Socio-political philosophical musings
To those on the edges of their seat waiting for the imminent progression of AI, just remember the millions who have lived and dies awaiting the same promise. No offence, but you have a higher probability of winning at Lotto than any major breakthroughs in general artificial intelligence.
When I was seriously exploring music, I started from the artists I enjoyed and searched their roots and influences and cascaded back. In the 1970s, this was to look at the roots of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Keith Richards. I’d be brought back to James Burton or Elmore James; I’d find Robert Johnson, BB King, Muddy Waters and Hubert Sumlin (Howlin’ Wolf); and I’d find John Lee Hooker, and Chuck Berry. And then, I’d dg further to find Son House, T-Bone Walker, and Big Bill Broonzy. Although I grew to appreciate these originals, I still preferred the reinvigorated versions of my youth.
In philosophy, I seem to have taken a somewhat similar path. In particular, it’s a journey back to Husserl. I was exposed to essence and being most probably through Sartre. this brought me to Heidegger that brought me to Husserl. To be fair there was a large gap between Sartre and Heidegger and a fairly long gap from then until Husserl. I’ve come upon Husserl’s name time and again but I deprioritised him, He seemed always to be the AND of Heidegger, sort of like how Garfunkel was the AND of Simon.
But I thought that Heidegger was the root—the source, as Son House might have been to the Blues. Given the connection of Husserl and Heidegger, I’m not sure that Dasein‘s genesis is clear cut. Moreover, I believe it’s a pedestrian German world, that fancy pants academes wish to evermore preserve in amber as a stand-in to being there, though Heidegger insisted that the meaning was more nuanced and in some way I could consider that it prefigured Derrida’s privileged pairs highlighted in his Deconstruction.
I’ve commenced reading Husserl’s’ Ideas, and my takeaway at this point is his eidetic facts.
Not explicitly about Kübler-Ross. In the 1990s, I enjoyed listening to the stories of a cantadora—keeper of the stories—, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and her Theatre of the Imagination. Many inspirational stories. That I deem psychology as a pseudoscience does not mean that it serves no purpose. It runs aground where they interpret metaphor for the actual—the symbol for the object. There is a lot to glean from symbols as representations, and one can even apply them to their lives, but never conflate the map for the terrain.
I loved Baba Yaga, but the one I am reminded of today regards candles as measures of life remaining. In this story, a person on a deathbed pleads with Death.
Death explains that the candles represent peoples’ lives and their life force.
Some are tall and burning brightly whilst others are on the verge of being snuffed out
The Dying assumes that all the tall and bright candles must represent young children and that the ones with almost no wax and wick to burn are the elderly.
Death explains:
Some children have very short candles.
And some of the very tall and very bright ones are very old people.
‘Look, here is yours’, Death tells him.
The Dying is directed to one of the dimmest, most pathetic, struggling-for-its-last-few-moments-of-burning-candle in all the land.
He understands.
Even the moral sceptic is not immune from his own form of the wish to over-intellectualize such notions as those of moral responsibility, guilt, and blame. He sees that the optimist’s account is inadequate and the pessimist’s libertarian alternative inane; and finds no resource except to declare that the notions in question are inherently confused, that ‘blame is metaphysical’.
PF Strawson, Freedom and Resentment
Part of my central thesis of non-agency is centred on the notion of blame, and it seems PF Strawson has a lot to contribute in this arena. In short, given my lack of belief of material human agency, I wish to investigate the connection between seemingly innate impulses to project blame and the absence of a blameworthy object.
In order to devote more time to researching and writing my thesis and less time editorialising elsewhere, I may post some shorter content such as these gems that I stumble upon along the way. This facilitates my desire to create and share content without the burden of devoting hours to render it. It also gives me places to come back to.
I only hope that you don’t blame me for doing so.
Meantime, indulge my recording my thoughts here in the public space.
We don’t have very precise definitions of blame, we have an intuitive sense of what it means. There is a subject (or object, as the case might be) that creates (or has been attributed to have created) an action that results in an interaction on an object (or process) with a subsequent effect and a notion of intentionality. But we have to parse casual effect, responsibility, and blame as they are not strictly equivalent. Let’s begin with a causal event.
I believe that on balance the causal event process and object interaction is uncontroversial. A billiard ball (Object A), through directed (or undirected) motion, collides (action) with a second billiard ball (Object B) with the subsequent effect of displacing the second ball.
What we can claim in this scenario is that A → B, A causes B to move. Except in the loosest of idiomatic speech, we can’t really extend this causal relationship to claim that A is responsible for B’s movement. Even further removed, one can’t claim that A is to blame for B’s movement.
Responsibility and blame are different moral claims attributed to an agent. I feel I am safe to claim that a billiard ball has no agency. Whilst human agency is defined as an individual’s capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action (Houston, 2010), an agent in a more general sense is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity.
The word blame is infused with negative connotations. Praise is a loose antonym with positive connotations, but I won’t focus on it because it is not nearly as heavy and operates semantically differently. In any case, I feel justified to cross blame from the list of possible qualifiers for the billiard ball scenario.
Is A responsible for B? Again, I believe that most people do not assign responsibility to inanimate objects—notwithstanding animism, pantheism, and possibly panpsychism.
Here are some diagrammes.
Above, there is only cause and effect. We can intuit that the movement of Object A is not uncaused. Even so, it careens into Object B, causing it to move. And while one could say A is responsible for moving B, this would be non-standard English language use.
If one pulls back to catch a wider glimpse, one can see that the cause of Object A striking Object B, was a person striking Object A (possibly with a cue stick). Here, the casual event chain is the person causing A to strike B. Two cause-effect relationships at a macro level. However, in this case, we can also say that the person is responsible for the event to set A into motion. We can also say that the person caused B to move (by the way of Object A). Even here, blame would be inappropriate to assert.
We may be able to reframe the scenario slightly differently to get blame into the picture, but let’s take a short detour and create a praise situation. If Object B is hit into a pocket, we can praise the person. Perhaps this shot wins the game. The person is responsible for making the shot.
In scenario B, the person misses the shot. Moreover, Object A does collide with Object B, but perhaps Object B is the 8 ball, and it was not supposed to be pocketed yet. Or perhaps the cue ball deflects off of Object B causing A to scratch because it falls into a pocket. Either of these situations might cause the person to lose the match. A mate may blame this person for being responsible for the loss.
Before moving on, I’ll point out that one distinction that affords blame more weight than praise is the ongoing psychology. Whilst with praise, a person may reflect fondly on a positive event, there is not really a counter to a grudge in the case of blame. And while praise can be misattributed with benefits to social capital, misdirected blame can result in a loss of social capital with longer-term implications.
Perhaps someone unseen pushes you into another person causing them to be injured. You may have been the cause of this person being injured, but like the billiard ball, Object B, you are not morally responsible. Moreover, you may be the target of blame.
These are rather low-stakes scenarios. Imaging these as legal negligence or in a criminal setting. Innocent people are routinely convicted for crimes they never committed. Perhaps, they had been previously unaware of any of the actors or events, yet they are blamed and fined or incarcerated.
This isn’t my interest to discuss at the moment. This is a different scope, so let’s return to the main theme.
In the low-stakes billiards example we can say that the person seems to have agency. For trivial events, we can ignore whether this is more than seeming. In essence, we can ignore the antecedent event arrow that caused the person to be in a situation to have the opportunity to strike the ball in the first place. We’ll return to this later.
Whilst researching a chapter on the notion of blame among hominids, I was chasing down a rabbit hole and I ended up finding Schopenhauer’s oft-quoted,
Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants
And that’s where the trouble started. Memory is fallible. Although I feel deceived, I don’t feel bad because many people have misattributed this quote to Schopenhauer, but if the Wikipedia footnote is steering me right, this was actually Einstein’s misquote—the Einstein; Albert Einstein of E = MC2 fame.
According to the citation, Albert said this:
„Der Mensch kann wohl tun, was er will,
— Albert Einstein, Mein Glaubensbekenntnis (August 1932)
aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will.”
It translates into the offending sentence.
‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants.’
The full translated quote reads,
‘I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants’ accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.’
Albert Einstein
What Schopenhauer actually said not only doesn’t resonate quite so well, it doesn’t even convey the same notion. His actual words were:
‘You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.’
— Arthur Shopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will, Ch. II.
In the original German read,
Du kannst tun was du willst: aber du kannst in jedem gegebenen Augenblick deines Lebens nur ein Bestimmtes wollen und schlechterdings nichts anderes als dieses eine.
— Arthur Shopenhauer, Ueber die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens
In the spirit of misattributed quotes, here are a few things Einstein never said but are attributed to I’m anyway.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Not Albert Einstein
“I refuse to believe that God plays dice with the universe.”
Not Albert Einstein
Though to be fair, the last one at least directionally reflects something he did say,
“It seems hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that He plays dice and uses ‘telepathic’ methods… is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.”
Albert Einstein
Yet again, I am confused. I feel I’ve been living a lie.
The problem with free will is that we keep dwelling on it. Really, this has to stop.
— Owen D. Jones, The End of (Discussing) Free Will, 18 March 2012
This quote was made by Owen Jones in an article published in 2012. I share it because I feel the author is not only being cavalier but wrongly so. According to the bio at the end of the article, Owen D. Jones is a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. As I see it, the problem is not some theoretical—What is the sound of one hand clapping?—pseudo-problem. Human agency is the basis of our legal and jurisprudence systems.
Like good magicians, people like Owen want to redirect your focus to neuroscience and consciousness rather than have to explain how the causal engine that is the brain manifests itself ex nihilo.
Doubling down on my causa sui position, humans may be able to make constrained solutions, and yet they never have control over the constrained system they inherit. I discuss this at length elsewhere, but I wanted to address this comment forthright.
I’ll leave with a quote I tend to trot out a lot.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair, prepared speech, I, Candidate for Governor (1935)
Free will is a necessary illusion for power structures to propagate or they will lose a cornerstone of their control mechanisms. And since humans want to feel they are in control, they are willing to accept the downside for the illusion of an upside.
Neuroscience and Philosophy was recently released by MIT Press and came to my attention. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it looks interesting. Portions are available on Google books.
I may return to comment, but I just wanted to share before I retire for the night.
I just wrapped up chapter eleven of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve got only 35 pages to go to get through chapter twelve. I’ve been tempted to stop reading. Chapter eleven—and I am tempted to inject a bankruptcy pun here—has been more frustrating than the rest thus far. And yet I am glad to have persisted.
My intellectual focus these past months has been on agency. Et voilà, paydirt. Chapter eleven’s title reveals the context: Religion is a Team Sport. Let’s walk through this garden together.
A goal of Haidt is to educate the reader on his third principle of moral psychology: Morality binds and blinds. He establishes parallels between sports and religion. And here’s the thing—I don’t disagree. But here’s the other thing—I feel that are equally vapid—, with no apologies to sports fans or the religious. Let’s keep moving.
“A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.”
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Chapter 12: Religion is a Team Sport
He talks about the organising and unifying functions of both. But here’s the thing. It unifies the like-minded. Haidt claims to be irreligious and not be into sports, and yet he cites these as somehow desirable. I find him to be an apologist for religion.
I am not a psychologist, but if I were, I’d be tempted to claim that Haidt’s conclusions follow from his personal beliefs. He believes in morals, society, order, intuition, and institutions. He is a textbook Modern and an extrovert to boot. I think he also falls into teleological fallacy traps. Was that a play on words?
His goal is to fuse the positions of Darwin and Durheim. Along the way, he reminds us of the New Atheists, their publications, and their positions: Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason; Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion; Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Although he views religion through rose-coloured glasses, he comes to the conclusion that religions have done a great deal of harm over the millennia, but the good outweighs the bad, especially if you consider it through a social-moral lens. But if religion creates in-groups versus out-groups, which they do, and religious in-groups outlive even non-religious ingroups, then this is a winning option. But what if you don’t like that option?
Personally, I am a collectivist, but this is not willy-nilly any collective.
Haidt contrasts the New Atheist vantage that religious belief is an evolutionary byproduct versus a position that what started as a byproduct evolved into group selection and then, perhaps, an epigenetic phenomenon.
Here’s my contention:
Borrowing from New Atheism, Haidt adopts the notion of a “hypersensitive agency detection device [that] is finely tuned to maximize survival, not accuracy”.
The first step in the New Atheist story—one that I won’t challenge—is the hypersensitive agency detection device. The idea makes a lot of sense: we see faces in the clouds, but never clouds in faces, because we have special cognitive modules for face detection. The face detector is on a hair trigger, and it makes almost all of its mistakes in one direction—false positives (seeing a face when no real face is present, e.g., ), rather than false negatives (failing to see a face that is really present). Similarly, most animals confront the challenge of distinguishing events that are caused by the presence of another animal (an agent that can move under its own power) from those that are caused by the wind, or a pinecone falling, or anything else that lacks agency.
The solution to this challenge is an agency detection module, and like the face detector, it’s on a hair trigger. It makes almost all of its mistakes in one direction—false positives (detecting an agent when none is present), rather than false negatives (failing to detect the presence of a real agent). If you want to see the hypersensitive agency detector in action, just slide your fist around under a blanket, within sight of a puppy or a kitten. If you want to know why it’s on a hair trigger, just think about which kind of error would be more costly the next time you are walking alone at night in the deep forest or a dark alley. The hypersensitive agency detection device is finely tuned to maximize survival, not accuracy.
Op Cit, p. 292
I fully agree with the assertion that the brain values fitness over truth, and I’ve commented in several posts that pareidolia and apophenia create false-positive interpretations of reality.
But now suppose that early humans, equipped with a hypersensitive agency detector, a new ability to engage in shared intentionality, and a love of stories, begin to talk about their many misperceptions. Suppose they begin attributing agency to the weather. (Thunder and lightning sure make it seem as though somebody up in the sky is angry at us.) Suppose a group of humans begins jointly creating a pantheon of invisible agents who cause the weather, and other assorted cases of good or bad fortune. Voilà—the birth of supernatural agents, not as an adaptation for anything but as a by-product of a cognitive module that is otherwise highly adaptive.
Op Cit, p. 293
For me, this supports my contention that agency is a wholly constructed fiction. The same agency we ascribe to unknown natural events, we ascribe to ourselves. And perhaps this ability served an egoistic function, which was then generalised to the larger world we inhabit.
I have an issue with his teleological bias. He feels that because we have evolved a certain way to date; this will serve as a platform for the next level as it were. I’ll counter with a statement I often repeat: It is possible to have adapted in a way that we have been forced into an evolutionary dead end. Historically, it’s been said that 99 per cent of species that ever occupied this earth are no longer extant. That’s a lot of evolutionary dead ends. I am aware that few species could have survived an asteroid strike or extended Ice Ages, but these large-scale extinction events are not the only terminal points for no longer extant species.
So finally, Haidt essentially says that it doesn’t matter that these religious and cultural narratives are wholly fictitious, if they promote group survival, we should adopt them. This seems to elevate the society over the individual, which is fine, but perhaps the larger world would be better off still without the cancer? Just because it can survive—like some virulent strain—doesn’t mean we should keep it.
Finally, given these fictions, what’s a logical reasonable person to do? I don’t buy into ‘this country is superior to that country’ or ‘this religion is better than that religion’ or even ‘this sports team is better than that’ or ‘this company is better than that’.
Haidt does idolise Jeremy Bentham, but this is more Pollyannaism. It sounds good on paper, but as an economist, I’ll reveal that it doesn’t work in the real world. No one can effectively dimensionalise and define ‘good’, and it’s a moving target at that.
No thank you, Jonathan. I don’t want to buy what you are selling.
News Flash: From the time I started this content, I’ve since read the final chapter. Where I categorically reject a lot of what Haidt proposes in this chapter, I tend to find chapter twelve to fit more amicably with my worldview. Perhaps I’ll share my thoughts on that next.
If you’ve reached this far, apologies for the disjointed presentment. I completed this over the course of a day through workaday interruptions and distractions. I wish I had an editor who could assert some continuity, but I am on to the next thing, so…
Bonus: I happened upon this journal article, and it somehow ended up here. I haven’t even read it yet, so I’ve got no commentary. Perhaps someday.
Rai, T. S., and A. P. Fiske. 2011. “Moral Psychology Is Relationship Regulation: Moral Motives
for Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, and Proportionality.” Psychological Review 118:57–75
I’m about 60 per cent done with Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, having just read another couple of chapters and found my way into the third of three sections. As I said at the start, I didn’t think this was quite up my street, but I forced myself to read it to understand the perspective.
I composited this illustration to illustrate what I feel the problem is. I believe the Media-Industrial complex deliberately marginalises and vilified anyone not in-frame. This is flat Earth territory, where passage beyond the boundaries cannot be attained because, if not empty space, it’s filled with monsters.
I may have depicted myself on a Z-axis, but that may have been more difficult to digest. The effect is the same. In-frame are institutionalists like Haidt who need their adopted morals to unify around.
Firstly, this book is VERY (read: too) focused on the American political condition. It’s more about party politics through a moral lens (Moral Foundations Theory) lens. Although there is some relevance to the wider world, Haidt could have better generalised the model, and this leads me to my second criticism.
Secondly, Haidt is mired in fundamental attribution bias. Because he frames this in the same way he views the world and his world is Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans, he excludes many people not beholden to these partisan beliefs. I keep finding myself, saying that doesn’t describe me.
In Haidt’s defence, these party-affiliated automatons do exist and in large numbers, but they are not the whole story. Also in his defence, he was working as a Democratic strategist—rather, speechwriter—so his personal frame was how to get more of these voters to side with a Democratic message that touched on the 5 moral tenets.
If you are someone with a Nietzschean/Foucauldian perspective and a non-cognitivist like me, then you realise that both of these sides are arguing over the definition of morality rather than whether this was all a construct with the intent to manipulate. Since Haidt’s challenge is to convert believers in one moral framework to another—rather, to convince them that the morals they subscribe to are available in different packaging on the other team—, it doesn’t serve his purpose to try to convince those of us who see that the emperor is not wearing any clothing. Telling us that the nonexistent robe is blue rather than red will do little to convince us to manifest a robe.
This chart illustrates that all represented groups value harm [sic. negation of the care-harm value pair) and fairness. Conservatives value Authority, Ingroup, and Purity. I am not sure what he means by ‘moderates’, save to say that they are some imaginary middle. As I associate Liberals with Moderates, it makes little sense to me. He does not clarify this group in the book.
As noted above, my biggest contention is that this group contains institutionalists exclusively, so anarchists are excluded. These people are proponents of social contract theories. Moreover, it excludes noncognitivists who view morals as constructed bollox. Haidt clearly sides with both of these views.
Here is my take on these pairs.
I don’t feel that these two are a true dichotomy. Neglect or perhaps apathy is the absence of caring. Harm is a negative activity. Although if one cares, one is unlikely to inflict harm (unnecessarily), one can not inflict harm and still not care. Moreover, this is subjective. If a person one cares for dislocates a shoulder, one may inflict pain (harm) relocating it in an attempt to reduce longer-term suffering.
Both fairness and cheating are loaded terms. As I’ve discussed at length, fairness is defined differently, which creates ambiguity. Haidt acknowledges this, but he does not further parse the distinction. My strongest rejection may be on this pair.
First, if I reject the notion of property, then from my perspective no one has exclusive rights to it. So a ‘society’ like the United States centred on property rights will consider this to be ‘cheating’ the putative property owner and ‘unfair’, but from the opposite vantage, the property owner acquired the property unfairly, and reclaiming the property may be seen as reestablishing balance.
Secondly, perhaps a non-capitalist feels that profits are excessive, so they feel they are entitled to take an item. Even more justifiable might be software piracy, where the ‘property’ is intellectual and not physical, so the producer never loses possession of their ‘good’.
Thirdly, a person from a collectivist culture may assist a mate who is taking a test. The individualist will condemn this as cheating. The collectivist culture may consider this cooperation to be answering to a higher moral calling. As it happens, this also breaks down on biological sex markers, with women answering in line with collectivists.
This is the first Conservative pair. It feels to me that authority is a relationship one doesn’t need to accept out of hand. I suppose respect comes into play here as well. To me, respect is earned, and one does not deserve authority until they’ve proven oneself. I am not big on authority. Perhaps I stand with Liberals on this one. I may not directly subvert or undermine it, but neither do I take it without question.
I have a tough time thinking about this one. I feel it may be more about what you are loyal to. Even on the Conservative side. For example, when I view Republicans, it appears that these people are loyal to their party but to the detriment of the country and the world at large. Haidt points out that they do not care about the greater world, as they are groupish or tribalists, so this makes sense, but disloyalty to their country is less clear. What I feel is that these people (not unlike the Democrats) are like an invasive species. They feel self-righteous and will only accept a country populated with others who share their values. In practice, a common refrain from these people is that ‘if you don’t like it, just leave’. They do not accept the response that a person might prefer to stay and ‘fix’ it. They’ll betray their country at the drop of a hat.
As I say, Democrats (Liberals) will do this, too, but according to the charge, they aren’t claiming to be loyal from the start. But I disagree with this assertion. I participate in a lot of ‘Vote Blue no matter who’ groups. When I tell them that their candidates suck, they dig in hard. When I point out that their candidates predictably get voted into office and not even fail to follow through on promises, they don’t even pretend to try. I attribute this to the public being loyal to their parties and the party members being loyal to their funders and handlers.
Defined, sanctity is the state or quality of being holy, sacred, or saintly, so it’s a metaphysical position or claim. This is where Conservatives get hung up on virginity and the such. The body is a temple. Haidt had initially used purity, as captured in the chart above, which is more in line with secular speech but still poses problems.
The argument is that the brain has a module that recognises and distinguishes clean from dirty—potable versus unpotable; edible versus inedible; fresh versus rotten, and so on. Through evolution, humans use this facility to process metaphorical concepts on this same hardware through firmware updates because hardware updates are extremely rare. It’s similar to adapting a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to process AI/machine learning for pattern recognition. It was not the original or intended purpose, but it works—sort of.
I believe a counterargument is that this retrofitting is defective and produces poor results. Being a cynic, I see opportunists exploiting this glitch. They want to leave this glitch in place—not that they could remove it anyway—, so they can manipulate the masses. In fact, Haidt’s argument is that Republican operatives know how to work these levers; the problem in his eyes is that Democrats haven’t figured out how to hack their constituents.
Liberty is another weasel word. This is a dog whistle—or rather a foghorn. And it doesn’t mean much. When I hear ‘Liberty’, it immediately throws up red flags. I interpret it as government-granted freedoms. So, if we are born free—whatever that might mean to you—into a place with a social contract, Liberty are areas carved out where we retain our otherwise inherent freedoms. In this view, liberty has no context outside of government; freedom transcends government. It’s more archetypal albeit nebulous.
Oppression is subjective. I recall reading about casted people in India and Bangladesh. These people would be viewed from a Western lens as oppressed, but they saw themselves as part of a karmic process. They did not feel oppressed. Of course, an interloper from the West might convey their own narrative to convince the other person that they were being oppressed.
It can work in reverse as well. Cognitive dissonance assuaging mechanisms are strong forces. I’ll argue that most Westerners are wage slaves being oppressed by a system, and yet they’ll defend their exploiting Capitalistic system. We’ve been here before.
We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
“We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves.” This is a quote in the last paragraph of chapter nine, Why Are We So Groupish?
He does provide some sensible albeit not wholly uncontroversial rationale supporting group selection dominating individual or ‘selfish’ selection. I share this quote because this describes him as part of the in-frame groups above.
Like me, Haidt is an atheist. Unlike me, he feels that there is some higher calling. In chapter 9, he discusses how his feelings for Country were triggered by the events of 11 September 2001. This was not my experience. I didn’t believe in countries prior to the World Trade Centre attacks, and I still don’t. I vocally protested the illegal invasion, though I know a lot of Liberals who became drawn in by the Jingoism.
In the terrible days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I felt an urge so primitive I was
Jonathan Haidt, openning sentence to chapter 9 of The Righteous Mind, Why Are We So Groupish?
embarrassed to admit it to my friends: I wanted to put an American flag decal on my car.
I am a collectivist, so I value social interaction, but I don’t elevate this as some higher purpose. It’s just a potentially beneficial configuration, but not all configurations are so. Again, I’ll suggest that this is his attribution bias affecting his judgment.
And with that, I am out of virtual ink
As a person dismissive of individual human agency, of course, I am not going to rate the probability of collective agency highly. However, I am very drawn to this topic because I am sure there will be attempts to make parallels and connexions between the individual and the collectives. My guess is that attacks by those who support individual agency yet deny collective agency will pose arguments that will in the end undermine their own position that they will nonetheless cling to.
This event is being broadcast on Zoom on 21 through 23 July 2022 from 17:00 – 21:00 Tawain Time (GMT +8).
Conversational topics will be (i) The Reality of Free Will and (ii) The Loci of Responsibility, two topics near and dear to my interest.
Details can be read here: https://www.lmpsttw.org/ch/events/5thtmc-schedule-721-723
A colleague had this to add.
A question that exercises the minds of philosophers is the existential status and role of groups and collectives. Do ‘forests’ exist, or are there just trees in proximity? Do “herds” exist, or are there just elephants? Perhaps the answers to these questions are of little consequence, but there are other, more interesting questions like, for example:
Do collectives act as single units, and if so, how? Do properties of individuals ‘scale’? For example, we readily attribute consciousness and intelligence to individual humans, can we also attribute consciousness and intelligence to a committee, or community? How is a collective conscious or intelligent? Also, individuals have ‘agency’ – they can/do exercise their individual “will” – but does a collective have a “will”, or “agency”? Does a large population of agents (a ‘country’, say) have a ‘will’ of its own? Does a country have ‘free will’,, and ‘know’ what it is ‘doing’? Do such questions even make sense?
On July 21-23, the National Taiwan University is holding a mini-conference about such “social ontology” conundrums, via ZOOM: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/98941995734, Zoom room ID：989 4199 5734
Philosophics 