On the Role of Morality in the Modern World

To decide what role morality should play in our lives, it is more important to understand why it exists than to understand precisely what it is. I can discuss the sky with a five year old and be quite confident she knows what I’m talking about even if the chances that she understands the nature of the electromagnetic scattering phenomena that account for its blue color are vanishingly small. In the same way, I can be confident in discussing morality with any reasonably intelligent human being that they know what I’m talking about without being unduly concerned about whether they have read what Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and Freud had to say about it.

Morality exists because it evolved. It evolved because it improved the chances that we would survive, or, more precisely, that the genetic material we carry would survive. It has no purpose, any more than our eyes, ears or teeth have a purpose. “Purpose” implies an intelligent builder. There was no intelligent builder, and therefore no purpose. Eyes, ears and teeth exist because human beings are more likely to survive with them than without them. So it is with morality.

As a complex evolved trait, morality is likely to have a long evolutionary history. The human eye didn’t suddenly pop into existence thanks to some remarkable random mutation that resulted in an “eye gene.” Similarly, the evolutionary changes relevant to the expression of morality are not the result of a sudden mutation in anatomically modern humans that resulted in a “morality gene.” Just as many other animals are sensitive to light, many other animals exhibit behavior analogous to moral behavior in human beings, elicited by the same types of physical processes in the brain as occur in our own brains. Just as the eye didn’t evolve overnight, so morality has likely been a work in progress for a very long period of time – certainly tens of millions and more likely hundreds of millions of years.

One day in the not too distant future, we may discover the extent to which the physical processes in the brain responsible for human morality have evolved fairly recently in terms of evolutionary timescales; say, in the last three or four million years. The answer to that question should be very interesting. It may be that they have evolved very little, and that the complex moral systems we are so proud of are merely the result of our greatly expanded cognitive abilities attempting to analyze and rationalize emotional responses that are, perhaps, little changed from the time we shared a common ancestor with the apes.

Be that as it may, we can say with great confidence that the traits responsible for the expression of morality evolved long before the emergence of large nation states, whether ancient or modern. The most important recent changes likely took place during a time when we existed as small bands of hunter gatherers, all of whose members were genetically related to each other to some extent.

All this begs the question of what role a trait that evolved because it promoted our survival long ago should continue to play today in a world in which our modes of social organization, not to mention our ability to destroy each other, have undergone radical change in what amounts to, in terms of evolutionary time scales, the blink of an eye.

We certainly can’t abolish morality. We are moral creatures, and the emotional processes in the brain associated with morality will strongly influence our behavior in any case. Exactly how different individuals respond in similar situations will vary depending on factors such as culture, education, and rational analysis, but I suspect the function of the basic wiring in the brain responsible for eliciting the response, the “moral center” of the brain, if you will, will be similar from individual to individual. For example, “liberals” and “conservatives” will differ over such things as what types of behavior they consider good and evil, and who belongs in their “in-group” as opposed to their “out-group,” but look at a sample of the comments on a blog with either orientation, and you will see that the emotional nature of the responses to morally loaded situations is similar in either case. If a neuroscientist were to scan the brain of an individual from either side as it responded to the stimulus of some “hot button” issue of the day, I doubt whether he could tell the difference.

We behave morally in social situations because it is our nature to do so. We could not substitute rational thought for moral behavior in deciding our response to any given situation even if we wanted to. Even if we could somehow disconnect ourselves from our emotional brain, we simply lack the mental power necessary for anything that intellectually demanding. Thus, the fear that people will become amoral if they don’t have some “reason” to act morally, in the form of a religion, or philosophy, or respect for tradition, is ill-founded. We act morally because it is our nature to act morally. Such “reasons” can have a limited influence on exactly how we act in given situations, but we will hardly become amoral in their absence.

That may be a comforting thought, but it has its drawbacks. Assuming the ultimate goal of the individual is still to survive, it is hardly clear that the best way to accomplish that goal is to respond blindly to emotions that evolved because they happened to promote survival under conditions that no longer exist. There is no compelling reason to expect that they will continue to promote our survival in the radically different world of today. For example, it is generally considered good to fight evil. However, mankind’s most notorious icons of evil thought they were doing just that. Name any one of them you choose; Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, you name the villain. None of them were deliberately doing things they considered evil just because they wanted to be evil. On the contrary, they thought they were doing good, eliminating evil threats to the welfare of whoever they considered the “chosen people.” There exists no objective reason for asserting that they were doing anything else.

Similarly, when it comes to behavior we associate with “doing good,” the reasons for the evolution of the positive emotional response we derive from such actions often no longer exist. In small groups of hunter-gatherers, sacrificing resources for the good of others in the group promoted the survival of genetically related individuals who were likely to return the favor. In modern nation states with populations of tens or hundreds of millions, sacrificing resources for the good of others can make us feel good in exactly the same way. However, the individuals who benefit from this behavior are much less likely to be related to us, and the chance that they may someday return the favor may be vanishingly small. When the governments of modern nation states force their citizens to engage in this sort of “good” behavior, it is reasonable for them to ask whether the state exists to serve the interests of the people who live in it, or the people exist to serve the interests of the state.

Many of our best thinkers have suggested that the best way out of these and similar dilemmas is to create a new morality, tailor made to accomplish whatever noble ends they have in mind in the modern world. The problem with this is that it is not possible to mold human emotional responses like so much clay. Human nature is not infinitely flexible. As the Communists recently discovered, it is not possible to arbitrarily create new goods and new evils and then simply “reeducate” human beings to accommodate them.

We must act morally in our day to day relationships with other individuals because, given our nature, there is no alternative. If we must have a “new morality,” then, let it apply to these relationships. Let us keep it as simple as possible, as much in harmony with our nature as possible, and with the general goal of promoting harmony and preventing individuals from harming their neighbors. When it comes to such things as the relations between modern states, however, I am not convinced that relying on a tool as ancient, blunt, and out of its proper element as morality is advisable. It may well be better to decide what goals we really want to accomplish in the long term, and then pursue those goals with our limited powers of reason, such as they are.

We face many fateful decisions about our future that have no easy answers. Our continued survival is anything but assured. For better or worse, though, we must make those decisions. If we want to get it right, we had best learn to understand ourselves.

On Justifications of Morality

There is no justification of morality.  Period.  That’s the bottom line. 

Before one sets forth boldly to justify morality, it is always a good idea to first acquire an understanding of what it is.  Morality is a human trait resulting from predispositions hard-wired in the brain.  The exact manner in which it manifests itself in the form of behavior and perceptions is influenced to some extent by the environment.  Human beings are an evolved life form.  Therefore, traits such as hands, feet, eyes, ears, and morality exist because, at least at some point, they promoted our survival. 

Eyes did not suddenly spring into being in perfect form as a result of some remarkable chance mutation.  Their development can be traced back over hundreds of millions of years, presumably to the emergence of light sensitive cells on some primitive life form.  The same may be said of morality.  It is a manifestation of physical processes that take place in the brain.  Related physical processes take place in the brains of other animals, as they did in the brains of our ancestors going back tens of millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of years. 

Until quite recently, our ancestors did not have the mental equipment necessary to speculate wisely about Kant and Schopenhauer.  Morality would not have promoted our survival if it had taken the form of a predisposition to read tomes of philosophy, and then draw our own conclusions.  It promotes our survival by modifying our social behavior in a much more efficient manner, and one that worked for our animal ancestors as well as it does for us today.  It causes us to act according to moral rules or imperatives that we obey without thinking about them.  Other primates don’t have the luxury of thinking about why they act morally.  They just do it.  We can think about it, and the results have been very interesting.

On evolutionary time scales, human intelligence evolved with great speed.  There may have been some alterations in the mental wiring responsible for moral behavior during the process, but it’s most unlikely the related changes took place in perfect harmony.  We still experience morality in the same way as other primates, in the form of imperatives, or absolute rules.  As a result, it seems to us that those rules must have an objective existence of their own, independent of the mental processes that give rise to them.  For thousands of years philosophers have been seeking this object, this holy grail – in vain.  Even though we experience it that way, morality as an objective thing does not exist.  The holy grail was never there.  Morality exists, but its existence is in the form of physical processes in our brains, not as an object with an independent existence of its own.  Because morality is not an object, attempts to give it objective legitimacy – to “justify” it – are necessarily in vain.  One cannot “justify” behavioral traits that evolved in response to a social environment that no longer exists.  At best, one can understand what they are and why they are there.

It occurred to Darwin that the behavioral traits associated with morality had evolved, and many thinkers since his time have come to the same conclusion.  It was, however, a conclusion that seemed to fly in the face of any number of ideological narratives, not to mention most of the world’s organized religions.  As a result, it has taken us a long time to accept the obvious.  However, our knowledge has continued to expand, and recent scientific advances, particularly in the form of powerful tools that allow us to watch the brain in action, and the ability to unravel the human genome, have made it increasingly difficult to deny any genetic component to morality.  The idea has gone mainstream.

All this comes as bad news to those philosophers who have devoted their careers to the search for the holy grail of objective justification.  It completely upsets their apple cart of nicely arranged epistemologies, ontologies, and teleologies.  In spite of that, they no longer have the luxury of pretending that the idea doesn’t exist.  One way or another, they have to address it.  One can find an interesting response to this troubling state of affairs by Jan Gorecki, one of the guild of grail seekers, in his book, “Justifying Ethics; Human Rights & Human Nature.”

Gorecki is aware of the idea that morality is there as an adaptive function.  He is also perceptive enough to grasp the implications of that idea.  Speaking of the genetic explanation of morality he writes,

If true, it precludes not only the validity of the functional justification, but also of all other traditionally claimed justifications. Within the view of the world and of ethics accepted by proponents of this explanation, there is no room for such normmaking facts as divine will, intuitionist ontology, existence of pure reason as the source of ethics, or of human nature understood otherwise than as a genetic fitness implement. That is why no proponent of the genetic explanation supports any kind of objective justification of morality; they understand that, once their explanation is considered true, all justifications fail.

Precisely!  I couldn’t have said it any better myself.  What’s even more remarkable is the way that Gorecki, in spite of this realization, manages to maintain the precarious balance of his own particular apple cart.  Here are some relevant quotes:

… the very idea of morality being with us as an adaptive tool is enigmatic… In a living organism, the adaptive emergence of various organs is reasonably clear in the light of natural selection. But how can anyone explain, short of a miracle, an analogous role of moral evaluations in human society? (!)

Morality is, from this perspective, just one such technique. It is claimed that the human ability to ontogenetically develop the specifically human moral experiences emerged as a mutation over five million years ago, among hunters-gatherers living in small, endogamously breeding kinship bands. By providing a strong altruistic and cooperative motivation, this ability enhanced the inclusive fitness of the carriers of the “moral gene.” (!!)

This brings us to the basic question: is the genetic explanation true? The question cannot be answered in a publicly convincing way. It may well be true; it is possible that whatever exists is matter, that life can be reduced to physicochemical processes and mind to physiology, and that human morality is there since it promotes replication of the carriers of the “moral gene.” (!!!)

During this discussion, Gorecki cites several of the works of E.O. Wilson, such as “Sociobiology,” and “On Human Nature.”  It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  If professional philosophers can so grossly misunderstand ideas as they are set forth by one who writes as clearly and elegantly as E.O. Wilson, are we really to believe that they understand Kant, who wrote in obscure German sentences a page and a half long?

The rest is predictable.  Gorecki buries his head in the sand, and insists that the rest of us do likewise;

…the belief “that human values are determined or fixed genetically…is doubtful to say the least,” and possibly untestable. (It’s certainly doubtful in the form he understands it.) Thus, we are not, and may never be, able to determine whether the genetic explanation of ethics is true. This indeterminacy is most relevant for our analysis; unproved and uncertain, the genetic explanation cannot be used for rebuttal of the functional justification (and other justifications) of morality.

Sound familiar?  It should.  It’s a time tested way of denying the obvious, if the obvious happens to conflict with a cherished world view.  Just hold the obvious to an impossible standard of proof, and then pretend it’s rational to ignore it by virtue of the fact that it can’t be proved.  Of course, one can always close ones eyes, hold ones hands firmly over ones ears, and declare that anything one doesn’t want to believe “can’t be proved.”  For that matter, it would be true.  Infirm creatures that we are, with a limited, and generally grossly overestimated, ability to reason, we can’t “prove” anything.  We must act according to probabilities.  It is highly probable, and becoming increasingly so as our knowledge expands, that morality is an evolved trait.  Failure to grasp the implications of that knowledge, and to act on them, is risky now, and will become increasingly risky in a world in which our powers of self-destruction expand with each passing day.  Assuming we value our own survival, we had best learn to know ourselves.

On the Smartness of Liberalism and Vegetarianism

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias had an interesting post on intelligence yesterday.  He quotes an article in the Social Psychology Quarterly that claims, among other things, that

Adult intelligence predicts adult espousal of liberalism, atheism, and sexual exclusivity for men (but not for women), while intelligence is not associated with the adult espousal of evolutionarily familiar values on children, marriage, family, and friends. … Childhood intelligence at age 10 significantly increases the probability that individuals become vegetarian as adults.

Where to begin?  Perhaps with the obvious observation that the psychologists have lost none of their ancient skill in doublethink.  They are perfectly familiar with the meaning of the term “intelligence,” and consider it a “well known fact” that it can be measured using reliable tests when associated with, for example, liberalism, vegetarianism, and atheism.  At the same time they are just as certain that “intelligence” is a highly ambiguous complex that it is hopeless to even attempt to measure when associated with, for example, sex or race.  

For the sake of argument, let us assume that the first of these “truths” of the psychologists really is true.  In other words, let us assume that Mr. Kanazawa really does know what he’s talking about when he speaks of intelligence, and that this intelligence really is measurable.  What, then, are we to make of its association with such “value-loaded” categories as liberalism and vegetarianism, not to mention a tendency to have fewer children?

To begin, allow me to enlighten Mr. Kanazawa on a matter touching on this discussion, but about which he seems somewhat confused.  In his abstract we read, “The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences.”  I have no doubt that it is an unresolved theoretical question in the behavioral and social sciences.  For those of us who don’t move in such high intellectual circles, however, the answer is obvious enough.  Values and preferences reflect mental traits of various animals, one species of which happens to be Homo sapiens.  Mental traits originate in the brain, and the human brain exists in its current form because all of its essential features have, at one time or another in the past, promoted our genetic survival. 

Values and preferences such as liberalism and vegetarianism have not, of course, evolved in their perfect modern incarnations, like Athena from the brow of Zeus.  Rather, they correspond to responses of the human brain to conditions quite different from those that prevailed during the long process of its evolution, moderated by cultural influences.  As values and preferences, they are morally loaded.  In other words, one doesn’t embrace liberalism and vegetarianism by virtue of a purely rational evaluation of whether they will promote one’s genetic survival or not.  Rather, they are adopted by virtue of emotional responses associated with those innate mental characteristics we associate with morality.  In other words, they are perceived as “good,” and not just good from a utilitarian point of view,  but “good in themselves.”  That’s how human morality works, no matter how smart one happens to be.  Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an objective “good in itself.”  Liberalism and vegetarianism certainly have a real existence as “goods,” but only as subjective, or perceived goods.  In other words, they do have a genuine existence as goods, but that genuine existence is in the form of a figment of our imaginations.

Liberalism and vegetarianism, then, can be considered artifacts of innate human mental characteristics interacting with an environment utterly different from that in which they evolved to begin with.  Those mental traits could not possibly have evolved fast enough to keep up with the profound changes in the human environment that have occurred over, say the last 10,000 years.  Furthermore, they are not perfectly malleable and adaptable to those changes, as the inventors of the New Soviet Man discovered to their cost.  Under the circumstances, it seems rather risky to assume that complex behavioral traits that have emerged as ancient human mental characteristics interact with the modern environment will continue to promote our survival. 

In the case of liberalism and vegetarianism, I would claim that they certainly do not.  According to the article,

Liberalism … [is] the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans … are not designed to be altruistic toward an indefinite number of complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or exchange with. … There is no evidence that people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources with members of other tribes. …

True enough.  However, as we often hear, the world has shrunk.  We are no more capable of altruistic behavior towards strangers and “other tribes” than we ever were.  However, thanks to modern means of transportation and communication, it has become possible for us to perceive a far greater number of others as belonging to “our tribe.”  “We” is no longer constrained by the environment to a small group of people who are likely to be genetically related to us.  “We” can now correspond to much larger social constructs, such as fellow citizens in a modern state, fellow members of huge political organizations, or fellow believers in massive religious denominations.  “We” can be such entities as “the proletariat,” or “the German people,” or “the oppressed masses.”  “We” can even include other species.  Liberalism and vegetarianism are only “evolutionarily novel” in the sense that they represent the response of a relatively unchanged human brain to massive and transformational environmental and perceptual changes.

Unfortunately, such modern “goods” no longer promote our survival.  In the case of liberalism, the result is the handing over of resources to those from whom the chances that we will ever receive any corresponding benefit in return are vanishingly small.  In the case of vegetarianism, it is the establishment of artificial taboos against certain foods that one can dispense with in certain developed countries that happen not to be at war, but which may be essential to survival elsewhere, or in those same countries in the event of war or one of the other types of social breakdown that occurred with such alarming frequency in the 20th century.  To the extent that a “good” no longer promotes our survival, it is, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, a serious threat.  Morality exists, like everything else about us, because, and only because, at some time in the past, it promoted our survival.  That being the case, nothing can be more immoral than failing to survive.  To anyone who would claim otherwise, I can only say, to borrow a phrase from E.O. Wilson, please “lay your cards on the table,” and explain why.

What, then, can we say about the association of higher levels of human intelligence with such survival threatening “goods” as modern liberalism and vegetarianism, not to mention with such behavioral tendencies as having fewer children.  Apparently, we are forced to conclude that, as things now stand, human beings with above average intelligence represent a biological dead end.  Eventually they must either become more stupid, or more intelligent.  My personal preference is for the latter.  I have a hunch it will more effectively promote our long term survival.

UPDATE:  Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy has more on the Kanazawa article.  From his take:

I suspect that much of the public interest in Kanazawa’s study is driven by a perception that political views endorsed by more intelligent people are more likely to be true. This, however, is a dubious inference. Even intelligent people have incentives to be rationally ignorant about politics and to do a poor job of evaluating the information they do know. I do think that, other things equal, a political view is more likely to be correct if it is more likely to be endorsed by people with greater knowledge of the issue (controlling for other factors that may affect their answers). While knowledge and intelligence are likely to be correlated, they are not the same thing. Ultimately, the fact that a political ideology is more likely to be endorsed by more intelligent people is only a weak indicator of its validity.

Or, as Confucius once said, “Study without thought is vain; thought without study is dangerous.”

Interestingly, Kanazawa himself does not claim that intelligent people are more likely to endorse liberalism because it is true. Instead, he argues that the result is due to the fact that liberalism is more at odds with our genetic instincts than conservatism is, and intelligent people are more likely to endorse “novel” ideas.

Liberals are not different from conservatives because they are more rational, and therefore less subject to genetic instincts.  (”Genetic instincts” is imprecise, but we’ll use the vernacular for the time being).  Rather, liberalism and conservatism are manifestations of the same genetic instincts in the context of the modern world.  They differ only in such factors as identification of who belongs in the “in-group” and who belongs in the “out-group.”  These distinctions can have a major political impact, but, as far as human nature is concerned, they are peripheral.  They are both merely possible expressions of emotional responses whose fundamental origins in the brain are identical in both cases.

Niall Ferguson and the Amity/Enmity Complex

In earlier posts, I have noted the remarkable paradigm shift that has recently occurred in acceptance of the fact that human behavior, including moral behavior, is highly dependent on predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain. It did not come easy.  The concept of innate behavioral traits flew in the face of a good many cherished ideological myths, not the least of which was the myth of Marxism.  We have made great progress, but we have not reached our journey’s end. 

Not all the myths are dead.  Legions of psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, philosophers, and other “experts” of every stripe are still fighting a delaying action.  They will continue to insist until the bitter end, or, to put it more concretely, until the facts finally drag them back to reality, that, while some aspects of human behavior may be innate, we are only wired to be “good” and “moral.”  Once upon a time they told us that, because the “gentle” chimpanzee was our closest relative in the animal kingdom, then, obviously, our nature was to be “gentle” and “unaggressive” as well.  When it turned out that, after all, the chimpanzee is not as “gentle” and “unaggressive” as first imagined, and, in fact, displays some character traits that are distinctly politically incorrect, the hapless beast was tossed overboard in favor of today’s favorite, the lately fashionable bonobo.  The bonobo, we are told, is a paragon of cooperative behavior, with sexual habits that are in perfect harmony with the most advanced views on the topic.  In a word, we have made progress, but only partial progress.  Instead of being fully buried, our heads are now only half buried in the sand.   

All this gushing over bonobos ignores some hard facts.  Among them is the Amity/Enmity Complex.  As I noted in an earlier post, Robert Ardrey once described the Complex as

…the resolution of a paradox posed by Darwin, solved by Wallace, explored by Spencer and Sumner, revived and extended by Keith, and for the last twenty years cast aside under the pretense it does not exist. The paradox may be simply stated: If the evolutionary process is a merciless struggle among individuals to survive, with natural selection determining the fittest, then how could such human qualities as altruism, loyalty, charity, and mercy have ever come into existence? If Darwinian evolution presents a picture of dog eat dog, then how did dogs ever get together?

…What seems to have occurred to no one, excepting possibly (Arthur) Keith, is that the animal is a moral being, and that human morality is a simple evolutionary extension of a form of conduct which has existed in nature for many hundreds of millions of years. But unless we inspect both the history of the falsehood and the history of the truth, we shall not in least part grasp our contemporary predicament.

…Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.

It does not take a mental giant to figure out how the predisposition to acquire such a dual morality would have promoted the survival of ancestral humans.  It served to spread populations out, optimizing their exploitation of available territory.  Ardrey has included several interesting descriptions of related behavior in other primate species in his books.  At a time when we possessed only crude weapons, the survival value of enmity between adjoining groups was enhanced by the fact that it was unlikely to have lethal consequences.  Times have changed.  Our weapons are no longer crude.

The complex is the fundamental human behavioral trait behind such “isms” and other related evils as racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious bigotry.  However, rather than admit something as unpleasant as an innate behavioral trait that might predispose us to be other than perfect angels, we have refused to accept the obvious.  The obvious is that the enmity half of the Amity/Enmity Complex is the unifying fact that explains all these behaviors.  Rather than accept it, we have instead experienced the devastating effects of each of these “isms” in turn, only giving them a name that associates them with “evil” after the fact.  Would it not be better to understand the underlying phenomenon than to continue on this eternal treadmill, constantly closing the barn door after the animals have already fled?  There have been many Cassandras among us since the time of Darwin, thinkers who pointed to the abundant evidence for the existence of the Complex, and the dangers of ignoring its existence.  One would think that, if the preceding centuries of violence and warfare were not enough, the scales would surely have dropped from the eyes of even the most stubborn doubters after the genocide and mass slaughter of the 20th century.  Alas, bonobos are still in fashion, and we’re still not quite there yet.

I remain optimistic, however.  I have witnessed the paradigm shift referred to above in my lifetime.  The other shoe will eventually fall.  Facts are stubborn things.  They don’t go away, and we continue to accumulate them.  The Amity/Enmity complex is a fact.  As long as we retain the freedom to inquire and to research the truth, it will become, like innate human behavior, a fact that is increasingly difficult, and finally, impossible to ignore.  It may be that we will have to beat the last, recalcitrant, “progressive” psychologist over the head with the last quantum fluctuation in the last electron in the last molecule in the final neuron that proves, once and for all, that the Complex is real, but one day he, too, will be dragged kicking and screaming back into the real world. 

Meanwhile, the manifestations of the Complex, countless as they are in our history, remain obvious to anyone with a mind open enough to look at them.  Besides much else that recommends it to the interested reader, there are many interesting examples in Niall Ferguson’s book, “The War of the World.”  For example, referring to anti-Semitic pogroms in pre-WWI Russia:

What happened between 1903 and 1906 was quite different in character… The catalyst was a classic “blood libel”, prompted by the discovery of the corpse of a young boy,…In the violence that ensued, hundreds of shops and homes were looted or burned. This time, however, many more people were killed… Between October 31 and November 11 there were pogroms in 660 different plances; more than 800 Jews were killed.

To the persecution of the “bourgeoisie” in the Russian Civil War:

The Bolshevik newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta declared: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood… let there be bloods of blood of the bourgeoisie – more blood, as much as possible.”… Between 1918 and 1920 as many as 300,000 such political executions were carried out.

and, finally, to the genocide committed against the Armenians by the Turks:

Like the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, the Armenians were doubly vulnerable: not only a religious minority, but also a relatively wealthy group… In the mid-1890s irregular Kurdish troops had been unleashed against Armenian villages as the Ottoman authorities tried to reassert the Armenians’ subordinate status as infidel dhimmis, or non-Muslim citizens. The American ambassador estimated the number of people killed at more than 37,000… The murderous campaign launched against the Armenians from 1915 to 1918 was qualitatively different, however; so much so that it is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide… the men and boys older than 10 were massacred… The number of Armenian men, women and children who were killed or died prematurely may have been even higher than a million, a huge proportion of a pre-war population that numbered, at the very most, 2.4 million.

Is it really so hard to see the common thread here?  Is the truth really so difficult to recognize and accept?  The damage we have done to ourselves boggles the mind.  One day we will learn to understand ourselves, and grasp the reasons why we do these things.  May that day come sooner rather than later.

Richard Joyce and the Legitimacy of Morality

Morality is the expression, moderated by culture, of predispositions that are hardwired in our brains. Like everything else about us, they evolved because, at the time they evolved, they increased our chances of survival. One could cite many plausible reasons that may have contributed to the evolution of moral brains. Given limited resources, an unconstrained battle of all against all to secure a maximum share for each individual would likely have been a poor survival strategy, particularly at a time when our rapidly evolving brains were giving us the capacity to develop increasingly lethal weapons.

Morality is what it is. It is an expression of a reality that will not change because we think we need it to be something else. It is an evolved survival mechanism. As such, it can have no intrinsic legitimacy, yet we are wired to perceive morality as having a real, objective existence, outside our brains. In a word, we perceive it as an absolute. We perceive it in that way because, presumably, that’s the way it has been most effective in promoting our survival.

The evolutionary origins of morality, as of the rest of our intrinsic nature as a species, are becoming increasingly difficult to deny. We can now pinpoint the very neurons that fire in response to situations that have a strong moral context. Books accepting this fundamental premise are beginning to appear in increasing numbers. For example, “How we Decide,” by Jonah Lehrer, which I discussed in an earlier post, has an excellent chapter entitled, “The Moral Mind.” Some of the most interesting works are emanating from the corner of the philosophers.

One of the great goals of the philosophers has always been to establish reasons for the legitimacy of morality, to give it “clout,” in the form a a claim to the right to demand universal compliance with its rules. To the extent that this remains one of their goals, the philosophers have been like dead men walking ever since the days of Darwin, hit between the eyes by his Theory, but charging ahead, nevertheless, on shear momentum. Should you care to read an account of some of their more recent intellectual contortions, allow me to suggest “The Evolution of Morality,” by Richard Joyce. You should find it fascinating.

Joyce is an intelligent and thoughtful writer who, unfortunately, shares some of the philosophers’ penchant for obscure language and hair splitting ratiocination.  His book is, neverthess, a great deal more comprehensible than, say, one of Kant’s tomes, and should be intelligible to the layman.  It exposes some of the more childish rationalizations of moral legitimacy by the author’s colleagues.  Unfortunately, however, Joyce can’t quite bring himself to give up the great quest himself.  Philosophers have always been in love with the idea that our superior reasoning abilities make us not only quantitatively, but qualitatively different from the other animals, and Joyce is no exception.  I have no doubt that, assuming that research can continue as freely as it has in the past, numerous similarities will be found between the processes associated with morality in our own brains and in other intelligent animals.  Joyce overcomes this difficulty by carefully defining morality in such a way that it becomes impossible for creatures lacking the capacity for speech to be moral beings, as if the structures and phenomena in the brain responsible for morality cared one way or the other about his definitions. 

Once he has safely removed the rest of the animal kingdom to the other side of the language divide, Joyce frees himself to consider morality as a “belief,” similar to the belief in a God.  He examines the case for granting morality the status of an object, of a thing in itself, independent of any evolutionary origins.  Running through several of the arguments in favor of such a transcendental morality, he rejects them all in turn.  In his final chapter, he reveals himself to us as what he refers to as a moral skeptic of the “agnostic,” as opposed to the “atheistic” variety.  By this, he means that he can find no epistemically justified basis for moral judgments, but does not, therefore, conclude that such a basis for claiming that moral judgments are “true” does not exist.  Here, it seems to me, Prof. Joyce is allowing himself a bit of silliness.

I say that for two reasons.  In the first place, the author has done an excellent job of demolishing the basis for any remaining agnosticism regarding moral “beliefs” in his book.  In the second, I meant what I said above about him being intelligent.  I did not mean to condescend by making that claim, but simply to state my opinion.  It seems to me he is too smart to be a moral agnostic.  There is ample basis for that conclusion in his final chapter, where we find nuggets such as,

If biological natural selection is responsible for giving us a moral sensibility in the first place, then without it we would be in no position to give consideration to “the ethical progress of society.” (with reference to some remarks by Thomas Huxley).

But acknowledging beliefs under the influence of natural selection raises epistemological concerns, for the faithful representation of reality is of only contingent instrumental value when reproductive success is the touchstone, forcing us to acknowledge that if in certain domains false beliefs will bring more offspring then that is the route natural selection will take every time. Moral thinking could very well be such a domain.

Thus, that moral skepticism may seem to many obviously false and pernicious is exactly what the moral skeptic predicts, and therefore cannot be employed as a consideration against the view. To do nothing more than point with a sense of appalled outrage at the conclusions of the moral skeptic is merely to beg the question, and thus is no argumentative consideration at all.

and the last sentence in his book;

If uncomfortable truths are out there, we should seek them and face them like intellectual adults, rather than eschewing open-minded inquiry or fabricating philosophical theories whose only virtue is the promise of providing the soothing news that all our heartfelt beliefs are true.

I won’t go into the reasons why I think that comments like those above are evidence of an unusually perceptive mind.  Suffice it to say that I do.  They also make it clear that Joyce is much closer to being a moral “atheist” than he would have us believe.  If he wants to go on maintaining that he can’t exclude the equivalent of the fairies in Richard Dawkins garden, than so be it.  What he has written above makes it clear that, nevertheless, he sees the handwriting on the wall when it comes to “objective morality.”

I suspect the reason that Joyce can’t quite free himself of his agnosticism may well have something to do with his own “human nature.”  Like all the rest of us, including, by the way, such atheist worthies as Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, and Sam Harris, he experiences morality as a real, absolute thing.  From an evolutionary point of view, that was the most efficient way for nature to “design” it.  That Joyce’ rational mind has not quite freed itself from the grip of this perceived absolute is evident from comments such as,

Natural selection doesn’t deserve the bad rap given it by Huxley and Williams. It is a process that has made us sociable, able to enter into cooperative exchanges, capable of love, empathy, and altruism – granting us the capacity to take a direct interest in the welfare of others with no thought of reciprocation. (With the implication that all these things are “really” good.)

and

But even if this is not so, the only honest and dignified course is to acknowledge what the evidence and our best theorizing indicate… (A senseless statement unless honesty and dignity are objective moral goods).

and so on.  In fact, we are moral beings.  None of us can live outside of our own moral skins, myself included.  Our brains are wired to perceive moral rules as absolutes.  Assuming, however, that we wish to survive (and that, after all, is the one and only reason morality exists in the first place), it would behoove us to understand its real nature, in order to moderate our “moral” behavior with reason.

“Guns, Germs and Steel” and Ideological Orthodoxy

As I mentioned in earlier posts, we have just witnessed a remarkable transformation in the “accepted wisdom” regarding the innate in human nature. The politically correct orthodoxies of the “progressive left,” according to which human nature is, essentially, a cultural trait, and “not in our genes,” have been smashed by the progress of science. In the last few decades we have gained the ability to peer deep inside the brain. Karl Marx would have been deeply disappointed by what we have found. The “new Soviet man” has been relegated to the realm of fantasy once and for all, and common sense has prevailed. We have established beyond reasonable doubt that fundamental aspects of our nature are hard-wired in our brains. This is no time to rest on our laurels, though. We are hardly out of the woods yet. The ideological orthodoxies of the left are still the “ground state” in academia and the social sciences. They will continue to prevail whenever they can’t be decisively refuted by repeatable experiments.

Consider, for example, the book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” by Jared Diamond. Wikipedia sums it up for us:

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while attempting to refute the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example Chinese centralized government, or improved disease resistance among Eurasians), these advantages were only created due to the influence of geography and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

In a word, we are dealing here with the orthodoxy that there are no substantial genetic differences between human populations, or at least none that would, in the view of the ideologically pure, give one population an “unfair advantage” over another.  Common sense would seem to dictate that evolution hasn’t come to a dead halt in human populations that have been widely separated and, to some degree, isolated for upwards of 50,000 years.  Indeed, common sense prevails when it comes to “fair” advantages, such as skin color, or lactose tolerance.  When it comes to “unfair” advantages, such as that nebulous thing we call “intelligence,” however, evolution and common sense must give way.  When it comes to intelligence, all human populations are perfectly, undeviatingly equal, and have been since the emergence of the species, although Diamond does make a tongue in cheek reference to the intellectual inferiority of white people in his book.  As connoiseurs of political correctness are, no doubt, aware, such drolleries are permitted.  Other than that, however, absolute equality prevails.  If an Einstein dies in one population, it does not become “unequal.”  No, my friends, at the very instant of his death, a new genius is born, and perfect equality triumphantly prevails once again.

Far be it for me to dare to contradict one jot or tittle of Professor Diamond’s book. I merely point out that what it contains is not science. Rather, it is, in essence an ideological tract. How do we know this? Because every one of Professor Diamonds “discoveries” is perfectly predictable in advance. Once one has read a few chapters of his book, one can tell what he will “discover” in the rest of it without taking the trouble to read it.  You will smell no Lollard here.  Professor Diamond has lived, and will surely die, in the odor of sanctity.  No ideological heresies will befoul his memory.  Everything he has written, and everything he will write, will conform, in all purity, to his ideological worldview.

Well, in theory, some ideological verities might actually be true in fact.  However, we have just seen some very significant ones demolished by a mountain of evidence before our eyes.   Let us refrain from recklessly poking sticks into the hornet’s nests of academia.  Let us merely insist that no impediments be tolerated in the path to increasing human knowledge.  As long as we are free to question and learn, the truth will prevail in the end.

You should Decide to Read this Book: “How We Decide,” by Jonah Lehrer

I find some of the books that are being published these days mind-boggling. “How We Decide,” by Jonah Lehrer, is one of them. Perhaps it’s not really the book that’s mind-boggling, fascinating as it is. What’s really astounding is the public reception it’s received. Consider, for example, its review in the New York Times. It’s positive, even enthusiastic, cites a few interesting tidbits from the book, and then closes with some suggestions about questions Lehrer might take up in future works. The astounding thing is that there is no allusion whatsoever to matters of political correctness, no suggestion that the author is a minion of fascism, no dark hints that his conclusions border on racism, and no tut-tutting about his general lack of moral uprightness.

All this is mind-boggling because it attests to a sea change in public attitudes, to a transformational change in the way certain seemingly obvious truths are received. Changes like that don’t happen over years. It takes decades, and I suspect you have to be around for decades yourself to notice them. Underlying every anecdote, every example, and every assertion in the book is the tacit assumption that our behavior, outside of such fundamental traits as hunger and sexual desire, is not just an artifact of our environment, a reflection of our culture, imprinted on minds of almost unlimited malleability. Rather, its underlying theme is that much of our behavior is conditioned by innate characteristics hard-wired in the circuitry of our brains. Forty or fifty years ago, many books with a similar theme were published by the likes of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Robert Ardrey. Inevitably, whenever a new one turned up, secular religious fanatics of the Marxist and related schools began frothing at the mouth. Their authors were demonized and denounced as perpetrators of every sort of evil and immorality. Any suggestion that certain aspects of human nature were innate posed a threat to their plans to create an earthly paradise for us, and then “re-educate” us to like it. In a word, it threatened the whole concept of the “New Soviet Man.” They became just as furious as any fundamentalist Christian at the suggestion that the earth is more than 7,000 years old. Richard Dawkins has done a particularly able job of dissecting one of the literary artifacts of this school of thought, “Not in our Genes,” by R. Lewontin, et. al., demonstrating his virtuosity at dissecting secular as well as traditional religions.

Secular religions have certain disadvantages not shared by the more traditional, “spiritual” varieties. For example, they promise heaven in this life instead of the next, and so are subject to fact-checking. The history of the Soviet Union is a case in point. They are also more vulnerable to demonstrable scientific facts, because they cannot point to a superhuman authority with the power to veto common sense, and they typically claim to be “scientific” themselves. All of these have contributed to the sea change in attitudes I refer to, but I suspect the great scientific advances of recent years in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have played the most decisive role. Many of those advances have been enabled by sophisticated scanning devices, with which we can now peer deep into the brain and watch its workings in real time down to the molecular level. Lehrer cites many examples in his book. The facts are there, in the form of repeatable experiments. Lehrer cites the evidence, treating the innate in human behavior, not as a heresy, but as a commonplace, obvious on the face of it. I can but wonder at how rapidly the transformation has taken place.

“How We Decide” is a pleasure to read, and it will surely make you think. I found the chapter on “The Moral Mind” particularly interesting. Among other things, it demonstrates the absurdity of the misperception, shared by so many otherwise highly intelligent people from ancient to modern times, that we will not act morally unless we have some rational reason for doing so, such as the dictates of a God, or the systems of philosophers. As Lehrer puts it,

Religious believers assume that God invented the moral code. It was given to Moses on Mount Sinai, a list of imperatives inscribed in stone. (As Dostoyevsky put it, “If there is no God, then we are lost in a moral chaos. Everything is permitted.”) But this cultural narrative gets the causality backward. Moral emotions existed long before Moses.

Lehrer also cites some of the many great thinkers who have, throughout our history, drawn attention to the remarkable similarities in our moral behavior that transcend culture, and came to the common conclusion that there was something innate about morality. For example, quoting from the book,

Although (Adam) Smith is best known for his economic treatise “The Wealth of Nations,” he was most proud of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” his sprawling investigation into the psychology of morality. Like his friend David Hume, Smith was convinced that our moral decisions were shaped by our emotional instincts. People were good for essentially irrational reasons.

What Smith and Hume couldn’t know was how morality is innate, or why. Now, as Lehrer shows us, we are finally beginning to find out.

Do yourself a favor and read the book.

Of Human Nature and Political Games

In my last post I noted with some gratification that phenomena as obvious as the influence of innate predispositions on human behavior are finally being accepted, in the popular media and elsewhere, as obvious, whereas 40 or 50 years ago they would have been furiously attacked as evidence of racism, fascism, or some similar social malady. In those days, such attacks came mainly from the left, with emphasis on the Marxist left. Well, hold on to your hats, dear readers, because it appears that we’re not quite out of the woods yet. Now it appears that the political right is turning its baleful glance on evolutionary psychology, and discovering that it is a font of nefarious schemes to subvert free will and human virtue.

We begin this story with an article that appeared on NPR’s website. It discussed the ideas of Washington Post science writer Shankar Vedantam regarding the interactions of the conscious and unconscious mind as set forth in his new book entitled “The Hidden Brain.” I have no certain knowledge regarding Mr. Vedantam’s political leanings, but, considering the fact that NPR has deigned to discuss his book and he writes for the Washington Post, I suspect that he probably stands rather to the left of Rush Limbaugh. Now, given the unfortunate history of attacks on proponents of innate predispositions by assorted Defenders of the Faith on the left, one would think that Mr. Vedantam’s embrace of evolutionary psychology would be grounds for loud huzzahs all ’round. For example, according to the NPR article, he notes the importance of innate aspects of human behavior in the development of social maladies such as racism, citing research from a day-care center in Montreal that found that children as young as 3 linked white faces with positive attributes and black faces with negative attributes. All this seems harmless and commonplace enough. All Vedantam is really saying is that there is such a thing as an Amity/Enmity Complex, that it can manifest itself as racism, and that, if we are to control such socially destructive behavior, it would behoove us to understand what causes it.  Fifty years ago, he would have been loudly denounced as a heretic by the High Priests on the left for stating such obvious truisms.  Today, we hear barely a whimper from that direction, but, alas, the time for rejoicing has not yet come.  It appears that the right has now discovered, in its turn, that evolutionary psychology is really a nefarious plot against mankind.

I cite as exhibit A an article written by Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom.  Instead of rejoicing at the return of the Prodigal Son from the left, it seems he has smelled a rat.  Mr. Vedantam, it appears, is not really a benign science writer for the Wapo, but a myrmidon of the left, a mere tool in a broader plot to seize control of our minds and reprogram us into latter day versions of Homo Sovieticus.  Let’s allow Jeff G. to set the tone.  Referring to the Montreal study, he says,

Of course, were the data reversed (had, for instance, the day-care center under review been located in the basement of Reverend Wright’s church, say) — with whites linked to negative attributes and blacks viewed positively — that data almost certainly wouldn’t be extrapolated out as normative the way it is here. In fact, such data would likely be used to exhort the force of identify politics to “empower” historically disenfranchised groups, the result being that we must now believe that identity politics is simultaneously ameliorative (when it empowers certain identity groups) and “racist” (when it empowers other identity groups), even as the mechanism is precisely the same.

Here Jeff G. invents the first in a series of strawmen, attacking Mr. Vedantam for what he “almost certainly” would have done if the racial shoe had been on the other foot.  Apparently, he is unaware of the absurdity of attacking someone for a misdeed they haven’t actually committed, but which he has concluded they would have committed in some hypothetical alternate reality.  Continuing with the article,

And here you have the last two maneuvers: 1) It is silly to call children as young as 3 bigots, Vedantam will (pretend to) concede; and yet they are showing bigoted behavior — like, for instance, they draw “bigoted associations” or make “racist statements” — which transgressions Vedantam will trace to “culture and upbringing”. Are these children responsible for their own culture? Their own upbringing? Of course not, the argument will suggest. And so their bigotry, which is undeniable (given the “associations” drawn by the kids in one Montreal day-care center) must come from somewhere else, and must be lodged somewhere outside of the conscious reach of these children (where presumably it could be corrected).

Certainly culture plays a role in determining whether we perceive specific racial characteristics in a positive or negative light, but where, exactly, does Mr. Vedantam imply that these associations are “lodged somewhere outside of our conscious reach?”  The logical process by which Jeff G. arrives at the conclusion that this “must be” is beyond me.

Once we are here — once we begin to give power to deeply-seeded attitudes learned through acculturation and rote indoctrination (and buried deep in our “sub-conscious”) while simultaneously divorcing the conscious mind from the unconscious mind in such a way that the unconscious mind is no longer a part of the intentional “we” — it is an easy next step to argue 2) that “we” are not responsible for any kind of unconscious racism or bigotry; thus, we can say racist things, or make racist associations, without those associations or statements being intentionally racist. More, we can’t be expected to recognize in ourselves such unconscious bigotry precisely because it lies in our unconscious mind, which is the “autopilot” to our “we,” and as such stands apart from our conscious control over it. Which means we’ll have to rely on others to spot our bigotry for us. God bless ‘em.

Now the strawmen are really starting to come out of the woodwork.  Whoever said that our racial attitudes are “buried deep in our sub-conscious,” beyond our conscious control?  Whoever came up with the idea that our conscious and unconscious minds are “divorced” from each other?  Whoever suggested that it is impossible for us to become conscious of our own “unconscious racism” because our “unconscious minds” aren’t part of our “We?”  Mr. Vedantam certainly makes no such claims in the NPR article, nor does he imply anything of the sort.  In fact, these are all fantasies invented by Jeff G. himself.  Of course, they are necessary fantasies if we are to give any credence to the central theme of his article, which is that Mr. Vedantam is part of a larger conspiracy to convince us that “we must rely on others to spot our bigotry for us.”  Why the insidious leftist elites Mr. Vedantam supposedly serves would want us to believe this becomes clear later in the article.  As Jeff G. puts it,

The upshot of all this is that we are left with an obvious way to fight “racism”: change society and culture in such a way that our “unconscious” mind — over which we have limited ownership (or rather, something akin to a rental agreement) — learns the “correct” lessons. We need to be taught which kinds of associations are acceptable and which are not. Our speech and thought needs to be cleansed; our autopilot re-educated.

Well,  not exactly.  Nowhere does Mr. Vedantam claim that it is even possible to “re-educate our autopilot,” and this must be dismissed as another of Jeff G.’s fantasy strawmen.  Far from implying that we have no control over our autopilot, he specifically states exactly the opposite.  Quoting from the NPR article:

“Our hidden brains will always recognize people’s races, and they will do so from a very, very young age,” Vedantam says. “The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask [children] to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways.”

There is no suggestion here that the associations be “reprogrammed,” but simply that children be made aware of their existence, and the fact that they can manifest themselves as social evils such as racism.  Returning to the NPR article,

Going back to the autopilot analogy, Vedantam says it’s not a problem that the brain has an autopilot mode — as long as you are aware of when it is on. His book, “The Hidden Brain,” is about how to “take back the controls.

In other words, far from suggesting that we need to be “re-educated,” because we can’t control our “autopilot” by our own volition, Vedantam is again saying exactly the opposite; that our conscious minds are really in overall control, and that we are quite capable of dealing with asocial manifestations of unconscious behavior such as racism on our own, without the need for any “re-education” by cliques of leftist illuminati.  No matter, Jeff G. has already left reality far behind, and can’t be bothered to read what Vedantam is actually saying.  he continues,

On offer here is the following prescription: you can only know your autopilot by learning what culture and society have imprinted upon you. Once there, you can only “take back control” by changing what culture and society imprint. Because otherwise, nothing else Vedantam writes makes sense: if you could consciously control your unconscious, that would be a form of consciousness that robs the unconscious of its (presumed) power; so the answer is that you must control your unconscious mind by consciously decided what is appropriate for it to learn in the first place.

Which is to say, you can only take back control by giving over control to those who will properly teach you.

Here one can only shake one’s head.  Nowhere does Vedantam suggest that “you can only ‘take back control’ by changing what culture and society imprint.”  Far from claiming that you cannot consciously control your unconscious, he actually explicitly states exactly the opposite.  Nowhere does he suggest that its even possible to “correctly” program the unconscious mind by “giving over control to those who will properly teach you.”

Well, I can only offer Mr. Vedantam my sincere sympathy, and express the hope that, in future, those who attack his book will take the trouble to read it first. 

 The political animals on both the right and the left will always have their ideological axes to grind.  Meanwhile, we continue to learn.  That which is true will remain true whether it happens to be politically desirable and expedient or not.  Let us seek the truth.

Stephen Hawking, Genetic Engineering, and the Future of Mankind

The Daily Galaxy has chosen Stephen Hawking’s contention that the human species has entered a new stage of evolution as the top story of 2009.  It was included in his Life in the Universe lecture, along with many other thought provoking observations about the human condition.  I don’t agree with his suggestion that we need to redefine the word “evolution” to include the collective knowledge we’ve accumulated since the invention of written language.  The old definition will do just fine, and conflating it with something different can only lead to confusion.  Still, if “top story” billing will get more people to read the lecture, I’m all in favor of it, because it’s well worth the effort.  Agree with him or not, Hawking has a keen eye for picking topics of cosmic importance.  By “cosmic importance,” I mean more likely to retain their relevance 100 years from now than, say, the latest wrinkles in the health care debate or the minutiae of Tiger Woods’ sex life.

Hawking begins with a salutary demolition of the Creationist argument that life could not have evolved because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The fact that the use of this argument implies ignorance of the relevant theory has done little to deter religious obscurantists from using it, so the more scientists of Hawking’s stature point out its absurdity, the better. 

The lecture continues with some observations on the possible reasons we have not yet detected intelligent life outside our own planet.  These reasons are summarized as follows:

1. The probability of life appearing is very low
2. The probability of life is reasonable, but the probability of intelligence is low
3. The probability of evolving to our present state is reasonable, but then civilization destroys itself
4. There is other intelligent life in the galaxy, but it has not bothered to come here

My two cents worth:  I think the probability of life appearing is low, but the probability that it is limited to earth is also low.  It would be surprising if life only evolved on one planet, but managed to survive long enough on that one planet for intelligent beings like ourselves to evolve.  On the other hand, we may be the only intelligent life form in the universe.  If not, why haven’t we heard from or detected the others?  Let us hope that the proponents of the third possibility are overly pessimistic.

Later in the lecture, after noting the explosion of human knowledge over the last 300 years, Hawking observes:

This has meant that no one person can be the master of more than a small corner of human knowledge. People have to specialise, in narrower and narrower fields. This is likely to be a major limitation in the future. We certainly cannot continue, for long, with the exponential rate of growth of knowledge that we have had in the last three hundred years. An even greater limitation and danger for future generations, is that we still have the instincts, and in particular, the aggressive impulses, that we had in cave man days. Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men, and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantage, up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race, and much of the rest of life on Earth. A nuclear war is still the most immediate danger, but there are others, such as the release of a genetically engineered virus. Or the green house effect becoming unstable.

I would differ with him on some of the details here.  For example, the bit about aggression oversimplifies the evolution of innate predispositions.  Back in the day when Konrad Lorenz published “On Aggression,” the behaviorists would have dismissed even a gentle soul like Hawking as a “fascist” for speaking of an “instinct” of aggression in such indelicate terms.  Nevertheless, when it comes to the basic premise of the sentence, Hawking gets it right.  We are not purely rational beings, nor is our behavior determined solely by culture and environment.  Rather, we act in response to predispositions that were hard-wired in our brains at a time when our manner of existence was vastly different than it is today.  They had survival value then.  They may doom us in the world of today unless we learn to understand and control them.

Hawking continues:

There is no time, to wait for Darwinian evolution, to make us more intelligent, and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase, of what might be called, self designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. There is a project now on, to map the entire sequence of human DNA. It will cost a few billion dollars, but that is chicken feed, for a project of this importance. Once we have read the book of life, we will start writing in corrections. At first, these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression.

Laws will be passed against genetic engineering with humans. But some people won’t be able to resist the temptation, to improve human characteristics, such as size of memory, resistance to disease, and length of life. Once such super humans appear, there are going to be major political problems, with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete. Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings, who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate.

Here, he is right on.  Unless we manage to destroy ourselves in the near future, or at least our highly developed technological societies, individuals will inevitably begin to take advantage of the potential of genetic engineering.  That is a good thing, to the extent that our survival is a good thing, because we are unlikely to survive unless we do develop into what Hawking calls “self-designing beings.”  We have certainly made a hash of things at our present level of development in a very short time.  We can’t go on long the way we are now. 

Continuing with Hawking:

If this race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, it will probably spread out, and colonise other planets and stars. However, long distance space travel, will be difficult for chemically based life forms, like DNA. The natural lifetime for such beings is short, compared to the travel time. According to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. So the round trip to the nearest star would take at least 8 years, and to the centre of the galaxy, about a hundred thousand years. In science fiction, they overcome this difficulty, by space warps, or travel through extra dimensions. But I don’t think these will ever be possible, no matter how intelligent life becomes. In the theory of relativity, if one can travel faster than light, one can also travel back in time. This would lead to problems with people going back, and changing the past. One would also expect to have seen large numbers of tourists from the future, curious to look at our quaint, old-fashioned ways.

In fact, covering galactic and inter-galactic distances is not theoretically out of the question.  One may not be able to exceed the speed of light, but one can reduce the distances one has to travel via the Lorenz contraction.  Thus, if I could find some means to accelerate myself to nearly the speed of light, the apparent distance to, for example, the Andromeda galaxy would shrink until, finally, I could reach it in a time short compared to a human lifetime.  The only problem is, if I were able to turn around and come back the same way, the Milky Way would be about 3 million years older than when I left.  Accelerating objects the size of a human being to nearly the speed of light and ensuring their survival over large distances would not be easy.  However, accelerating the DNA required to create a human being, along with, say, self-replicating nano-machinery that could create an environment for and then use the DNA to bring a human being to life would be much easier, and, I think plausible.  It may be the way we eventually colonize distant star systems with suitable earth-like planets.  I am not on board with the alternative suggested by Hawking:

It might be possible to use genetic engineering, to make DNA based life survive indefinitely, or at least for a hundred thousand years. But an easier way, which is almost within our capabilities already, would be to send machines. These could be designed to last long enough for interstellar travel. When they arrived at a new star, they could land on a suitable planet, and mine material to produce more machines, which could be sent on to yet more stars. These machines would be a new form of life, based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules. They could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

It puzzles me that someone as brilliant as Hawking could find such a vision of the future attractive.  Perhaps he has made the mistake of conflating our consciousness with ourselves, and thinks that “eternal life” is merely a matter of perpetuating consciousness in machines.  In fact, consciousness is just an evolved trait.  Like all our other evolved traits, it exists because it helped to promote our survival.  “We” are not our consciousness.  “We” are our genetic material.  That “we” has lived for many hundreds of millions of years, and is potentially immortal.  Consciousness is just a trait that comes and goes with each reproductive cycle.  If our consciousness fools us into believing that it is really the substantial and important thing about us, and its perpetuation is a good in itself, it may mean the emergence of a new race of machines.  Regardless of their consciousness, however, they won’t be “us.”  Rather, “we” will have finally succeeded in annihilating ourselves, and the future evolution of the universe will have become as pointless as far as we are concerned as if life had never evolved at all.

European Anti-Americanism, Then and Now

Brussels Journal quotes a charming new anti-American tune by Belgian musician Raymond van het Groenewoud with the original title, “Down with America.” According to BJ, the tune is

written in Dutch… and will be available in record shops as of next week, and was played on Belgian state radio last Thursday and Friday. Here is a quote from the lyrics of the song:

Hamburgers and coke, yes you already knew
But do you also know the cause of the general decay?
Short-sighted thinking, loud talking
Sticking to one-liners forever
Down with America! Down with the jerks from America
Down with America! [...]

Down with American colonialism
Down with that ugly, biting English
All the Anglo-Saxon pretence, arrogance
Yes, a hot pick up their ass
And that is that [...]

I am from the Belgian, the European panel
And I ask you: “Clear my channel! Clear my channel!”
Megalomaniac unicellular idiots
Kiss my ass, yes, kiss my balls

Thus one of the most recent expressions of European “Kultur.” I doubt that Der Spiegel, whose editors have been known to throw tantrums and become blue in the face over the excessively patriotic lyrics of Toby Keith, will even bother to take notice.

Like racism, anti-Semitism, and religious bigotry, anti-Americanism is a common expression of the Amity-Enmity Complex I’ve written about earlier. However, unlike racism, which justified slavery, or anti-Semitism, which resulted in the Holocaust, or religious bigotry, which has caused millions of deaths in Europe since the days of Constantine, anti-Americanism hasn’t yet resulted in a catastrophe sufficiently horrific to give it a bad name and render it socially unacceptable. As a result, it still thrives luxuriantly, although its intensity has fallen off somewhat of late from the obsessive, mindless frothing at the mouth one found in even the “respectable” European newspapers and magazines in the last years of the Clinton and the first years of the Bush Administrations.

In an ideal world, the psychologists would have recognized the Amity-Enmity Complex for what it is long ago; the fundamental aspect of human nature responsible for anti-Americanism and all of the other varieties of destructive behavior mentioned above, not to mention most of the countless wars that have marred our history from the dawn of recorded time. However, this is not an ideal world, psychology has been more akin to an ideology than a science lo now these many years, and so, instead of recognizing and controlling the Complex itself, we stagger on from disaster to disaster, assigning a bad name to each of its manifestations in turn so that we may recognize them as evil. So it is, and so it will continue until some inspired team of neuroscientists tracks down the bio-chemical processes responsible for the expression of the Complex molecule by molecule, documenting it so thoroughly than all but the most recalcitrant of the assorted species of psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists are dragged kicking and screaming into the real world, and can no longer deny a truth that should have been obvious to them long ago.

Well, we have been making wonderful and encouraging progress along those lines of late, and one finds glimmerings of common sense in even the darkest journalistic haunts of the social science professoriat. However, before they master a notion of such cognitive complexity as the close kinship of, for example, anti-Americanism and racism as common manifestations of the Amity-Enmity Complex, I suspect we will yet have a long path to follow.

To amuse you during the long wait, I’ve uncovered an interesting example of anti-Americanism from days gone by. Of course, such artifacts will come as no surprise to the cognoscenti among you, who, no doubt, can cite many interesting specimens of their own. Be that as it may, I turned up this example in a back issue of H. L. Mencken’s “American Mercury,” dated October 1924. It is entitled “A Yankee in Paris,” and documents a savage attack on Americans who dared to cheer on their Olympic football team. There are many nuances to the story that will be abundantly familiar to the modern reader, such as the remarkable delicacy of the mainstream media then as now in avoiding any mention of such outbursts. I have included a pic of the opening blurb below, and the story in full may be found here.