Social production of moral indifference - 4c

 The scientific picture of how genes work is much more complex than people tend to think, though you’d never guess this from the newspapers. Frequently there will be an announcement suggesting a direct connection between genes and traits or conditions (‘Gene for autism finally discovered!’). One gene is said to give you brown eyes; another, blonde hair; and yet another, schizophrenia.  The notion of the “selfish gene” conveys the idea that one gene works in isolation, going about its own selfish business. 

It does not make sense to consider a gene in isolation as being responsible for a complex function. Genes are not so powerful. For each biological function, there is always a series of genes working together. Cooperation of genes with each other is the main operational basis of genetics, and therefore of evolution. Dawkins acknowledges a role for gene-gene interactions in The Selfish Gene, noting that ‘the effect of any one gene depends on interaction with many others.’ 

When saying that a gene causes X to happen, what is meant is that on the average X happens, and at a statistically reliable rate. There is always lots of variability, including individuals in whom nothing happens or even the opposite of X occurs. When thinking about genes, it is important to remember words like on “average,” “typically,” “usually,” “often,” “tend to,” and “generally”. Genes are very far from being fixed in their actions. And a large part of evolution occurs by altering regulation of genes, rather than genes themselves.

The vast majority of genes extract certain kinds of information from the upbringing and environment of the person. Genes are very good at simple if-then logic: if in a certain environment, then develop in a certain way. Complex behaviors like nurturing, especially when tied to even more complex emotions like "love," are never either genetically predetermined or environmentally  produced. Gene/environment interactions are everywhere. 

Right from birth, it’s very hard to distinguish the contribution made by nature from that of nurture. A "bad" genotype does not condemn a person to a particular behavior; for ill effects to occur, a bad environment is also required. Likewise, a "bad" environment is not a sentence; it also requires a "bad" genotype if it is to produce ill effects .  The environment, as well as the genome, has an enormous influence on the personality of a child, mainly through the child's peer group. A hormone can make you nicer or nastier depending on your values. A criminal personality, even if partly genetic, is much more likely to be expressed in a criminal environment. 

Even brain structures can be modified by external factors. Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong. We haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else. The way a person develops can be steered and adjusted by changes in that environment along the way. It all depends on the context. Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience. 

Even something as seemingly hardwired as our physiology — cells dividing, moving, deciding their fates, and organizing into tissues and organs — is not engineered by genes alone. Biophysical events (like chemical reactions in the cells, mechanical pressures inside and on the cells, and gravity) can switch genes on and off, determining cell fate. Take taste. When mothers breastfeed their babies, tastes of the foods they have eaten are reflected in their breast milk, and their babies develop a preference for these foods. Babies “inherit” food preferences from the behavior of their mothers. 

Changes wrought by one's diet, behavior, or surroundings can work their way into the germ line and persist far into the future. Thus, what you eat or smoke today could affect the health and behavior of your great-grandchildren. Increasingly, researchers are finding that an extra bit of a vitamin, a brief exposure to a toxin, even an added dose of mothering can alter the software of our genes in ways that affect an individual's body and brain for life. DNA Is Not destiny.

Nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. It is rather nature via nurture. Genes are not puppet masters that determine one’s behavior exactly - environmental influences are sometimes less reversible than genetic ones.  Any geneticist who says that he has found an influence for genes and therefore there is no role for the environment is talking bunk. And any nurtures who says that he has found an environmental factor and therefore there is no role for genes is equally talking bunk.

A more nuanced argument about human evolution is given in  The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. The central argument in this book is that cultural evolution became the primary driver of our species’ genetic evolution. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? The secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains ― on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.

Once cultural information began to accumulate and produce cultural adaptations, the main selection pressure on genes revolved around improving our abilities to learn various skills and practices that became increasingly available in the minds of the others in one’s group. This culture-gene coevolutionary interaction creates an autocatalytic process such that no matter how big our brains get, there will always be much more cultural information in the world than any one of us can learn in a lifetime.

Social production of moral indifference - 4b

Embedded in the definitions of many scientific and economic theories are value judgements about what is desirable and what is undesirable. In academic circles, 'selfish gene' maybe seen as a metaphor, but when it escapes academe (the book was written for a popular audience), it is no surprise that it has metamorphosed into the idea of the 'selfish individual'. People are influenced by scientific reporting on human nature and their behavior is accordingly changed. Robert Merton labeled this quality of believing that establishes itself as true by the very act of believing it to be true as a “self-fulfilling prophesy.” 

It has resulted in people searching for hidden motives, something beneath the surface of human behavior. If people only act to maximize their gains in some way or another, then how do you explain people who give things away for nothing? You will be told that they are trying to maximize their social standing, or honor, or prestige that accrues to them by doing so. Then what about people who give anonymous gifts?: Well, they’re trying to maximize the sense of self-worth, or the good feeling they get from doing it. 

Such writing provide the fuel for economists, who assume humans are rational actors seeking only material rewards. It is a commonly accepted idea that we are individuals always and only looking out for number one. The Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker argued that marriage contracts arise out of individual calculations of value made with an eye toward utility and fitness maximization. But we know from our intimate relationships that they are not the simple outcomes of market exchange.

The foundations of the new zeitgeist of unbridled self-interest was laid by Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. We are told that capitalism succeeded because it’s based on harnessing the selfish nature of each individual for the ultimate good of society. The battle to be the best apparently isn’t confined to individuals; even genes are out to get each other. So the prevailing attitude is that one doesn't need to be ashamed of elbowing others out of the way - after all, it’s in my genes. The science of human nature has warped our understanding to the point of naturalizing harsh social policies and economic systems. This has gradually lead to the acute social problem that Harsh Mander is talking about.

Some who hold the cynical view think that they’re being hard-boiled and scientific. They think that this sort of attitude comes when you give up romantic or religious conceptions of human nature and take evolution seriously. Since the amoral force of natural selection has shaped our minds, they argue, genuinely altruistic motivations are a myth. All we really want is to survive and reproduce. This type of thinking is wrong about natural selection and wrong about psychology. Natural selection might be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but it’s selfish about genes, not individuals. 

Genes that caused an individual to be cooperative in a group would have an advantage over genes that caused an individual to be selfish. So, strange as it might seem, selfish genes create altruistic individuals, motivating kindness toward others. We are naturally kind because our ancestors who were kind to others outlived and outreproduced those who didn’t. If you choose to be selfish, then, you can’t justify yourself by saying you’re following the lead of your genes — caring just about yourself is profoundly unbiological.

Another negative effect of the notion of the 'selfish gene' is to strengthen the idea of humans as machines. Since the invention of the clock, a vision of nature as an intricate clockwork designed by God has been popular. With the advent of computers, the machine metaphor of nature has become even more entrenched in the way people think. Dawkins's statement that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information” underlies much of how people understand our world. The metaphor of NATURE AS MACHINE has been so powerful in the modern world that it misleads many people into mistaking humans for machines. 

During the last few decades, a kind of genetic determinism has been rampant generating a host of powerful metaphors – DNA being referred to as the genetic “program” or “blueprint of life,” the genetic code as the “language of life,” and the human genome as “the book of life.” The notion that the gene is the central aspect of life seems to be well embedded in the culture. One reads in the popular literature  about the gene for obesity, the gene for aggressiveness, and the gene for longevity. 

The computer has become a source of powerful and often used metaphors. People often say that men and computers are  merely  two different species of a more abstract genus called 'information processing systems.' The public embrace of the computer  metaphor  rests on  only the vaguest understanding of a difficult and complex scientific concept. When a complex idea enters the public consciousness in a simplified form, it becomes little more than a caricature of the original.

In biology, genes are commonly described like computer programmers that “code” for certain traits. In discussions of psychology, countless writers describe the mind as “software” and the body as “hardware” with a brain that is “wired” in a certain way. Larry Page, cofounder and CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet has referred to human DNA as “600 megabytes compressed” of programming, arguing that “it's smaller than any modern operating system” and therefore our “program algorithms probably aren't that complicated.” 

This is a misguided view. The  trouble with metaphoric usages is that the metaphors are overextended.  The public's vague understanding of computers and computer circuitry with its emphasis on codes and coding makes them see the discovery of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule as similar to explaining a computer's basic wiring diagram. This makes them see humans as physical objects that can be designed and engineered to specification. The metaphor suggests the belief that everything that needs to be known is known.

Brain and computers are very different things. The brain is fundamentally embodied and cannot be separated from our physical existence in the way software can be separated from hardware. Morality, aesthetics, ideology, religion etc. are not reducible to the neurons in our head and the genes in our cells. They are emergent properties - an elegant, scientific way of saying that nobody is sure where they come from. Regarding living beings, including humans, as machines, makes it easy to see each individual as selfish and competitive, seeking only personal advantage. 

Such an exaggerated, gene-centered view of life leads many to believe that if our behaviors are determined by our genes, and if our genes can't change, then it must be that our behaviors can't change, no matter how much we would like them to. They think that social injustices must be ineradicable because they are rooted in our genes. To many, The idea of a selfish gene makes reality into a nihilistic dystopia where we can be reduced to have about as much freedom as a teaspoon has in deciding whether to stir a cup of tea. This is a gross misunderstanding of how genes function. 

Social production of moral indifference - 4a

 . . .  we need a better story to tell – a less selfish, more inclusive metaphor to offer the wider world. - Laura Hercher, genetic counsellor 

The concept of the “selfish gene” has been around for more than three decades. First coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, the term describes sequences of DNA that spread by forming additional copies of itself within the genome and make no specific contribution to the reproductive success of the organism in which it is found. Dawkins flips our everyday experience and intuition on its head: “We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” 

The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals, families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behavior of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically, they are selfish. Before this, it had been proposed that natural selection was honing the behavior of living things to promote the continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to survive was in concert with other genes in the perishable body of an individual.

But the gene-centric view of evolution has been deeply misunderstood over the years. His use of the word ‘selfish’ is metaphorical and the book aims to show how selfish genes act to produce altruistic individuals.  One of the chapters in the book is titled ‘Nice guys finish first’. Dawkins has said that he could have called the book ’The Cooperative Gene’ and he  would not have to change a word of the book but it would have sold fewer copies. In the introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrote:

Many critics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by title only. . . The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize 'selfish' and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. 

The Selfish Species? The Selfish Group? The Selfish Organism? The Selfish Ecosystem? Most of these could be argued, and most have been uncritically assumed by one or another author, but all of them are wrong. Given that the Darwinian message is going to be pithily encapsulated as The Selfish Something, that something turns out to be the gene, for cogent reasons which this book argues. 

But  Dawkins himself contributed to the misunderstanding by stating in Chapter 1 of the first edition, 'Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish'. There is nothing wrong with teaching generosity and altruism, but 'born selfish' is misleading. Dawkins realized his error and dropped this sentence from the second edition onwards but the offending sentence is  still quoted in many discussions of the 'selfish gene' concept.

The account of The Selfish Gene serves as a moral and ideological justification for selfishness to be adopted by modern human societies as simply following "nature". This provides an excuse for behavior with bad consequences for future human society. The popularity and influence of the book can be gauged from the fact that in April 2016, it was listed in The Guardian's list of the 100 best nonfiction books. In July 2017, the book was listed as the most influential science book of all time in a poll to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Royal Society science book prize, ahead of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.

Efforts to explain the evolution of altruism by only invoking genes went by names such as inclusive fitness (also called kin selection) and evolutionary game theory. These theories had a way of transmuting altruism into selfishness. A relative helping another relative became an individual helping its genes in the body of another individual, thereby maximizing its own “inclusive fitness.” Evolutionary game theory rendered altruism as a matter of scratching your back so that you’ll scratch mine. Selfish gene theory performed the ultimate transmutation of calling everything that evolves by genetic evolution a form of selfishness. 

Another biologist, Robert Trivers, explained how, from an evolutionary perspective, even altruism was really just a sophisticated form of selfishness. He described what he called "reciprocal altruism" as an ancient evolutionary strategy. "Under certain circumstances," he wrote, "natural selection favors these altruistic behaviors because in the long run they benefit the organism performing them." In the 'selfish gene' view, those special human virtues that we value so highly are no exception. Our very genes are selfish; all creatures in nature are ultimately selfish; we humans are merely unique in having taken our selfishness to new levels of Machiavellian manipulation. 

An influential thinker, Richard Alexander comes to a similar conclusion, proposing that "ethics, morality, human conduct, and the human psyche are to be understood only if societies are seen as collections of individuals seeking their own self-interest." We became our own "hostile force of nature," entering into a "social arms race" with each other. The evolution of human intelligence represents a “special kind of struggle with other human beings for control of the resources that support life and allow one to reproduce.” Human nature is all about outmaneuvering, manipulation and control. 

Social production of moral indifference - 3c

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has been rated by many as the single best idea anyone has ever had. His idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out into human culture, ethics, politics, and religion. It has been abused and misrepresented by many to give an air of scientific respectability to appalling political and social doctrines. If we judged Darwin's theory by some of the people who used it later in morally reprehensibe ways, we would avoid reading about it.

 Using evolution to justify social inequality has become known as "social Darwinism."  It's not as if the world was a nice place before Darwin and became nasty on the basis of his theory. We are especially prone to self-serving biases. It was thus no surprise that many used evolution to advance their nefarious causes.  These biases are advantageous for some people in the short run but they are often harmful to other people and even to everyone in the long run. 

Although Darwin himself never applied his theory to social evolution, Herbert Spencer was only too eager to do so. He liked evolution because he thought it justified the inequalities of British class society. Hitler liked evolution because he thought it justified the ultimate social inequality of genocide. Darwin himself was passionately against slavery and thought that social policy should be based on compassion, which he regarded as "the noblest part of our nature". 

The expression ‘survival of the fittest’, coined by Herbert Spencer, translated Darwin's evolutionary theory into a catchy phrase, so that it came to be applied to society. Evolution — understood erroneously by many to mean progress — might well be based on chance mutations, but surely that didn’t mean we had to resign ourselves to our fate? 'We could give chance a hand, couldn’t we?', was their line of thinking. This provided an important added twist to ideas about change: it could be steered, preferably in the right direction.

This was the aim of social Darwinism, an ideology that caught on in the late-19th century. Darwin used the term ‘fittest’ to mean ‘best adapted to an environment’. In the wake of Spencer, it came to mean ‘most successful’ — that is to say, ‘strongest’. The adherents of social Darwinism saw society as a living organism that evolved like any other, and whose individual cells (social classes and races) were sick or healthy, fit or unfit. According to this line of thought, social abuses are not socio-economic phenomena but diseases, ‘cancers’, whose carriers are ‘parasites’ that must be eradicated. 

For social Darwinists, the remedy was clear. Weak groups only hold the rest back and by properly steering evolution, they must be removed without delay. This led to eugenics as a tool of social Darwinism: the strongest were encouraged to reproduce, while efforts were made to curb the reproduction of inferior specimens. Social Darwinism was advanced as a scientific justification of racism and power abuse. It was used to defend colonization: ‘Negroes’, ‘Indians’, Aborigines, and other ‘savages’ in overseas regions were portrayed as races that had dropped behind in evolution, being only a rung higher than brute creation. 

Failure was seen as a sign of intrinsic weakness and disease; to provide help in such cases was counterproductive, because it merely prolonged the survival of groups who were doomed to die out anyway. Social amenities were abolished to stop the poor reproducing. In 1834, under the influence of the Malthusians, Britain introduced a new Poor Law that defined poverty as a moral shortcoming. When Hitler claimed that the German people had the moral right to conquer the territory of inferior peoples when they needed more 'Lebensraum' or living space, he was voicing the notions that prevailed in his day and age. 

Eugenics was a serious academic discipline at many universities. Institutes devoted to it existed in England, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, America, Germany, and Norway. Its theories were supported by prominent figures, including American presidents. Its founding father, the British anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton, became a fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted well after having espoused ideas about improving the human race. Galton felt that the average citizen was “too base for the everyday work of modern civilization.”

Spencer sold hundreds of thousands of books on his assertion that we should fan the flames of this battle, since ‘the whole effort of Nature is to get rid of [the poor] – to clear the world of them, and make room for better’. The steel baron Andrew Carnegie wrote in a 1889 essay known as “The Gospel of Wealth.” “While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore . . . great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”

This ideology using less extreme language, featuring ruthless economic competition, the brutal exploitation of workers, and extreme inequalities of wealth and poverty, persists to this day. The latest mutation of social Darwinism interprets nature to mean market forces. The strongest man or woman makes it, at the expense of all those other men and women if they try hard enough. The ethical implication is that rich people are rich by virtue of their own effort and dispositions. Luck has nothing to do with it. Paul Verhaeghe writes in What About Me?:

The main thrust of that thinking is clear. If success is the new moral standard, those who commit the sin of failure need to be referred by the high priest (manager) or to the father confessor (psychotherapist) for further treatment. All this must be done as efficiently as possible, of course. 

It is painful to see how mental-health disorders are these days almost automatically translated into economic losses. The most eye-popping example was a small article in a Belgian newspaper of 21 January 2012, reporting that suicide was costing Flanders €600 million a year, ‘seriously threatening our economy’. What appallingly selfish behavior!

The fact that matters could be seen from the opposite perspective — that our economy poses a serious threat to our health — apparently occurs to nobody.

Charles Darwin perceived a fundamental problem of social life, and a possible solution. At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Yet members who behave “for the good of the group” often put themselves at a disadvantage compared with more selfish members of the same group. If so, then how can altruism and other prosocial behaviours evolve?

The solution, according to Darwin, is that groups containing mostly altruists have a decisive advantage over groups containing mostly selfish individuals, even if selfish individuals have the advantage over altruists within each group.

During the 1960s, evolutionary biologists, while agreeing with Darwin’s logic, decided that between-group selection – the evolutionary force favoring altruism – is almost invariably weak compared with within-group selection, the evolutionary force favoring selfishness. 

Social production of moral indifference - 3b

Kropotkin thus suggested two forms of struggle with opposite results: (1) organism against organism of the same species for limited resources, leading to competition (the theme that Malthus imparted to Darwin and that Huxley described as gladiatorial); and (2) organism against environment, leading to cooperation (the style that Darwin called metaphorical). If the struggle for existence pits two lions against one zebra, then the zebra has no chance. But if lions are struggling jointly against the harshness of an inanimate environment, then cooperation may overcome a peril beyond the power of any single individual to overcome.

Kropotkin argued that the cooperative style had been underemphasized and must balance or even predominate over competition in considering nature as a whole. As he studied his selected examples, he became more and more convinced that the cooperative style, leading to mutual aid, not only predominated in general but also characterized the most advanced creatures in any group - ants among insects, mammals among vertebrates. Mutual aid therefore becomes a more important principle than competition and slaughter.

The main reason why Kropotkin favored cooperation while most nineteenth-century Darwinians advocated competition as the predominant result of struggle in nature had to do with the different landscapes they studied. Kropotkin spent five years in Siberia. There, in the polar opposite to Darwin’s tropical experiences, he dwelled in the environment least conducive to Malthus’s vision. He observed a sparsely populated world, swept with frequent catastrophes that threatened the few species able to find a place in such bleakness. This led him to conclude:

Sociability thus puts a limit to physical struggle, and leaves room for the development of better moral feelings.

 Darwin acknowledged that both forms existed but his actual examples certainly favored bloody battle. Darwin’s less sophisticated supporters then raised the competitive view to near exclusivity, and gave it a social and moral meaning as well. They came to conceive of the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another’s blood.  They raised the “pitiless” struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well. 

One might argue that the gladiatorial examples have been over-sold and misrepresented as predominant. Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more common results of struggle for existence. Perhaps communion rather than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most circumstances. Kropotkin writes, 'It happened with Darwin’s theory as it always happens with theories having any bearing upon human relations. Instead of widening it according to his own hints, his followers narrowed it still more.' As Stephen J.Gould says in Kropotkin was no Crackpot:

What can we make of Kropotkin’s argument today . . .? I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. 

If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode.

...we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance...

Social production of moral indifference - 3a

I am not ... asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time ... The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. — Stephen Jay Gould

Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist. He coined the term “survival of the fittest” as a way of characterizing Darwin’s natural selection theory. But the term is avoided by modern biologists, because the phrase can be misleading. The problem is that the word "fit" is frequently confused with a state of physical fitness. In the evolutionary meaning, "fitness" is the rate of reproductive output among a class of genetic variants. 

Darwin introduced the phrase as an alternative to "natural selection" only in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1869. He intended it to mean "better designed for an immediate, local environment". Darwin’s “struggle for existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about bloody battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works in many modes: Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis, and mutual aid may also secure success in other times and contexts. Darwin explained his concept of evolutionary struggle in On the Origin of Species:

I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. 

But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought.... As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence.

Nevertheless, during much of the twentieth century, the science of evolutionary biology was dominated by the idea of ruthless competition. Competition among individual genes, or organisms, was assumed to be the principal driver of evolutionary change. Cooperation, meanwhile, was viewed as a major problem in evolutionary biology because it presumably required altruistic self-sacrifices (which was considered a wrong-headed assumption) and was not in any case considered to be a very important phenomenon. 

Darwin’s own chief disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, advanced this “gladiatorial” view of natural selection (his word). Huxley maintained that the predominance of bloody battle defined nature’s way as non-moral (not explicitly immoral, but unsuited as offering any guide to moral behavior). He said that any human society set up along these lines of nature will devolve into anarchy and misery. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must lie in mitigation of this struggle. Study natural selection and do the opposite in human society, was his advice.

This apparent discordance between nature’s way and any hope for human social decency has defined the major subject for debate about ethics and evolution ever since Darwin. For Darwin and other leading British evolutionists, the expression "struggle for existence" posed no problem. Huxley’s solution has won many supporters – nature is nasty and no guide to morality except, perhaps, as an indicator of what to avoid in human society.  A contrary view contended that Darwinism undermines morality by claiming that success in nature can only be measured by victory in bloody battle.

Russian intellectuals reacted negatively to what they perceived as injecting British enthusiasm for competition into evolutionary theory. They concluded that Darwin had greatly exaggerated the role of Malthusian overpopulation giving rise to competition as the main force behind evolution. The name most closely associated with this line of thinking was Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist, zoologist and political scientist. 

In 1902, Kropotkin published his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which gave an alternative view of animal and human survival. He argues that the struggle for existence usually leads to mutual aid rather than combat as the chief criterion of evolutionary success. Human society must therefore build upon our natural inclinations (not reverse them, as Huxley held) in making a moral order that will bring both peace and prosperity to our species. 

Kropotkin did not deny the presence of competitive urges in humans, but did not consider them the driving force of history. He argued that "it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including the human'. '...the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.' It was not ‘survival of the fittest’ but ‘survival of the friendliest’. In the last chapter, he wrote: 

The animal species [...] in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits [...] and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development [...] are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. 

The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

Social production of moral indifference - 2b

What’s fascinating is that most guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment remained hesitant to apply ‘tough’ tactics at all, even under mounting pressure. Two-thirds refused to take part in the sadistic games. One-third treated the prisoners with kindness, to Zimbardo and his team’s frustration. One of the guards resigned the Sunday before the experiment started, saying he couldn’t go along with the instructions. In Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook, there is a quotation, from John Mark, who had been one of the guards in Zimbardo's "experiment." It's from the July/Aug, 2011 issue of the Stanford Alumni magazine: 

"During the day shift, when I worked, no one did anything that was beyond what you'd expect in a situation like that. But Zimbardo went out of his way to create tension. Things like forced sleep deprivation — he was really pushing the envelope. I just didn't like the whole idea of constantly disturbing people and asking them to recite their prisoner numbers in a count. I certainly didn't like when they put a guy in solitary confinement.

"At that time of my life, I was getting high, all day every day. I got high before I went to the experiment; I got high on my breaks and lunch. I got high afterwards. I brought joints with me, and every day I wanted to give them to the prisoners. I looked at their faces and saw how they were getting dispirited and I felt sorry for them.

"I didn't think it was ever meant to go the full two weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment, he knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experiment — by how it was constructed, and how it played out — to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds — people will turn on each other just because they're given a role and given power.

"Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch. I don't think the actual events match up with the bold headline. I never did, and I haven't changed my opinion."

The big problem with the Stanford Prison Experiment had always been that it was so unethical that no one dared to replicate it and so Zimbardo had for decades been the final authority on the subject. But then, two British psychologists designed an experiment for the BBC to answer the question: what happens to ordinary people when they don a uniform and step inside a prison? Bregman says that it was an effort to sit through the resulting 4 hr. program because nothing much happened. The main difference from Zimbardo's experiment was that the psychologists didn’t tell the guards what to do. All they did was observe. 

Things were just getting started when one guard announced he didn’t feel suited to the role of guard: ‘I’d rather be a prisoner, honestly …’ On day two, another suggested sharing the guards’ food with the prisoners to boost morale. Then on day four, when it looked like some sparks might fly, a guard advised a prisoner: ‘If we can get to the end of this, we can go down the pub and have a drink.’ Another guard chimed in, ‘Let’s discuss this like human beings.’ Or, as the Sunday Herald summed it up, ‘What happens when you put good men in an evil place and film it for telly? Erm, not that much actually.’ 

From a scientific perspective, the experiment was a resounding success. Haslam and Reicher (the psychologists who conducted the study) published more than ten articles about their results in prestigious academic journals. But the BBC Prison Study has since faded into obscurity, while people still talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment. This exposes a harsh truth: if a study shows the negative side of human character, it will receive wide publicity; if it shows the good side, it will be ignored.

The Stanford Prison Experiment attempts to show what today’s social psychologists call situationism: the idea that people’s behavior is determined largely by what’s happening around them. If you put people in certain situations, they are more likely to be racist or sexist, or they may lie or cheat. But continued to its logical extreme, situationism, according to one psychologist, “has an exonerating effect”. “In the minds of a lot of people, it tends to excuse the bad behavior … it’s not the person’s fault for doing the bad thing, it’s the situation they were put in.” 

Social production of moral indifference - 2a

“Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.” - Oscar Wilde

In the 1970s, sociologist Erving Goffmann introduced the concept of ‘framing’ – each of us views the world through a mental picture frame which enables us to make sense out of our jumble of experiences. In Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman discusses some of the most well-known narratives of modern times - the novel Lord of the Flies, the end of the Easter Islanders, Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram's Obedience Experiment, the Bystander effect etc. All of them give prominence to the negative side of human character. But the popular interpretations of all of them have major problems.

Take Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment is one of the two or three most famous experiments in the history of psychology. It is depicted in movies, television and introductory psychology textbooks. In the years that followed the experiment, Zimbardo would grow to be the most noted psychologist of his time, becoming president of the American Psychological Association. In the decades since the experiment, millions of people have fallen for Philip Zimbardo’s setup. He has repeatedly emphasized his view that this experiment reveals much that is significant in understanding what happens in real prisons.

The standard description of Zimbardo’s experiment is as follows. In order to gain insight about the behavior of prisoners and guards in real prisons, Zimbardo and his colleagues constructed a simulated prison in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University. Then they recruited 21 psychologically healthy male college students and randomly assigned 10 of them to be prisoners and the other 11 to be guards. The prisoners were to be held captive in the simulated prison around the clock for two weeks, and the guards were to serve duty in the prison on eight-hour daily shifts, so there were always at least 3 of them in the prison at any given time. For this, they would be paid $15 a day.

The results, in brief, were that the guards behaved toward the prisoners in “negative, hostile, affrontive and dehumanizing” ways. The prisoners behaved alternately in rebellious and passive ways. At one point, on the second day, they ripped off their clothing and identification numbers while shouting curses at the guards. Later, five of the prisoners reacted with such extreme emotions that they were removed from the study before the end of five days. By the end of the sixth day the behavior of the guards and prisoners had spiraled to the point that Zimbardo decided to end the experiment early. "These guys were all peaceniks," he said of the students chosen to be guards. "They became like Nazis."

The standard interpretation: In a prison, one group has power over another and the powerless group is stripped of their individual identities. This  creates extreme, maladaptive responses that are characteristic of the responses often seen in real prisons. Those in power become abusive, and those subject to that power become immature, passive, and rebellious. These effects do not have to do with differences in original personality (because in the experiment, the subjects were randomly assigned to roles). Rather, they result from the situation in which people find themselves. 

Bregman writes, ‘Philip Zimbardo’s study wasn’t just dubious. It was a hoax.’ A major problem with the experiment is with its 'demand characteristics'. Any characteristics of a psychology experiment that let research participants guess how the experimenters expect or want them to behave are referred to as demand characteristics. In any valid experiment, it is essential to eliminate or at least minimize demand characteristics. In this experiment, the demands were everywhere.

Zimbardo claimed in many interviews that his prison ‘guards’ turned sadistic of their own accord. Subsequent revelations about the experiment reveal that the guards didn’t even have to guess how they were supposed to behave; they were largely told how by Zimbardo and his associates. In his relatively recent book, The Lucifer Effect (which I have not read but is quoted by Bregman), Zimbardo mentions a meeting with the guards that took place on the Saturday preceding the experiment. There could be no mistaking his instructions:

We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them […] We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. They’re going to be wearing uniforms, and at no time will anybody call them by name; they will have numbers and be called only by their numbers. In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness.

Is this not an overt invitation to be abusive in all sorts of psychological ways? The supposedly independent scientist had, by his own admission, drilled his guards. They hadn’t come up with the idea to address the prisoners by numbers, or to wear sunglasses, or play sadistic games. It’s what they were told to do. And, when the guards did behave in these ways and escalated that behavior, with Zimbardo watching and apparently (by his silence) approving, it would have confirmed in the subjects’ minds that they were behaving as they should.

Most of the subjects stuck it out because Zimbardo paid well. They didn’t get the money until afterwards. Guards and prisoners alike feared that if they didn’t play along in Zimbardo’s dramatic production, they wouldn’t get paid. Not only that, on the Saturday before the experiment started, Zimbardo was already talking about ‘we’ and ‘they’ as though he and the guards were on the same team. Which meant that the story he later told about losing himself in the role of prison superintendent as the experiment progressed couldn’t be true. 

Social production of moral indifference - 1b

For decades, what the primatologist Frans de Waal called 'Veneer Theory' used to be the dominant biological view of human nature. It regarded genuine kindness as either absent or an evolutionary misstep. Morality was a thin veneer barely able to conceal our true nature, which was entirely selfish. In the past couple of decades, however, Veneer Theory has been increasingly questioned by new evidence to the contrary. For example, anthropologists demonstrated a sense of fairness in people across the world and economists found humans to be more cooperative and altruistic than the Homo economicus view would allow.  

When we behave horribly, we are called 'animals' but when we behave generously, we are called 'humane'. We like to think that our finer characteristics are the result of our culture and have nothing to do with our evolutionary history. But as Stephen Jay Gould said, ‘Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our “noble” traits as well?’ Morality is a direct outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other animals. 

In the Origin, Darwin drew no distinction between man and other organisms. At the heart of Darwin’s theory  is the denial of humanity’s special status. Humans, just like any other species, were descended, with modification, from more ancient ancestors. Even those qualities that seemed to set people apart — language, wisdom, a sense of right and wrong - had evolved in the same manner as other physical traits, such as longer beaks or sharper incisors. Evolution has shaped people to be altruistic by instilling within us a genuine concern for the fate of certain other individuals. 

Darwin wrote an entire book about animal emotions, including their capacity for sympathy.  Having companions offers immense advantages in locating food and avoiding predators. Darwin’s writing massively contradicts Veneer Theory. He speculated, for example, that 'The social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.' After over 40 years of observation of primate behavior, Frans de Waal  contends that concern for others is their natural conduct. 

It appears that social animals are wired to cooperate and to reduce stress by seeking each others’ company. Many types of social interactions may be best understood in terms of a non-zero-sum game with multiple winners. Darwin had this idea long before scientific studies of animal behavior when he noted that natural selection would opt for “the feeling of pleasure from society”. Studying primate biology brings us closer to the truth than studying Hobbs, which is that we are social to the core. 

Anyone who says that large-scale cooperation is beyond our nature knows too little about primates, including ourselves. Research with other primates has shown that the propensity to forgive can be shaped heavily by one’s cultural experiences. Separate infant monkeys from their mothers, and they’ll grow up to be less conciliatory than is typical for their species. Raise them among individuals from a more conciliatory species, and they’ll become more conciliatory than is typical.

It’s not that religion and culture don’t have a role to play, but the building blocks of morality predate humanity. We recognize them in our primate relatives, with empathy being most conspicuous in the bonobo ape and reciprocity in the chimpanzee. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply our empathic tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in existence since time immemorial. Biology holds us “on a leash,” said biologist Edward Wilson, and will let us stray only so far from who we are. 

This also means that the reputation that Darwinism has gained of painting nature as a cold, unforgiving theater is misplaced. The idea that Darwinism has to be replaced in our daily lives so as to build a moral society are based on a profound misreading of Darwin. Since he saw morality as an evolutionary product, he envisioned an eminently more livable world than the one proposed by many of his followers, who believe in a culturally imposed, artificial morality that receives no helping hand from human nature.

The most common theory about our earliest ancestors is the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis. But early hominids were largely defenseless creatures of small stature and had body structures that would have made them less efficient hunters compared to other predators. They much better fit the profile of prey species, vulnerable to a large variety of carnivores. It makes sense to relabel “Man the Hunter” as “Man the Hunted”. It is highly likely that these creatures lived in large groups for protection requiring individuals to be highly social and cooperative. 

It is only because of the prevalence of Veneer Theory that it was believed that goodness is not part of human nature, and that we need to work hard to teach it to our children. Children were seen as selfish monsters, who learn to be moral from teachers and parents despite their natural inclinations. They were seen as reluctant moralists. But experiments have shown that moral understanding develops astonishingly early in life. Infants under one year of age already favor the good guy in a puppet show. The puppet who nicely rolls a ball back and forth with another is preferred over one who steals the ball and runs off with it.

Darwin noted that the only uniquely human expression is blushing, an observation that has stood the test of time. Blushing is an evolutionary mystery that must be particularly perplexing for those who believe that exploitation of others is all that humans are capable of. Such a signal makes no sense for a born manipulator. Blushing tells others that you are aware how your actions affect them. This fosters trust. We prefer people whose emotions we can read from their faces over those who never show the slightest hint of shame or guilt. 

Recent studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive. Compassion and benevolence are rooted in our brain and biology. For example, helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. People who develop the need for psychiatric intervention are those who have become alienated and antisocial. It works this way only because we are not born as loners. Our bodies and minds are not  designed for life in the absence of others. 

German and Japanese aggression once shook the world, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the seventeenth century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility.  Our expectations for ourselves play a strong role in shaping our behavior. It is important that we get out of the rut of giving cooperation and fairness secondary roles in the evolution of cohesive and smoothly functioning social groups. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” wrote Orwell .

Social production of moral indifference - 1a

(I am a conformist in every sense of the word, but, curiously, I like reading about views that question the status quo. The minority view is more interesting. So I thought of writing a few posts against the prevailing individualistic, grasping, violent view of human nature but it became much longer than I expected. I have divided the posts into sub-sections and numbered them 1(a), 1(b), 2(a), 2(b) etc. But it must be remembered that the divisions between different sub-sections are porous.)

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be. — Abraham Harold Maslow

At the beginning of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a band of prehistoric hominids has been driven from a water hole by another clan. One of them picks up a bone and realizes that he can wield it as a weapon. He and his band use their newfound power to beat one of the other clan members to death. This violent act enables them get their water hole back and marks the Dawn of Man. He throws the bone up into the sky, where it turns into a satellite orbiting the earth.

One should examine the assumptions behind this story instead of accepting them blindly. Are competition and conflict really the only reason for human progress? The story of how we became human is an important one, not just from a scientific point of view but because it informs our beliefs about human nature. The current belief in self-interest  tells us that to behave morally is to invite others to take advantage of us. It shapes what we teach our children, both at home and in the schools. 

The dominant views expressed by people around us, the messages we receive from the news media, etc. shape our patterns of thought. These views influence most of our behaviors but they are rarely questioned. If, during a job or performance interview, we are asked to describe ourselves, our answer will very much reflect the dominant expectations of that time. Our appearance, self-perception, and social behaviour are entirely determined by the messages we receive.  By encouraging us to expect the worst in others, it brings out the worst in us. 

Research has shown that people tend to act according to what they see or hear is the common behaviour. When visitors to a national forest read signs that asked people not to steal petrified wood because a lot of people had stolen wood in the past, theft actually increased. People had concluded that since many had the habit of stealing wood, it was okay for them also to do so. Over 2,500 college students from twenty-three countries, were surveyed and the counties that had higher rates of corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud were also the countries that had higher rates of lying. 

You are no longer surprised by accountants validating the books of fraudulent companies or doctors being little more than marketing agents for the pharmaceutical industry. It is common to hear people who are uneasy about the occasional side effects of economic wheeling and dealing being portrayed as namby-pambies just not up to the rigors of the marketplace. As a result of the self-interest model's influence, our bonds of trust have taken a heavy beating in recent years.

Such negative assumptions have guided most realms of human affairs, from policy making to media portrayals of social life. As our science enters further into the domain of the human heart and mind, we come to see our lives less in terms of joys, virtues, sins, and miseries and more in terms of chemical imbalances, hormones, good moods, and depressions — material problems which can be tackled by technological solutions, not moral challenges with which we must learn to live. As Issac Asimov said, 'The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.'

There are two contrasting views about human behaviour. One school of thought regards humankind as essentially good, and sees it as society’s task to ensure that our benevolent disposition comes to the fore. The other believes humankind to be essentially bad, and wants society to act as a police officer, to curb our evil tendencies as much as possible. One side is highly altruistic, and focused on ‘give and receive’; the other is highly egotistical, and focused on ‘divide and rule'.

The latter view has become dominant today. It results in a mechanistic, fear driven society that can be manipulated.  Politics becomes a place where the strongest groups dominate and the weaker pay the costs of defeat or neglect. There is a definite correlation between what humans think of themselves and what they become. Assuming the worst about people often brings out the worst in them without their realizing it. It's a clear case of the old statement - "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist". 

According to Hobbs, human life in a state of nature was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. It resulted in ‘a condition of war of all against all.’ He assumed that anarchy can be tamed and peace established if we all just agree to relinquish our liberty and put ourselves into the hands of a solitary sovereign who he called after a biblical sea monster: the Leviathan. Hobbes’ thinking provided the basic philosophical rationale for directors and dictators, governors and generals down the ages to grab power. You are often told that ‘knowledge is power’ but it is more true to say that ‘power is knowledge’.

The condition we face is much like that described in Bertolt Brecht's play, The Exception and the Rule. On Brecht's stage a handful of characters wander through a pattern of actions that show a moral universe turned upside down. What is good is made to appear evil; justice and injustice trade places. A coolie attempts to do a good deed. He is killed by his employer who sees the coolie's gesture as a threat from a class enemy. The murderer is placed on trial but is acquitted in a judgment that finds his behavior perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. In his poem The Second Coming, Yeats describes such a situation:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

What matters more than the model of human nature that you choose to use is to realize that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it. As Keynes once admitted, it was ‘a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression … The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in the old ones which ramify. . . into every corner of our minds.’ Conceptual locks are far more powerful than factual locks. 

In the posts that follow, it would appear that I have over-emphasized human cooperation and under-emphasized the competitive and self-aggrandizing aspect of human nature. But the assertions about the negative aspects of human nature have become so common that it was necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and human society. Individual self-assertion is something quite different from the petty, unintelligent narrow-mindedness which goes for “individualism” and “self-assertion.” 

An award for gaffes

Have you heard of the 'Foot in Mouth Award'? It is awarded by the Plain English Campaign for "a baffling comment by a public figure." The award was first made in 1993, when it was given to Ted Dexter, the chairman of selectors for the England cricket team.  Politicians have been recipients of the award more times than any other group of people. The list includes some familiar names. Here is a sample:

Alicia Silverstone - The American actress, star of Clueless, was awarded in 2000 for her comment: "I think that Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness."

Richard Gere - The American actor was presented with the award in 2002 for his philosophical comment: "I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I'd think 'No, actually I am a giraffe."

Boris Johnson - He is a regular contender for the prize. He won in 2004 for his comment: "I could not fail to disagree with you less." His second win in 2016 was secured by the unsinkable: "Brexit means Brexit and we’re going to make a Titanic success of it."

Naomi Campbell - The English supermodel picked up the award in 2006 for saying, "I love England, especially the food. There's nothing I like more than a lovely bowl of pasta."

George W. Bush - Bush's award was made during his final year in office as President of the United States (2008). Entitled a "Lifetime Achievement Award", it was given not for a single quote, but for his continued "services to gobbledygook". His gaffes were described as covering a large number of topics, and included comments such as "I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe – I believe what I believe is right", and, "I hope you leave here and walk out and say, 'what did he say?'"

Silvio Berlusconi - The former Italian Prime Minister received the award in 2011 for comments such as "I am pretty often faithful", when talking about fidelity in 2006, and describing Barack Obama in 2008 as being "Handsome, young and also suntanned".

Mitt Romney - U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney received the award in 2012 for making gaffes like: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me" and "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love."

Donald Trump - He was at the time of the award (2015) campaigning for the Republican nomination in the 2016 US presidential election. The Plain English Campaign said that Trump was "unrivalled". In particular the campaign cited his remarks on Mexican immigrants: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." It also cited his remarks on John McCain: "He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured."

(I heard that every Republican president makes you nostalgic about the previous Republican president. Trump made you feel that Bush was a wise, compassionate guy with a nice sense of humor. Can you imagine a time when you will be nostalgic about Trump? Maybe Trump II?)

Tocqueville on Religion - II

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America also offers a philosophic account of why a free society necessarily requires a religious foundation. A free society depends on freedom of thought and discussion, it certainly includes a right to question conventional opinion. But it would be a mistake to think that this freedom requires an unfettered skepticism about all things or a willingness to treat all ideas as open to question. On the contrary, all societies depend in some degree or another on shared beliefs or “opinions men receive on trust.” 

It is not possible for societies or even for individuals to arrive at all beliefs on the basis of the unguided, independent thinking of each individual. This, Tocqueville claims, is an “inflexible law” of the human condition. “If man were forced to prove to himself all the truths he makes use of every day, he would never finish; he would exhaust himself in preliminary demonstrations without advancing.” Having neither “the time because of the short span of life, nor the ability because of the limits of his mind,” man cannot establish by his own efforts all of the convictions that he needs; those that claim to have done so are dishonest or deluded.

Accordingly, an individual is “reduced to accepting as given a host of facts and opinions that he has neither the leisure nor the power to examine and verify by himself.” The functioning and prosperity of society therefore require “that all the minds of the citizens be brought and held together by some principal ideas; and that cannot happen unless each of them sometimes comes to draw his opinions from one and the same source and unless each consents to receive a certain number of ready-made beliefs.” All societies, and especially free ones, require some intellectual unity, which in turn supports a unity of the citizens’ sentiments.

The limited power of the individual human mind makes it impossible for common ideas on moral and religious questions to arise from the spontaneous and unregulated thought of each individual. Religion, Tocqueville thinks, is the most important source of common beliefs for citizens. Here he is careful to note that his defense of society’s religious consensus is undertaken not with a view to what is good for religion, but instead with a view to what is good for society. Such religious beliefs are evidently useful “even if one wants to pay attention only to the interests of this world.” Tocqueville is concerned not with the salvation of souls but with the preservation of a decent political order. Such an order depends, however, on the preservation of commonly held religious beliefs. 

Tocqueville argues that human beings desire freedom but not an unlimited freedom. When they have firm moral convictions rooted in firmly held religious beliefs, they can be confident that they know how to exercise power justly, but what if they lose their religion and therefore become uncertain about what is morally right while nevertheless retaining a certain decency? In that case, they will no longer want to govern themselves, because they will find the responsibility frightening and oppressive. At this point, they will come to think that they can solve their problem by simply submitting themselves to the state, letting their rulers decide all things for them. He writes in Democracy in America: 

There are religions which are very false and very absurd ; but it may be affirmed, that any religion which remains within the circle I have just traced, without aspiring to go beyond it (as many religions have attempted to do, for the purpose of enclosing on every side the free progress of the human mind), imposes a salutary restraint on the intellect; and it must be admitted that, if it do not save men in another world, such religion is at least very conducive to their happiness and their greatness in this. 

This is more especially true of men living in free countries. When the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold of the highest portions of the intellect, and half paralyzes all the rest of its powers. Every man accustoms himself to entertain none but confused and changing notions on the subjects most interesting to his fellow creatures and himself.

His opinions are ill-defended and easily abandoned: and, despairing of ever resolving by himself the hardest problems of the destiny of man, he ignobly submits to think no more about them. Such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude. 

Nor does it only happen, in such a case, that they allow their freedom to be wrested from them; they frequently themselves surrender it. When there is no longer any principle of authority in religion any more than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. The constant agitation of all surrounding things alarms and exhausts them. 

As everything is at sea in the sphere of the intellect, they determine at least that the mechanism of society should be firm and fixed; and as they cannot resume their ancient belief, they assume a master. 

For my own part, I doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious independence and entire public freedom. And I am inclined to think, that if faith be wanting in him, he must serve; and if he be free, he must believe. 

Tocqueville on Religion - I

Alexis de Tocqueville’s four-volume Democracy in America (1835-1840) is commonly said to be among the greatest works of nineteenth-century political writing. It is regarded as the first-ever analysis of democracy to dissect its pathologies. Many of his observations were both astute and prescient (which is remarkable considering that he was only in his 30s). 

He was a liberal, but, as he once said, a “new kind of liberal.” “One of the noblest enterprises of our time,” he added, would be to show that “morality, religion and order” do not need to be opposed to “liberty and the equality of men before the law.” Tocqueville stood out as a friend of religion who was also a friend of freedom. The remarkable feature of his thought was that he believed religion was essential to preserve liberty contrary to what hard core secularists thought. 

Thus although he emphasized that the separation of church and state is necessary to political liberty, he could say in Democracy in America  that religion “should be considered the first of [the Americans’] political institutions”. Probably the most important reason for his support of religion was that Tocqueville thought that organized religion was the only possible long-term counterweight to some of the main threats democracy faced. Democracy fosters intellectual and moral habits that can be deadly to freedom: the tyranny of the majority, individualism, materialism, and democratic despotism.

Rather than attempting to push religion out of the public sphere, he welcomed it, provided that its influence was indirect and it did not try to dominate the public sphere. For Tocqueville, the only way for either freedom or religion to prosper in the long run was by recognizing that they were mutually necessary, and mutually beneficial. He wrote not as a religious teacher aiming to propagate a particular faith, but instead as a political analyst interested in the kind of religious beliefs necessary to uphold freedom and democracy. He wrote not with a view to preserving completely intact a particular religion, but instead to discover the religious essentials of the free society and to explain how and to what extent they can be preserved. 

“Most religions,” he contends, “are only general, simple, and practical means of teaching men the immortality of the soul.” This teaching “is the greatest advantage that a democratic people derives" from religious beliefs and is what makes these beliefs “more necessary to such a people than to all others.” Religion is “only a particular form of hope,” one that is “as natural to the human heart as hope itself.” He reminds us that as responsible citizens of a democracy, we must take care to preserve the country’s inherited religious traditions. This is a difficult task because democratic conditions tend to undermine religion.

According to Tocqueville, democracy presents a new form of freedom that displaced the servitude of the ancient and medieval world. But, he thinks that this democracy carries within it the possibility of new forms of servitude. Democratic freedom is also a form of power: the power of the people to rule. This power carries with it new possibilities for abuse, and Tocqueville accordingly emphasizes the importance of religion’s ability to impose a necessary limit on the majority’s power. He sees the danger of majority tyranny. He sees that human nature is flawed and that human beings in any form of government are prone to do injustice to each other if they are not restrained in some way.

What “is a majority taken collectively,” Tocqueville asks, “if not an individual who has opinions and most often interests contrary to another individual that one names the minority?” If we can “accept that one man vested with omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries, why not accept the same thing for a majority?” Men do not change their “character by being united,” nor do they “become more patient before obstacles by becoming stronger.” Accordingly, Tocqueville concludes that the vast power held by the democratic majority carries “consequences” that are “dire and dangerous for the future.”

I take the example of a future time, in the 20th century, when ruthless ideologies like Nazism and Communism arose and took hold of certain countries. These atheistic ideologies held that everything was permitted in society’s interests, even to the extent of destroying certain categories of citizens that were held to be socially undesirable. Tocqueville sees religious belief providing people with a sense of immovable moral limits which he viewed as necessary because of the protection it provides for the rights of those outside the majority, who are subject to the majority’s power. 

On the basis of these arguments, Tocqueville seeks to correct the anti-religious thinkers of his day — and those of our own day - who think of  religion as nothing but a source of oppression, and promote public atheism as a guarantee of freedom. For such men, “the freedom and happiness of the human species” require us to believe that human beings can be understood as nothing more than an accidental aggregation of matter and not as beings with souls. When such thinkers “attack religious beliefs,” Tocqueville argues, “they follow their passions and not their interests.” That is, they neglect the interests of society while following their anti-religious feelings instead.

In reality, Tocqueville argues, religion “is much more necessary” in a “republic” than in a “monarchy,” and “in democratic republics more than all others.” It is safe to give the people power to rule only if they believe that there are moral limits on their power that they must respect and their belief in such limits is sustained by their belief in religion.

Many people think of individualism as opposed to despotism. But in Democracy in America, Alexis de  Tocqueville warns that naked individualism may lead to democratic despotism. Excessive forms of individualism and materialism make citizens indifferent to their public duties and therefore undermines their ability to sustain the spirit of cooperative citizenship on which self-government depends. He says that “it constantly leads him back toward himself alone and threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude of his own heart.” 

The despot, Tocqueville observes, “readily pardons the governed for not loving him, provided they do not love each other. He does not ask them to aid him in leading the state; it is enough that they do not aspire to direct it themselves.” This will make people as a whole surrender their right to govern themselves, handing themselves over to the rule of an all-powerful government directed by one man or perhaps a small elite.

There are some activities which can be undertaken only if you have a belief in after-life. By teaching the existence of an afterlife with rewards for virtuous living, religion gives men the confidence to undertake certain community activities that the self-interest of individualism prevents. Without such beliefs, doubts would inevitably stifle men’s public-spiritedness. The religious belief in rewards and punishments after death sustains such sacrifices by making their rewards certain. David Sloan Wilson writes in Evolution for Everyone 

A given religion adapts its members to their local environment, enabling them to achieve by collective action what they cannot achieve alone or even together in the absence of religion. The primary benefits of religion take place in this world, not the next. 

Reaching a similar conclusion by a different route, Hannah Arendt felt that  totalitarian elements dominate modernity, and that in a mass society there would always be a majority of people whose dedication to their own social and private interests would make them easy prey for party machines and demagogues (The Portable Arendt). "For the really horrific discovery of totalitarian regimes had been that mass conformists - "job holders and good family men" - were much more pliant, dedicated, loyal, and abundant agents of extermination than the criminals, "fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots" and social failures of the mob. She writes:

The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything - belief, honor, dignity - on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives. 

Social limits of growth – IV

Positional goods were once free, taken for granted and seemingly plentiful, and thus social relations were rarely mentioned by classical economists. Hirsch shows that they were implicitly assumed. Taking Adam Smith’s economic analysis in The Wealth of Nations and  his social analysis in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hirsch summarizes his views as follows: “[Men] could safely be trusted to pursue their own self-interest without undue harm to the community not only because of the restrictions imposed by the law, but also because they were subject to built-in restraint derived from morals, religion, custom, and education.” Smith’s position is a far cry from the celebrations of the dominance of self-interest that one finds today.

In Republican Paradoxes and Liberal Anxieties, Ronald Terchek says that people rely on fragments of his work to understand Smithian metaphors or assumptions about rationality and economic markets. They omit critical parts of Smith's theory and, in the process, give us not merely an incomplete Smith but also a distorted Smith. Even though Smith believes that the pursuit of self-interests in economic markets generates social benefits, he warns that such interests are too often driven by deceits that serve our vanities and lead to our own unhappiness.

He argues that although the rise of commerce introduces freedom, it provides no guarantee of a happy, moral life. For Smith, there is nothing about freedom that assures its wise and prudential use. Rather, he sees that free societies have many temptations that, if pursued, invite unhappiness. Therefore he promotes freedom as well as the moral development of agents and sounds both a celebration and a warning about liberty. 

The prominence Smith gives to self-interest is widely known. He repeatedly argues that people have an interest in their own well-being  and that they engage in activities that they think will promote it. But in addition to self-interests, Smith credits people with carrying moral sentiments. Smith claims that we come with natural endowments that enable us to make elementary moral judgments, to rejoice with the happiness of others, and to grieve at their misfortune. Such sentiments "superintend" our passions and desires and prompt us to be attentive to others. 

Also, Smith finds that when one person or a few people hold the preponderance of power and wealth in society, they can be counted on to use these goods to serve their interests, not the interests of those dependent on them for a living and security. Smith repeatedly argues that when wealth and power are combined, the greatest social cost comes from the loss of independence of those who are excluded. Dependencies cause honesty to be routinely penalized. He holds "Nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency, and nothing gives such noble and generous notions of probity and freedom as independency."

He warns of the deception of wealth which makes people believe that more personal wealth and power will bring them happiness. He sees wealth giving us the ability to make choices to do things we could not have made without it. However, he finds wealth becomes dangerous to us when we allow it to define our character. He emphasizes individuals who marginally improve and do not make quantum jumps in fortune or rank. When Smith introduces us to those who have earned vast fortunes, we encounter people who find that tranquility has eluded them. 

Usually seen as a champion of increasing national income, Smith nevertheless fears that when national wealth passes a critical point and luxury becomes widespread, the consequences are usually disastrous. He fears that during prosperous times, individuals lose a sense of their limits and refuse to do what is necessary to retain their freedom. In pressing their own immediate interests, they do not secure their long-term welfare but rather buy a little time for their current enjoyment only, in the end, to become dependent on those who care little about them. 

He worries that excessive individualism undermines itself. He holds that self-restraint remains necessary for people who wish to retain their freedom. He acknowledges that background makes the most profound difference in the chances and choices available to people and restricts the autonomy of many in commercial society. He fears that the accumulative, unsettling effects of economic growth serve to demythologize the very restraints that he thinks are necessary for a flourishing, autonomous life and for political legitimacy.

Smith warns about the deception of deference, namely the widely held notion that those who possess great wealth and honor deserve our admiration and respect. According to him, this deception is "the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." When we are deferential, we excuse our "superiors," even when our moral sense would direct otherwise. Standing in awe of wealth and power, we not only ignore the wise and virtuous, but we also despise and "neglect persons of poor and mean condition.'  Moreover, Smith finds that deference contributes to the legitimization of a regime, its practices, and the inequalities it protects and exonerates.

His good society is characterized by more than markets, diffused power, and freedom. It is a place where politics is not instrumental, and where culture promotes a sense of limits and deference. He is also concerned about the concentration of private power and the pattern of hierarchy and subordination that evolves within civil society, knowing that people can be dependent on private concentrations of power as well as public ones. If any of these latter characteristics are weak or missing it is not at all clear that Smith would automatically approve. 

(Adam Smith's capitalists were all small fry - shop owners, merchants and small scale industrialists. In his time, a 'manufactory' with a dozen workers was a big concern. The market was highly fragmented and wealth and power was not concentrated in a few hands.)

PS: The Theory of Moral Sentiments was Adam Smith’s attempt to explain where morality comes from and why people can act with decency and virtue even when it conflicts with their own self-interest. The book is heavy reading and I gave up mid-way. An accessible account of the work is How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.

Social limits of growth – III

In Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch illustrates the psychological problem created by growth using the example of Education. Education has usually been associated with external benefits, based on the assumptions that educated people make better citizens, they are more productive, and all the resulting benefits are not captured in their own higher earnings. For example, they pay more taxes and enhance the productivity of those with whom they work. But education also has a role as a signaling device in the modern economy which may negate these external benefits. 

Education's function as a screening device helps the employer sort out those who can best survive and master an educational obstacle course.  The “quality” of schooling has a relative dimension in which quality consists of the differential over the educational level attained by others. Adding layers to the level to which the competition for credentials is pushed merely absorbs educational resources without adding to the productivity of the winners in the competition.  

When education expands faster than the number of jobs requiring those educational credentials, employers  intensify the screening process. Jobs for which a high school diploma was previously sufficient will then require some college education. Individuals who decline to join the educational upgrading will suffer a devaluation of their credentials in the job market. This means, as the average level of educational qualifications in the labor force rises, a kind of penalty is imposed on those lacking such qualifications

Additional education becomes a good investment, not because it would generate additional income but because you will not be able to maintain the current level of income if others receive more education and you do not. Thus, the utility of expenditure on a given level of education as a means of access to the most sought after jobs will decline as more people attain that level of education. ‘The race gets longer for the same prize.‘

Because ever more people reach higher levels of education (due to well meant “inclusionary” state policies), but at the same time the amount of high-level jobs remains more or less stable, both sides – the employers and the potential employees – face increasing costs of screening. The former are forced to introduce additional barriers, tests and other screening efforts to find the people who fit their needs. Meanwhile, the latter are faced with an ever longer “obstacle course” (i.e., longer education + more intense screening by employers) to get the desired high-level jobs. This clearly makes both sides worse off.

The increase in capacity of the educational sector also has probably increased the attention paid to the quality of education provided. Existing institutions that have many years track record are valued more by employers than new colleges. Not only do they convey information the employers can trust but, in addition, it enables them to buy the elite contacts of the employee. Thus, establishing new colleges end up increasing the demand for an education at existing colleges.  

Even if the absolute quality of education in a particular institution is fully preserved, the previous incumbents of the superior schools would still lose their edge. This loss will force them to demonstrate their proficiency in a tougher or longer course of study. Education enjoyed in its own right is capable of indefinite extension; as an instrument for entree into top jobs, it is not. When you consider education as a screening device, the possibility of general advance is an illusion.

An “inflation” of educational credentials of this kind involves social waste in two dimensions. First, it absorbs excess real resources into the screening process by increasing the length of the obstacle course that employees require for testing for the qualities desired . Second, social waste will result from disappointed expectations of individuals and from the frustration they experience in having to settle for employment in jobs in which they cannot make full use of their acquired skills. 

Considered in isolation, the individual’s demand for education as a job entree can be taken as genuinely individual wants. But satisfaction of these individual preferences itself alters the situation that faces others seeking to satisfy similar wants. Competition among isolated individuals in the free market entails hidden costs for others and ultimately for themselves. What is possible for the single individual is not possible for all individuals. This is true for all higher levels of selection: What is possible for an individual state or an individual country is not possible for all units. Hirsch writes:

‘Once again, it is a case of everyone in the crowd standing on tiptoe and no one getting a better view. Yet at the start of the process some individuals gain a better view by standing on tiptoe, and others are forced to follow if they are to keep their position. If all do follow, whether in the sightseeing crowd or among the job-seeking students, everyone expends more resources and ends up with the same position.

Hirsh is not saying that more educational resources should not be provided. The way the system is structured at present, politicians are forced to make such promises and are under pressure to keep them. As he writes, ‘If theorists of human capital fell into this trap, why expect acquirers of human capital to avoid it?’ But the investments will be a social waste that will just force you to run faster to stay in the same place. Although individuals benefit from isolated action, the sum of benefits of all the actions taken together is zero. 

Social limits of growth – II

For his analysis in Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch divided goods into two primary types. The first type was material goods: These are, in a sense, goods as commonly defined in economics. Their consumption generates utility because of the intrinsic characteristics of the good in question. These will generally be called FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods like soaps, shoes, refrigerators etc.). The supply of material goods could be, and was, increased in response to the public’s rising demand for them. 

The second category was called positional goods. There were certain amenities whose supply cannot be increased. Economic growth increases their utilization which increases their relative scarcity. The ozone layer, clean air, drinkable water, natural beauty, land for infrastructure (e.g. roads, sewers) and growing food, antiques etc. are examples. (‘Buy land. They are not making it anymore.’ – Mark Twain). Positional goods have no equivalent in standard economic theory. The focus of Hirch’s analysis was on the interplay between these two divisions of the economy. 

Within the realm of material  goods, all the   accomplishments economists attribute to the invisible hand of the competitive market economy holds true. Economic growth understood as a continuous increase in affluence means that ever more people have their needs in the material sector satisfied – and turn ever more attention to the positional sector. What happens when the material pie grows while the positional economy remains confined to a fixed size? 

Classical economists focused their attention narrowly on mankind’s bodily needs and thereby managed drastically to simplify the economic problem. That made demand and increases in demand always into a good thing, it showed competition to be a beneficent force that diminished monopoly profits and caused market prices to reflect costs and preferences; and it made quantification possible by rendering GDP estimates a simple measure of the economy’s contribution to welfare.

But when positional goods enter the picture, the situation is muddied. So long as material privation is widespread, conquest of material scarcity is the dominant concern. As demand for material goods are increasingly satisfied, demand for goods and facilities with a public (social) character become increasingly active. The limited demand for things with augmentable supply  (material goods) and the unlimited demand for those whose supply is limited (positional goods), have created a great number of peculiarities and problems in our society.

The consumption of positional goods is valued at least partly by comparison with the consumption of these goods by others – e.g., having a manager’s job makes me better off not only because of its intrinsic characteristic (salary, power, freedom etc.), but also because others are not managers. In a further sense, positional goods define our position within the society and are thus socially scarce.

Social scarcity can have differing visible effects. One is physical congestion: the more people acquire the material good “car”, the more frequent are traffic jams. The other is social congestion: this is the case in the area of jobs, where there is limited scope for “leaders”, “bosses” and the like. Furthermore, some positional goods are socially scarce because they generate utility by being physically scarce – for instance, there is limited amount of “picturesque” natural landscapes. Another area where such “direct” social scarcity prevails is in arts: a Picasso is seen as valuable mainly because there is only one of its kind.

The scarcity of a positional good renders different people’s enjoyment of it interdependent, so that one person’s increased consumption  or use of it reduces its availability for other people’s enjoyment. This causes numerous problems. Smog, traffic jams, the deterioration of cities, the spoiling of much natural beauty by overcrowding and too many tourists, the poisoning of the soil and ground water by the burying of toxic waste products are a few examples. 

While the economy as a whole keeps growing, the positional sector gets ever smaller (i.e more scarce) in relation to the rest. This makes positional goods relatively more expensive and/or their quality deteriorates (e.g., due to congestion effects). Also, while any individual has the possibility to attain positional goods, it is impossible for everyone to attain them making an increasing fraction of the population frustrated. Therefore, economic growth is continuously aggravating the problems arising from social scarcity. 

Demands for positional goods tend to grow as general standards rise, a demand that can be satisfied for some only by frustrating demand by others. For most people,  they become objects of desire that the most intensive effort cannot reach.  This creates situations in which individually rational behaviour leads to socially irrational outcomes. Positional competition that is promoted by growth leads to ever more frustration within the allegedly ever better off society.