Pinker is wrong

A bit late, I know, but I just read Steven Pinker's "Science is Not Your Enemy," and I have to say I think he is badly wrong. Not that science is your enemy, but much, perhaps most, of what he says in defence of the thesis in his title is false.

He begins with the claim that the "great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists." In the next paragraph he names them, and they are all philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith. Now Descartes certainly was a scientist as well as a philosopher, Leibniz was a mathematician, and Hume a historian who wanted, in his philosophical work, to be a second Newton of the moral sciences (i.e., roughly, a psychologist), but they are all philosophers, and their philosophical work is not the same kind of thing as their work on optics, calculus, etc. Pinker seems to be blurring this distinction from the start. He claims that methods and insights from the sciences are shedding light on ancient problems and that "writers in the humanities" should be delighted about this. So now philosophy is all the humanities, and the fact that some philosophers also did science means that distinctions between science and the humanities are artificial and bad. He doesn't quite say that, but it seems to be the idea. When you do say it explicitly it is clearly a bad idea.

From here he moves on to defend 'scientism,' reclaiming the word from those who use it in an allegedly vague and certainly pejorative sense. As he redefines it, 'scientism' is distinguished by commitment to the beliefs that the world is intelligible and that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The intelligibility claim is connected to the belief that phenomena can be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. 

One immediate problem with this is that understanding comes in different forms. It is one thing to understand a thing in terms of some general principle, another to understand something particular in its particularity, i.e. not as an instance of a general rule. I need to give examples or this idea will be very obscure. Say my mild-mannered neighbour turns out to be a serial killer and I struggle to understand how this could be, how he could have killed all those people. Perhaps all I need is statistical information about the correlation between mildness of manner and violent behavior. But perhaps that will not help me at all. Perhaps what I don't understand is how this man's particular mildness could coexist with the brutality of these crimes. I need some way to see the gentle neighbour as the same person as the serial murderer. One thing that might help here would be if he is like some character in a novel and you point this out to me. Then I can read the novel and, if you are right, I might gain the insight, the understanding, that I need. But novelists are not scientists. They don't offer general principles. Another example would be if I want to understand how Hamlet or a painting by Jackson Pollock works. I might want to know things about the brain and the effects on it of certain patterns of sound or colour, but what I want is probably something quite different. I don't want general laws. I want to know how this work is put together, how its various parts rhyme or contrast. To understand Hamlet, for instance, I need to know the plot, the characters, and the language of the play. I need to understand how these things work together in the play, in this play. What I want to understand is essentially particular. General principles can help at most only a little.

Maybe that's still too obscure. One way to understand something is to see it as an instance of a general rule, and science does a good job of providing these rules. But sometimes what we want is to understand a particular person or thing not as an instance of a general rule but as the particular thing it is. Why do the particular features of this work go so well together? It can't be because of some general rule because only this work has these features in just this relation, and telling me that any work that has these features in this relation is good is telling me nothing helpful. "Hamlet is good because of its Hamlet-iness" is not illuminating. Nor is, "When you watch Hamlet blood flows to these parts of your brain." If I want to understand a person, similarly, it might help if I know that all teenagers are like that or that such-and-such behaviour is common in old men, but equally this might just make me puzzled about all old men, or simply be no help at all. If I want to make sense of x it might be that I need to find a way to relate various things about x to various other things. Putting things in context is a way of understanding that does not involve applying general rules to particular cases.  

A second problem with Pinker's benign scientism is that according to it "the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world's traditional religions ... are factually mistaken." At most this applies to literalist versions of religious belief, and even there it is hard to believe that there isn't something else going on, that the people who insist we could get to heaven in a rocket or find hell by digging in the right place would at some point in the experiment reveal that they had not meant all of it, including the 'literally' part, literally. Maybe I'm over-optimistic there, but the idea that science could prove that God did not create the world, or become a man, or send his messenger to us, shows an outstandingly crass conception of religious belief (at least for someone who wants to be taken seriously as a critic of religion). This is a point that has been made repeatedly in response to people like Dawkins, but Pinker seems to be ignoring it. 

He then moves on to ethics:

in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings.   

Science, or facts combined with "unexceptionable convictions", supports utilitarianism! Incredible that seemingly intelligent people would still bother to think about ethics any other way! Who needs philosophy? Incredible also that Pinker would come so close to endorsing Mill's version of utilitarianism without, apparently, having read what Mill has to say on the subject. Mill offers a reasonable defence, of course, but he is far from claiming that the issue needs no argument. Indeed he brings out just how much room for debate there is on, for instance, the nature of flourishing.

When Pinker moves on to politics it is hard not to see shades of Jonathan Haidt:

The new sciences of the mind are reexamining the connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly discussed in Madison’s time but submerged during a long interlude in which humans were assumed to be blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we are increasingly appreciating, are moralistic actors, guided by norms and taboos about authority, tribe, and purity, and driven by conflicting inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation.

There is more wrong with Haidt's thinking than I can go into now, but for an introduction see here. Pinker has a lot of the same flaws, especially ignorance of the philosophical work on the topic he is discussing and ignorance of the fact that what he is getting into is philosophy.

I largely agree with all the criticisms of Pinker's essay made here, here, and here, but let me try to add a brief point of my own. Ignorance of philosophy is certainly a big part of Pinker's problem, but so is the difference between matters of fact and matters of value. If I want to know what makes a poem so good science won't help me. If I want to know in what circumstances if any abortion is OK science won't help me. If I want to know how best to relate one thing to another science will often be of limited use to me. This is not to deny that science has great value, or that open debate and hard work are valuable. It is, though, to push back against the idea that science is the way to solve all problems, i.e. to push back against scientism.

Let me end with some points made by others I agree with to save you from having to click on all the links above. First, Massimo Pigliucci:

Yes, quantitative methods can (and should) be used by historians, though this will always likely be complementary to, rather than substitutive of, classical historical methods. And yes, the fruitful collaboration between philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists is a shining example of how to bridge the divide between the two cultures. But no, quantitative analyses of Jane Austin novels interpreted in evolutionary psychological key are frankly ridiculous (I've seen it done), and while clearly the study of the physiology of visual or auditory perception are fascinating fields in their own right, they are far less useful to my enjoyment of a Picasso or a Beethoven sonata than knowledge of the history of art or of music.

Next, P. Z.Myers:

Science is a fantastic tool (our only tool, actually) for probing material realities. Respect it for what it is. But please, also recognize that there’s more to the human experience than measurement and the acquisition of knowledge about physical processes, and that science is a relatively recent and revolutionary way of thinking, but not the only one — and that humans lived and thrived and progressed for thousands of years (and many still do, even within our technological culture!) without even the concept of science.

Scientism is the idea that only science is the proper mode of human thought, and in particular, a blinkered, narrow notion that every human advance is the product of scientific, rational, empirical thinking. Much as I love science, and am personally a committed practitioner who also has a hard time shaking myself out of this path (I find scientific thinking very natural), I’ve got enough breadth in my education and current experience to recognize that there are other ways of progressing.

And finally, Ross Douthat:

Like Sam Harris, who wrote an entire book claiming that “science” somehow vindicates his preferred form of philosophical utilitarianism (when what he really meant was that if you assume utilitarian goals, science can help you pursue them), Pinker seems to have trouble imagining any reasoning person disagreeing about either the moral necessity of “maximizing human flourishing” or the content of what “flourishing” actually means — even though recent history furnishes plenty of examples and a decent imagination can furnish many more. Like his whiggish antecedents, he mistakes a real-but-complicated historical relationship between science and humanism for a necessary intellectual line in which the latter vindicates the former, or at least militates strongly in its favor. And his invocation of “the scientific facts” to justify what is, at bottom, a philosophical preference for Mill over Nietzsche is pretty much the essence of what critics mean by scientism: Empirically overconfident, intellectually unsubtle, and deeply incurious about the ways in which human beings can rationally disagree. 

P.S. Then there's Ray Monk on Wittgenstein and scientism:

Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. There is a widespread feeling today that the great scandal of our times is that we lack a scientific theory of consciousness. And so there is a great interdisciplinary effort, involving physicists, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, to come up with tenable scientific answers to the questions: what is consciousness? What is the self? One of the leading competitors in this crowded field is the theory advanced by the mathematician Roger Penrose, that a stream of consciousness is an orchestrated sequence of quantum physical events taking place in the brain. Penrose’s theory is that a moment of consciousness is produced by a sub-protein in the brain called a tubulin. The theory is, on Penrose’s own admission, speculative, and it strikes many as being bizarrely implausible. But suppose we discovered that Penrose’s theory was correct, would we, as a result, understand ourselves any better? Is a scientific theory the only kind of understanding?

The Stone on Haidt

Two good philosophical responses to Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind at The Stone:

Michael P. Lynch's "A Vote for Reason"

Gary Gutting's "Haidt's Problem with Plato"

Bateman on Haidt

When I was blogging about Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind (here, here, here, and here) I had an email exchange with Chris Bateman, with whom I found myself very largely in agreement. He now has a review of Haidt's book up at his blog Only A Game. I recommend it.

Nature

Allen Buchanan says:

The fact that something is natural doesn't make it good. To say that something's natural is simply to say that it accords with the way we happen to be as a result of evolution. 

It depends what you mean by natural. I'm not sure that anyone has ever really explained what 'natural' means, but it certainly does not always mean what Buchanan says it means. Anscombe, as I recall, says that in Catholic thinking (or perhaps in Aquinas) 'natural' sometimes just means good or not wrong. But I think some people use it to mean a sort of cross between the positive (or Humean) conception Buchanan has in mind and the purely normative sense that Anscombe describes. There is a sense I find in people such as Leon Kass and Michael Sandel that the source of life, call it God-or-nature, is good. Jonathan Haidt describes people trying to justify moral reactions by imagining the harm that could come from this or that odd situation (incest where pregnancy is impossible, a man having sex with a frozen chicken, etc.). Basically, when we disapprove of something we will (often) claim that we do so because we foresee bad consequences. Pointing out that such consequences are highly unlikely shows not so much that we are wrong to disapprove but that we disapprove for some other reason.

In these cases we need to dig a bit, or just think more. Ronald Dworkin does this kind of reconstructive moral psychology in Life's Dominion (I think he does a good job, others disagree), as does Jonathan Haidt in his most recent work (not well in my opinion, but others no doubt differ). In Better Than Human Buchanan unhelpfully politicizes the issue of biological enhancement, mentioning George W. Bush as often as possible (so that conservative moral positions are associated with conservative political positions) and even bringing in Patrick Devlin (think nature is a seamless web? well you know who else talked about seamless webs...). The issue is already controversial enough without bringing in guilt by association. Other than this Buchanan's arguments are good (so far--I'm only halfway through the book), but he seems blind to the possibility that respect for nature and/or life might be a value. He points out that nature isn't always nice, even quoting the old "red in tooth and claw" line and committing what I think of as the Black Corridor fallacy, namely treating the amorality of something impersonal as if it were a kind of cruelty. Jonathan Balcombe combats this attitude with a chapter in Second Nature about the warm and fuzzy side of nature. But I think this is not enough.

How can one possibly live as if nature were an enemy to be struggled against? That seems so wrongheaded to me that even neutrality seems close to impossible. Something like Chesterton's primal loyalty, along with his hating the world enough to change it and loving it enough to want to change it, seems not only good but practically necessary to me. How can we live sanely without thinking of the natural world, or just the universe, as our home? And how can we (again: sanely) avoid warm feelings about home? Buchanan shows no loyalty to nature, happily suggesting that we re-engineer mice, for instance:

the post-mouse future will arrive considerably ahead of the post-human future, and that's a good thing. Let them be the risk-pioneers. (p. 94)

The post-mouse future referred to is one in which mice have been so changed as to no longer be what we know as mice. How is this good? Buchanan writes in this passage as if it's good for us, because the risks involved will fall on the mice. To be fair to him, though, we should consider that he might also mean that it's good for the mice, because they will become post-mouse by being enhanced, not just changed but improved.  This raises the question what constitutes improvement. A better mouse-trap does its job better, but mice don't have a job (unless they were built for a purpose by the Creator, in which case Buchanan is wrong). Better mice might be happier mice, but we ought not simply to assume that happiness is the only relevant value. Or we might think of mice in more or less Aristotelian terms, as having not so much a job but a function, or multiple functions. There are things mice do: see, hear, run, avoid cats, etc. If we make them better at some or all of these things then they will be better mice. Perhaps. But there's also the idea that mice are something like works of art. And then improving them no longer makes much sense as an idea, except in cases where sick or handicapped mice are made more like standard mice.

The cosmic patriot or jingo of the universe, as Chesterton puts it, would love mice just as they are, and would want no part in trying to enhance them. The very idea of improving mice would be like the idea of improving Hamlet (perhaps by adding a sex scene). The same, only more so, would go for human beings. You can't really think (can you?) both what a piece of work is man and we can make him better. Not without a dismissive "yeah, yeah, I get it" after the 'what a piece of work' part anyway. And it's resistance to the "yeah, yeah" attitude that I think Buchanan doesn't get. Otherwise, as I say, I think I agree with him. But I haven't finished the book yet, and I worry that there might be a kind of no true Scotsman problem lurking for someone who takes my position. For now, though, I must stop blogging and enhance my back garden by weeding it before it gets too hot.

  

The end of Haidt

(His name rhymes with height, by the way.)

The final third of The Righteous Mind offers an evolutionary hypothesis about why people are social animals, or "groupish," as Haidt puts it (which I won't try to assess--it sounds reasonable to me); suggests that we can become 'hive-minded' in certain circumstances (ancient phalanxes and modern raves, for instance); suggests further that religion can be explained in evolutionary terms because it helps bind groups together; and then suggests ways we might all learn to get along better. It's a bit of a mess, but not all bad.

On p. 190 he concedes that "a great deal of our moral, political, and religious behavior can be understood as thinly veiled ways of pursuing self-interest." How much is a great deal? On p. 315, in the first paragraph of his conclusion, Haidt calls moral psychology "the key to understanding politics." He isn't contradicting himself here, but there is something of a tension. We are left to imagine how it is meant to be resolved. Perhaps self-interest makes up a significant minority of the reason why we disagree over politics. Perhaps it is the main reason, but moral psychology allows us to understand the mysterious rest. I don't know what Haidt thinks. 

Chapter 10 concerns what it takes to switch our minds from merely groupish, but still largely self-interested, to bee-like parts of a collective hive-mind. Haidt suggests University of Virginia football games (I must not have been drunk enough when I went), witnessing nature's awesomeness, drugs, and dancing with lots of other people at raves. So a drug-fuelled rave in a field (with thousands of UVA fans) ought to be close to the ultimate buzz (ho ho). I almost regret not having had that experience, but I can too easily imagine that it would have been very much as Jarvis Cocker describes in "Sorted for E's and Whizz" (i.e. "adequately supplied with Ecstasy and amphetamines"):

Oh is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?
Or just 20,000 people standing in a field.
And I don't quite understand just what this feeling is.
But that's okay cos we're all sorted out for E's and whizz.
And tell me when the spaceship lands cos all this has just got to mean something.

In the middle of the night,
it feels alright,
but then tomorrow morning.
Oh then you come down.

Haidt doesn't say much about this problem, but he does recognize a downside to the hive. A nation-sized hive, he says, would be bad (he quotes The Doctrine of Fascism). But without membership in some smaller-scale hive we might suffer from Durkheimian anomie. We need to find a group or team to identify with. How about a football team? After all:

A college football game is a superb analogy for religion. (p. 247)

Well, no it isn't. Basically because of the fact that "all this has just got to mean something," and football doesn't have the right kind or quantity of meaning to offer. (I still like it, but that's not the point.)

More superficiality and ignorance from Chapter 11:

[T]he two most important thinkers in the history of the social sciences [are] Darwin and Durkheim. (p. 259)

Really? Not Marx or Weber? No psychologists or economists?

Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. (p. 264)

Ah. Maybe it's unfair to take a statement like this out of context. After all, don't I agree with it, really? I sort of do, but it still strikes me as superficial. Almost breathtakingly so.

Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals what they want. But a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. (p. 272)

Didn't Bentham's immediate follower J.S. Mill say quite a bit about the importance of society, and not just the individual, in Utilitarianism? Haidt appears not to have read it.

In the last main chapter, Haidt tells us of his own political and moral views, and how they changed from being narrowly liberal to more open-minded, when he went to India, and then to more conservative, when he read Jerry Muller (ed.) Conservatism. This book taught Haidt that conservatives view human nature as inherently flawed, and understand the importance of maintaining society's moral structure. Liberals, he says, tend to damage this delicate structure by going too far too quickly. His own view is a wise mix of liberal and conservative, not surprisingly: governments should restrain corporate excesses (liberal), regulation is the solution to some problems (liberal), markets are "miraculous" (libertarian conservative), and "you can't help the bees by destroying the hive" (social conservative).

The last, conservative, two points are odd. Markets do work in remarkable ways, and freedom generally is a very good thing. But does anyone really deny this? Did Bill Clinton? Does Barack Obama? On p. 305 Haidt writes:

I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.

How often is sometimes? And who are we talking about here? No one with any serious influence on US policy or legislation, surely. Or does Haidt have some peculiar definition of socialism in mind? I wonder how much Smith he has read. The liberal Martha Nussbaum is a fan, after all, rather like, it seems to me, every mainstream Democrat.

When he gets to his social conservatism Haidt suddenly starts talking in metaphors. He spells out a few more details on p. 309, but there isn't much there:

For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage [Haidt doesn't explain how this is even possible, let alone how it supposedly happened], increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families. The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all. The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people [liberals?, conservatives?--this seems relevant if we're assigning blame] more racist, not less.

The paragraph ends there, without further examples from the 1990s and 2000s, and is followed by the hand-wavy, "On issue after issue, it's as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive."

I'm not convinced that liberals should be judged by what they seem to be trying to do. Nor are they necessarily wrong in general if some of their efforts to help those in need have unintended bad consequences, either in addition to their good consequences or instead of having any good consequences at all. The record of liberals on social issues in the 1960s and 1970s is surely better than that of conservatives on the whole. I don't hear many calls for a return to segregation, even here in the graveyard of the Confederacy. I agree with the Burkean idea of changing slowly when possible, and only changing at all when necessary, but I see no evidence that liberal social policies have "destroyed the hive." It wasn't welfare that created problems for African Americans, and social conservatives don't have an exemplary record in this particular area.

In sum: Haidt talks a bit like Sarah Palin, but what he actually says sounds like a mainstream Democrat who accepts that everyone is capable of making mistakes. He also talks as if philosophy is irrelevant, but takes inspiration for some key ideas from Hume (people aren't nearly as rational as we might think) and Isaiah Berlin (moral pluralism). He seems, in short, to be rejecting the very things he is, in fact, embracing. I can't tell whether this is a deliberate tactic or just a sign of confusion.

To me the most interesting part of the book is the middle section, the one where he identifies six moral foundations: care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Each has a polar opposite, which helps to define it: harm, oppression, cheating, betrayal, subversion, degradation. It seems clear that harm and oppression are bad, or, put another way, that care and liberty are good. Fairness/cheating is trickier, because cheating seems like a kind of harm, but let's allow this one too. Now what about loyalty/betrayal? Loyalty to good people is good, but loyalty to bad people might not be. And not only might betrayal be good, when the person you betray is bad, but betrayal also sounds very close to cheating. If you break a promise is that cheating or betrayal? I would lump fairness and loyalty together and call them justice. And I think I'd do the same with authority/subversion. Authority is something like rightful or just power, and subversion (I would think) is only bad when what is subverted is good. (Which allows for the conservative point that, other things being equal, the status quo is always good.)

Finally we have sanctity/degradation. This is a weird one. Degradation sounds really bad, but simply regarding some things as sacred doesn't sound particularly good. "Is nothing sacred?" has rhetorical power, but it matters what is held to be sacred (not simply that something be so held). Haidt uses this category to cover respect for the American flag, an aversion to marijuana and other toxins, opposition to same-sex marriage, and xenophobia. But isn't respect for the flag more a matter of loyalty? On p. 149 Haidt even lists liberty, one of the other six foundations, as something that people hold to be sacred. So is sacredness really a sixth foundation, or is it an attitude toward the other five moral foundations? Opposition to immigration and love of the flag seem to me to be forms (perhaps misguided forms) of loyalty to a particular group, which is already covered under loyalty. Marijuana and same-sex marriage are connected by a concern (again, perhaps a misguided one) with the human body. Smoking anything is bad for the body, and if the body is a temple then this is a moral issue. Sexual ethics are related to this. Again, if the body is a temple then it matters how we use it, and one view is that certain kinds of sex are inappropriate. I would group concerns about sex and the body into a category called 'life', which is clearly an important concern in contemporary moral issues.

So instead of Haidt's six foundations I would focus on four clusters of issues: care/harm (or pleasure/pain), liberty/oppression (or autonomy versus its absence), justice/injustice, and life/death (including ideas about sexuality and the human body). But I agree with him that it's very helpful to see people as having different values, or caring about things in different ways, rather than as simply being right or wrong, moral or immoral. To the extent that this is his main point, I agree with him and value his book. I also agree with his picture of human nature as mostly non-rational. But the book does leave something to be desired, especially in its treatment of philosophy.

Haidt gets better

Part II of The Righteous Mind is much better than Part I. It consists of four chapters, and I'll say a little about each.

Chapter 5 is not great. Haidt rightly notes that utilitarian and Kantian ethics focus on one thing, happiness or autonomy, and say little about virtues or God, unlike other moral systems. But he calls this a Western phenomenon, rather than simply a feature of two kinds of theory, as if virtue ethics, communitarianism, and the natural law tradition, for instance, just don't figure in Western thinking. Admittedly, he's talking here about the moral thinking of the American college students on whom many psychological studies are based, but surely some of them think, as he seems to deny, in terms of community and divinity, or at lest some plurality of values. Indeed, Haidt goes on to identify narrowness in moral thinking with liberalism, and not all college students are liberals. His labeling system is so crude that he ascribes the "ethic of autonomy" not only to John Stuart Mill but to Peter Singer as well. Singer apparently values justice and rights "only to the extent that they increase human welfare" (p. 99). He should read Animal Liberation. Sigh.

The really good thing about this chapter is that Haidt supports, or at least implies support for, pluralism. He believes in multiple values, not just, say autonomy. Good. (He insists that he isn't making value judgments, only doing psychology about our moral thinking, but then he also uses sub-headings such as "How I Became a Pluralist," so it seems pretty clear that he is not just describing others' beliefs.) He says that seeing that people have different moral matrices (an idea I quite like) helped him understand how decent people could vote for the Republicans. They aren't just racist poor people and self-interested rich people after all! But, I would say, not so fast. And I don't mean this as a slam on Republicans. Democrats are quite capable of self-interest and racism too. Liberals can be prejudiced. It seems like an excess of charity to suggest that political differences come (entirely or primarily) from different value systems in which only recognizably good things are valued. In fact, surely nasty prejudices account for a lot of the things people do and even for the beliefs people claim to have. And surely self-interest is a big motivator, even if economists sometimes overstate its importance.

Chapter 6 starts with Haidt's theory of moral taste. Again he talks about Hume, again he disses "ethicists" who, supposedly, much prefer deontology and utilitarianism to anything Hume would have liked. Hume was not a million miles away from utilitarianism, though, and, as I mentioned above, there is such a thing as virtue ethics. It's quite popular with ethicists, even if it isn't the majority view. Haidt is exaggerating, and probably just ignorant about the people whose views he happily writes off. But it gets worse. He begins to speculate on p. 116 that Bentham and Kant might have suffered from the kind of autism called Asperger's syndrome. He officially concludes that Kant probably did not, but the idea is certainly planted in the reader's mind that these philosophers have something wrong with them. Never mind that Mill was a utilitarian too, and certainly not autistic. On p. 120 Haidt begins a section entitled "Getting Back on Track." So the Asperger's business was irrelevant after all? Then why include it? Anti-philosophy propaganda, it seems to me. Haidt seems to be counting on his readers to tend to ignore whatever people with autism have to say. And he seems to be counting on them to make diagnoses of dead philosophers that are not supported by the evidence. Ugly.

The chapter ends on a better note, as Haidt tells of his investigation into "identifying the adaptive challenges of social life that evolutionary psychologists frequently wrote about and then connecting those challenges to virtues that are found in some form in many cultures" (p. 124). He comes up, at this stage, with five such virtues: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Chapter 7 goes through these "moral foundations" in turn, explaining the evolutionary advantage of each, and how it affects current moral thinking (and unthinking reactions).

• The genes of those who care for the young, weak, sick, and injured tend to survive more than those of people who don't. Hence, we care. "It was harder to find bumper stickers related to compassion for conservatives" (p. 134), and liberals seem to care more than conservatives, but we all care and oppose harm.
• Cooperation has survival value, too, so we all value reciprocity (fairness) and oppose cheating. Liberals dislike the rich getting a better deal than the poor, conservatives dislike the lazy getting a better deal than hard-working people. (Let me just note that what people say might not be what they really mean. Do conservatives object to rich lazy people? Do they want a better deal for hardworking janitors? I'm sure some do, but some distinctions between the "hard-working" and the "lazy" might be code for social snobbery or just racism. Haidt doesn't show signs of having given this possibility much serious consideration.)
• Loyalty is good, betrayal is bad. But liberals are so focused on care and their version of fairness that they tend to emphasize loyalty much less than conservatives do. Sports fans and patriots are more likely to be conservative.
• Hierarchical structures are often useful (Haidt is somewhat tentative in this area), so it's good for people to be able to show due respect for authority and deference when appropriate. Liberals tend to be more subversive than conservatives, or to think of subversion of authority as a positively good thing.
• It helps to try new things and not be too picky, but adventurousness can be dangerous. Foreign foods and foreign people can be toxic or germ-bearing, so might be best avoided. Haidt identifies this kind of thinking as a concern with "sanctity," and it is bigger among conservatives than liberals. It even extends to things like respect for the flag. (This seems like a very mixed bag, but there you are.)

Chapter 8 talks about surveys taken to find out the moral attitudes and beliefs of liberals and conservatives. Self-identified liberals care much more about care and fairness than the other values Haidt has identified. Self-identified conservatives care about all of them. But conservatives were not all happy when they heard about Haidt's research and findings. One explained angrily that what he opposes is not what Haidt said but his being taxed and the money given to "a non-producing, welfare collecting, single mother, crack baby producing future democrat" (p. 168). Another identified a typical Democrat as someone who, among other things, has "had 5 kids from 3 different men." Note the sex of the person these conservatives most dislike. (It might also be worth thinking of what the popular image of people on welfare is--it isn't exactly rare for them to be pictured, e.g. in news stories, as African-American.)

Haidt does not mention this. His conclusion instead is that he had made a mistake in treating fairness as if it were mostly a matter of equality. Conservatives don't want equality as such, they want proportionality. People should get what they deserve, with the lazy getting much less than the hard-working. So he adjusts his conception of fairness, and also adds another moral foundation: liberty. People want to be left alone, and they don't want oppression.It's hard to believe that Haidt draws this conclusion from that evidence, but if you can, read pp. 168-169 for yourself (here or here, perhaps). I like his plurality of values, and the fact that he wants to avoid just-so stories in evolutionary psychology, and that he wants to understand why people think and behave as they do. But his own prejudices and his treatment of the prejudices of others are bizarre, and seem to distort his theory quite badly.        

More Haidt

OK, I've finished the first part (roughly the first third) of Haidt's book, and it's more of the same. He writes very clearly and uses lots of neat examples from psychology and philosophy. It would be interesting to try to use it as a textbook, except I think you would have to work to get students to believe the good bits and doubt the bad bits. Mostly he's arguing that people are not all that rational, that we tend to rationalize non-rational feelings rather than think things through on the basis of pure reason, and we rarely change our minds as a result of reasoning, although we do as a result of peer pressure. We are social animals, believing overwhelmingly what we have evolved to believe or what our social groups tell us to believe. Reason is not the slave of the passions, but it mostly does what they ask and only rarely steers the elephant in a direction it does not want to go.

None of this really strikes me as being anything like as new as Haidt seems to think it is, although his confirming evidence is certainly up to date. That most people are not very rational is something Plato believed, after all. That no living person is completely rational is also a platonic belief. And that wise decisions are more likely to come from a group of people than from an individual is also something Plato would be likely to accept (although, of course, it depends on the people, as I assume Haidt would accept too). That moral philosophy will not make a bad person good was known to Aristotle. And Haidt's general view is very much a Humean one, with the twist that reason is not quite the slave of the passions, at least not all the time. And I imagine most philosophers would agree with that (otherwise why be a philosopher?).

[UPDATE: Perhaps I should qualify this. When Hume says that reason is the slave of the passions he means that reason sets no goals, it can at most tell us how to achieve those goals. When Haidt agrees with Hume, what he means is that people make moral judgments and decisions on the basis of things like feeling, instinct, and peer pressure, not reason. When Haidt suggests that people sometimes use reason to come to conclusions about morality and politics he may or may not be saying something that Hume would agree with, depending on exactly what he means. When I say that most philosophers would probably agree with Haidt I mean that they probably value reason and see it as something more than a way to rationalize non-rational feelings. They still might be subjectivists about ethics.]

Haidt's position is pretty orthodox philosophically, but he keeps bashing philosophy all the same, either out of ignorance or to keep up the appearance that his message is more explosive than it really is.

Thus:

Deontologists [apparently the only thing moral philosophers can be other than utilitarians] talk about high moral principles derived and justified by careful reasoning; they would never agree that these principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of gut feelings. [p. 65]

Taken literally this might be true, but I think Leon Kass and Elizabeth Anscombe might be exactly the kind of people he wants to deny exist. We aren't all caricatures of Kant. Maybe no one is.

On p. 67 Haidt quotes Joshua Greene's conclusion of a study of people's moral judging and reasoning, to the effect that we have strong feelings about what must be done or not done, and then try to rationalize these feelings. Haidt sees it as a "stunning example of consilience" (p. 67). The "action" in ethics is supposedly shown to be in emotion, not reasoning. Ethics has been "biologized."

The problem here, as I see it, is that Haidt treats everyone as if they are doing moral psychology, just (sometimes) really badly. The low point is perhaps on pp. 73-74, where Haidt writes:

As is often the case in moral philosophy, arguments about what we ought to do depend upon assumptions--often unstated--about human nature and human psychology.

Then there's a footnote:

At least Plato stated his assumptions at great length. Many other moral philosophers, such as Kant and Rawls, simply make assertions about how minds work, what people want, or what seems "reasonable." These assertions seem to be based on little more than introspection about their own rather unusual personalities or value systems.

He goes on to say that Rawls is wrong because it has been found that most people would not care more about raising the standard of living of the least well-off person than about raising that of the average person  if designing a society from behind a veil of ignorance.

Kant's value system is basically Christian. Rawls's is liberal. Neither is exactly unusual, and the idea that their moral views are based on unstated assumptions about psychology is odd. What assumptions does Haidt have in mind? He leaves this unstated. How, in what way, are they assumed? He doesn't say. Anyone who says that Kant simply makes assertions about how minds work has not read the first Critique. And anyone who thinks we can test empirically what people behind the veil of ignorance would think (bearing in mind that such people would be ignorant of their own race and sex, for instance, i.e. they would not be real people) has seemingly not read even the Wikipedia entry on Rawls. I don't blame Haidt for not having read Kant or Rawls. But why bash them in that case?

Kant and Rawls are not doing psychology. Their concern is not primarily with what or how people think about ethics or politics but with what and how people should think. The categorical imperative is a justification (or rationalization, if you prefer) of certain values, and a tool for solving moral dilemmas. If Kant thinks it is rational that's because he thinks it's good (in a particular kind of way), not because he thinks that is how people actually do reason. And the same kind of thing goes for Rawls. If people were rational, he claims, they would draw the conclusions he draws concerning the basic principles of justice. I haven't read the study that Haidt cites, but Rawls is not making the kind of claim that could be empirically confirmed or refuted. So either the study is misconceived or else Haidt has misrepresented it. The abstract of the paper says that:

Overwhelmingly, the chosen principle is maximizing the average income with a floor constraint: a principle which is a compromise between those proposed by Rawls and Harsanyi. It takes into account not only the position of the worst-off individual but also the potential expected gain for the rest of society.

But, of course, the people in this study were not in the original position. So Rawls is not proved wrong, however suggestive or curious the findings might be.

Simply put, moral philosophy cannot be biologized because of the fact/value distinction. (However much of a continuum there might be linking the factual with the evaluative, it is still important to be able to see the difference between the factual, positive end and the normative, evaluative end.)

Another curiosity:

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. (p. 89)

Over the page he expands:

I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments, but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law. Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any individual's ability to reason.

[...]

We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.

So reasoning should be carried out dialectically, with exchange of ideas and peer review. (Maybe we should even have government by a group of intelligent and ethical people who pool their wisdom for the good of the state. You wouldn't get Plato thinking of anything like that!) Thank goodness for modern science!

Haidt ends every chapter with an "In Sum" section. Here's mine:

• Haidt writes engagingly and lucidly about matters of great interest and importance, citing lots of recent empirical studies to support his conclusions
• These conclusions are largely in line with what most philosophers would tell you about people's moral thinking, and indeed are at least mostly in line with what I think of as common sense  
• Yet Haidt, who clearly does not understand philosophy, presents his findings as a mighty blow to philosophy, as if it were a powerful giant that needs to be defeated because it is nothing more than bad science. The plucky David who slays this evil Goliath is none other than that lovable underdog, modern science. Hurrah!  

Philosophy envy?

I've started reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind and I'm glad I have. It certainly seems to be the kind of book I should read, since it is popular, somewhat scientific (and therefore more academically significant than a merely popular book), and deals with ethics. But it's annoying too. Most of my annoyance comes from Haidt's treatment of philosophy, which seems very unfair. I can't tell whether this unfairness is deliberate or not, but Haidt does say that he started out wanting to be a philosopher (or student of philosophy at least) before switching to psychology. So I wonder whether some lingering resentment is showing through in his treatment of philosophy.

Here are some examples. On p. 28 Haidt says that:

Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years. There's a direct line running from Plato through Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg. I'll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion.

The connection between Kant and Kohlberg is fair enough, but is there really a direct line from Plato to Kant? The influence doesn't seem very direct to me. Perhaps more to the point, when Plato and Kant talk about reason, or something that gets translated into English as 'reason', they aren't necessarily talking about the same thing. And even more to the point that I want to make, Western philosophy should not be identified with Plato and Kant. Approximately no one agrees with Plato, and Kant is not short of critics.

On p. 32 Haidt brings in Rawls:

He [Edward O. Wilson] was a professor at Harvard, along with Lawrence Kohlberg and the philosopher John Rawls, so [!] he was well acquainted with their brand of rationalist theorizing about rights and justice. It seemed clear to Wilson that what the rationalists were really doing was  generating clever justifications for moral intuitions that were best explained by evolution. Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

I don't know that Rawls would deny that what he is really doing is generating clever justifications for moral intuitions. He said his project was political, not metaphysical, after all, didn't he? But to say that these intuitions are better explained by evolution is to fail to distinguish reasons from causes. Rawls is not trying to explain how we have come, historically, to have the intuitions we do. He is trying to offer the best way to make sense of the intuitions we have. It is also to be optimistic about the explanatory power of evolution. I don't mean that evolution is not true, only that its truth does not always help us understand why things are as they are. Often it provides little more than a basis for plausible just-so stories.

The bit about mathematical truths is amazing. Is there a cosmic shelf? No. So what would Haidt say about the Pythagorean theorem? That it is a clever justification for mathematical intuitions best explained by evolution? Maybe it is something like that. It is still true. To say otherwise, on the grounds that evolution provides a "better" explanation, would be to misunderstand the nature of mathematics. And there seems to be a similar misunderstanding of philosophy here.

Thankfully, scientists have now shown Western philosophy, i.e. Plato, to be wrong. Reason ought not to be in control, because of the "shocking revelation" that "reasoning requires the passions" (p. 34). Silly Plato. He should have listened to that guy who compared the mind to a chariot pulled by two horses with reason at the reins. Without passion the chariot won't go. To be fair to Haidt, he does provide reasons to reject this as a picture of how the mind works. As he sees it, the mind is more like an elephant over which the rational part, which rides it, has little control. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. That's right, in opposition to the naive and discredited theories of Western philosophy, Haidt supports the view of .... David Hume. Not just implicitly, but very explicitly, with quotations and name checks. Bizarre.

I suppose it makes for a popular story. Philosophy is hard and not just anyone can do it well, so let's reject it as irrelevant. If that means wildly distorting what philosophers actually believe then so be it. (In case anyone reading this doesn't know; Hume is extremely popular with contemporary philosophers, Plato is not.) Sad to see.

More later, no doubt, with plenty of puns on Haidt's name: sheer Haidt, Haidters gonna Haidt, etc.

Charity, moral psychology, and politics

I think I'm going to have to read at least enough of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind to be able to talk about it professionally, but it sounds flawed in its conception (judging by bits of reviews I've seen, nothing more). Perhaps it's the reviewers who are getting it wrong. And perhaps I've said this before, although a quick search of this blog suggests I haven't.

Here's the stuff I have in mind. Nicholas D. Kristof writes that:

“The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

And:

Another way of putting it is this: Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three.

This makes conservatives sound better than liberals. William Saletan produces a similar kind of sound:

Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.

There is a basic mistake here which I think is easy to see if we substitute racial purity for any of the listed themes or values: having more values is not necessarily better (although I agree that it might be), in the way that having a more varied diet or speaking more languages is undoubtedly better. I'm guessing that the common source of this error is Haidt himself, although I'll have to read his book to find out.

A second problem is the apparent use of charity in interpreting people's political beliefs. Perhaps the Tea Party hates redistribution because its members believe in reaping what you earn. But perhaps these people oppose redistribution for purely self-interested reasons (they expect to do badly from it), or because they are racist and think of the poor as likely to be members of ethnic minorities that they regard as lazy. I imagine that individual members of the Tea Party vary, and that some are influenced by two or more of these and other considerations.

Saletan also says:

Haidt has read ethnographies, traveled the world and surveyed tens of thousands of people online. He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Alongside these principles, he has found related themes that carry moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation.

The concern he attributes to the Tea Party seems to have to do with fairness. But it's worth asking whether people actually do reap what they earn. Some do, some don't, surely. Some people get rich by working hard or being very talented, or both. But luck usually comes into it somewhere, and not every talented, hard-working person has good luck. Similarly, some poor people are lazy. Some lack talent (but is that their fault?). And some are simply unlucky. If anyone denies that luck is involved (and thoughtful conservatives such as Hayek do not do so) then they aren't necessarily showing sensitivity to some value to which others are blind. They might be in denial of the truth. And the more values we have to attribute to them in order to try to make charitable sense of their beliefs, the less coherent their belief-system might be.

Another question concerns the idea that liberals don't care about all six "themes." Trades union members care about loyalty, for instance. Religious people, many of whom are politically liberal, believe in and value authority. And supporters of women's rights often refer to women's bodies as things that the government should not touch. Isn't that a kind of sanctity? Perhaps it is better counted as a concern with freedom. Still, Haidt's views seem problematic in a variety of ways. They do address an important issue though. Which is why I need to read his book.

Love and meaning

This review of Hugo Strandberg's Love of a God of Love made me want to read the book, despite not being the most glowing review an author might hope to receive. I think that's a sign that the reviewer (Edward Vacek, SJ) has done a good job. Vacek's first criticism is that Strandberg does not examine the nature of love in depth, which surprised me given that he (Strandberg) is a colleague of Camilla Kronqvist, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Perhaps he refers to this work or feels it unnecessary to repeat work that has already been done by others. What appeals to me about Strandberg's work is this:

Strandberg's central thesis is quite worthy of reflection. Where people commonly speak of belief in God, he holds that what they really mean, if they mean anything that is existential, is that they love a God of love.

And this:

He additionally holds that those who claim that God does not exist will normally nevertheless be believers. For him, anyone who resists exploiting another in fact loves the soul of that other, even when that other is, say, a mountain. Since all objects are not isolated, anyone who respects some positive "weight" in some object is already a believer. That is, according to Strandberg, love of a single object is always also directed to something beyond and more all encompassing than the object, and that means it is love for God

Vacek calls this way of thinking slipshod, which I suppose it is, but it also seems generous (Strandberg sees love of God as a good thing, and he sees it everywhere, even in those who claim that God does not exist). I'm not sure that the generous quality of Strandberg's thinking could survive being made less slipshod, i.e. more rigorous.

Love also comes up in Christine Vitrano's essay "Meaningful Lives?" (which I think is only temporarily available free online). Here are some passages that I hope will give a sense of her argument even to those who have not read her (very clear and short) paper:

According to [Susan] Wolf, motives connected with meaning arise most obviously ‘when we act out of love for individuals about whom we deeply and especially care.’

She believes we also ‘act out of love’ in the pursuit of impersonal things, such as when we toil over a work of art, music or philosophy, or tend to our gardens.

Not all reasons of love contribute to a meaningful life, however, because ‘love can be misplaced or misguided; the energy or attention that you give to an object of love may be disproportionate to what that object merits.’¹⁰ So being attracted to certain activities and projects will increase the meaning of your life only if they are worthy of your love and attention. Wolf sums up her view succinctly: ‘Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.’

Wolf's examples of worthwhile and worthless activities appear to be arbitrary, providing no insight into the concept of objective value. For example, she states with confidence that baking chocolate cakes and tending to our gardens are meaningful ways to spend time, but doing crossword puzzles, playing computer games and attending aerobics classes are not. Yet Wolf provides no justification why baking and gardening have objective value; nor does she explain why she believes the other activities are ‘not the sorts of things that make life worth living.’

Why does pursuing a project or activity as an escape or distraction render it meaningless?

Wolf declares that vocations ‘to which one feels oneself called’ are ‘paradigmatic examples of what gives meaning to people's lives.’³⁰ If so, why is the life of a dedicated corporate lawyer meaningless?

A serious difficulty emerges when, towards the end of her book in a reply to Jonathan Haidt, Wolf changes her view on the worthiness of solving crossword puzzles and racing lawn mowers. Haidt is concerned that a former student, whose life revolved around her love of horses, was in danger of having her life declared meaningless by Wolf. Her reply begins with a reiteration of her belief that no one is an authority on which activities have objective value, which is why we need to ‘pool our information and experience.’³⁴ But she adds: ‘If Haidt's student finds something valuable in her web of horse-riding projects’ then, even if she is unable to convince others of its merits, ‘this does not imply that she must be mistaken’ about its value.³⁵ Wolf explains that ‘value can emerge from brute attraction or interest interacting with drives to excellence,’³⁶ so devoting yourself to horses and pursuing that interest wholeheartedly would count as valuable. Wolf then admits that she was too hasty in her dismissal of solving crossword puzzles and racing lawn mowers, for both activities might play an important role in some people's lives, and, therefore, may be appropriate candidates for value.

Unlike Wolf, however, I believe we ought to resist making judgments about meaning unless we have a viable theory of objective value.

Wolf seems to be onto something here. If I were to develop her ideas, I think I would want to bring in Anscombe's ideas about the kinds of actions and reasons for doing things that we can make sense of. Trying to kill an enemy is intelligible, even when wrong, but putting all your green books on the roof, or collecting saucers of mud, is not intelligible. (Of course we can invent a story to make it intelligible, but I'm talking about the context of normal life, absent any kind of special story.)

If you bake a cake you don't then just throw it away (or leave it out in the rain). (Unless your baking it was something like a Buddhist spiritual exercise, but in that case you were engaging in a spiritual exercise, not (simply) baking a cake.) But when you've done a crossword puzzle you typically do throw it away. It isn't something you love in the way that you might love a garden. Similarly, computer games are typically ways of passing, or even killing, time. Even if you love to play the game, it is only a game. Most game-players recognize this. Those who don't are generally recognized as being rather pathetic. This is ordinary, not arbitrary. A mere distraction cannot be meaningful because if it were then it would not be a mere distraction. It would be an end in itself. And the life of a corporate lawyer is meaningless, if it is meaningless, precisely because it is not a vocation to which anyone feels called. They do it for the money. If I'm wrong then the example is a bad one, but it's clear enough, it seems to me, what Wolf is getting at.

Haidt's horse-riding example seems quite different from the racing lawn-mowers case. A horse is something you can love, and horse-riding is an ancient skill. Racing lawn-mowers is, presumably, meant to be silly. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Perhaps there could be exceptions, but if one races lawn-mowers in the usual way with the usual attitude, if the activity has the kind of place in your life that it has in the typical racer of lawn-mowers, then it will be something you do merely for amusement, not as a central meaning-giving project. You can't love a lawn-mower, especially one that you ride. (Perhaps it's possible to love a simple tool with which one nobly toils, but rider-mowers are all about convenience. They aren't comrades in effort.) Love of riding lawn-mowers is on a par with love of playing Donkey Kong (you don't want to be Billy Mitchell). If that life seems potentially meaningful to you, watch The King of Kong. We don't need a theory of objective value to recognize wasted time or douchebaggery.

Haidt at VMI

Jonathan Haidt spoke at VMI today about hive psychology. As I understood him, and as I recall, here's what he said:

Why does selflessness occur?

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes conversion experiences in which people lose their sense of ego and want to give their lives to God. Emerson describes a similar-sounding loss of egotism and sense of oneness with God brought about by being in a forest. Others have supposedly similar "peak experiences" in all kinds of circumstances, or at least in a variety of places. Warriors sometimes lose their sense of individual identity, as J. Glenn Gray reports. Soldiers marching in formation, dancers at raves, people engaged in religious rituals, people who work for the same company and exercise together, crowds at sporting events, and others, all supposedly feel a similar sense of oneness with the group.

Haidt sees this as connected with religion, ethics, and politics. He also regards human beings as the only species to have found a way to fake the hive mentality that comes naturally to ants and bees, in which the individual is little more than an organ of the larger body that is the group. In humans, though, some degree of self-interest, if perhaps only in some members of the group, always remains. Self-interest has obvious survival value, but members of a group might increase their chances of survival if some are prepared to sacrifice for the good of all. So hive psychology makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. And that's why selflessness occurs.

A good leader, then, will do things that create a sense of membership in a group, a sense of all for one and one for all. Charisma helps, and being seen to be trustworthy and loyal to the group, prepared to make sacrifices on its behalf, is helpful also. But so can be less obvious things, like getting the people you want to follow you to exercise or dance together.

All this seemed to me to be interesting and very relevant to VMI, which is kind of like one big hive. But there is a lot going on here, about religion, ethics, politics, psychology, and biology. What does it all really mean?

I have no quarrel with the leadership lessons Haidt draws. These strike me as an empirical matter--if you can get workers to work better by having them exercise together then it might be good business to do so. Haidt said nothing about the ethics of doing so, and whether it works or not is something a philosopher cannot answer.

In terms of religion, I think we get little insight from all this. Maybe religion has survival value, maybe not. If it does, this doesn't tell us much about what religion is, whether (any of) it's true or not, etc. Nor does anything about ethics seem to follow.

Where there might be an interesting moral to draw is in connection with politics. The hive mentality seems best suited to rather simplistic or non-rational kinds of belief. Hives, like crowds and mobs, don't handle nuance very well. "Yes we can!" and "Drill, baby, drill!" can be chanted, but more sophisticated ideas don't fit the hive mentality. Hence the absurdity of one of my favorite pieces of graffiti: "War in the Gulf? Think it through, then act." It's hard to argue with the reasonableness of the last part of this, but it doesn't seem slogan-y enough for graffiti. It might be the very reasonableness, the intellectual sophistication that comes from wanting to track the truth, that makes liberals (here used in the Enlightenment sense, not as a euphemism for the left) unpopular with the hive-minded. Hence perhaps the lack of anything equivalent to Fox News for liberals. You could  have something like a Stalinist version of Fox News, but there's no market for it.* And maybe a hive-ish liberalism is somehow a contradiction in terms.

Maybe none of this goes much beyond Plato's political psychology, but Haidt has some interesting data, and maybe more than just that.  

*UPDATE: If this makes it sound as though I think Obama is a Stalinist of some kind, then I have expressed myself badly. To paraphrase Augustine: What, then, do I mean? So long as no one asks me then I know. But if someone asks me to explain it, then I don't know.

Elevate me

Jean Kazez says:

The good of religion It goes back to Keith Richards's book. Over and over again, he talks about the "elevation" he feels from making one out of many--one sound in a band with many members. This is a term also used by Jonathan Haidt, who references Barbara Ehrenreich's book about the lost art of dancing in the streets. We can't all be Keith Richards, but anyone can become a member of a church--and then the "band" is huge, crossing boundaries of both space and time.

But wait--why do you need a church for that? Why isn't there sufficient elevation in going to rock concerts or political rallies or baseball games? It's different, because a church (but not a stadium) is a place in which people deal with the passage of time (marked by holidays) and the major events of life--birth, marriage, illness, death. Contingently, though not of necessity, churches are in the time/birth/death business because they are places run by priests who have contact with the powers that supposedly govern such things.

The new atheist attitude is that the whole edifice of religion should come falling down because there aren't any gods. But then you'd lose all the good. As I see it: better for religion to evolve in a rational direction, not vanish entirely. That view is the main thing that makes me a not-new atheist, and it has nothing to do with "accommodationism" about science and religion.

The second paragraph reminds me of the end of Larkin's "Church Going":

I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I think Kazez and Larkin are excellent on why there might be a need for church, but actually going to church does not (in my experience) provide the kind of elevation that Richards talks about. This elevation seems to come from a kind of communal art, although 'art' might be too grand a term for it. I think it would include the joy that a Cleveland Browns fan recently described to me of chanting "Asshole" in unison with a whole stadium at a hated former player. It certainly includes this kind of singing, etc. at a football/soccer match. But that has nothing to do with marriage, birth, and death. We still tend to go to church (or turn to religion in some form) for those things.

So how do we bring the things we care about (the Browns, the birth of a baby, etc.) together with church and/or religion? I'm not sure that a more rational form of religion is the answer. The best lack all conviction/The worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats said. (This seems to apply to politics as well as religion, and is almost explicitly given as a common reason for not voting for the clearly better presidential candidate in the US.) So we need to make the worst more rational (which people are constantly trying to do, without much success) and the best more passionate (which means finding something they can get passionate about).

Which is a bit like saying we need a new god, or only a god can save us now. Also like Nietzsche's madman's "I seek God, I seek God." It seems to keep being said. Which means, not to end on too much of a downer, that hope remains alive.