Altruism: Don't We Wish

I recently heard an interview with Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University. He had some really interesting thoughts; and not just thoughts, but results of his own research. Oh how I wish I could agree with him.

Haidt’s research shows that our political convictions—in particular, being liberals vs. conservatives—is based on psychology rather than reason. Of course, liberals have always “known” this about conservatives: those conservatives are just mean people who want to oppress and victimize other people. And conservatives have always “known” this about liberals: those liberals are just immoral people who want to destroy the moral compass of society. But Haidt has shown that liberal vs. conservative biases may come from the deepest part of our brains. Conservatives have a need for order, while liberals relish diversity. This even shows up in the conservative preference for dots on a screen that move in lock-step with one another, and liberal preference for dots moving independently.

But what do we do with this information? It is here that, I fear, Haidt has gone off on a cloud of wishful thinking. If both liberals and conservatives can just recognize that their beliefs have a psychological basis, then they could start to talk and work things out. This is, as I understand it, Haidt’s gospel, as it were. He also says that our society needs both liberals and conservatives, to keep each other from going overboard.

Alas, there are two problems here.

• Liberals are much more likely to agree with Haidt on his basic points. Conservatives will usually reject the very premise that psychology has any influence on their beliefs. They believe that they are God’s chosen and that they are as unlikely to be wrong as for God to not exist. The Holy Spirit has made them conservatives. That being the case, a true conservative will consider it unnecessary or even evil to have a meeting of minds with liberals. Haidt reached his conclusion from his liberal background; can he point to even one conservative scholar who has reached the same conclusion from his or her conservative background? Maybe he can, and if so, I’d like to hear about it.
• Conservatives have a lot more guns piled up, ready to hand, than liberals. How can any parity of discussion be reached when one side is heavily armed and the other side virtually helpless? If you have guns, who needs dialogue?

These are two deadly asymmetries that make discussion impossible between liberals and conservatives, in general. Happily, some individual conservatives and liberals can talk, but this will not happen on a large enough scale to influence the immediate future.

Haidt gave an example of how liberals and conservatives could discuss an issue and perhaps come to a better understanding of one another. The issue: global warming. The liberals could begin a discussion by citing a military general, rather than an environmentalist, who talks about the dangers of global warming. Great idea. Only we climate scientists have already tried this. Defense Secretary Maddis has already said that global warming will cause international conflicts to which the U.S. military must pay close attention. Maddis is not just a conservative, but a hand-picked Trump follower. But the conservative global-warming denialists have either taken no notice or have been hostile toward this prominent conservative. A search of the most prominent denialist website turned up no matches with “Maddis.” The reason is, of course, that the denialists are paid by fossil fuel corporations, or individuals who have gotten rich from them, or foundations started by them.

Haidt also said that, on average, religion makes people more moral. But in order to justify this statement, Haidt had to include, in the term “morality,” those activities that bind the group together, even if it means that the group is hostile toward other groups and causes a great deal of harm to the world in general. I am sure Haidt does not mean to establish a moral equivalence between, say, the United Nations and the Nazis, but I am unclear about how he avoids this equivalence.

This problem is the very same one we encounter when we consider altruism, about which I have often written. Altruistic behavior, encouraged by empathetic feelings, enhances an individual’s evolutionary success within his or her social environment. In ancient times, the social environment was very local. Today, the environment can be the whole world. Natural and cultural selection may favor warm, fuzzy feelings within the group, but may also favor extreme hostility. This hostility can take two forms: the feeling of sweet revenge against cheaters within the group, and extreme hostility toward people outside the group, whether they are cheaters or not. It might be enlightening to think that conservatives draw the line between “us” and “them” more narrowly than do liberals. Haidt may have written about this someplace.

In a related thought, Haidt also said that, according to surveys, conservatives care more about the people around them, while liberals care more about the people of the world. And here is where I have to draw a completely different conclusion from my Oklahoma experiences than Haidt may draw from his New York experiences. The conservatives who live around me in Oklahoma seem to be hostile toward everyone except, maybe, their own families. They dump garbage in their neighbors’ yards and allow their dogs to attack anyone who is out on the street. Many of them fly Confederate flags, which displays their hostility toward even many of their immediate neighbors. And, in this reddest of red states, “Oklahoma is ranked 3rd in the nation for women killed by men in single victim-single offender homicides.” (see data here). Red states are not moral, at home, or in their communities. I wonder if the surveys that Haidt has conducted indicate more about what people like to think about themselves than what they actually do. Prominent conservatives, from Bill O’Reilly on down, proclaim Christian morality while pursuing immoral personal lives.

What I come away with, from Haidt’s statements, is that individual conservatives and liberals might try to understand one another better, after finding some personal common ground. This common ground might be something as strange as a shared adoration for the music of the 1930s country singer Jimmie Rodgers—which I share with a very conservative person I’ve not yet met but if I do I will talk to her about this rather than about politics. But on a national level? I think it is hopeless.

Haidt’s views might be appropriate for a society at equilibrium—that is, one in which liberal and conservative views can mix and respond to one another, reaching some kind of stable balance. But right now, our country is experiencing extreme disequilibrium. This is not true in every country. In France, a country about which I know a little, the conservatives and liberals disagree vividly. But the conservatives do not have stockpiles of guns in France the way they do in America. Even if American conservatives choose not to use these guns, they have the psychological advantage: we all know that they have them.

Is Human Nature Racist?

Human nature is not innately racist. It is human nature to feel empathy for and behave altruistically toward those in your group, but not necessarily toward those outside your group. Through most of human history, human groups were confined within human races. Kids were raised to be racists because other races were outsiders.

But when kids of different races grow up together, they do not express racial hatred unless their parents or other members of society educate them to do so. Rogers and Hammerstein said in South Pacific something like, You have to be carefully taught to hate, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate…

One of the best places to see this is where I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa was the scene of one of the worst racial incidents in American history, when in 1921 white racists burned down “Black Wall Street” which was one of the most affluent black business centers in the country (see also here). All that remains today are some metal placards in the sidewalks that indicate which black businesses were burned down. Reportedly, whites flew airplanes over the black Greenwood section of town and threw incendiary material onto the buildings. I interpret this as an act of war by white Americans against black Americans.

In the first photo, visitors from France were with us.

And yet today you can find white and black children playing together all over town. Not quite everywhere, but certainly in my neighborhood. In the intervening 92 years, racism has been largely unlearned in Tulsa. Problems remain, of course; last year a white police officer drove to the home of a black man and shot him. It has taken a long time—interracial marriage (“miscegenation”) was illegal in some states until 1967—but the progress has been astonishing. (The miscegenation laws were aimed at blacks and whites, apparently not at GIs bringing home Asian wives.)

These and other events make me suspect that there might be, among the many and diverse elements of human nature, an anti-racist sentiment floating around. It might be simply one aspect of the emotion of love. I do not know what it is. But it came seemingly out of nowhere into the mind and heart of an eleven-year-old boy who should have, by nature and nurture, been racist. If this anti-racist element indeed exists in human nature, we should embrace it and celebrate it.

Good Friday Message: What Kind of a God Would You Be?

I guess I wouldn’t make a very effective God. The real God, if there is one, makes certain that the laws of nature ruthlessly afflict anyone who happens to have bad luck, for example inheriting certain bad mutations, or happens to get a contagious disease. Would you be able to do this? I couldn’t do this. I would be unable to resist helping those who suffer and who beg for help. I would not be able to be as cruel as religious people think God is. I just couldn’t do it. I would be too much of a bleeding heart. You probably would be too.

That is, I would be more like Jesus and less like God.

I understand the argument that God lets people suffer because God expects other humans to come to the rescue. But this argument has many exceptions. What about the situations where nobody is available to help? What about the situations when there is no way to help? In these cases, only God can help, and he does not.

Oh, and of course, a competent God would have to send to Hell anyone who got their doctrine wrong.

Oh well. You can’t have a bleeding-heart God running the world, I guess.

Anti-Altruists

There are some people—the exact number is hard to determine—who care nothing for their fellow world citizens. Some of them are psychopaths, whose brains make them incapable of empathy, but psychopaths are only part of the problem. There are many others who are anti-altruists even though they may not be clinically psychopathic. One example, and I’m sure you can think of many in your own experience, is the people who left beer bottles and cans on the beach and under the trees at the state park where the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences had its meeting last weekend. They left their litter—some of it dangerous broken glass—not by accident but deliberately. They were sending a message to the rest of us. They wanted to make it perfectly clear that they hate the rest of us and the planet that we share with them.

I’m not talking about careless litterers, of which Oklahoma has a large number. A lot of people put trash in their truck beds and seem totally unaware that this trash can blow out of the truck bed and onto the road. One time, as I drove at full speed down an interstate highway, a plastic door lifted up out of a truck bed and slammed against my car. I wonder if, sometimes, Oklahoma drivers lose furniture out of the backs of their trucks (maybe a couch with Granny still sitting on it). Just yesterday someone lost a truck wheel out of the back of their truck and left it on a busy street. Instead I refer to deliberate litterers. Deliberate litterers are on a par with chimpanzees flinging their shit at people. They are worse than if they were children who never grow up.

What do we do about such people? There is nothing we can do. Laws do not stop them. They will not listen to any appeals to reason much less empathy. All we can do is to tolerate them. All we can do is to clean up after them and hope they don’t shoot us. Empathy is one of the greatest capacities that has evolved in the human species, and we must simply accept that there is a margin of losers who do not possess this most important human trait. We are accustomed to thinking of mutations such as trisomy 21 as a deleterious mutation. But Down’s syndrome people are almost always cheerful and nice. The lack of empathy, socially and perhaps genetically influenced, is a truly bad part of human variation. You may have heard about the psychologist who discovered that he was genetically psychopathic but had grown up training himself to be empathetic. We can only hope that some of the kids who have received anti-altruism in their genes and upbringing may be able to similarly overcome this curse. We continue to offer messages and examples of altruism in the hope that this may, once in a while, occur.

A World of Empathy, Part Two: Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory

I introduced Graham Greene in a previous blog entry. The Power and the Glory takes place in a bit of Mexican history that I had known nothing about. Apparently there were Marxists revolutions in some Mexican states in the mid-twentieth century, in which churches were shut down and priests, except those who renounced their work, were executed.

The protagonist (Padre José) was a priest who knew his own inadequacy, which included a weakness for alcohol. But he knew that he was a priest, and couldn’t ever quit being a priest, a fact to which his own unworthiness was irrelevant. He had a burden of love, of pity, for all of the Catholics-in-hiding in the Marxist state. Every time that he had a chance to escape, he gave it up in order to administer last rites.

As with the protagonists in other Greene novels, the priest finds out that his empathy for people entraps him in conflicting feelings. Other priests have given into the revolutionaries, and he wonders if his refusal to also renounce his faith was just pride. And he also discovered that he could simply not stop being a priest even if he wanted to. When he was in prison, he was hearing the confessions of the other prisoners, even though they did not know he was a priest (since he was in disguise). The Catholics in hiding knew who he was but would not point him out to the revolutionary authorities. He knew that the man who was following him, a sallow ugly man with fangs, recognized him as the fugitive priest and planned to turn him in for a reward, but he could not help but give the man a ride on his mule when the man was sick. He could not avoid helping his Judas. Perhaps the worst conflict in the priest’s heart was the fact that the revolutionaries had shot hostages who refused to identify him: his military captor told him, “’I’ve shot three hostages because of you.’” If people had died for him, they deserved a saint, not a drunkard.

The priest was always thinking about his own sinfulness, and that of the world, even when he looked at the stars. “The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise—the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship.” But he could not not be a priest: “But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation—the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God.”

And like most Greene protagonist, the priest knew that suffering was an unavoidable flip side to joy. He told his secret parishioners, “One of the fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is a part of joy…Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger…that is all a part of heaven…” From this he concludes that heaven is right here on Earth. And here was the pitiful (pity-filled) love that the priest could not avoid: “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of the imagination.”

To the priest, God’s love was even frightening in its intensity. “God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint-pot of ditch water. We wouldn’t even recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead to walking in the dark? Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

The central point of the novel is in this quote. Upon hearing yet another confession about sexual sin, the priest thought: “Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or for a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.” This important thought is something that would never have gone through the mind of a Protestant or Catholic fundamentalist.

It was pity that brought the priest to his death, and he knew this would happen the moment he chose to show pity. He had escaped to a state where religion was not prohibited, but the ugly fanged man found him, and told him that he was needed to offer last rites to someone back in the state he had left. The priest knew it was a trap, but he knew it was his responsibility to go. Of course, he was arrested and executed. Greene brought all the plot lines together at the end of the novel: at the end, the dentist who had met the priest at the beginning of the novel now watched his execution from his office window. The dentist’s patient, writhing in pain, was the military leader who had ordered the execution.

Greene’s point was that the priest, despite his own sins and doubts, was in fact a saint, because he loved people unto death. This is the kind of religion that an agnostic can comprehend and admire.

On John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies

I recently read John Updike’s 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies. The late John Updike was one of the most empathetic writers who ever lived, at least as empathetic as Anton Chekhov. In this novel, Updike traces four generations of the Wilmot family: from a minister to a mail carrier to an actress to a religious cult member. Updike got inside the minds of these fictitious people, just the way he got inside the mind of a fictitious young Muslim in his novel Terrorist. What a diversity of people Updike could understand, and explain to us! In the Beauty of the Lilies was obviously inspired by the Branch Davidian event of 1993 just as Terrorist was inspired by the September 11 attacks.

Updike, in his autobiography Self-Consciousness, explained his religious views; they could be described as Christian agnosticism. Furthermore, Updike, more than any other mainstream novelist, was interested in the revelations about the world that science provides.
Updike began this novel in a way that editors would permit no other writers to begin: with religious and political concepts. But it was not mere exposition. The story of the Wilmot family begins about 1910 when a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, suddenly realizes that he no longer believes in God. He wanted to, but could not. His loss of faith was a palpable event to him. When his faith evaporated, the world became simpler and clearer for Clarence, but also horrifying. Updike wrote:

The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega ate His very own?—simply evaporated…And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting…The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem… There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness… [Theological books were] pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown…How little, could Darwin not have but noticed, had he left “Him” [God] to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor… [Theological books were] paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth.

I have never read such a beautiful description of what it feels like to lose faith in a Biblical sort of God.

A church official talked with Clarence about his loss of faith, and tried to get him to see that he could remain a clergyman even if he was an agnostic, because we cannot define the terms we are using anyway, and besides, a clergyman is supposed to minister to the needs of people here and now. The official told Clarence that the new insights from physics (e.g. Einstein) showed how little we understood the world just by looking at it. He also told Clarence that the Bible was not the end but the beginning of our explorations. But Clarence realized that the skeptics within Christianity had “burnt the ship beneath them and then [found that they] couldn’t walk on water.”

So Clarence eventually quit the ministry and ended up selling encyclopedias door to door, which was a dismal failure. In addition to the financial failure, Clarence felt an intellectual one: the encyclopedias boasted of being facts, all facts, just facts. Clarence felt “sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”

Clarence Wilmot eventually died in poverty and with TB, and in utter hopelessness. How can we, even if we end up seeing the universe as agnostically as Clarence, avoid such hopelessness? What would I have said to someone like Clarence? At the very least, I would encourage him to not see the universe as just facts. I write encyclopedias, and my encyclopedias consist of more than just facts, but the structure of meaning that they create. Somewhere, in this meaning, one can find religious affirmation, even if not in a personal God.

I know this conclusion is not logically satisfying, but it is what I can do for now. Please feel free to share comments.

The conclusion of the novel comes almost full circle, when the pathetic playboy son of the actress (Clark Wilmot) undergoes a religious conversion in a cult. At the end, he realizes that it is a mental trap, and during the climax scene, he does not give up as his great-grandfather had done, but plays a heroic role. You have to read it to find out what it was.

Religion and the Evolved Human Mind

The following essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World (Prometheus Books). I am not sure I agree with everything that I wrote in this passage—my views keep evolving—but I hope you find it interesting anyway.

There is no such thing as religion.

Many writers, as I did in the original edition of Encyclopedia of Evolution, assume that religion is a unified set of evolved behaviors. (I have corrected this mistake in my revised encyclopedia.) It is now clear to me that religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes (pieces of information) that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. We have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. I hereinafter use the term “religion” to refer to this collection of memes.

Therefore when we say that religion is universal among humans, we mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. We cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. And social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others. But we cannot say, as I once said, that religion per se is an ineradicable part of the human mind.

Only humans appear to have religion. Intelligent nonhuman animals appear to live only in the present. They seem unaware that they will die, or take much notice when other members of their species die. The human awareness of death, an awareness we carry with us from adolescence onward, is not necessarily superior to the blessed ignorance of most nonhuman animals.

Exceptions may include elephants, who appear to mourn and to remember the deaths of specific individuals, and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. A vivid example appeared in the November, 2009 National Geographic. The chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon all knew one another. And they all knew an old female, who died in her late forties, which is an advanced age for a chimp. As the human caretakers carried her away on a stretcher, the other chimpanzees lined up along a fence and did things that, to a human observer, appeared to be expressions of grief. Several researchers, including Jane Goodall, have observed chimpanzees appearing to dance as they watched a waterfall, as if they were exulting in its beauty. While even Jane Goodall cannot know what was going on inside of the minds of the chimps, her interpretation—that this was proto-religious awareness on the part of the chimps—is credible.

The main reason that fully-developed religion is unique to humans is that humans have such large brains. The size of the human brain relative to the size of the body, compared to that of other primates, is out of the ball park. Relative brain sizes of primates exceed that of the average mammal, which exceeds that of the average vertebrate. More than any other species, humans seem to have excess brain capacity. One of its outlets is religion.

This would not necessarily be the case in other intelligent species. Science fiction has created a universe full of intelligent but essentially non-religious species. For the inhabitants of Middle Earth, created by the Christian writer J. R. R. Tolkein, religion is not distinct from everyday life. Intelligence does not require religion, but in our case the increase in brain size over evolutionary time has resulted in the capacity for religion.