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 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.