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 Amity/Enmity Complex: Science Finally Catching Up?

This is encouraging. According to an article at LiveScience, researchers are finally starting to notice a phenomenon that’s been blindingly obvious for the last 150 years; the Amity-Enmity Complex.   Apparently a team led by Carsten De Dreu at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has discovered that oxycontin, the so-called “love hormone,” plays a role in regulating intergroup conflict as well.  The text of the article should have a familiar ring to it if you’ve been reading this blog.  For example,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article continues,

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

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

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

The Real Face of “Hate Speech”

Apropos “hate speech,” it’s interesting that none of those who are so active in promoting censorship as a means of fighting it even noticed the most extreme and potentially dangerous outburst of it in recent memory.  I refer to the obsessive hatred of the United States promoted in the mass media of any number of countries around the world.  It reached extreme levels in the final years of the Clinton and first years of the Bush adminstrations before apparently finally choking on its own excess.  I speak German, and followed the development of the phenomenon there with interest and dismay.  It became so extreme that it occasionally became difficult to find any news about Germany among the rants about the evils of the United States on the websites of such “news” outlets as that of Spiegel magazine.

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

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

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

Hume on Morality

In 1729 the French Roman Catholic priest Jean Meslier left behind a Testament begging the pardon of his flock for the falsehoods he had been forced to teach during his life. It systematically and brilliantly exploded the myths of organized religion and demolished the notion of a God. I’m sure similar thoughts have occurred to countless human beings through the ages, but I have never seen them set forth so simply, forcefully, and thoroughly as in Meslier’s Testament, later somewhat incongruously christened, “Superstition in all Ages.” I personally rejected religious belief at an early age, and many years later found that not a single one of my reasons for doing so was missing from the pages of the Testament. Meslier did not require Darwin and his theories to reject religious belief. He simply recognized truths that should be obvious to any intelligent human being and set them down. Voltaire complained that Meslier wrote “in the style of a carriage horse,” but if the Testament was not elegantly written, it was simple, logical, and understandable. Anyone who wants to know the reasons I don’t believe in a supernatural being will find every one of them of any significance in its pages.

What Meslier wrote regarding religion is reminiscent of what another of his great contemporaries wrote regarding morality and human nature. I refer to the philosopher and historian, David Hume. Through the power of his logic, Hume grasped a truth that a whole generation of behaviorist psychologists denied, and that has only recently been vindicated thanks in large part to the development of powerful new tools that have enabled us to peer deep into the working brain. In Book III of his “A Treatise of Human Nature,” published in 1740, Hume set forth the reasons for his conclusions that morality has no independent existence of its own, cannot possibly be merely the result of culture and education alone, and has its roots in human nature. Quoting from the book:

…nothing can be more certain, than that it is not any relation of ideas, which gives us this concern (a sense of justice), but our impressions and sentiments, without which everything in nature is perfectly indifferent to us, and can never in the least affect us. The sense of justice, therefore, is not founded on our ideas, but on our impressions.

Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be derived from reason; and that becaquse reason along, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.

If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, ’twere in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts, with which all moralists abound.

The utmost politicians can perform is to extend the natural sentiments beyond their original bounds; but still nature must furnish the materials, and give us some notion of moral distinctions.

Obviously, some of these conclusions are based on logical arguments set forth in the earlier books, as are Humes idiosyncratic definitions of terms such as “impressions” and “ideas.”  I heartily recommend that anyone interested in the development of these ideas read the whole book.  However, the point is that one of the greatest thinkers our species has produced didn’t require Darwin and fMRI brain scanners to realize that morality has its roots in human nature, and that it has no existence of its own independent of the human mind.  Now, nearly 300 years later, as attested by a growing flood of books on hard-wired behavior and evolutionary psychology, it’s finally starting to dawn on the scientific establishment that maybe Hume had it right all along.  I suspect the great man may have found it comical that the people who are writing these books are often the same Don Quixotes who continue to earnestly chase that gaudy imaginery butterfly, the good-in-itself.  After all, if their books prove anything, it is, as Hume himself so unequivocably pointed out, that the butterfly doesn’t exist.  Still, let us be optimistic.  One step forward is better than none.

David Hume

South Park and Sex Addiction

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I caught a great episode of South Park yesterday. It was a spoof on the “sex addiction” meme, starring Tiger Woods, with an “Emperor’s New Clothes” theme, where everyone had to pretend that they believed that rich, powerful men who enjoyed sex with multiple partners were afflicted by some terrible mental disease. It’s absurd when you think about it. Is there some reason why evolution should favor rich, powerful men who decide they don’t want to have children? Have these people never heard of the Genghis Khan effect, repeated on a lesser scale over and over again? And yet, we were all expected to nod our heads sagely and pretend we actually believed the “sex addiction” thing. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have lost none of that ephemeral comic edge that “Peanuts” used to have back in the 60’s, and I hope they can hold on to it for a good while longer.

If you haven’t seen their movie, “Team America,” get the CD. I give it both of my thumbs up. You could probably count the number of films that have hit the big screen in the last decade that are creative, funny, and not relentlessly PC at the same time on one hand. “Team America” is one of them. As for the flap over the latest Muhammed episode, it speaks volumes about the times we live in. Two guys have the nobility to put their lives on the line in defense of freedom of expression, and the people whose liberties they are risking so much to defend react with incomprehension. Meanwhile, the abject sheep on the roof with their crucifixes in urine and caricatures of Mary smeared with elephant dung, who know full well they have nothing to fear from the victims of their scorn, are lionized as heroic fighters against “censorship” and avatars of culture.

The Tea Parties and Human Nature

Liberty Leading the People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frans de Waal and Moral Mysticism

Go to the website of any of the major booksellers and do a search with the keywords “evolution” and “morality” and you will find an avalanche of books about the biological origins of morality. Acceptance of the connection between these two words implies the slaughter of any number of ideological sacred cows, not the least of which was Communism, but these books generally mention the bitter, decades-long battle the ideologues waged against that acceptance only in passing, if at all. In fact, the connection between evolution and morality has always obvious to anyone with an open mind since at least the days of Darwin, but, of course, such people are rare, especially in academia. In the end, thanks in large measure to advanced neurological imaging and a host of other emerging assistive tools, the weight of evidence finally buried the ideologues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Justifications of Morality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Smartness of Liberalism and Vegetarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niall Ferguson and the Amity/Enmity Complex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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