all today, his work is usually distorted and bowdlerized as the “Killer Ape Theory.”  Here, in a nutshell, is what Ardrey said:  “Innate predispositions have a profound influence on human behavior.”  Here, in a nutshell, is what his many academic opponents said:  “Human behavior is almost entirely determined by culture, and is “Not in our Genes.”  Ardrey was right, and they were wrong.  Obviously, academia is still having a very hard time swallowing that unpleasant fact.  As a result, instead of having the simple decency and intellectual honesty to admit that he was right, they ignore him.

Well, those of us who lived through those times know the truth, and, in any case, a man like Ardrey would surely have welcomed the victory of his ideas more than his personal vindication.  It’s unfortunate he couldn’t live to see that victory.  We are left to contemplate the implications of this whole affair for the advance of human knowledge.  Once again, we have seen the limitations of our intelligence.  Once again, we have witnessed our uncanny ability to deny the world as it is when it doesn’t conform to the world the way we want it to be.  We have learned little from the experience.  Now we see the ideological battle lines being drawn once again over the issue of global warming.  Ideological in-groups that would surely have been familiar to Ardrey dominate the debate on both sides of the issue.  They have already convinced themselves that they are bearers of ultimate truth, and that their opponents are criminals or fools.  They will filter the facts accordingly until a bludgeon in the form of another ice age or sea levels up to our necks comes along to knock them back to their senses.  Meanwhile, let us cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Liberty Leading the People

The ideologues have been overwhelmed by a deluge of facts from the emerging fields of neuroscience and brain imaging. They have been forced to accept the vindication of Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, E.O. Wilson, and all the other old ethologists and sociobiologists, although they seldom have the grace to mention their names. A sea change has occurred in acceptance of the influence of innate predispositions on human behavior in the last two decades, but the old “nurture is everything” behaviorists still cling stubbornly to a few intellectual redoubts. Among these is the notion that morality, while it may be hard wired in the brain, is actually evolving towards the “real good,” which commonly includes such things as universal human brotherhood and abhorrence of anything which might injure the “rights” of any life form, whether bird, beast or “other.” Unfortunately, it ain’t so.

Human brains are wired for a dual system of morality, one that applies to those perceived as the “in-group” and a sharply different one for those in the “out-group.” All sorts of negative characteristics are reserved for the latter. They are unclean, harmful, unjust, “immoral,” and generally evil. Eventually, some bright young neuroscientist will ignore the tabus of her elders and start systematically searching for the traces of the Complex among her fMRI and CEEG scans, and she will find them, because they are there. The Amity/Enmity Complex has always been as obvious as the noses at the end of our faces, just as the influence of innate predispositions on human behavior has been obvious to anyone with reasonable intelligence and an open mind since the days of Darwin. Human history is one, long testimony to its existence. The emergence of the Tea Party movement has provided us with some particularly striking examples of the Complex in action.

Consider, for example, the reaction on the left of the political divide among the “progressives” and liberals, those great champions of the will of the “people.” We’ve just seen exactly what limitations apply to their definition of the “people.” Anyone who disagrees with them is not included.

The Tea Party phenomenon is the only instance of the emergence of genuine mass popular movement most of them have ever witnessed. According to the latest Rasmussen survey, 24% of American voters now say they are part of the movement. Unfortunately, their views do not coincide with those of their leftist opponents. The response of the “progressives” has been to excise this particular bloc of the people with a meat cleaver.

The psychological gymnastics used to accomplish the job are classic examples of out-group identification. See, for example, the “astroturfing” meme at Daily Kos, some of the many attempts to associate the movement with violent extremists here, here, here and here, the Tea Partiers as “frauds” at Huffpo, and a particularly amusing example of the many attempts to associate the movement with racism by erstwhile warmonger Jonathan Chaitt, which includes the rather striking non sequitur,

The Tea Party is not racist. But it is an almost entirely white movement, largely driven by a sense that the government is taking money away from people like them and giving it to people unlike them, with ‘them’ understood in a racial context.

Heap the numerous attempts by these professionally pious and virtuous lovers of the “people” to discredit the movement with deceptions and smears on top of the rest, and you have a textbook case of the Enmity half of the Amity/Enmity Complex.

Far be it from me to claim that the leftists’ ideological clones on the right are any different. I merely use the Tea Party movement as a particularly striking, and therefore educational, example of an aspect of human moral behavior that the recent spate of books on the subject continue to leave out. One must hope that continuing advances in neuroscience will force them to pull their heads from the sand in the not too distant future. True, the Amity/Enmity Complex is an embarrassing aspect of our behavior, but it is also a particularly dangerous one to ignore.

They may have been buried, but they didn’t go away. The context has certainly changed, but the ideological struggle continues. Read any of the books mentioned above and you are sure to find some trace of it. An interesting example for those whose tastes don’t run to long tomes is a brief work by Frans de Waal entitled, “Primates and Philosophers.” De Waal is a professor at Emory specializing in the field of animal behavior. In Part I of his book he takes issue with “veneer theory,” something of a straw man whose proponents supposedly believe that humans are consciously competitive and selfish creatures, with morality merely a “a thin crust underneath of which boil antisocial, amoral, and egoistic passions.” Part II consists of critical comments supplied by Robert Wright, Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer, academics specializing in the area of evolutionary psychology, philosophy, and bioethics. Wright is author of the recent bestseller, “The Evolution of God.” The final section of the book consists of De Waal’s response.

As we learn in an introduction to the book written by Josiah Ober and Stephen Macedo, de Waal and his commenters all “accept the standard scientific account of biological evolution as based on random natural selection,” and “None suggests that there is any reason to suppose that humans are different in their metaphysical essence from other animals, or at least, none base their arguments on the idea that humans uniquely possess a transcendent soul.” However, immediately following these caveats, we are also informed that “A second important premise that is shared by de Waal and all four of his commentators is that moral goodness is something real, about which it is possible to make truth claims… The two basic premises of evolutionary science and moral reality establish the boundaries of the debate over the origins of goodness as it is set forth in this book.”

I actually find it stunning that comments like that could appear in a book by a bevy of perfectly respectable professors as if it were a commonplace, not even worthy of further discussion. One recalls the comment by E.O. Wilson in his book, “Consilience,” that if these people really believe that “moral goodness is something real,” they should “lay their cards on the table” and explain why. I find myself reaching for the works of John Stuart Mill to reassure myself that, even though, like the rest of us, he experienced morality as a transcendental reality, he, too, grasped the irrationality of genuinely believing in that reality. Let me lay my cards on the table. Moral goodness is not something real. The idea that it is real is irrational and basically absurd.

If it is real, pray tell, what is the nature of its existence? Anything that is real in itself cannot depend on human minds for its existence. In what sense, then, would morality exist in a lifeless universe? It would, of course, cease to exist, because it is, in fact, a subjective construct of the human brain. There is no rational justification for morality as a real thing.

I know, I am wasting my breath here. After all, how likely is it that people who have spent their whole lives laboriously absorbing the tomes of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer will suddenly realize that, while these works may be interesting intellectual curiousities, the idea that they can serve as guides to “real goodness” is nonsense? I suppose I should be content to have witnessed the remarkable paradigm shift in the acceptance of the notion of morality as an evolved trait in my lifetime. It was always a stretch to believe that all the philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists who have spent their lives on the quest for the holy grail of “real moral goodness” would suddenly see the light when they grasped the connection between morality and evolution and stop cobbling away on their transcendentalist theories. The only problem is that this cobbling away is dangerous.

It is dangerous because, to the extent that these people concoct this or that gaudy chimera of the “good in itself,” they will ignore or reject truths about human beings that are in conflict with it. These notions prevent us from knowing ourselves, and, unless we know ourselves, unless we thoroughly understand our own nature and learn to control it, we ourselves will always pose the greatest threat to our own survival.

Read the book, and you’ll see the latest version of the “New Soviet Man” these true believers are aiming at. In their Brave New World, human beings will have finally grasped the “fact” that “society” includes all mankind, and universal brotherhood will prevail. It’s merely a question of recognizing “true goodness” followed by a little judicious “reasoning,” to the effect that, because a equals b and b equals c that, (surprise, surprise) we have really been evolving towards that “true goodness” all this time, and are perfectly suited for it, and, voila, the new straightjacket is ready.

To his credit, de Waal does take a brief peek at the emperor’s new clothes. As he puts it,

It should further be noted that the evolutionary pressures responsible for our moral tendencies may not all have been nice and positive. After all, morality is very much an in-group phenomenon. Universally, humans treat outsiders far worse than members of their own community: in fact, moral rules hardly seem to apply to the outside… Obviously, the most potent force to bring out a sense of community is enmity toward outsiders. It forces unity among elements that are normally at odds. This may not be visible at the zoo, but it is definitely a factor for chimpanzees in the wild, which show lethal intercommunity violence… In the course of human evolution, out-group hostility enhanced in-group solidarity to the point that morality emerged.

It mystifies me that anyone can grasp all these things and yet still, against all odds, fail to see the light. In almost the next sentence, however, we witness the good professor stumbling over the edge of a very familiar cliff;

Humans go much further in all of this than the apes, which is why we have moral systems and apes do not. And so, the profound irony is that our noblest achievement – morality – has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior – warfare.

I have some suggestions of my own. Let us reject the straightjacket once and for all. Let us finally jettison the intellectually bankrupt notion of the “good in itself.” Let us embrace morality as something fundamental about us that will always play a decisive role in our day-to-day relationships with other human beings. At the same time, let us grasp the fact that certain aspects of our nature have been and will continue to be highly destructive in the modern world, and represent, even now, a threat to our survival, and will continue to pose such a threat unless and until we learn to understand and control them. Let us give over the chasing of gaudy moral butterflies. Our intellectual powers are limited, but, if we are to survive, we must at least try to apply them.