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.

Evolutionary psychology can help us move beyond violence

It's alarming that anti-Muslim sentiment is growing. On an NPR report on Friday, you could hear people in the background shouting ugly things like "we don't want you people here." I think it's important that we see this for what (I think) it is: ingroup vs. outgroup, and competition for resources. (And, obviously, stress among those who are unemployed, losing their home, etc., and wanting a scapegoat for that.) Evolutionary psychology tells us that we are only connected to our ingroup through our hatred of the outgroup: girls in middle school move up the social ladder by shedding friendships with less popular girls. It is by keeping others out that we form a cohesive group. We have to move past this, but I think people need to come to terms with our basic drives first.

I don't think it's about the religion, at its base. (I doubt many of the people shouting attend church. They just come from a Christian cultural heritage.) It's about ethnic rivalry. And "ethnic" refers more to our cultural group than to a biological group--because science shows that we can't be grouped by race--for example, see Race: The Power of an Illusion. (Although for one rebuttal click here.) I have read that the human species is less diverse than a population of chimps living on one mountainside! Humans had a recent bottleneck, a time when most of us died out, so that the remaining gene pool was very small. This was around 75,000 years ago. So all humans are closely related to one another, compared with other species.

Another obvious point is that most (all?) religions have engaged in horrific violence. Again, I don't think (as Dawkins, Hitchens, others do) that it's the religion itself causing the violence. The religion just defines the ethnic group that hates the other groups because they are competing for resources and because the cohesiveness of our ingroup is defined by our disdain of the outgroups. I think the groups would hate each other, religion or no religion. Obviously, most of our religions have used violence in trying to convert others or in competing for resources (such as land) with others. It is maddening when people suggest that Islam is a religion with violence at its core, because there is so much violence in the history of every Abrahamic religion. Every religion grew out of the point-of-view of an ancient people--people who wanted to preserve themselves at the expense of outsiders. In the Old Testament, Yahweh often told the Hebrews to slaughter other tribes. Steven Pinker points out (sorry, I constantly refer this same TED video) that hunter-gatherer groups would preemptively attack other groups, because they would assume the other group was planning to preemptively attack them. That's the culture we came from, and maybe that was still the norm in the time of the Old Testament. In fact, I think that's one thing Jesus was trying to get us to move beyond. (Then Christianity, like all human institutions, became more about preserving the institution than about loving one's neighbor.) Muhammad was trying to get the Arab tribes who were warring among themselves to unite, at least that's what I gleaned from Karen Armstrong.

I do hope that the mainstream churches are actively discouraging this violence toward Muslims.

For more on how quickly skin color can change in the human species click here.

Signature Strengths

If you are interested, here is the link to the Authentic Happiness website. You have to create a name and password to use it. The character strengths survey that Jon Haidt writes about and other surveys are found on this website.

If you already know yourself pretty well, you may find this survey redundant.

The Happiness Hypothesis

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.

We can still learn to be happy and live a meaningful life in spite of the fact that our brains didn't evolve for the purpose of making us happy.

We just have to "retrain the elephant, " as Haidt says.

The elephant is the old part of the brain that's been shaped by evolution for a long time. The "rider" is the newer part that tries to control the elephant. He also refers to the rider as the "lawyer" who comes up with logical-sounding arguments to support whatever gut reaction the elephant has already had to an issue.

The elephant was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life, and part of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank. The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious. The elephant will pursue its evolutionary goals even when greater happiness can be found elsewhere... (p. 101).

See also: blog entry "The Good Life," which talks about the concept of flow as well as this book.

It's intriguing that Haidt (while writing this book, he says) began to question whether the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment is the best solution to the human conundrum. I have found the concept of nonattachment very inspiring, and it seems to me to be the solution to the problem of being human, since humans have the capacity to dwell on our own mortality and the transience of everything. My attachment to nonattachment may have been partly because my dad often quoted Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science, the religion of my grandparents, although it turns out that Eddy was quoting Shakespeare): "There is nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so." Haidt also points out that whether nonattachment is the best approach may depend on the era in which you live--the Buddha lived during turbulent times, whereas "people living in a wealthy democracy can set long-term goals and expect to meet them." (Aside: Steven Pinker notes that, in spite of how it appears, the world has become less violent over time.) Haidt also writes that maybe Buddha should have gotten out of his chariot and actually asked people if they were miserable. Research shows that whether people are happy or miserable is only slightly based upon their circumstances, but mostly based on their "happiness set-point" or whether they "won the cortical lottery" as Haidt puts it. Another psychologist, Dan Gilbert, whose amusing video you can watch on TED, says if the event happened over three months ago, it has little impact on one's happiness. Unbelievable. And more reason to work on changing our brains.

One of Haidt's main points in this book is that we humans think that we are unbiased, but research shows that we are all biased. (This gets back to the rider as lawyer, coming up with statements to support our biases.) Some of the classic experiments on this were done on people who had undergone surgery (for seizures) to sever the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. These experiments showed that the left hemisphere can come up with explanations for things the right hemisphere has seen but has not entered into normal consciousness. (Haidt, pp. 8-10) Even when told that humans are biased, we can see how others are biased but still maintain our own neutrality. He touches on the fact that depressed people may think differently, because they are convinced they are worse than average (most people apparently are convinced they are better than average. I have also read elsewhere that depressed people are more in touch with reality!)

I think I am more aware of bias than your average person, but Haidt would say I am just as deluded as everyone else, I suppose. I think I've been influenced to be more able to see points of view by my husband, who is a very diplomatic (sometimes to a fault!) person. He's very effective at mediation because he can see that each side has a point and wants their grievances heard. I especially noticed this when he was working in Central America.

In the past several years I have come to realize that everyone has a point-Republicans, Democrats, Christians, Atheists, whatever. For example, I think Creationists are afraid that if they accept all the implications of evolution and cosmology they will have to confront the fact that we live in a meaningless universe that doesn't care about us. (And then one has to move beyond this realization to look for meaning, as forward-thinking theologians would probably agree.) I just wish people could be honest with themselves about why they believe what they do.

I think a lot of political and religious extremism can be attributed to the fact that each person forms opinions because of gut reactions, and then comes up with logical explanations for his or her opinions. Maybe this is an obvious conclusion, but I think it's important that the public understand this tendency we have to logically explain away our opinions. Then maybe we could question the fervor with which we hold opinions these days.

Meeting on July 17

Lots of discussion:

1. Whether humans are "evolving" to a new level of altruism at the societal level--Ken Wilber wrote a book suggesting we're on a "brink" of something new. This also goes along with what we've probably mentioned at each meeting ... the idea (first from Julie's professor) that life is evolving towards greater cooperation. However, there is probably a distinction between biological evolution, and the cultural evolution that happens now that evolution gave us these brains to contemplate stuff like this. Similar to the distinction between genes and memes. Note: I was just now watching Robert Sapolsky's Great Courses lecture series on Biology and Human Behavior, and he pointed out that many of us were taught evolution by that old TV program Wild Kingdom, where the wildebeest, say, would "sacrifice himself" for the good of the species by letting the crocodiles eat him while the other wildebeest swam to safety. Sapolsky said that what the TV neglected to show us was that the wildebeest (or whatever other animal was featured) was probably the oldest one and got pushed into the water rather than sacrificing himself. Sapolsky says "evolution is not about evolving behaviors that optimize the survival of your species."

2. The origins of agriculture as a step towards a more difficult, if more secure life. As we have increases in technology such as agriculture, we are able to avoid or survive some of the smaller catastrophes (frequent famine), but the trade-off is that when we do have a catastrophe, it's bigger (we can't just pick up and move like the hunter-gatherers can, for example). (Idea from Brian Fagan, The Long Summer, and the concept of "trading up on the scale of vulnerability.")

3. If we have evidence that, say, sociopaths have innately different brains than the average, or that Einstein had particularily large and unusually shaped parietal lobules, what does that mean for us in terms of who we are (and how much pride or shame we can take in being that person)?

How much discretion did the “you” making the choices actually have if the outcome could have been predicted in advance, at least probablilistically, based on events that took place in your mother’s fallopian tubes decades ago?

(We had discussed this when we read The Blank Slate, too--the above quote is from page 51 of that book.)

TED video of neuroscientist Jim Fallon talking about psychopathic brains