Hezo Kittie

(psychologist and linguist Steven) Pink(er) and the (Evolutionary Psychology of the) Brain

from Pinker's The Blank Slate:

"The dynamic between Calvin and Hobbes (the cartoon characters) is inherent to social organisms, and there are reasons to believe that the solution to it--a moral sense--evolved in our species rather than having to be deduced from scratch by each of us after we've picked ourselves up out of the mud. Children as young as a year and a half spontaneously give toys, proffer help, and try to comfort adults or other children who are visibly distressed." -- p.188, Part III: Human Nature With a Human Face, Ch. 11: The Fear of Nihilism

When I say that children are born super smart, I don't mean that they are born with an understanding of stuff like quantum theory without being taught it or reading about it, but there are really complex concepts that they intuitively grasp without having to break them down / rationalize what they're doing. I'm still not really sure where I'm going with this.

"According to the theory of moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that licenses some moral arguments and not others. The world presents us with non-zero-sum games in which it is better for both parties to act unselfishly than for both to act selfishly (better not to shove and not to be shoved than to shove and be shoved). Given the goal of being better off, certain conditions follow necessarily. No creature equipped with circuitry to understand that it is immoral for you to hurt me could discover anything but that it is immoral for me to hurt you. As with numbers and the number sense, we would expect moral systems to evolve toward similar conclusions in different cultures or even different planets. And in fact the Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social constract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative. Our moral sense may have evolved to mesh with an intrinsic logic of ethics rather than concocting it in our heads out of nothing." - p. 192

Same basic idea, different interpretations: treat people the way you want to be treated. Everyone gets that. How do people want to be treated though? I think there are certain rights that everyone wants and deserves, but there's probably some big differences in the specifics.

Anyway, the passage reminded me of a hypothetical situation. Imagine a world in which a person has fucked up hundreds of times, but on his 60th birthday he realizes how much those actions hurt others, and wants to spend the rest of his life in selfless service. [Note: I don't really like the word selfless. It implies that it is neutral or painful to help others. And although occasionally it can be, I think the majority of the time it's very fulfilling for the person giving. Again, this is non-zero-sum, or Win-Win in Covey language. I prefer the word 'harmonious'.] But instead of being welcomed back by society, they turn a cold shoulder. "We gave you all these chances, and look at the trail of destruction you left in your life. You can't undo or make up for what you've already done." Oh yeah, there's a name for this hypothetical world, it's called HELL. Heaven and Hell and forgiveness and grace don't seem so abstract anymore when they're put in actual situations (forgive your friend/enemy or not?). Now I know why there's always priests at deathbeds, asking for repentance and shit. Repenting with your last breath/thought will give a man some peace of mind at his darkest hour, which is cool, but at the same time it's just not practical. I don't believe in the afterlife. Even still, until the second your heart stops beating, you're always given that choice. "Jesus is forever knocking at your door," as Christians say.

"The second misconception is to imagine that talk about costs and benefits implies that people are Machiavellian cynics, coldly calculating the genetic advantages of befriending and marrying. To fret over this picture, or denounce it because it is ugly, is to confuse proximate and ultimate causation. People don't care about their genes; they care about happiness, love, power, respect, and other passions. The cost-benefit calculations are a metaphorical way of describing the selection of alternative genes over millenia, not a literal description of what takes place in a human brain in real time. Nothing prevents the amoral process of natural selection from evolving a brain with genuine big-hearted emotions. It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions." - p.244, Part IV: Know Thyself, Ch. 14: The Many Roots of Our Suffering

Good argument, but I mostly like that passage for the last two sentences.

"Family love indeed subverts the ideal of what we should feel for every soul in the world. Moral philosophers play with a hypothetical dilemma in which people can run through the left door of a burning building to save some number of children or through the right door to save their own child. If you are a parent, ponder this question: Is there any number of children that would lead you to pick the left door? Indeed, all of us reveal our preference with our pocketbooks when we spend money on trifles for our own children (a bicycle, orthodontics, an education at a private school or university) instead of saving the lives of unrelated children in the developing world by donating the money to charity. Similarly, the practice of parents bequeathing their wealth to their children is one of the steepest impediments to an economically egalitarian society. Yet few people would allow the government to confiscate 100 percent of their estate, because most people see their children as an extension of themselves and thus as the proper beneficiaries of their lifelong striving." - p. 245 Part IV Ch. 14

This reminds me of two unrelated conversations I had, one with Marty and the other with Hilty. I talked to Marty at Jordan's party in the beginning of summer. After most people went to bed or home, I went out for a cigarette and Marty and I discussed fucked up shit in the world. I don't remember the specifics. It came down to, "What now?" and I don't know who this is attributed to, but I dropped a quotation by someone that I truly believe in: "People ask me, 'What can I do to help and fix all the messed up stuff in the world?' and I simply tell them, 'Go home and love your family.'" Marty basically disagreed, saying that there's so much more we could do. He mentioned wanting to be a lawyer so he could make change that would positively affect a lot of people, which is pretty cool. He also said something about wanting to invent a new undergraduate major at Poly and scoffed at the idiocy displayed by students in some of his classes. Oh yeah, Marty was also wasted out of his mind, but that's just a minor detail. I'm sure his arguments would not have changed, they just would have been more articulate had he been sober.

When I talked to Hilty, he mentioned that he is unsure if he wants to have kids because they are a huge and wasteful strain on resources. Not necessarily because he wants the resources himself, but that in general parents throw large amounts of material goods down their family tree, and most of it doesn't go to anything useful.

"What now?"

Hilty said that a week earlier, after he had won poker, he donated the money to the Red Cross. Was his motive from guilt or for his own well-being, to reassure himself of past wrongs? No. Now, I don't know this because I am not him, but I have every reason to believe that he truly wanted to do something, anything, to help.

One, but not the only, reason I have to have faith in his inherent goodness was because before the topic of children came up, he was telling me about the Buddhist teachings that Will Kreiser has been reading and following for a while. It intrigued Hilty, so he decided to try out a couple of things, such as meditation. He also dropped some Buddhist knowledge that he learned from Will regarding interconnectedness and nature, and he really knew his shit. And all the ideas he mentioned could have been hella Christian as well; yet again, same concepts, different culture. That's why I like not getting caught up in the details.

"Love your family" is still the foundation for me, not because I see their ideas as bad, but because we should not forget the first step (loving our immediate family) before we start "expanding our circle of influence" by adding children of the world into what we consider family. I also consider family as of primary importance because it's when my sense of empathy is amplified by like a thousand. For example, when my sister is suffering, I seriously feel like absolute shit, even before I learn about the situation and only see her distressed.

And the world is pretty complex, to say the least. There's enough food in the world to feed a bazillion people, yet we can't even get the food to the starving because we can't get past the military. Since I've been reading all this evolutionary psychology shit, I tend to think of the problem in terms of the minds of the dictators. So, let's say everyone in the world tends to think what they're doing is right, or at least that their idea of the world is correct. Why do dictators withhold food from the starving, which seems so obviously evil to us? Do these people just enjoy the suffering of others or indulge in evil practices? Doubtful. The dictator probably sees the oppressed group in two ways.

1.) sub-human
2.) the cause of their problems

The dictator probably associates the people to parasites, trying to siphon funds and goods from the dictator's party. This is why they can do things like torture without cringing; it's equivalent to stepping on an ant to them. Their capacity for empathy is still functioning, but they have different ideas on who should be included under the "humanity" umbrella. "There's no way they can still have a functioning capacity for empathy when they promote all this suffering! THEY ARE PSYCHOPATHS" Well, they might actually be psychopaths, but if they aren't then they probably are self-deceived. They truly, honestly believe that these people are merely harmful pests, as much as they believe that the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

I don't know what the answer to this is. The problem is way more complicated than this, and I know nothing. This is just one really simple explanation that just brings up more questions.

Is it our obligation to try and convince the dictators to include the oppressed in their humanity umbrella?
How do we convince these people that their ideas of humanity are wrong?

Another abstraction: I am completely convinced that it is correct for the oppressed to be included in the humanity umbrella. There is no way for me to be convinced that the starving deserve to be starved or that they are lesser human beings. What if the dictator is as adamant about his view as I am of mine?

What now?

"But Sting also sang, 'Every move you make, I'll be watching you.' And Isadora Wing concluded that fastener-free copulation is 'rarer than the unicorn.' Even in a time when seemingly anything goes, most people do not partake in sex as casually as they partake in food or conversation. That includes today's college campuses, which are reportedly hotbeds of the brief sexual encounters known as 'hooking up.' The psychologist Elizabeth Paul sums up her research on the phenomenon: 'Casual sex is not casual. Very few people are coming out unscathed.' The reasons are as deep as anything in biology. One of the hazards of sex is a baby, and a baby is not just any seven-pound object but, from an evolutionary point of view, our reason for being. Every time a woman has sex with a man she is taking a chance at sentencing herself to years of motherhood, with the additional gamble that the whims of her partner could make it single motherhood. She is committing a chunk of her finite reproductive output to the genes and intentions of that man, forgoing the opportunity to use it with some other man who may have better endowments of either or both. The man, for his part, may be either implicitly committing his sweat and toil to the incipient child or deceiving his partner about such intentions." - p. 254 Part IV Ch. 14

The evolutionary explanation is kind of a stretch, but it could be one possibility to explain what Cameron Diaz says in Vanilla Sky: "Don't you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not!" Also I think it's funny that he talks about hooking up.

"In the Tragic Vision, moreover, human nature has not changed. Traditions such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores, and political institutions are a distillation of time-tested techniques that let us work around the shortcomings of human nature. They are as applicable to humans today as they were when they developed, even if no one today can explain their rationale. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate enough to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up, because human nature always leaves us teetering on the brink of barbarism. And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best we can hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted according to feedback about the sum of their good and bad consequences. It also follows that we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss." - p. 289 Part V: Hot Buttons, Ch. 16: Politics

Am I too young to already start turning conservative? I don't think I fall under a particular particular political party because I don't know much about their policies, nor do I have an opinion on them. I also don't know much about the world.

Fartsauce!