Chapter 5 - Nuturing

[Jess]

Would be keen to discuss chapter 5 with others once they have read it, particularly 5:3 'The nurturing origins of our moral soul'

[Aussiescribbler]

I haven't read this book, but I am familiar with Griffith's theories from reading Free: The End of the Human Condition: The Biological Reason Why Humans Have Had to Be Individual, Competitive, Egocentric and Aggressive, Beyond The Human Condition and A Species in Denial as well as having done some voluntary work for him for a brief time in the mid-nineties.

For a long time I wanted to believe that his books contained the liberated truth he claims they do. There were things which didn't ring true, but I tried to tell myself that was just my mind being "evasive". Now I believe that he is profoundly mistaken, as you will see if you read my reviews of his books here on Goodreads.

Here are my thoughts on the "love-indoctrination" aspect of his theory, which was one of the elements I hung onto the longest.

Griffith's idea, as I understand it, is that nurturing undertaken for genetically selfish reasons taught our ancestor's infants that selfless behaviour is meaningful and this then became genetically encoded so that we are born with a program for selflessness.

First of all, what do we mean by something being "selfish"? Any living thing is motivated by self-interest. It is the only basis on which choices can be made. Assuming that we did have a program for altruistic behaviour then the reason we would be following that program is that the program either makes it feel better to follow it or feel worse not to. So, if being motivated by self-interest is selfishness, then such a program would lead to us being selfless for selfish reasons.

I think the term "selfish" is relevant only where there is a conflict of interests. This applies in the animal kingdom when there is conflict over breeding opportunities. At such times self-interest is divisive. At other times self-interest is integrative. While social animals compete, they also cooperate and spend time on integrative social behaviour. They may cooperate in the hunt because it allows them to meet their own personal need for food. They may engage in integrative social behaviour for the same reason that we do, because it feels good.

Nurturing isn't selfish behaviour in the sense of behaviour which is characterised by a conflict of interests.

Thus love, in the sense of the integrative social urge, does not require "indoctrination" away from selfishness. It will occur in social animals where there is no conflicting interest to obscure it.

What the extended nurturing period would have done is to liberate intelligence. Intelligence was a potential just waiting to develop. The intelligence of other animals has to be tightly focused on the struggle for survival. A food rich environment and peaceful leisurely lifestyle would have allowed our ancestors the time and freedom to contemplate their environment in less obviously goal-oriented ways. They were liberated to seek understanding.

What of morality? Love is not morality. Integrative social behaviour is driven by the pleasure principle and is characterised by unconditional acceptance of others. A loving individual will accept you whether your behaviour is moral or not.

For humans morality only became necessary and only became possible with the arrival of neurosis.

When social conflict broke out it would have been met with criticism. Eventually we would begin to second-guess the criticism and try to avoid the behaviour. Thus we developed a conscience, a sense of morality. The conscience is that part of our ego where we store our expectations about our behaviour. These expectations are learned from those around us, hence different individuals, according to their personal circumstances, culture or upbringing, will feel guilty about different things.

The way it works is that we are born unconditionally accepting of others and of ourselves. Various factors tend to undermine our self-acceptance, such as the criticism of others either explicit or implicit. Our self-acceptance becomes conditional. This is what makes morality possible. When someone presents us with a moral principle they are saying : "You will only be acceptable if you do this." If our self-acceptance were still unconditional, we would not be so easily controlled. But as a neurotic individual we can be held to ransom, essentially, over our need for self-acceptance and the acceptance of others.

But if we remained unconditionally self-accepting, morality would not be necessary because, to the self-accepting individual, what feels good is to be integrative.

Selfishness (as opposed to integrative self-interest) amongst we humans is the natural self-directness of the suffering individual. If we hit our thumb with a hammer we will have trouble thinking of anything but our hurting thumb. Similarly the hurting individual can think of little but his hurting self. And the principal hurt is a lack of self-acceptance. This is a kind of black hole that we will try to fill with what we can - idealism, materialism, power. But only unconditional self-acceptance can liberate us from this kind of selfishness and allow us to open up in a spirit of unconditional acceptance (i.e. love) to others and thus move beyond the human condition to a unified humanity.

Where is the evidence for a genetic program for "selflessness"? Where is the need for it in finding understanding of human behaviour? Nurturing is incredibly important because it is a major determining factor in preventing or postponing the undermining of our self-acceptance. A shortage of nurturing leaves us feeling unacceptable. And the more we are needing of self-acceptance the more selfish we will be. No need for a genetic expectation of an ideal world.

[Aussiescribbler]

"Societies ranking high or low on the Infant Physical Affection Scale were examined for degree of violence. The results (Table 1) clearly indicated that those societies which give their infants the greatest amount of physical affection were characterized by low theft, low infant physical pain, low religious activity, and negligible or absent killing, mutilating, or torturing of the enemy. These data directly confirm that the deprivation of body pleasure during infancy is significantly linked to a high rate of crime and violence." Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence, James W. Prescott, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1975

Prescott makes it very clear how the problems of our world arise from the inadequate nurturing of children and shows that cultures which physically punish their children exhibit much higher levels of violent behaviour :

http://www.whale.to/a/prescott3.html