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January 8 - January 25, 2024
principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability.
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
Leary suggested that self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a “sociometer” that continuously measures your value as a relationship partner. Whenever the sociometer needle drops, it triggers an alarm and changes our behavior.
The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.
would preserve their belief in their own honesty. The bottom line is that in lab experiments that give people invisibility combined with plausible deniability, most people cheat.
And now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any conclusion twenty-four hours a day. Whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming or whether a fetus can feel pain, just Google your belief.
Westen found that partisans escaping from handcuffs (by thinking about the final slide, which restored their confidence in their candidate) got a little hit of that dopamine. And if this is true, then it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be
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very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.51 It’s hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature (of an argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed
The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach,
moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. To
article titled “The Weirdest People in the World?”2 The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).
They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature.
The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights.23
Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity.
If that’s your view of human nature, then it’s easy to create mathematical models of behavior because there’s really just one principle at work: self-interest. People do whatever gets them the most benefit for the lowest cost.
But conservatives care more, and they rely on the Fairness foundation more heavily—once fairness is restricted to proportionality. For example, how relevant is it to your morality whether “everyone is pulling their own weight”?
Republicans understand the social intuitionist model better than do Democrats.
Hsieh had stumbled into a modern version of the muscular bonding that Ehrenreich and McNeill had described. The scene and the experience awed him, shut down his “I,” and merged him into a giant “we.”
Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.
At no point was religion itself beneficial to individuals or groups. At no point were genes selected because individuals or groups who were better at “godding” outcompeted those who failed to produce, fear, or love their gods. According to these theorists, the genes for constructing these various modules were all in place by the time modern humans left Africa, and the genes did not change in response to selection pressures either for or against religiosity during the 50,000 years since then.
People belonging to such a [religiously cohesive] society are more likely to survive and reproduce than those in less cohesive groups, who may be vanquished by their enemies or dissolve in discord. In the population as a whole, genes that promote religious behavior are likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perish and the more united ones thrive.46
Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust.
Putnam and Campbell found that the more frequently people attend religious services, the more generous and charitable they become across the board.58 Of course religious people give a lot to religious charities, but they also give as much as or more than secular folk to secular charities such as the American Cancer Society.59 They spend a lot of time in service to their churches and synagogues, but they also spend more time than secular folk serving in neighborhood and civic associations of all sorts.
By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.60
It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.
“It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”
Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).
Only groups whose gods promoted cooperation, and whose individual minds responded to those gods, were ready to rise to these challenges and reap the rewards.
We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects.
Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.
The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak.
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.
Life narratives provide a bridge between a developing adolescent self and an adult political identity.
If you believe that people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed, then yes, that may be sufficient. But conservatives generally take a very different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.
Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community.
Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left.
Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
Throughout this book I’ve argued that large-scale human societies are nearly miraculous achievements. I’ve tried to show how our complicated moral psychology coevolved with our religions and our other cultural inventions (such as tribes and agriculture) to get us where we are today. I have argued that we are products of multilevel selection, including group selection, and that our “parochial altruism” is part of what makes us such great team players. We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you destroy all
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Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish.
In an earlier study, Putnam found that ethnic diversity had the opposite effect. In a paper revealingly titled “E Pluribus Unum,” Putnam examined the level of social capital in hundreds of American communities and discovered that high levels of immigration and ethnic diversity seem to cause a reduction in social capital.
Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital.
Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix.
In particular, liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community.
politics, religion, and our spectacular rise to planetary dominance. I fear that I crammed too many sights into the
