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.

Of Niall Ferguson, Objective Criticism, and European Hatemongers

There has, of course, always been an undercurrent of anti-Americanism in European society. Our rapid expansion across the continent and rise as a potential competitor, our form of government, our heterogeneous mixture of races and ethnic groups, and religious idiosyncrasies, our geographic distance, and many other factors have acted to reinforce the sense that Americans were “others.” Our brains are hard-wired to have a dual system of morality, which I have elsewhere referred to as the Amity/Enmity Complex. We reserve “good” moral behavior for those in our “in-group.” The “other,” however, is perceived as evil, unclean, and contemptible. Ask the European Jews who survived World War II how that works. The collapse of the Soviet Union reinforced the sense of our power and significance. Instead of just one among several others, for many Europeans we became “The Other.” Predictably, human nature took its course, and hatred of Americans reached new extremes.

As I happen to speak German, I was able to watch the phenomenon as it developed in that country firsthand. It became impossible to overlook when the German mass media, with Spiegel magazine in the forefront, began to discover just how lucrative it could be to feed the growing undercurrents of anti-American hate. The rest of the media soon caught on. Towards the end of the Clinton administration, the German media started becoming choked with expressions of rage, hatred, and denunciations for any number of trumped up claims of US “immorality.” Spiegel’s editors became positively obsessed with the game, to the point that it became difficult to find any news about Germany on their website mixed in with the daily dose of intemperate railing against the USA. This quasi-racist Amerika bashing went on well into the Bush administration, until a growing number of decent Germans, and the few Americans who were paying any attention, started pushing back. David of Davids Medienkritik was prominent among them, and one can find some of the more egregious and vicious attacks documented on his website.

Gradually, the word spread, and more Americans began to notice, including influential players in our own mass media. It became increasingly obvious to the “respectable” elements in the German media that, if they kept it up, they would soon enjoy reputations similar to that held by Julius Streicher and “Der Stürmer” during the Third Reich. This, of course would not do. It might seriously jeopardize their chances of raking in any future international prizes for “objective journalism.” They began moderating their tone, until today one only sees the occasional chunk of red meat still tossed out to the legions of Amerika haters.

Of course, this remarkable change in tone makes it quite obvious that the editors of Spiegel and the rest were quite conscious of the game they were playing all along. If not from that, one could detect it in the day and night difference between the occasional English articles on their site and the German stuff intended for domestic consumption. While the unabashed hatemongering was still going on unabated, however, they were quite disingenuous about it. One of their favorite phrases was “objective criticism.” Any slanted, half-baked attack on the US was fobbed off as “objective criticism.” I don’t doubt that many Germans still rationalize their hate as “objective criticism.” To them, I can only recommend that they take a look at the real thing. They need look no further than Niall Fergusons, “The War of the World.”

The book is anything but a pro-US panegyric. On the contrary, we come in for some harsh criticism touching such matters as our pervasive habit of shooting enemy prisoners of war, our bombing of civilians in World War II, our less than generous response to the European persecution of Jews and other minorities before the war, and any number of other real or perceived shortcomings. There’s more than enough to make the more thin-skinned of my countrymen squirm as they read it. To read it, however, is to learn the difference between the “objective criticism” of the hate mongers and the search for truth of a conscientious historian.

Balance is always one of the best tip offs. Ferguson is well aware of the opposing arguments on either side of the issues he discusses, and has a deep grasp of the relevant history. No one can be perfectly objective. Our world view is bound to mediate the way we perceive historical facts to a greater or lesser extent. However, Ferguson doesn’t ignore half of the facts because they conflict with a preferred narrative. History plays a much different role in the “objective criticism” of the Amerika haters. For them, it is just a sewer one wades through to pick up choice tidbits that fit the narrative. To them, its end is to villify. Facts that conflict with that end are ignored. As a result, the hater’s grasp of history is necessarily shallow. Challenge one of their choice tidbits, and it’s obvious. They never waste much time trying to defend the indefensible. They just hop ahead to the next tidbit.  Read the book and you’ll see the difference.

There is another good reason for reading “The War of the World.” In the process of demonstrating the difference between a serious history and propaganda, Ferguson has created a virtual case study of the Amity/Enmity Complex in action. Of course, the manifestations of anti-American hate referred to earlier are an excellent example of a recent manifestation of this destructive aspect of human nature. “The War of the World” chronicles many more, although Ferguson himself hasn’t grasped the connection. The book cites instance after instance of slaughter and destruction inflicted on the “other” in recent history. The Jews are, of course, the quintessential “other” of our time, and Ferguson reveals the incredible and unforgivable misery they have suffered from the irrational hatred of their neighbors, not only in Germany, but in pogroms and murders that were every bit as vicious in Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and a host of other countries. Read the litany of horror, and it may begin to dawn on you why the existence of Israel is necessary.

The Jews had plenty of company in the 20th century. Ferguson tells us of the Armenian genocide, the rape of Nanking, the slaughter of Serbs by Croats and of Moslems by Serbs, and countless other manifestations of the Complex. Read his book. Then read what Robert Ardrey, Arthur Keith, and many others have been trying to tell us since the time of Darwin about the dual system of human morality, and think about it.  Unless you’re blind. You’ll see they were right. One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, they’ll be proved right. Wait and see.

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.

A Malaysian Atheist asks for Help

The Friendly Atheist has posted a letter  from a Malaysian atheist appealing for help and advice to solve a problem related to religion.  It’s from a Malaysian woman in a relationship with a British man.  Both are atheists, but they can’t be married as such in Malaysia because, having been born to Moslem parents, she is automatically a “Moslem,” and can’t renounce the religion because apostasy is severely punished.  She claims the penalty is death, as in Saudi Arabia, but, based on some of the comments, in practice it’s less drastic than that.  As some of the commenters point out, the letter seems a bit fishy, I suspect because the British man isn’t really as interested in getting married as the writer seems to think.  Be that as it may, the letter is a case in point of how moral rules can be blunt instruments.

In this case, the rule we are talking about is the rejection of “religious bigotry.”  Like all moral rules, to be effective, it must be kept simple.  In essence, the rule is that if you object to someone else’s beliefs, and the set of beliefs you object to are generally accepted as a religion, than you are a religious bigot.  There are good reasons for the existence of such rules.  They leverage the innate human predisposition to acquire a moral code in order to prevent harm to individuals on account of personal beliefs.  It is tacitly assumed that these beliefs pose no threat to other individuals that they cannot reasonably be expected to bear, or that the “bigot” would not be likely to bear if the shoe were on the other foot.  As the case mentioned above illustrates, it is unwise to apply such rules indiscriminately, untempered by considerations of what is really being accomplished in the process. 

Take, for example, objections to Islam.  In general, a large proportion of the populations of the western democracies today would object to any sort of discrimination against anyone on account of their religious affiliation as Moslems.  To them, such discrimination represents “religious bigotry.”  However, if one really accepts the teachings of Islam at face value, their consequences if applied to these opponents of “religious bigotry” would likely induce them to change their tune with alacrity. 

Suppose, for example, that they were made to suffer severe punishment for beliefs over which they had no more voluntary control than the belief that 2+2 = 4?  Suppose they were prevented from marrying a person they loved because that person was not a Moslem?  Suppose their best friend suddenly announced that the friendship was over because its existence was not in accord with the friend’s religious beliefs?  Suppose they were required to accept the murder of one of their children by someone acting explicitly in the name of that religion, because the child was a homosexual?  Supposed they were required to live under laws explicitly based on the prescriptions of that religion?  Supposed they were required to accept official discrimination, resulting, for example, in a higher tax burden, on account of their own religious beliefs?  All of the above are explicitly required by the Moslem religion if one takes the Quran and Kadith seriously.  These opponents of “religious discrimination” would certainly reject all of the above out of hand if it were required of them by some arbitrary tyrant acting in the name of pure self-interest.  Why, then, are such demands acceptable if made in the name of religion?

Blind religious discrimination has been an incredibly destructive force in human history.  Religious discrimination against Moslems can be just as destructive as any other variety.  However, one does not become a “bigot” by virtue of objecting to the sacrifice of cherished liberties, won over centuries at a high cost in blood, because someone else’s religion demands it.  Those who demand religious liberty for themselves must be willing to accord that same liberty to others.  No “moral rule” can have any force that requires one to sacrifice one’s own liberty to accommodate someone else’s religion.

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 Holloway and Godless Morality

While we’re on the subject of morality, I will touch on a related artifact from a slightly earlier time.  It is a book entitled “Godless Morality” by Richard Holloway, who was formally Bishop of Edinburgh for the Scottish Episcopal Church, and now describes himself as an “after-religionist.”  Holloway was still formally a Christian in 1999, when the book was first published, but had already wandered far from the straight and narrow path.  His book notes that divinely mandated moral systems “bear a striking resemblance to, and offer confirmation of, the social systems in which they emerged.”  Morality was not something mandated by the Bible.  Rather, according to Holloway, “the creation of morality is our business, it is something we have to do for our own sake if we are to live sanely and with care for one another and the good of society.”  Christianity “has allowed itself to be imprisoned by its own lack of historical imagination and versatility in interpreting ancient texts,” and “There really is no single, discernable point of view to be found (in the Bible), and what we do discover is often impossible to interpret, because we are so far from its original context.”  In a word, when Holloway wrote the book, he was palpably no longer a Christian.  Apparently, he hadn’t quite realized it yet himself, but, to his credit, he did eventually have the intellectual honesty to put two and two together.  He now appears to be a more or less garden variety progressive leftist.  Reading his rather rambling book is like listening to NPR for a couple of hours, complete with the chapter on gay and lesbian issues. 

The theme of the book is that we must all get together and cobble forth a new morality, suitable to the cultural context of our time.  Good luck with that.  Its interest as far as this post is concerned is in what distinguishes it from the books on the subject that have begun to appear in the last few years.  As a mentioned above, it was published ten years ago, and it shows.  Holloway is vaguely aware of a connection between morality and our evolutionary past, but the related discussion is remarkably naive compared to what one finds in more recent works.  For some reason, he seems allergic to Darwin, perhaps because he was aware at some level of the left’s aversion, still very pronounced at the time, to any genetic interpretation of human behavior.  Instead, he drags in such worthies as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. 

According to Holloway, ”(Schopenhauer) tells us that the species wages war with individuals and their moralities.  It knows no morality except its own will-to-live, so that it has no scruple about over-riding our happiness and well-being, because the species has a closer and prior right to us than the individual has.”  This, we are to understand, “fits well with Nietzsche’s understanding of the human predicament as a consequence of humanity’s sundering from its animal past… And this is the origin of morality, this need to find some kind of balance between instinctive and intentional life, between the drive of the species and the consciousness of the individual.”  Of course, Darwin would have blushed to hear such stuff, not to mention his followers, who had already articulated sophisticated hypotheses concerning morality more than 150 years ago.  The point is that, as recently as ten years ago, one could simply ignore them and hold forth with quaint phrases from such poetic philosophers as Nietzsche on the origins of morality and still maintain at least some semblance of credibility.  That is no longer possible today.  We have been making progress.

It is interesting that, like a number of explicitly atheist writers,  Holloway is aware of the subjective nature of morality.  For example, he says, “I have claimed that morality is a human construct; it is something that we ourselves have created.”  However, he is as incapable as them of transcending his own nature and  following this claim to its logical consequences.  For example, he is clearly capable of unabashed virtuous indignation directed at the rich exploiters of the poor, or those who would discriminate against gays and lesbians.  I daresay he would be incapable of imagining a time or a cultural context in which slavery, predatory exploitation of the poor, and the treatment of homosexuals as pariahs would necessarily be “good,” although, if morality is really a human construct, cultures and contexts that would allow such revisions of morality should be at least hypothetically possible.  In other words, he still experiences morality as an object, as a “thing-in-itself,” all his protestations to the contrary.  We all do.  That’s the way we’re wired.  That’s the way I’m wired. 

None of us can live as other than moral beings.  However, I differ with Mr. Holloway, not to mention some of the more illustrious of my fellow atheists, in my assessment of the role morality should play in our lives.  Morality is a tool crafted in the course of our evolution because it has promoted our survival.  It has no “higher purpose” beyond that, and, to the extent that it doesn’t promote our genetic survival, it is utterly meaningless.  To the extent that one can posit a “good-in-itself” at all, it is survival.  There is and can be no “higher good” than that, from the point of view of our essential selves, our genes.  Morality evolved at a time and in circumstances vastly different from those we live in today.  It is, unfortunately, not infinitely malleable to suit the times, as the Communists recently demonstrated in a rather large-scale experiment that cost 100 million human lives.  It is not in our nature to be amoral.  Let us, then, live our lives according to simple moral rules that promote our survival and, if possible, our happiness.  However, at the same time let us realize that behavioral traits that evolved when we lived as small groups of hunter-gatherers armed with spears may no longer be appropriate now that we live in nation-states armed with nuclear weapons.  We can’t adjust our behavior at will to create perfect denizens of the kinder, gentler, more just world Mr. Holloway appears to favor.  Our morality has its dark sides, such as the Amity/Enmity Complex I’ve often discussed on this blog.  This aspect of our nature made it “morally good” for the Nazis to murder the Jews, for the Communists to slaughter the ”bourgeoisie,” and for the zealots of assorted religions the world over to liquidate infidels.   That, too, was “moral” behavior, as far as the killers were concerned.  That aspect of human morality will not change merely because the Holloways of the world wish it so.  Inevitably, situations will arise that do not neatly lend themselves to resolution in the context of moral rules.  To survive, it may be necessary to act rationally rather than morally.

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.

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.

“The Evolution of Morality” and Innate Human Behavior

There has been an incredible (and gratifying) sea change in attitudes towards and acceptance of the idea that our behavior is profoundly influenced by innate predispositions that are genetically programmed in our brains since the 60’s and 70’s. In those days, proponents of the idea were relentlessly attacked by so-called “scientists” who were actually ideologues defending Marxism and related secular religions. These attacks generally included vilification and demonization via slanderous accusations of “racism,” “fascism,” or some similar right wing sin. At the time, academics in such related fields as anthropology, psychology, etc., either cheered on the ideologues, or stood discretely aside, collaborating in a secular variant of religious obscurantism. In the meantime, there have been great advances in our knowledge of the inner workings of the brain. The proponents of innate behavior have been vindicated, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the basic truth of their arguments, and maintain any claim to scientific respectability at the same time. It would be difficult for anyone who hasn’t been around long enough to have witnessed these changes to appreciate their magnitude or significance.

A recently published book entitled “The Evolution of Morality,” by the philosopher Richard Joyce, is one more striking example of the change, among many others. In it one finds the remarkable passage,

There is one traditional complaint against sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that has, thankfully, receded in recent years: that the program would, if pursued, lead to unpleasant political ends. It shouldn’t be forgotten that much of the tone-setting early invective against these research programs was politically motivated. In their withering and influential attack on sociobiology, “Not in Our Genes,” Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin are, if nothing else refreshingly honest about this, admitting that they share a commitment to socialism, and that they regard their “critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society” (1984: ix). Elsewhere, Lewontin and Richard Levins proudly made this declaration: “…we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy” (Levins and Lewontin 1985: 165). It is not these disturbing confessions of political motivation that I mean to highlight here – intellectually repugnant thought they are (and should be even to Marxists) – but rather the bizarre presupposition that a Darwinian approach to human psychology and behavior should have any obvious political ramifications.

There is much else of interest in Joyce’ book, not the least of which is a quote of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus regarding innate ideas of good and evil at the start of the introduction. I highly recommend it to the interested reader. The fact that it, and many other writings in both the popular and scientific literature, now treat the idea of innate behavior as commonplace and generally accepted, except by such latter day Trofim Lysenkos as Lewontin, Levins, and Kamin, et.al., would surely seem bizarre to a Rip van Winkle ethologist of the late 60’s who suddenly woke up 50 years later. It is encouraging evidence that the obscurantism of the high priests of secular religions like Marxism is as vulnerable to the advance of human knowledge as the obscurantism of the fanatical devotees of the Book of Genesis.

All this begs the question, however, of how it is that such supposedly “scientific” fields as psychology and anthropology are so often hijacked by the purveyors of ideological snake oil and pseudo-scientific fads, to the point that they develop an immune response to new ideas that happen to be in conflict with the prevailing sacred cows. It seems to me that shame would be an appropriate response, but I’m not holding my breath. However, perhaps a little self-criticism wouldn’t be too much to ask before we charge ahead to the next fad. I would suggest that, for starters, those active in fields relating to something as complex as the human brain refrain from promoting their theories as established scientific truths until we understand the brain well enough to support such claims.

Take, for example, the theories of Sigmund Freud. Without a thorough knowledge of the detailed functioning of the brain, the idea that such theories should have the status of established facts is absurd. No such knowledge, or anything close to it was available at the time they were proposed, yet those theories were, for many decades, treated by many as established truths that only the ignorant would question.

If there is insufficient evidence to support a given hypothesis, would it not be reasonable to continue to identify it as such, until such evidence is forthcoming? Would it not be wise to refrain from claiming that we perfectly understand this or that phenomenon, and admit that there are some things that we just don’t know, until the facts are forthcoming to support such claims? When new ideas are proposed that are both plausible and supported by the available evidence, would it not be wise to allow discussion and investigation of those ideas without vilifying those who propose them?

Realistically, I suppose human beings will always be subject to such shortcomings. We prefer the comfortable illusion that we know to the humbling admission that we don’t yet understand. It is in our nature, so to speak. Happily, as is now so apparent in the field of evolutionary psychology, the problem will tend to be self-correcting as long as human knowledge continues to expand. The only thing we need to fear is that the paths to greater knowledge and understanding will be obstructed. Let us see to it that they remain open.