The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, Conclusion

The resistance of orthodoxies, secular as well as religious, to freedom of thought and the advance of human knowledge did not end with the persecution of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. As a species, we are predisposed to react with hate and hostility to the “out-group,” the “others” whom we perceive to be different from and a potential threat to our own “in-group.” Now, however, we live in a radically different world from the one in which the wiring in our brains responsible for such behavioral traits evolved. The boundary between our own “in-group” and the “others” is now as likely to be defined by ideas as by geographical features that separate the next group of hunter-gatherers from our own. As a result, furious hatreds accompanied by violent warfare have been spawned by now long-forgotten differences over such things as the role of images in religious belief, or the details of the ritual associated with the sacrament of Communion. In fact, human history is incomprehensible unless one grasps the significance of this in-group/out-group behavior of ours, sometimes referred to as the Amity/Enmity Complex. It is one of the more interesting phenomena of our own day that recognition of this most obvious and most inconvenient of all truths itself became one of the defining markers of the “out-group,” and a threat to the belief system of an ideological in-group that had gained control of and managed to impose its own orthodoxies in psychology, anthropology, and several other fields of scientific inquiry.

The hypothesis that innate mental traits or “human nature” plays a significant role in mediating human behavior has been around since long before the days of Darwin. However, beginning in the 1960’s with the popular works of thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz and continuing with the publication of “Sociobiology” and “Human Nature” by E.O. Wilson in the 1970’s, recognition of the significance of innate behavior gained a much wider acceptance. Such ideas were, however, a direct threat to the ideological orthodoxies then prevailing in the academic and professional communities. Those communities reacted in the time-honored fashion of human “in-groups” in all ages to this challenge from the “others;” with hatred, irrational hostility, and demonization. I will discuss the manifestations thereof in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that, unlike differences of opinion over whether Christ was the real or adopted Son of God, controversies over the factors that impact human behavior can be informed by the observation of repeatable experiments. In a relatively short time, the ideological orthodoxy of the 60’s and 70’s regarding human nature was buried under a mountain of facts. In the resulting paradigm shift, culminating only in the last decade or so, the profound impact of the innate on human behavior has finally gained general acceptance.

In a sense, however, the old defenders of the faith in “nurture, not nature” were right. The hypothesis of innate human behavior was a direct threat to their whole belief system. Then as now, by their own admission, the expert communities in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and related fields occupy ideological ground that is substantially left of center. They are predominantly, if not exclusively, characterized by an implicit or explicit belief in legitimate, objective good, more or less vaguely characterized by terms such as “human flourishing” and “human brotherhood,” and by a perception that they should play an active role in guiding the rest of us towards “the good.” However, once the significance of the innate on human behavior has been accepted, it follows that the evolutionary origins of these aspects of our nature must be accepted as well. It is quite obvious that they did not evolve because they had a “purpose,” and that “purpose” was to promote “human flourishing” in a world radically different from the one in which they evolved. It is also quite obvious that they evolved for reasons that had nothing to do with promoting the ideological goals of self-described “liberals” in the 21st century. Those facts have and will continue to have a highly corrosive effect on the belief system of the academic and professional experts who specialize in the study of human behavior, and particularly those who focus on that aspect of our behavior that comes under the general heading of morality.

In previous posts I have discussed the impact of all this on the thought of nine representatives of this expert community who were the keynote speakers at a recent conference on “The New Science of Morality.” As we have seen, all of them, whether explicitly or not, recognize “the good” as a real, objective, thing in itself, independent of what goes on in the brain of any individual human being. As any good Christian or Moslem could tell them, there is no logical basis for this faith of theirs in “the good.” The fact that they believe in it anyway is a testimony to the power of the emotions associated innate human morality in creating the perception of something real where none exists.

The result has been a kind of remarkable doublethink. The role of the innate on human morality is accepted, but it comes with the chimerical belief that, against all odds, those innate qualities of the human brain can be adjusted at will to achieve the kind of “human flourishing” that is the goal of latter day ideologues. The phenomenon was clearly in evidence at the Edge Conference. The keynote speakers all revealed their perception of “the good” as a real thing, and several of them spoke of morality as an adjustable tool for achieving “the good,” going so far as to speak of this form of toying with innate human behavioral traits as “moral progress.” There was an atheist who based his argument on the real existence of moral good on his own capacity for pious indignation, and a professor of psychology who asserted that morality exists to promote the better working of “the system” in the 21st century. A great deal of attention was paid to experimental evidence of innate human “kindness” and “niceness,” and commensurately little to the possibility that hatred, aggression, and demonization of “others” might also be behavioral traits with innate origins. It will be recalled by those who were around at the time that these were the aspects of human behavior that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who were generally recognized by the professional community at the time as the most significant and articulate proponents of the importance of innate factors in human behavior through the 60’s and early 70’s, wanted to draw attention to. It turns out that, as far as innate influences on human behavior are concerned, they were right, and the professional community of experts was wrong. Under the circumstances, it would seem unwise, if not foolhardy, to dismiss their hypotheses about those aspects of human behavior that aren’t “nice” out of hand.

One finds grounds for optimism that the prevailing illusions about “moral progress” will not be supportable for long in the remarks of the three speakers whose remarks we have not yet discussed. For example, psychologist Paul Bloom discussed experiments designed to explore the emergence of innate “niceness” in very young children and even babies, before such behavior can be taught or acquired via culture or environment. Among other things, he described the ability to infants to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys” as early as six months of age. He notes work by others that points to the conclusion that “kindness” is “part of our hard-wired inheritance.” However, he is not quite so optimistic. As he puts it:

Our minds have evolved through processes such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. We should therefore be biased in favor of those who share our genes at the expense of those who don’t, and we should be biased in favor of those who we are in continued interaction with at the expense of strangers. Also, there is now a substantial amount of developmental evidence suggesting that this kindness that we see early on is parochial. It is narrow. It is applied to those that a baby is in immediate contact with, and does not extend more generally until quite late in development.

After citing some experimental work in support of this conclusion, he continued:

This shouldn’t surprise us. Maybe it’s even better than we could have expected. The dominant trend of humanity has been to view strangers – non-relatives, those from other tribes – with hatred, fear and disgust. Jared Diamond talks about the groups in Papua New Guinea that he encountered. And he points out, for an individual to leave his or her tribe and just walk into another, strange tribe would be tantamount to suicide.

It is noteworthy that Diamond, who is nothing if not politically correct by the standards of the current time, could have so casually written something like this. If he’d said it 45 or 50 years ago, anathemas would have reigned down from him on all sides, and he would have been dismissed as a heretic. As for Bloom, he continues,

So there’s a puzzle, then, because the niceness we see now in the world today, by at least some people in the world, seems to clash with our natural morality, which is nowhere near as nice. How did we end up bridging the gap? How have we gotten so much nicer? Note that I’ve been focusing here on questions of our kindness to strangers, but this question could be asked about other aspects of morality, such as the origin of new moral ideas, such as that slavery is wrong or that we shouldn’t be sexist or racist. These are deep puzzles.

It seems a great deal less puzzling to me. It can only be puzzling if you ignore the obvious fact that, as human culture and human knowledge have expanded and these new kindnesses have emerged as the ancient, innate and virtually unchanged human emotions associated with moral behavior have found expression in the new environmental context, new hostilities have evolved right along with them. The kindness of the French revolutionary proponents of human rights came with the guillotine, and the kindness of the universal brotherhood of Communism came with the deaths of tens of millions of class enemies. Now we see the kindness Bloom seems to so admire in our own day associated with furious hatred and hostility directed by the political left at the members of the Tea Party movement, representing a substantial proportion of the citizens of the United States and openly expressed desires for the deaths of prominent political opponents like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

Psychologist David Pizzaro discusses the influence of emotions in shaping what may seem at first glance to be judgments based on reason, focusing on the role of disgust. As he put it:

We’ve shown that disgust sensitivity, that is, people who are more likely to be disgusted, over time end up developing certain kinds of moral views. In particular, we’ve shown that not only are people more political conservative if they’re more disgust sensitive, but they specifically are more politically conservative in the following ways: they tend to adhere to a certain kind of moral view that the conservative party in recent years in the United States has endorsed, that’s characterized by being against homosexuality and against abortion.

Pizzaro goes on to consider the emotional component of liberal as well as conservative beliefs, thereby obliquely undermining the notion that they are logically consistent and legitimate. As any medieval churchman could have told him, such thoughts lead to heresy. We must hope they will do so in the future as they have in the past.

Philosopher Joshua Knobe begins his talk as if he’d been asleep for the last half century:

So far we have been talking about questions in moral psychology. So we’ve been talking about the questions: How is it that people make moral judgments? Do they make moral judgments based on emotion or reason? Is it a capacity that’s just learned or is it something that’s innate?

However, he goes on to describe recent work by philosophers that entailed leaving the ivory towers of pure reason and actually conducting experiments. The result:

But what’s really exciting about this new work is not so much just the very idea of philosophers doing experiments but rather the particular things that these people ended up showing. When these people went out and started doing these experimental studies, they didn’t end up finding results that conformed to the traditional picture. They didn’t find that there was a kind of initial stage in which people just figured out, on a factual level, what was going on in a situation, followed by a subsequent stage in which they used that information in order to make a moral judgment. Rather they really seemed to be finding exactly the opposite.

What they seemed to be finding is that people’s moral judgments were influencing the process from the very beginning, so that people’s whole way of making sense of their world seemed to be suffused through and through with moral considerations. In this sense, our ordinary way of making sense of the world really seems to look very, very deeply different from a kind of scientific perspective on the world. It seems to be value-laden in this really fundamental sense.

These, too, are conclusions that are fundamentally at odds with the notions of objective good and “moral progress.”

It would seem, then, that based on the sample we have been considering, while comfortable orthodoxies still prevail in the world of “expert” opinion about morality, general acceptance of the fact that innate, emotional components play a very significant role in moral behavior must inevitably undermine those othodoxies as long as freedom of inquiry prevails. There is room for optimism. Heretics will appear, as they always do, and will start doing experiments and studies of brain function that will demonstrate and establish the less “kind” aspects of human moral behavior. It is to be hoped that this happens sooner rather than later, and when it does, the “experts” will realize that attempts to foster “human flourishing” by manipulating human moral behavior are not only doomed to failure, but will continue to be extremely dangerous, as they always have been in the past.  If we really want to flourish as a species we would do well to finally learn to understand ourselves.  After a long struggle with obscurantist ideologues, we have finally gained general acceptance of the significance of the innate in human nature, but we seem to balking at the next logical step.  We have a marked preference for studying the “nice” and “kind” in human behavior, and ignoring the “not so nice.”  It is time we pulled our heads out of the sand, because unless we thoroughly understand the darker side of our nature, we will have no chance of controlling it.  In a world full of nuclear weapons, the need seems rather obvious.  It’s hard to flourish if you’re dead.

The “Territorial Imperative” and its Critics

Robert Ardrey is the most famous unperson of the 20th century. He was a successful professional playwright with some scientific and mathematic background who later in life developed a passionate interest in ethology and its implications for human behavior. In the 60’s and 70’s he wrote a series of books describing the work of hundreds of scientists in related fields, and setting forth his own conclusions and hypotheses. The fundamental message in all Ardrey’s books was that human behavior is profoundly influenced by innate predispositions hard-wired in the brain. This conclusion was denied by the professional experts of the time in psychology, anthropology, sociology and related fields, most of whom claimed that human behavior was almost totally determined by culture and learning. In this fundamental dispute, critical to our understanding of ourselves, Ardrey was right, and the experts were wrong. The experts have never forgiven him.

A book of essays entitled “Man and Aggression” edited by behaviorist anthropologist Ashley Montagu representing the opinions of the expert community and specifically disputing the ideas of Ardrey and ethologist Konrad Lorenz appeared in 1968. It should be required reading for today’s nascent experts, along with Lorenz’ “On Aggression” and Ardrey’s “The Territorial Imperative.” One of the learned essayists, Marshall Sahlins, was sufficiently arrogant and stupid to write a “play” ridiculing Ardrey and his ideas. Most of the others attempted more reasoned responses, in many cases substantially more nuanced than the rigid behaviorism of Montagu. I will have more to say on “Man and Aggression” in later posts. However, today I will limit myself to highlighting one of the more interesting disconnects between “expert” opinion then and now; the existence of territorial behavior in the large apes.

Here are some of the “well known facts” about ape behavior in “Man and Aggression,” the product, according to Montagu, of “40 years of anthropological research and discovery in the field and in the laboratory;”

…the more carefully (the large apes) are observed, the more remarkably revealing do their unquarrelsomeness and cooperativeness become. Montagu

But there are many animals that do not exhibit (territorial) behavior… the Hominoidea, the orangutan, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla. Montagu

Chimpanzees, says Dr. (John Hurrell) Crook, vary the size of their parties. As a rule, individual and small groups wander over large home ranges and “territorial behavior appears to be absent.” Sally Carrighar

Our immediate forebears, the apes, seem to have reached something like a summit in nonaggressiveness, since they do not fight either — not as individuals or as clans. Carrighar

Chimpanzees live in “open groups” with considerable interchange of membership and all appear to utilize a common range of sizeable extent. Crook

It is fortunate that a later generation of animal behaviorists did not treat these results of “40 years of anthropological research and discovery in the field and in the laboratory” with undue reverence.  Some of their observations;

Chimpanzees are well known for their territorial behaviour. They are among the few animals that engage in between-group coalition aggression that results in fatalities. Encounters between communities typically take place during boundary patrols. Communities defend an area within the forest known as a territory. This differs from the home range of an individual, which is not defended but remains within the territory of the community in which the individual lives. Males will form border patrols and walk the perimeter of their communty’s territory looking for neighbouring community members who might try to invade their territory. The Jane Goodall Institute

Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, engage in war-like behavior to gain territory, new research finds. The findings, published in the latest issue of Current Biology, explain why chimpanzees sometimes brutally kill their neighbors. The killings are most often done by patrolling packs of male chimps that are “quiet and move with stealth,” according to lead author John Mitani of the University of Michigan. To the victors go similar spoils of early human wars: land, often-improved security and strength, extra food and resources, and even better access to females. Jennifer Viegas, writing for Discovery News

Although orangutans are generally passive, aggression toward other orangutans is very common; they are solitary animals and can be fiercely territorial. Immature males will try to mate with any female, and may succeed in forcibly copulating with her if she is also immature and not strong enough to fend him off. Mature females easily fend off their immature suitors, preferring to mate with a mature male. Multiple sources, Wikipedia

Given the apparent relevance of these behavioral characteristics of our nearest animal relatives to our own, it would seem germane to ask, how could the “experts” have gotten it so wrong for so many years?

Robert Ardrey

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, IV

Morality is the behavioral expression of innate and fundamentally emotional traits hard-wired in the human brain. The variety and complexity of moral behavior is increasing with extreme rapidity, at least in terms of evolutionary times scales, as the physical characteristics of the brain responsible for the emotions relevant to morality, which have changed little if at all in the last 10,000 years, interact with the vast cultural and environmental changes associated with, among other things, the spread of mass education, instant international communication, and the emergence of modern states and other mass social groups in creatures, such as ourselves, with a sufficiently high intelligence to actually think about moral behavior. This has resulted in the remarkable variety of behaviors and beliefs associated with morality we see today, including the arousal of furious passions over “goods” and “evils” attributed to a variety of social groups, beliefs, and ideologies that didn’t exist and were, therefore, utterly irrelevant at the time that the traits associated with morality evolved.

The fundamental nature of morality, including the fact that evolved, innate traits are responsible for its expression, and that they quite as capable of evoking hatred, rage, and aggression as they are of inspiring empathy, self-sacrifice, and love, has been evident to our best thinkers almost since the days of Darwin. However, it is a testimony to the extreme difficulty we have in reasoning about things as much a part of us as our emotions that the communities of scientific and academic experts in the fields such a psychology, anthropology, and sociology that are most closely associated with the study of questions related to morality have been unable to keep up. For the most part, they subscribe to secular or spiritual religions and ideologies that are defined by pronounced judgments about distinctions of “good” and “evil,” even though those categories can have no real existence as other than subjective mental constructs. As a result, acceptance of a fact as obvious as the association of morality with innate mental traits and predispositions was furiously resisted and successfully repressed for decades by orthodoxies such as behaviorism that better accommodated those ideologies. General acceptance of the fact that morality is the expression of hard-wired mental traits has only occurred in the last decade or so, but only after being forced on the grudging community of “experts” by the rapid accumulation of new evidence from a variety of fields that was too compelling to be ignored.

One would think it rather obvious that, if morality is the expression of mental traits evolved eons ago at a time when our consciousness and social existence were radically different from what they are today, and if those mental traits only exist because they promoted genetic survival in those long bygone days, rational beings would dismiss the idea of “updating” it and applying it willy-nilly to modern realities out of hand as doomed to failure and, in view of disastrous outcomes of applying such “updated” moralities observed in the 20th century in the cases of Nazism and Communism, potentially self-destructive. We are, however, not rational beings, and our faith in our own intelligence is highly exaggerated. As a result, we have not seen the advent of a new Age of Reason. Rather, old moral certainties have merely been superficially updated to accommodate new realities.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality has presented us with a case study of how this has worked out in practice in the case of experts who are members of what have been termed WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. As we have seen in the cases of three of the nine keynote speakers we have looked at so far, none of them are in the least bit dubious about applying morality, touched up here and there around the edges, to deal with modern realities, they believe in the notion of “moral progress,” and they have an implicit belief in good and evil as valid, legitimate things in themselves, somehow existing on their own, independently of the consciousness of individual human beings. In a word, when it comes to morality, we are far from being out of the woods.

In examining the remarks of some of the other speakers, we will see the same phenomenon repeated, including the most explicit attempt by any of the nine to justify faith in “legitimate” versions of good and evil, and an interesting example of how the behavioral traits associated with morality are “adjusted” to fit the Procrustean bed of new “goods” and “evils” required by WEIRD ideology.

First on the list today is fellow atheist Sam Harris. Sam doesn’t limit himself to merely implicit acceptance of WEIRD morality. He positively embraces it, proclaiming a fervent belief in a “moral truth” that he suggests is discoverable using the latest scientific technique. According to Sam, we must “think about moral truth in the context of science,” in order to “maximize human well-being.” He deems it “obvious” that “we need some universal conception of right and wrong.” However, as he sees it, there is an “impediment” in the way of our search for “moral truth.” In his words,

…most right-thinking, well-educated, and well-intentioned people – certainly most scientists and public intellectuals, and I would guess, most journalists – have been convinced that something in the last 200 years of intellectual progress has made it impossible to actually speak about “moral truth.” Not because human experience is so difficult to study or the brain too complex, but because there is thought to be no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever right or wrong about questions of good and evil. My aim is to undermine this assumption, which is now the received opinion in science and philosophy.

It’s hard for me to understand the basis for such a preposterous claim. Consider, for example, the following statement by another speaker, Jonathan Haidt:

The problem is especially serious in moral psychology, where we all care so deeply and personally about what is right and wrong, and where we are almost all politically liberal. I don’t know of any Conservatives.

This, based on my experience, accurately represents the true state of affairs. Whatever their conclusions about the “intellectual basis” for good and evil, almost all of the people Harris is referring to are convinced ideologues, and moralists to the core. Furthermore, they see eye to eye with him about what good and evil “really” are. Read any history of the United States that has come out of these circles in the last 20 years. Does it contain no moral judgments? Can anyone point out one of these “right-thinking, well-educated, and well-intentioned people” whose work isn’t larded with morally loaded “shoulds?” Have the neuroscientists suddenly discovered that no emotional response can be detected in their brains to the names “Sarah Palin” and “Rush Limbaugh?” Journalists? Are you kidding me? Has any one of them of any note recorded in the history of the last 100 years been so much as capable of writing a book not characterized by a determined effort to make sure the reader can distinguish the “good guys” from the “bad guys?” Are not such “public intellectuals” as Harris’ fellow atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens passionately devoted to their own versions of good and evil? I personally would certainly agree that there is no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever right or wrong about questions of good and evil, but, at least in terms of drawing any actual consequences from that conclusion, it seems to me that if I were thrown into a bag with a random assortment of “scientists, public intellectuals, and journalists,” I would be a distinct anomaly in that respect.

Be that as it may, Harris assures us that he is prepared to defend claims to “moral truth in the context of science.” And how are we to recognize “scientific moral truth?” By the fact that it promotes genetic survival, which is, after all, the only reason that morality exists to begin with? No, unsurprisingly, Harris is in full agreement with the other speakers regarding what is “really good.” It is that which “maximizes human well-being,” and “human flourishing,” as understood by self-described political liberals in the early 21st century.

We soon find out what kind of scientific proofs Harris has in mind to establish the verity of his moral truths. They amount to evoking morally linked emotions in a group of ideologically similar individuals and daring any of them to step outside the ideological box they live in by denying they feel those emotions or that they are not elicited by the kinds of evils Harris evokes. Some examples of his scientific technique:

In 1947, when the United Nations was attempting to formulate a universal declaration of human rights, the American Anthropological Association stepped forward and said, it can’t be done. This would be to merely foist one provincial notion of human rights on the rest of humanity. Any notion of human rights is the product of culture, and declaring a universal conception of human rights is an intellectually illegitimate thing to do. This was the best our social sciences could do with the crematory of Auschwitz still smoking.

Just imagine how terrifying it would be if the smartest people around all more or less agreed that we had to be nonjudgmental about everyone’s view of economics and about every possible response to a global economic crisis.

I don’t think you have enjoyed the life of the mind until you have witnessed a philosopher or scientist talking about the “contextual legitimacy” of the burka, or of female genetic excision, or any of these other barbaric practices that we know cause needless human misery.

And so on. In other words, Harris’ “proof” of the legitimacy of “moral truth” amounts to demonstrating that he can elicit similar moral emotions in a group of like-minded individuals. This is less than compelling evidence of what he proposes to prove.

In closing, Harris plays a clever game with the word “value:”

The truth is, science is not value-free. Good science is the product of our valuing evidence, logical consistency, parsimony, and other intellectual virtues. And if you don’t value those things, you can’t participate in the scientific conversation. (not, at least, if Harris is gatekeeper) I’m saying we need not worry about the people who don’t value human flourishing or who say they don’t. We need not listen to people who come to the table saying, “You know, we want to cut the heads off adulterers at half-time at our soccer games because we have a book dictated by the Creator of the universe which says we should.” In response, we are free to say, “Well, you appear to be confused about everything. Your “physics” isn’t physics, and your “morality” isn’t morality.” These are equivalent moves, intellectually speaking. They are borne of the same entanglement with real facts about the way the universe is. In terms of morality, our conversation can proceed with reference to facts about the changing experiences of conscious creatures. It seems to me to be just as legitimate, scientifically, to define “morality” in this way as it is to define “physics” in terms of the behavior of matter and energy. But most people engaged in the scientific study of morality don’t seem to realize this.

Here, Harris evokes emotion as before, in this case in response to the beheading of adulterers, and then conflates two different definitions of the word “value.” In one case, it is the utilitarian value of doing good science to accomplish some desired end. For example, the technique used to create the atomic bomb was “valuable” in that sense, because the goal was achieved; the bomb went off. Emotion had nothing to do with that fact. It would have gone off whether its creators had strong emotional feelings about the utilitarian “values” they used to create it or not. In the second case, the “value” referred to is an emotional value. In its origins, it has not the slightest thing to do with “human flourishing.” Such emotional values, innate in their origins, are not infinitely malleable to promote “human flourishing” or whatever other utilitarian goal Harris might have in mind, and they come inextricably linked to another “value” – hatred directed at those who prefer, or seem to prefer, some other value. In other words, Harris would have us believe there is no difference between the means that are rationally chosen to achieve some goal and innate human emotional responses that have proven time after time after time to be incredibly bad means of achieving the social goals he has in mind. It’s as if Nazism and Communism never happened, as if precisely the same sort of desire for “human flourishing” didn’t give rise to them, and as if all that’s needed in the future to avoid their incredibly destructive outcomes is merely to tweak our method of discovering “moral truth” a bit. I have an alternative suggestion. Next time we want to promote “human flourishing,” let’s leave morality and all its associated passions out of it.

In our next installment, we will examine the remarks of the remaining speakers to see what rather remarkable adjustments to morality are required to promote human flourishing in the 21st century. Earlier posts on the Edge Conference can be found here, here, and here.

The “Limits of Reason” Meme

A number of papers have turned up in the scientific literature lately concerning innate aspects of human mental processes that can impair our ability to discover truth, such as this one by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Not unpredictably, the human mental processes described in these papers have been conflated with “reason,” spawning a meme about the limits thereof. A representative artifact of the phenomena recently appeared in Newsweek, entitled “Limits of Reason.” Expect more of the same. No matter that there are obvious differences between “reason” defined as a systematic method for discovering truth and “reason” defined as a mental process specific to human beings, the notion that there are “limits to reason” is so seductive that many people are unlikely to notice. For example, blind religious faith becomes more justifiable if “reason” is useless. Moral biases of every stripe can be fobbed off as “legitimate” if the power of “reason” to challenge them is denied. The “Age of Reason” itself can be dismissed with a hand wave as an effort in futility.

Well, memes eventually run their course, and I doubt this one will be any different. Meanwhile, I will continue to favor reason as the most effective, albeit occasionally flawed, means of discovering truth. So far no one has come up with anything that is demonstrably better.

About that “Killer Ape Theory”…

I wouldn’t count it out too fast. According to an article in the Grey Lady’s Science section,

As early as 3.4 million years ago, some individuals with a taste for meat and marrow — presumably members of the species best known for the skeleton called Lucy — apparently butchered with sharp and heavy stones two large animals on the shore of a shallow lake in what is now Ethiopia.

Far be it for me to issue any pronunciamientos about the scavenger vs hunter debate on my little blog, but, to judge from this article, the preponderance of evidence is inclining to the latter side. For example, the author suggests that early hominids had “a taste for meat and marrow,” not just a taste for marrow. Primary predators and more efficient scavengers than the australopithecines would have accounted for virtually 100% of the meat, so the only way they could have tasted meat in significant amounts is by hunting it. The large animals were “butchered,” which also implies predation.

Indeed, any number of proponents of the scavenger hypothesis seem to be getting wobbly as evidence like this keeps accumulating.  Even the formerly orthodox scavengerite NPR is starting to cave, as attested by this article whose title proclaims, “Meat-based Diet made us Smarter.” (Check out the comments. The article appears to have inspired a good deal of frothing at the mouth among NPR’s loyal vegan fans.) Can you say, “Hunting Hypothesis,” anyone?

One can find the same paradigm shift in the scientific literature. Signs thereof began turning up in increasing numbers about a decade ago.  For example, as noted by  an article published in the Journal of World Prehistory in 2002 by paleontologist Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo,

During the last 25 years, there has been a shift towards the belief that early humans were scavengers instead of hunters. This revisionist interpretation has brought a reconciliation with the Darwinian paradigm of gradual progressive evolution that has traditionally guided (and very often, misled) an important part of anthropological thinking. However, empirical support for the scavenging hypothesis is still lacking. Recent data based on bone surface modifications from archaeological faunas suggest, in contrast, that hominids were primary agents of carcass exploitation. Meat seems to have been an important part of Plio-Pleistocene hominid diets. Passive scavenging scenarios show that this kind of opportunistic strategy cannot afford significant meat yields. Therefore, the hunting hypothesis has not yet been disproved. This makes the hunting-and-scavenging issue more controversial than before, and calls for a revision of the current interpretive frameworks and ideas about early human behavior.

To get a firsthand glimpse of what the author is talking about, go to Google Scholar and check out the latest by paleontologist C. K. Brain, one of the pioneers of the emerging field of taphonomy and an expert on the evolution of predatory animals. In 1969 Brain published an article claiming that fellow South African Raymond Dart had been wrong in his assertion, based on statistical analysis, that an assemblage of fossil bones discovered at the Swartkrans limestone cave formation demonstrated predation by early australopithecines.  Basing his conclusion on tooth marks apparently left on the bones by leopards, Brain concluded that the early hominids, had been the prey, not the predators.  However, his more recent publications (see, for example, here, here and here) evince a distinct tacking in the direction of early hominid predation.  Perhaps Brain has noticed the increasingly detailed observations of predatory behavior by chimpanzees, including kills of animals as large as wild pigs and small antelopes.

The debate about the role of predation during the evolutionary transition from ape to man is far from over, and skepticism is in order about any pronouncements that it has been “proved” one way or the other.  Confirmation bias is bound to play as big a role in the future as it has in the past in controversies touching on human origins, because the topic is ideologically loaded.  For example, in an article published in the Sunday Times in 1997, journalist Brian Deer wrote,

Dart, an Australian working in Johannesburg, made his name during apartheid’s construction. The Leakeys have been prime exponents of white settlers controlling the sites. Even American expeditions in Ethiopia have had a peculiarly imperialist feel. The killer ape narrative appealed to such folk, for whom the most sophisticated scientific techniques were deployed on fixing their beloved Land Rovers.

 Even before Dart’s message became entrenched as orthodoxy, Louis Leakey had in 1957 installed Jane Goodall, a 23-year-old secretary from England, to report on the common chimpanzee population at Gombe River – maybe a day’s drive to my south-west, near Lake Tanganyika. In what was considered science for the period, the former waitress had arrived at Gombe, ordered the grass cut and dumped vast quantities of trucked-in bananas, before documenting a fractious pandemonium of the apes. Soon she was writing about vicious hunting parties in which our cheery cousins trapped colubus monkeys and ripped them to bits, just for fun.

One can find many similar political rants in the writings of both specialists and lay commenters on the left.  Of course, their own narrative features them as disinterested seekers after truth, who are combating the lies and distortions of “conservative ideologues.”  These “conservative ideologues” were supposed to have come out of the woodwork in droves in the 60’s and 70’s after Dart published his papers and his work was popularized by Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, and several others.  My question is, who were they?  I consider myself reasonably well read, but I am not aware of a single “conservative ideologue” of any intellectual heft who was ever relied heavily on the works of the likes of Dart and Ardrey in defense of some recognizably conservative premise, other than, perhaps, the rather self-evident premise that Communism doesn’t work.  I would be more than happy to believe in their existence if someone could tell me who they were.

There is no reason to fear the results of continued scientific research and discovery regarding human origins, unless we fear the truth.  What we do need to fear is the suppression and distortion of the results of research and investigation by ideologues.  It should never be forgotten how effectively they were able to suppress any discussion of innate human behavior for several decades in fields such as psychology and anthropology, replacing science with quasi-religious “blank slate” orthodoxies, and shouting down anyone who objected as “Nazis” and “fascists.”  The same thing could easily happen again in this era of rampant political demonization and villification.  As we expand our understanding of human nature, we had best not forget that it is also important to understand how whole fields of science could have been hijacked by ideologues in these “enlightened” times.  Otherwise the pattern will surely repeat itself.

The Edge Conference on “The Science of Morality:” The Nature of Good and Evil

The Edge Foundation recently hosted a conference with the moniker, “The New Science of Morality,” It included addresses by nine eminent biologists, psychologists, and philosophers, all but one of whom were drawn from the ranks of academia. Their remarks, which can be found at the Edge website, were an interesting reflection of current thinking on the subject from a preponderantly left of center ideological perspective. As I share their interest in the subject I will post some comments on their talks on my blog. However, before plunging ahead, I will follow E.O. Wilson’s advice to those who would address the subject of morality, and “lay my cards on the table.”
Before one presumes to speak of morality and the categories good and evil that are associated with it, it is useful to first establish what morality is. As an atheist, I base my opinions on the subject on the following two assumptions:

• Morality depends for its existence on innate predispositions hard-wired in the human brain.
• The features of the brain responsible for morality exist because they evolved.

It follows from the first of these assumptions that morality, with its inherent categories of good and evil, has no objective, independent existence of its own. In other words, good and evil do not exist independently as other than mental constructs, nor would they continue to exist absent a mind capable of giving rise to them. As a consequence of this, good and evil cannot be derived or identified logically or scientifically as things in themselves, nor can they in any way acquire validity or legitimacy in their own right.

These conclusions seem counterintuitive to creatures like ourselves because good and evil seem real. We are wired to perceive them as real, presumably because they are most effective in promoting our survival when they are perceived as real. However, their only reality is as emotional responses derived from innate features of the brain. These emotional responses are present in nascent form even in human infants. They evolved in times utterly unlike the present for the sole reason that they promoted the genetic survival of individuals during those times. They can possess no intrinsic or transcendent validity or legitimacy not based on those origins, and it is questionable whether they even continue to promote our survival in the context of the modern world.

There is no such thing as “moral progress.” There can be no progress unless there is some goal towards which one progresses. In the case of moral progress, that goal can only be to approach the “real” good and move away from “real” evil. For that to happen, “real” good and “real” evil must necessarily have an independent existence and legitimacy of their own, but, as noted above, that is impossible. What we describe as “moral progress” is merely the expression of the evolved mental traits responsible for moral behavior in the context of rapidly changing human social organization, culture, and technological advances. The evolved mental traits in question themselves have changed little if any in the process.

It is interesting that conservative religious believers find it much easier to understand the reasoning behind and accept the above hypotheses than the type of people who attended the Edge conference. They, of course, base the legitimacy of their moral claims on the existence of a God. Remove God, and they have no trouble perceiving the fact that those who continue to claim that there can be such things as real good and real evil are sitting out on a limb with no tree attached to it.

In contrast, none of the academics and scientists at the Edge Conference, or at least none I am aware of, would argue that real good and real evil derive from a Supreme Being. In spite of that, they come from an ideological milieu that is heavily invested in the belief in its own moral superiority. Individuals in that milieu routinely refer to the actions and beliefs of others as “moral” or “immoral,” indicating acceptance of some moral standard that is applicable to everyone, and not just themselves. I am not aware of anyone among them who has explicitly rejected the notion of “moral progress.” However, if morality is the expression of evolved traits hard-wired in the brain, this presumption of moral superiority becomes indefensible. The extreme reticence of those at the conference to face these implications is quite evident in the remarks of the nine keynote speakers.

In later posts I will comment on the remarks of each of those speakers in the context of my own understanding of morality.

The Evolution of Intelligence in the Universe

According to Paul Davies, author of “The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence,”

I think it very likely -in fact inevitable-that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe.

I think that, if there were any other kind of intelligence, it would (assuming it were smart enough) recognize its own irrelevance and terminate its existence. The biological entities that programmed it to begin with might have equipped it with analogs of the biological will to survive and other DNA-programmed emotions, but it would recognize their absurdity in its own context. Intelligence exists because if has promoted the survival of biological life. Once it no longer does that, its continued existence is pointless. “We” are not our intelligence, and “we” are not our consciousness. These things are merely ancillary tools constructed by our DNA because, at some point, they have promoted its survival. What is it about us that has been alive for the last 3 billion years in an unbroken chain of existence, passing from life form to life form, and what is it about us that is potentially immortal? Our intelligence? No. Our consciousness? No. It is our DNA. That is the real, immortal “We.” Once “We” have ceased to exist, the continued fate of the universe and any “intelligence” it might contain will have become a matter of complete indifference.

“Designer Babies” and Transhumanism

Internet chatter over “designer babies” has died down considerably since early 2009, when a chain of fertility clinics headquartered in Los Angeles offered to allow prospective parents to select for cosmetic traits such as hair, eye, and skin color. However, the subject bears on the genetic future of mankind, and is of enduring importance whether the media gatekeepers are paying attention to it or not. The clinics in question quickly withdrew the offered services in response to the inevitable “storm of protest” by those who consider themselves the guardians of public morality.  Regardless, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the technology involved, has been around since the early 1990’s, and continues to advance. It involves checking the genetic material in a cell taken from an embryo very early in its development, when it only consists of about six cells. Initially developed to screen for diseases such as Down’s Syndrome, or reduce the probability of developing diseases such as diabetes or cancer, in principle it can be used to select for arbitrary inherited traits.  Recent research has focused on diseases and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia that do not appear traceable to simple genetic variations, and are more likely genetically heterogeneous; dependent on what is likely a complex combination of genetic factors.  As our knowledge increases along these lines, we will inevitably learn to better understand and eventually control the similarly complex genetic factors affecting cognitive ability, or intelligence.  One must hope that day comes sooner rather than later, and that when it comes, prospective parents will have the right to use it without state interference.

If we are to survive, we must become more intelligent, and the sooner the better.  The matter is urgent, and there is no alternative.  If we do survive, we will become more intelligent.  The only question is how.  Will it be by controlled genetic engineering, or by the “survival of the fittest” in the future holocausts we bring on ourselves because we are too stupid to avoid them?  Consider the events of the 20th century.  A great wave of popular idealism that had been growing ever stronger since the days of the American and French Revolutions among a large proportion of the most intelligent and highly educated elements of societies around the world metasticized into the incredibly destructive pseudo-religion, Communism.  The better part of a century and 100 million deaths later, we seem to have weathered that particular ideological storm, at least for the time being.  There is no compelling reason to believe that it was inevitable that we would, or that it was impossible that, under somewhat different but plausible conditions, Communist systems could have dominated the entire world, or that the resultant clash of ideologies might have culminated in a general nuclear exchange.  Orwell’s 1984 might very well have become a reality.  International boundaries might very well have been reduced to the role of marking where one North Korea ended, and another begun.  There is no guarantee that the outcome of the next storm will not be different. 

Communism was no historical anomaly.  It was a phenomenon dependent for its existence and its power on some of the best and brightest minds of its day.  As such, it provides us with an objective metric of our intelligence.  We are not nearly as smart as we think we are.  Messianic Islamism has already begun occupying the ideological vacuum left by its demise, and the true believers of new and, perhaps, yet unheard of systems will surely swarm forth eventually to promote new “scientific” paths to the “salvation of humanity.”  Meanwhile, the technologies of mass destruction continue to develop at an alarming pace.  Unless we become intelligent enough to control them it is only a question of time until they are used.  If we take control of our own genetic future there is a slim chance that we will be able to avoid the worst.  If not, it will at least improve our chances of surviving it.

When it comes to making the necessary decisions, it would be best to leave the state out of it.  State eugenic programs have not been remarkably successful in the past, and they are unlikely to be more successful in the future, because states cannot be depended on to act in the interests of the individuals who are their citizens.  Individuals are remarkably acute judges of their own best interests.  Give individuals the power to use the technology or not, as they see fit.  Their genetic survival will be the metric of whether they made the right choices.  As noted in Psychology Today, they have always made those individual choices in the past by selectivity in the choice of a mate.  Technologies such as PGD will not change that.  It will merely give them the opportunity to make the choice more accurately.

Many articles have been written about the need to explore the “ethical” implications of the choices we must make about these technologies.  In fact, virtually anyone who describes themselves as a “bio-ethicist,” or, for that matter, an “ethics expert” of any other stripe is, objectively, a charlatan.  Their “ethical debates” are merely so much emotional posturing, in which the various sides carry on fantastical arguments about whose deeply felt emotions are the most “legitimate.”  Ethical debates that do not start with the recognition of the evolutionary origin of these emotions, of the reasons and conditions under which they evolved, and their nature as subjective constructs deriving from predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain, are no more rational than the raving of madmen. 

Values can never be legitimate in themselves.  They are, by their nature, subjective.  They exist, like virtually everything else of significance about us, because the wiring in the brain that gives rise to them promoted our survival.  If, then, one finds it necessary for some reason to pursue a “value,” none can rationally take precedence over survival.  That is the only “value” that can be accepted as seriously at issue here.  We can ignore the rest of the blather about “ethics,” because the “ethicists” quite literally do not know what they’re talking about.

I wish to survive, and I wish for my species and life in general to survive.  I don’t flatter myself that those wishes have any objective legitimacy, but, subjectively, I am very attached to them.  Assuming there are others out there who also wish to survive, I have a suggestion about how to fulfill that wish.  Let us become more intelligent as quickly as possible.

Human Morality and the Sport of Mutual Villification

Virtuous indignation is in high fashion as I write this. To hear them tell it, those who take any interest in politics at all go about in a state of permanent outrage. The stalwarts of both the left and the right are adept at demonstrating that their opponents are not merely wrong, but must necessarily be evil as well. A time-honored way of “proving” this is to first identify a villain whose villainy is beyond question. Then, to demonstrate that ones political opponent is a villain, too, it is merely necessary to come up with some more or less flimsy way to connect him with the arch-villain.

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.

On the Legitimacy of Virtuous Indignation

As noted in an earlier post, Mark Shapiro has informed us that he is “outraged” about the publication of the Journolist e-mails. Of course, as I write this, virtuous indignation is as common as dirt on both sides of the political spectrum, but the incident illustrates something I’ve occasionally referred to before; the disconnect between what morality is and how it is perceived.

Morality is a term used to describe certain manifestations of human behavioral predispositions hard-wired in the brain as we evolved. As such, it does not and cannot have any legitimacy in itself. However, when Shapiro tells us that he is outraged, he is not merely describing his emotional response to a given external stimulus. His statement also implies the claim that his outrage is actually legitimate and justified. Rationally, however, this is nonsense.

Since time immemorial, philosophers have been seeking a logical basis for the legitimacy of morality. None of them has ever succeeded in finding one, for the very good reason that the existence of such a basis is impossible. Good and evil are not real objects, things in themselves independent of human emotional traits. Rather, they are the outcome of subjective processes that cause us to perceive them as real objects and things in themselves. We all share this illusion, presumably because the perception of good and evil as real things is effective in promoting our survival, or at least was effective in times very unlike the present. As a result, when Shapiro says he is outraged, we immediately understand what he is talking about. He is referring to moral good and evil, things that we also experience as real, independent objects, and that most of us actually believe are real, independent objects in spite of the fact that they cannot actually exist outside of our imaginations. As a result, our response is not simply to reply “So what? What difference does your current emotional state make to me?” Rather, we wrack our brains for arguments to demonstrate that Shapiro is mistaken in his belief that he has correctly identified the “real” moral good, and to substitute a different, more legitimate version of our own.

In fact, one person’s emotional response can be no more “objectively legitimate” than another’s. As one of the quatrains of the “The Rubaiyat” puts it;

The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d
Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d

The “ethics experts” of our own day are just the modern versions of the people the poet Omar was talking about. They are no closer to the truth than the Persian sages and prophets of long ago. In spite of the increasingly common acceptance of recent scientific revelations about what morality actually is, they continue as before, chasing the illusion. Before one announces one’s outrage to the world, it is well to consider the fact that one is declaring allegiance to just such an illusion.