A Post from Strange Loop Nan

I knew that there were amazing examples of symbiosis in the biological world, such as the social insects (see "Thoughts on Anthill..." entry), and the mitochondria in our own cells. And I love the idea of slime molds being able to exist as single cells but communicating by cyclic AMP that it's time to congregate and make a fruiting stalk. But I was surprised to read this morning in Matt Ridley's book that the Portuguese man-o'-war is actually a colony, not a single organism. I looked it up on a great site called Animal Diversity Web. I never did take a zoology class, so I guess that's how I missed this until now.

This kind of stuff fascinates me, partly because I think it's more evidence that it's hard to draw a line between self and nonself. A while ago I read I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstader . I had to skip over the main part, the explanation of how Godel's theorem--which leads to Hofstader's conclusion that there is no "I"--because I just couldn't get it. (The best I could do was figure that the scientific community seems to find Hofstader plausible.) I really wanted to get to Hofstader's idea that we don't really exist as separate selves. I find that immensely comforting, and I began to think of myself as Strange Loop Nan (i.e., the strange loop that is called Nan). You can read a nice excerpt on why the "I" doesn't exist here.

Ridley writes about this in the context of increasing cooperation over time in the history of life.

More ideas from The Happiness Hypothesis

• Damasio (Descartes' Error) found that people who had a neurological defect were unable to make decisions. We think of emotion as impeding rational decision-making, but people who don't feel emotion "find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart."
• The reason we can't stop thinking about something like a white elephant, or an inappropriate and embarrassing thought, is that once we have that thought, our automatic systems take over and constantly check whether we are having that thought we don't want to have.
• When "two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other."
• "... the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things. We can't just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks."
• Whether you're a happy person or not is largely heritable. "Twin studies generally show that from 50 to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences." Haidt says that those who are generally happy and easy-going "won the cortical lottery." But: you can change your "affective style"--and the three best ways to do so are meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. "All three are effective because they work on the elephant."
• One reason many of us are so resistant to the idea of SSRI's is that we feel that "character development ought to involve a lifelong struggle to develop one's moral potential." 
• Robin Dunbar thinks that our brains became large in order to manage larger and larger social groups, and that "human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people ..."
• "In a world with no gossip, people ... would get away with a trail of rude, selfish, and antisocial acts, often oblivious to their own violations ... Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance ... Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life ... "
• Gossip also bonds us:  "Tell an aquaintance a cynical story that ends with both of you smirking and shaking your heads and voila, you've got a bond."
• Wealth and happiness: "People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than whose who don't. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller." I think many families have striven for so long to get out of poverty, that now in the past few decades in the West, when they reach the middle class or above, they are still in the mindset of seeking wealth and material goods. We don't always recognize that finally we have enough and are comfortable. 
• I wonder how much our society has been influenced by the childrearing practices of the early 20th century. If Freudians and behaviorists were telling parents not to show their children too much affection, then those children probably weren't very good parents either because of the neglect they received in childhood. 

Food for Thought-Sept. 17

The following are ideas for topics we may discuss at the book club meeting tomorrow:

• 'Evolution doesn't care if we're happy, successful, or living a meaningful life. The only goal from the point-of-view of evolution is to leave as many offspring as possible.' Does anyone in the group have a different point of view?
• Research shows that perpetrators of things we think of as evil rarely think they are doing anything wrong. In fact, they see themselves as victims responding to attacks. Does this surprise you, and does it put conflicts from local ones to international ones in a new light? Do you agree that "almost everyone has a valid point"?
• Which "universal law" appeals to you more, Kant's categorical imperative or Bentham's Utilitarianism (maximum total benefit for as many as possible)?  Do you think that your political orientation is shaped by which of these approaches appeals to you?
• Haidt talks about the "uses of adversity," and then explores whether it's just that adversity can "lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement," or whether it's imperative to experience a lot of adversity in order to grow. What do you think? Is a certain amount of adversity necessary to develop wisdom? (Haidt says the research shows that adversity at certain points in life, such as the late teens, can build character but at other points it's harder to overcome adversity.)

More on The Happiness Hypothesis

Where our different philosophical backgrounds came from regarding morality:

Haidt says that ancient cultures extolled virtues. Now we extoll moral reasoning.

The ancient Greeks gave us both the "quest for parsimony [finding just one central rule] and the worship of reason." The Enlightenment revived these two outlooks and "sought a foundation for ethics that did not depend on divine revelation or on God's enforcement." (p. 161)

The two opposing points of view on what this universal moral law should be were put forth by Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham.

Kant: (Deontologists-from Gk deon=obligation)
Moral Laws have to be universally applicable (the categorical imperative).
Would it be okay for everyone to do this thing I want to do? If not then it's not okay for me to do it.
Ethics is "a branch of applied logic."

Bentham: Utilitarianism  (Consequentialists)
"In all decision-making ... goal should be the maximum total benefit (utility), but who gets the benefit is of little concern." (p. 162)
Ethics through moral reasoning. (Haidt points out this is how we are educating our children today.)

Haidt takes a detour through Ben Franklin's attempt to live a virtuous life while fully aware of his temptations and shortcomings. He felt that Virtue was its own reward.  This encourages delayed gratification.

Durkheim talked about "anomie" (normlessness). "Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of any value." Haidt warns that because we are so careful now not to impose our norms on others, children in our society don't have a bedrock of values, but instead are encouraged to sort of create their own. This leads to the condition of anomie. 

Disgust and Divinity

"Disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat." When we started eating a lot of meat, we came into contact with a lot more contagious pathogens, and disgust developed so that we wouldn't want to eat rotten food.

Haidt has done a lot of research on disgust and the value of purity in different cultures. He thinks the desire for some things to be pure and sacred is part of our natures. I've read about this before--for example, in The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, to whom Haidt refers. I never have quite gotten the idea of the third dimension of human social space, the dimension of divinity. (Anyone have any thoughts to share on this?)

Mircea Eliade (historian of religion) says "that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world. This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against." (p. 193) Now this I do understand--that is, time and space stripped of all sacredness furthers the anomie that Durkheim talked about, so that people in our culture feel rootless. 

The Culture War and The Myth of Pure Evil

Haidt has much more to say about the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in this TED video. It is also interesting to read his "What Makes People Vote Republican?" It's particularly helpful to me--as someone who often votes Republican in national elections, but hangs out with liberals and has some very liberal viewpoints, and ends up feeling out of touch with everyone. 

But the larger reason I think it's important to read/watch these is because, as Haidt says, most of us seem to believe in a "the myth of pure evil" (pp. 72-76). He refers to a book by social psychologist Roy Baumeister:

In Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Aggression, Baumeister examined evil from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator. When taking the perpetrator's perspective, he found that people who do things we see as evil, from spousal abuse all the way to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims. But, of course, you can see right through this tactic; you are good at understanding the biases that others use to protect their self-esteem. The disturbing part is that Baumeister shows us our own distortions as victims, and as righteous advocates of victims. Almost everywhere Baumeister looked in the literature, he found that victims often shared some of the blame...

... Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from the outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil...

...Neither the 9/11 hijackers nor Osama bin Laden were particularly upset because American women can drive, vote, and wear bikinis. Rather, many Islamic extremists want to kill Americans because they are using the Myth of Pure Evil to interpret Arab history and current events. (pp. 74-76)

Baumeister also found, unfortunately, "The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism ... Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means." (p. 76)

I keep telling my husband, who often thinks of writing about how to promote a more civil society, that he and some of his colleagues should collaborate with Haidt or other social psychologists looking at this stuff.

The Age of Empathy, and Selfish Genes

I had suggested that this be the core book for our October meeting, while encouraging people to read other books on altruism/cooperation as well.

I have started to read The Age of Empathy, and am not finding it that enlightening.

For one, he rails against Social Darwinism quite a bit--wasn't Social Darwinsim discredited in the early 1900's? Definition from Wikipedia:

Social Darwinism is a pejorative term used for various late nineteenth century ideologies which, while often contradictory, exploited ideas of survival of the fittest. More from the Wikipedia article

Sadly, "survival of the fittest" is what some lay people (and some scholars in the social sciences) still think of when they think of Darwin. I read today that Darwin did use the term, but that Herbert Spencer came up with it before Darwin published On the Origin of the Species. It is an unfortunate phrase, as it makes people think that Darwin is saying that life is all about competing, and that only the physically strongest and most aggressive survive. "Fit" refers to fit to survive and leave offspring in the environment the organism finds itself--it could be brute strength that is called for, but it could mean so many other things, such as having a nose that can filter cold air if you find yourself living in Ice Age Europe.

As we read in Genome, humans who tended to live in monogamous pairs were more fit at some point in our history: Men hunted; high-quality protein was necessary for our larger brains; women gave birth to premature infants because of head size; men helped care for the infants and provided meat; women did not need to go out and hunt, so could stay with the young child while digging roots and tubers, which were a more reliable source of steady calories when no meat was killed. The pairs who lived that way tended to leave more offspring at that point in human history. So, "fit" in this case means cooperating in a monogamous pair.

One thing I didn't know was that Enron's "CEO, Jeff Skilling ... was a great fan of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and deliberately tried to mimic nature by instigating cutthroat competition within his company." (p. 39) This seems to be a misunderstanding of what I think Dawkins was saying (it's been a long time since I read the book). Genes are selfish--in that a gene's ultimate purpose is to get itself reproduced--but that doesn't always mean that the organism they find themselves in is necessarily selfish. (Well, I believe that organisms are ultimately selfish; that's what our discussion of altruism in evolution is all about.) But even though the ultimate aim is for the organism to reproduce itself, the proximal aim could be to do so by showing generosity to the rest of one's group in the hope that they will reciprocate with more altruism. So the selfish gene theory doesn't rule out altruism and cooperation. Apparently de Waal and Dawkins have had disagreements about the meaning of the "selfish gene." (p. 40)

I keep waiting to get to an examination of primate cooperation, but so far (p. 43), the book rambles with anecdotes. And de Waal seems more interested in making political statements than sticking to biology. He starts out in the first paragraph of the preface with politics:

Greed is out, empathy is in.

The global financial crisis of 2008, together with the election of a new American president, has produced a seismic shift in society. Many have felt as if they were waking up from a bad dream about a big casino where the people's money had been gambled away, enriching a happy few without the slightest worry about the rest of us. This nightmare was set in motion a quarter of a century earlier by Reagan-Thatcher trickle-down economics and the soothing reassurance that markets are wonderful at self-regulation. No one believes that anymore.

Can't I just read about primate behavior?

I will finish this book--it is a quick read, since it doesn't go into much depth. Then I'm going to read one of the others on the list to discuss at the October meeting (see sidebar).

Here's a review that had some criticisms of The Age of Empathy that I agree with. For example,

This is a wonderful book to dip into, but a frustrating one to read from start to finish, since it is hard to discern a clear organizing principle for the chapters. After reading a few pages, one tends to run out of momentum, because themes seem to repeat.