Moral and Political Thought

Picking up where I left off the last: This business of hardwired political views as a new science is, as they say in Hollywood, "blowing up;" it's becoming a big deal. The metaphor "hardwired" ought to be looked at for a second: does our moral and political behavior really work as if someone had spot-welded all the parts together, with no going back and unplugging these wires from over here, plugging those in there, soldering a new cable into a jack bought at the parts store because a component was discovered that would access other systems was spied in the manual, etc? No changes can occur? It's a "done deal" at some point?

Well, apparently lots of scientists would like us to think so. There's the Grail of isolating the one gene, or a cluster of genes, that would sure enough predict that your two-year-old would indeed grow up to read Noam Chomsky...or Ann Coulter. In Sasha Issenberg's piece I linked to above, a political strategist reads some new Psychology books and decides he'll help his candidate by focusing ads based on "thinkers" versus "feelers." Haidt says most of our political "thinking" is "moral instinct papered over," and what a good writer Haidt is! It's lines like that that get people persuaded you're really onto something. And maybe he is. A quick diversion:

In a previous blogspew on Jonathan Haidt, I linked to his YourMorals.org test. Here's another test, called Political Compass. It's much shorter than the battery Haidt's colleagues want you to take, and one of its main purposes is to get you out of thinking on the dumb Euclidean line of
Left<-----------Centrist------->Right; it's more 3-D-ish, and it's HERE if you wanna take it. I think it gives a certain snapshot of who you are politically, and by association, morally. I've taken the test three times now, most recently within 72 hours of my writing this. HERE's my result. I'm a "left libertarian." A quite pronounced one, it seems.

Robert Anton Wilson explains the Dumb Game of Left-Right Euclidean politics in a way no one else I've ever seen come close. [Thanks to the guys at rawilsonfans.org.]

Haidt says he wrote The Righteous Mind not to try to convince anyone to switch their allegiances, but to try and understand the Other better, and possibly minimize the hate. (His name rhymes with "fight," not "fate," as I've been listening to people talk about him lately.) I liked the last two paragraphs of Jonathan Ree's pithy review in The New Humanist. The most I can implement from this book, I take it, is to use George Lakoff's framing techniques to talk about Authority, Sanctity, and Loyalty in a way that might catch the ear of a "conservative." I'll get back to Haidt in a moment, but I was talking about genes and morality...

I think we can safely agree that we have a reflex for self-flattery, that emotions do rule, that our reasoning is like a lawyer's trying to win a case. And of course our political ideas are NOT totally deliberative. I do think environment and experience and learning all contribute, especially if one has tested one's own presumptions many times. I've done it. I've read National Review. I read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. I once had a job where I was offered a transfer to another library branch, one in a very beautiful and wealthy section of Los Angeles, where most of the patrons I'd meet would be old, very wealthy Republicans. I had very long hair and thought I'd try testing myself here - I'm pretty sure I was a left-libertarian then too - and I was prepared to experience lots of nastiness. But after a few years, I really liked most of the patrons, and they were very sweet to me. Some were obviously very conservative, but they asked me questions about politics and I gave them my honest takes, and they respected me.

I'd say about 8-12% of the patrons I ran into there were the classic mean, pinched, bitter, evil, ugly rich old white people. Most were surprisingly, delightfully pleasant. This opened my eyes. It didn't change my politics much though.

                                  William Irwin Thompson. "The history of the soul is always
                                  the history of the voiceless, the oppressed, the repressed."
                                  Photo by Michael Laporte

But do I think genes will explain all this? No, despite NYU psychologist Ned Jost's findings in the "The End of the End of Ideology" paper, mentioned in Issenberg's excellent overview article. Indeed, read the section on Jost's work and see if it doesn't look isomorphic to the Rattray-Taylor oral/anal lists I gave in my previous blogpost. Jost: We're not divided by class, geography or education so much as by temperament. 


Temperament. O! How I urge you, Dear Reader, if you haven't already, to read the first lecture in William James's Eight Lectures on Pragmatism. If Haidt and his data-set don't come off as "tender-minded," then you weren't paying attention.

It seems the search for a genetic substrate that will explain macro-world phenomena gets you funding. It allows scientists to do what they really want to do: wake up in the morning and go to work to solve some problem of some sort. If their hypotheses don't work out the way they had envisioned, they write that up anyway: it's still good science: if we thought it worked this way, we were probably wrong. Meanwhile, jobs and knowledge were created. And though searching genomes and testing genes has gotten much cheaper over just the past year or so, it's still heady stuff. It's creative work, too. Get the ideas. Figure out how to test them. Figure out how to test your test. It's brainy stuff, aye.

But I remember the great generalist and one-time M.I.T. lecturer William Irwin Thompson - who dropped out of academia - saying about hardcore sociobiology something along the lines that it's sheer bullshit to say you're going to find a gene to be an auto-mechanic. You say morality and a political bend is more "basic" than something as particular as Thompson's reductio ad absurdum? You're probably right, but do we realize how dizzyingly complex "genes" are? If you try to keep up with this stuff, it seems like it's getting to be like particle physics. Or worse. It may be even more complex than that, especially if we take into account epigenetics, where RNA plays a much bigger part than we'd imagined. It's not just DNA sending RNA "the" message to other genes to make proteins z, q and x3. That was the older, simpler days. Now the environment has genes and RNA-DNA feeding back in ways we didn't guess, hopping genes, "junk DNA" that is turning out to not be so junky...I mean check out this recent article, "Chromosomes Organize Into 'Yarns': May Explain Why DNA Mutations Can Effect Genes Located Thousands of Base-Pairs Away," from a few days ago.

Although why I'm some left-libertarian socialist and those who love Fox News are decidedly...<cough> not, and I find their morality, extrapolated/writ large as basically stupid, devolutionary, and sadistic, I don't really know why I'm like this. One parent was staunchly Democrat. Another a Republican who never really got into the Issues. I have a sibling who went from extreme Right Wing Christian born-again Evangelical to a sort of New Church, Jesus said to heal the sick and feed the poor leftist Christian. Most of the other immediate family members aren't very political, although if they are, it's right wing authoritarian stuff.

Ultimately, it's genes, something like ethological "imprinting," family upbringing, peer group at puberty, geography, historical moment, accidents like meeting a very influential person at one point or another when you're vulnerable to some sort of change, and...more accidents and happenstance. Genes? Yes. And probably a bunch of stuff we have only the slightest inklings about. Here's one we've just begun to really gain deeper understandings about:

There's a neuroeconomist named Paul Zak. He wondered about how economies are effected by the human action of "trust," which seemed kind of nebulous to me. He thought - and it made sense to me - that the more trust, the better the economy works. Here's a short article on the "trust hormone" that we make endogenously and secrete when we make eye contact, hug, smile at each other, fall in love, etc. The video of Zak is about 3 minutes long. So add to all the factors above: hormones.

                                        Neuroeconomist and "Dr. Love," Paul Zak

Finally, back to Jonathan Haidt. In my understanding of the world to date, there are some people who, like Oscar Wilde, thought/think that obedience to authority was the Original Sin. In modern terms, these people have often transcended the socio-sexual Hive Morality and experienced neurosomatic bliss, then showed others how to do it. We got the Sexual Revolution from these people, largely. And I see that movement as still going strong, still playing out on the stage, at least in the West. When Authoritarian Men try to roll back gains women had made, even subject them to sexual humiliation, I think it's largely because women have made so many gains. Women are doing well, relative to men, at least in Unistat. By 2019 they will probably make up at least 60% of all graduate students. And they will continue to do well. As well they should. They aren't hurting men by doing well. But a small, loudmouthed, fairly fascistic set of men are responding to the changes - probably mostly unconscious of the deeper reasons why: their fear of losing Control - so they are making themselves very busy right now, shooting every toe on each foot, one by one...

                                                         Oscar Wilde: Heretic

Those who transcend Hive Morality - cranks, neophiles, inventors, deviates, heretics - drive human evolution. The drag on cultural evolution - the Authoritarians, the inflexible Loyalists, the Sanctimonious about some Angry God they've projected from within themselves onto the rest of us: they are most of the Church, most of the Politicians and Legislators ("Well...let's look at precedent!"), and Mammon-worshippers. They're nationalists, often racists and small-minded loudmouths who say they're for individual liberty but do quite something else. These are the drags on progress. Haidt thinks they deserve to be understood by "liberals" because these people - the guardians of Hive Morality - don't want things to change, because it represents a threat to their status in the primate hierarchy.

Given my political bend, no wonder Haidt's equal Big Six doesn't wash with me.