Existence as the Foundation of Morality

Existence is used in two different ways: as in being as opposed to nothing, and existence in the sense of a matter of fact-about the being of a particular thing.

Existence as being is a true relation which applies to any-thing at all. I can say “Aristotle is male” which is true only if I am in fact that biological sex, but that “Aristotle is” means something else. The being of “Aristotle is” the very reality of such a subject that it can predicated of something. Being seems to be an internal relation, belonging to all things and as such is a necessary relation of all true things, whereas existence as a matter of fact is an external relation contingent upon the truth of something “in the world."

Existence as opposed to being is to be some particular thing as opposed to no particular thing. More specifically, that there is at least one matter of fact to make the proposed relation of subject to predicate true. This is what is referred to in logic as the existential quantifier, "at least one.” For existence to exist means that being is “grounded” in factual relations. To be is to be a particular thing. 

A fact relates to something which can be perceived from the world of existent things. There is no difference between being and what can be perceived, for nothing cannot be perceived. Our minds are capable of discerning the nature of things, though we may err.

To be conscious is to be conscious of something. Our consciousness establishes identity, that a thing is itself and not something else given its unique nature. From identity we derive the other laws of thought: noncontradiction (something can’t be something else), excluded middle (something can’t be itself and not be itself), and causality (a thing acts as itself). 

If existence exists, then the nature of something is determined by its factual nature. To be is only meaningful in relation to particular things, and so existence has external relations which make it meaningful, as opposed to a purely internal relation. All things are only connected internally in that they exist, but the nature of their existence is unique.

Because one exists in certain objective conditions unique to one self, these conditions of existence are what determine what one ought to do. One cannot deny one’s existence, but at the same time it is possible that you never existed for to exist means to be that particular set of conditions. By continuing to exist as opposed to not exist, you as a self-aware being accept the value of your own particular existence. Self-preservation is the most fundamental value as it requires continual effort to resist physical homogeneity with the environment. There are objective conditions which maximize your existence relative to other things, given your nature as a particular being.

Out of Eden: The Surprising Consequences of Polygamy by David Barash

Evolutionary psychologist David P Barash gives us the comprehensive case for humans being naturally polygamous, with more evidence than you might want. Barash challenges  two competing assumptions about human nature those in the west are most comfortable with: that humans are either by nature monogamous or promiscuous. The former monogamy owes to the dominance of custom from the Greco-Roman past as well as from Judeo-Christianity. The latter promiscuity is the great of hope of social radicals and egalitarians since the French Revolution who see marriage of any kind as despotic and unnatural. 

Barash's thesis is that humans are naturally inclined toward polygamy, both polygyny and polyandry, due to our primate past, and that monogamy for everybody is a social imposition, though not exactly unnatural. Barash's case has two major lines of evidence: 1) lingering differences in males and females called dimorphism and 2) comparative anatomy with ape relatives. 

The basic argument for the first line of evidence is that polygamous species males face greater competition against other males for reproductive partners. The ratio of male to female partners is limited by the fact that a human female can only give birth 9 months at a time from a single male partner. So if one male has exclusive access to several females, the other males are left out of the gene pool. This would incentivize males to develop stronger bodies to compete against one another for mates since the competition isn't "fair." The expectation is for men to be physically larger than women, take longer to mature, and be more violent in a polygamous species 

The physiological differences between men and women are more striking than I realized. Men are on average five inches taller than women and 10-20% larger overall, but when fat is discounted, men are 40% heavier, with 60% more muscle mass and 80% more muscle in the arms. The male-female difference in crime is 10 to 1. The difference is slight in petty crime, greater in robbery, even greater with assault, and most dramatic in homicides. Homicide rates are very different in Iceland and Honduras but ratio the same. So this strongly suggests humans are by nature polygamous. 

It isn't as if females are inclined to monogamy and males to polygamy though. Though overt polyandry, several male partners for one female, is rare but it is practiced covertly. This is obvious given the existence of adultery and legal divorce. Through divorce in fact one woman can over her lifetime has offspring from several male partners. This points to a predisposition to polygamy being human and not just male nature. 

The second line of evidence is comparative anatomy with primates. Gibbons are monogamous and their females are equal in size. Gorillas are polygamous and males are larger than females. The dimorphism among humans suggest our ancestors were closer to the gorilla. Chimps and bonobos are the closest to us genetically and have multiple sex partners. They however openly practice promiscuity among both males and females rather than taking mates. This is because male competition occurs among their sperm. If humans were closer to the chimp model of promiscuity, male sperm count should be pretty large. It is in the middle. The evidence is that we are mildly polygamous, or serially monogamous. 

A survey of 849 societies found that prior to western imperialism, 708 (83%) had polygamy. One half were usually polygynous and one half occasionally so, though most men end up with one wife. 16% were officially monogamous and fewer than 1% polyandrous. Most men in a polygamous society however don't have more than one wife. A harem is for men of wealth and power. The case Barash is making isn't that everybody was polygamous, just that it was practiced in some way for those who could afford it. 

There are strong forces which induce humans to pair bonding and monogamy. Pair bonding is affective and monogamy is political. The "four horsemen" which promote monogamy are parental attachment, mirror neurons, neuroplasticity, and the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. Humans are born into the world helpless and develop strong attachments with their caregivers, which in turn shapes our future relationships to greater emotional dependency. This condition elicits greater male provision of resources to children. Mirror neurons are a proposed explanation for empathy by exciting the same brain activity when observing somebody else as if we are doing the same action, which makes interpersonal relationships possible on a deeper level. Our brain's neuron connections grow and brain regions develop in response to continued interaction. The hormones oxytocin for females and vasopressin for males induce positive feelings from partner from physical arousal. 

Strict monogamy as opposed to pair bonding however is political. Following Freud's speculations Barash argues that social and legal monogamy arose as a form of social leveling, to ensure equal access among males for females to maintain social peace and harmony. Polygamy means having a large portion of males condemned to bachelorhood with no prospects of accumulating wealth. Societies with mass polygamy were tyrannical and highly stratified. It is possible that democracy cannot work with widespread polygamy, though it seems to me that mass polygamy is more a consequence than a cause of social inequality as providing for a few hundred wives would be quite expensive in a hunter gatherer society. Prior to such accumulation of wealth humans were mostly serially monogamous with maybe a few having more than one or two partners. 

"Monogamy may therefore have emerged as a sop to men, reducing the number consigned to frustrated bachelorhood, in a kind of unspoken social bargain whereby powerful men gave up the overt prerequisites of polygyny in return for obtaining a degree of social peace and harmony."

Barash even speculates that the drive to accumulate wealth derives from our polygamous heritage. 

"We've seen that polygyny in particular is a direct outgrowth of high male variance in reproductive success. Is it possible that income and socioeconomic inequality- not just the tolerance of such differences, but the establishment of circumstances underlying their very existence- is associated with a polygynist mindset, whereby some individuals accrue more than others? Certainly it is more than their "fair share." It seems at least possible that capitalism's fondness for more...is a consequence of an evolutionary process that has- at least in the past- rewarded those who obtain more."

The Abrahamic god the father meme is also speculated to have some of its appeal from our harem alpha ape past. 

"Much in the evolutionary psychology of Homo sapiens renders our species susceptible to God as portrayed in the Abrahamic religions. We are deeply sensitive to dominance hierarchies and especially to the need to respect the silverback make and his prerogatives. We are subject to sexual impulses that in our evolutionary past contributed to the success of our ancestors but that also risked serious trouble is they were not employed cautiously; hence, we are endowed with urges that are powerful but that we also recognize as potentially dangerous to ourselves, especially if they evoke jealous anger from the powerful male."

"In his book The Naked Ape, zoologist Desmond Morris wrote that religion's extreme potency is simply "a measure of the strength of our fundamental biological tendency, inherited directly from our monkey and ape ancestors, to submit ourselves to an all-powerful, dominant member of the group."

Extrapolation to culture though takes us to cultural evolution through memes which isn't biological but influenced by biology. The argument would be that we are predisposed towards certain memes like patriarchal religion or worship/attraction of successful men. That men are socially valued for competition and women for fidelity would be explained by the polygamous urges. 

I think the case Barash makes is less surprising than he makes it out to be. Human nature is multifaceted and it seems we have some predispositions toward polygamy, but I think it's really for most of us serial monogamy of having multiple partners over a lifetime but one, overt, partner at a time. Our primate past could very well have been polygamous, I think it's plausible. I think that the transition from ape to human induced us to become more monogamous during the Pleistocene but that the rise of civilized life and wealth reactivated these powerful tendencies toward polygamy, and a moral-social revolution changed it to official monogamy. 

"Here, then, is something of a monogamy bottom line: human beings have several deeply evolved predispositions, which don't always coexist comfortably. In particular, we are almost certainly endowed with a string inclination for pair bonding, piled on top of alongside or incorporated within and sometimes without another, contradictory inclination: for multiple sex partners. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, do we contradict ourselves? Very well, we contradict ourselves. We are vast; we contain multitudes, which include simultaneous contradictory impulses toward both polygamy and monogamy."

The Generational Archetype of Howe and Strauss

Howe & Strauss present a very interesting and useful theory about how generations are different and what makes them so. It is called the generational archetype of four different generational types which follow one another in a repeating order: 

Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. 

There are two divisions in the generations:

Dominant (idealist & civic) 

Recessive (reactive and adaptive). 

The dominant generations follow from a spiritual awakening (idealists) or from a secular crisis (civics). 

The recessive generations follow from an inner driven era (reactives) or an outer driven era (adaptives) which relate to how the awakening or crises resolve themselves. 

Awakenings result in inner driven eras pushing back against social change, and outer driven eras follow from crises to protect social changes. 

In response to the conditions of the previous dominant generation come a reaction to crisis or awakening. The reaction following a crisis period by the recessive adaptive generation is of maintenance of the social order, an outer driven era. The response to a spiritual awakening is cynicism and social fragmentation and polarization, which for the resulting Reactive generation means an inner driven era to separate from the social order. 

Dominant 

Civic- secular crisis

Idealist- spiritual awakening

Recessive 

Adaptive- outer driven era

Reactive- inner driven era

This book is written to apply to the United States, beginning in 1584. The authors claim this is because generations matter more in the US than they have in the old world, given that the US was the first modern  small-l liberal and small-r republican government, rather than being ruled by kings and nobles in which a child, Louis XIV of France, could ascend the throne and not reflect the current adult generation. As more countries become democratic and capitalist, the archetype should become apparent in the culture. 

Something to consider is that being  a dominant generation as opposed to recessive doesn't make the generation inherently better, and not necessarily a cause of their own conditions. They are dominant because of a crisis or awakening and what they do strongly influences the future social order. Leaders of the social revolutions of the sixties were mostly older than boomers, often of the silent generation, and the boomers normalized their goals into public life with both good and bad results. The progressive generation saw women gain the right to vote, but also the failure of the treaty of Versailles. 

It seems to be the case that dominant generations give birth or at least influence the next dominant generation, and recessive generations give birth and/or influence the next recessive generation. An idealist generation comes from a civic generation, and the next civic generation comes from an idealist generation. 

Idealist-Civic-Idealist-Civic...

Adaptive-Reactive-Adaptive-Reactive...

The generation which influences you the most, your parents, seems to skip a cycle to maintain the dominant/recessive chain.  

These four types complete a cycle of roughly 90 years the authors call a saeculum, almost a century.

Over the twentieth century the cycle went:

Civic: the greatest generation (1910-1924)

Adaptive: the silent generation (1925-1942) 

Idealist: the baby boom generation (1943-1960) 

Reactive: generation x (1961-1981) 

The start and end points are somewhat vague for generations as they are defined as a cohort over a period of time shaped by major social events relating to secular crises and spiritual awakenings and their aftermath. 

The greatest generation, the authors call them the GI generation, was defined by coming of age in the Great Depression and service in World War II, which were secular crises, so their cohort would be those old enough to have lived in the depression but young enough to be young adults during the war.

The silent generation was mostly too young to serve in World War II and were young adults by the Korean War of the early 1950s and the Eisenhower administration. This cohort came of age in the aftermath secular crises of war and economic depression and and abided by the postwar consensus. Their recessive attitude was oriented outward to defend the consensus. 

The baby boomer generation came of age in the 1960s and agitated against the social consensus put into place by the GI's. Their spiritual awakening took place as young adults during the Vietnam war and the civil rights era. 

Generation x, the authors call them 13ers, grew up after the idealism of the 60s turned into the excess and disillusionment of the 1970s. Rising crime and stagflation instilled a cynical attitudes towards institutions and the idealism of the previous generation. This generation withdrew to inner life as the 80s and 90s saw a return to economic growth and social stability. 

And the cycle begins again with the millennial generation (1982-1998) which is predicted by Howe and Strauss in 1991 to be a civic generation. Though it's not agree what exact years make the millennial generation, I define the cohort as becoming an adult sometime before the end of the Obama presidency, 2016, but not before the year 2000, the millennium. The early millennials are born from the baby boomer idealist generation. Millennials grow up during the economic prosperity of the 80's and 90's, the end of the Cold War, and into the culture wars fought by the boomers. Millennials come of age after 9/11 and with economic challenges following the end of the 90s tech boom and the worldwide 2008 Great Recession. This is similar to the upbringing of the GI Generation in the 1920s prosperity and culture wars which was followed by the Great Depression and World War II. Millennials are for Howe and Strauss the  turning of the saeculum who will like the GI's define their century, the twenty first. 

As for the next generation after the millennials, whatever they will be called, Howe & Strauss' theory predicts an adaptive generation to come next: born in the 21st century and fully immersed in the Internet, social media, and the post-9/11 order. Whatever order millennials come up with, the next generation will probably work within and maintain it.

I think the generational archetype is a useful way for understanding history and even making predictions. It seems Jungian to me, not just in the use of archetypes but how dominant and recessive relate to Jung's anima and animus: the extrovert-introvert, masculine-feminine, and active-passive side of all our our natures. People will deride the generational archetype as unfalsifiable just as they would Jung's psychology, but I think it's pretty useful.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski

"So now you're a little crazy. No love. Everybody needs needs love. It's warped you"

"People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be."

"The Bible says, 'Love thy neighbor.'"

"That could mean to leave him alone. I'm going out to get a paper."

Factotum means something like jack of all trades, one who does all things.  

I liked this book better than Post Office, the first Bukowski novel I read. This work gives a wider, all around study into Bukowski's world through his subject Henry Chinaski who here goes through various vocations rather than one drudging.

Chinaski drifts through World War II America, coming back and forth from his home Los Angeles, working a series of blue collar jobs to support his writing, most of which is rejected. Chinaski isn't drafted and does not volunteer to serve in the war. He is only willing to work enough to finance drinking and sexual trysts. His parents, particularly his father, resent him for this disinterest and make him go out and find work to continue living at home. After leaving home, Chinaski goes through job after job and leaves Los Angeles and California several times but returns. Towards the end he is about to go to Bakersfield, where I'm from, to pick tomatoes, but there isn't room on the truck after he helps others on. At the end he goes to a strip club, where he can't get it up.

The central theme is work itself. Chinaski has little to offer others except his labor during the hours of the day. Chinaski finds no purpose except in working for others because he is a profoundly lonely man. His parents want nothing to do with him, he has no family of his own to support, doesn't belong or participate in any social organizations, and lives a purely material existence. The only pleasures in life are venal: sex and booze. There's nothing spiritual about it. Subjectivity in a world where interest in somebody else is the only way it all works. Work as a means to self satisfaction which doesn't last, and so work itself for him the only value. 

But there are worse things than being alone, the title of a Bukowski poem. And so Chinaski goes on, which is why we love him.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

I first saw Jonathan Haidt in a TED talk back in 2009 or so talking about the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of psychological differences. There does seem to be psychological and biological influence on people's political views as there is a consistent left-right divide in democracies throughout the world which usually make up the majority of the electorate. This was enlightening to me as the media often portrays the left right divide at best as a contest of ideas or at worst crass self-interest. That people may decide political views based on personality put things in perspective for me, and has given me a basic sort of humility towards those with different views who may be unaware of why they feel a certain way about things and aren't just bad people. It also means we ought to have an honest dialogue with others who may be predisposed to ideas which aren't in their interest and seek not to change their mindset but the conclusions they are motivated to reach.

As sensible as this view of morality and politics is to me, academia has taken a while to get there. Haidt has helped to revolutionize this moral psychology for the twenty first century, especially for a popular audience. Haidt in collaboration with professors and grad students of UVA, UCI, and USC runs the website YourMorals where you can take a quiz to gauge your own moral psychology, and further their research.

Haidt entered college in 1987 and became a professor at UVA in 1995. When Haidt started college, the reigning view of moral psychology was that morality was developed through reasoning with others on the universal foundations of care and harm. Jean Piaget came up with his famous theory of mental development, in which children self construct morality with other children linked to their understanding of the physical world. We have an egotistical understanding of the world early in life and learn empathy just as we learn object permanency, that things exist behind our perception of them. Lawrence Kohlberg came up with three stages of morality: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Before social conventions we act egotistically expecting others to provide for us, then we learn dependency on others and we take moral rules to be obedience to rules which is a sort of realism, and then we reach postconventional morality which is based on norms independent of the arbitrary commands of others. A student of Kohlberg Elliot Turiel argued that the values of harm and fairness were universals from which all moral rules were ultimately based on. These foundations were opposed to social convention and authority from earlier stages of mental development.

All of this fitted in nicely with the left-liberal worldview, confirming western notions of how humans think, and so dominated academia from the 70s to the 90s when Haidt came along. The cracks in this idealistic paradigm came Richard Schweder, a cultural anthropologist and advisor to Haidt who did some work in India. What he discovered was that in a non western culture like India there wasn't a clear dividing line between social convention and what is fair or harmful. He used a method of Turiel's, telling stories about individuals who break social rules and asked yes or no questions as to whether the behavior was justified. What Schweder did differently was to tell stories about behaviors not linked to harm and fairness. The results were that Americans thought the acts were permissible, and the Indians thought they weren't. The conclusion: "the moral order is a social order" given the difference between western and non western notions of the relation of individuals to society. Individualistic culture which the liberal view assumes has a clear diving line between social convention and harm/fairness while sociocentric cultures do not.

Turiel himself wrote a rebuttal essay claiming that the stories just had different meanings to different people but the underlying reasoning was the same. Something like disgust and disrespect are aspects of harm, as is adhering to social rules there respect is to fairness. Of course the question comes up whether there can be a case of morality not based on fair or harm which can actually falsify the theory. But research from other non western societies like Brazil bears important differences in what people think is socially acceptable, which can be very different from harm and fairness. So Shweder was on to something.

Further evidence against the reigning paradigm came from cognitive psychology. When asked why something non harmful like eating dogs or being a satanist is wrong, people rationalize their answers in favor of their preferences and not the other way around. People's preferences are formed by unconscious reactions to uncomfortable or ambiguous stimuli which is hardwired in the brain. The almond shaped amygdala supercharges the emotions of the limbic system, linked to hormones, to make quick judgements before the rational cortex has time to make a decision.

Political psychologists John Jost and Arie Kruglanski have proposed that the personality trait of openness predicts liberal and conservative attitudes. Conservatives are more likely to view unfamiliar or ambiguous behavior as threatening than liberals which confounds the line between social order and moral order. This is the subject of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney that came out the same year as Haidt's book, and is an excellent compliment.

The philosophers preceded the cognitive psychologists and so their views still set the debate today. A very influential view has been that reason is separate from emotional functioning, which has its adherents from Plato to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's metaphor was that of the two consuls of the Roman Republic who shared duties domestically and outside the country.

This view has been undercut by neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio who point toward two pieces of evidence. 1) brain damage to the prefrontal cortex affects emotional functioning. This was demonstrated by railroad worker Phineas Gage in the 19th century who was struck by a railroad spike in his left frontal cortex. He survived with his memory and intelligence intact but his behavior radically changed. He became more impulse and obstinate to the point where he was fired. 2) Split brain operations reveal how stimuli from one half affects the operation of the other half. The left half of the brain is involved in language and abstract reasoning and the right half is involved in spatial and recognition tasks. If a word is flashed to the left eye (controlled by the right hemisphere) the right side of the body (controlled by the left hemisphere) can act without any conscious awareness.

Even more evidence against the separation of reason and emotion came from behavioral economics. The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the late 1970s challenged rational choice models of decision making with bounded rationality. Individuals make shortcuts to decision making called heuristics, rules of thumb. Humans are cognitive misers, meaning they economize their own expenditure of reasoning and available data to patterns of thinking which are familiar. A common heuristic is availability: a preference for information readily available is preferred to what isn't. Heuristics are essentially intuitive and not rational and yet are a regular part of mental functioning.

Haidt's own moral theory from such research is that moral reasoning begins with intuition and reason comes second. His metaphor is of a rider on an elephant, the conscious yielding to the dictates of the unconscious. Haidt's model is the closest to the philosopher David Hume who said reason is slave to the passions. Before advances in cognitive science the disagreements between the philosophers continued on for centuries, but with all the aforementioned developments Hume won the debate. Now it's up to moral psychologists to build working models of this theory.

Haidt's own intitutive model of the mind gives six foundations for moral values, in addition to harm and fairness. These are:
1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating
3. Loyalty/betrayal
4. Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation
6. Liberty/oppression

Foundations 3-5 are inherently social values as distinct from 1 and 2. The first two are directly related to group authority and and not the individual. Foundation 6 was added to account for the uniqueness of libertarians, and is an inherently political value.

Conservatives score relatively evenly on all six foundations. Liberals score higher on care and fairness and less on the other foundations than conservatives. Libertarians score like conservatives on care and fairness, more like liberals on loyalty, authority, and purity, and higher on liberty than conservatives or liberals.

What Haidt's foundations suggest is that conservatism is the default mindset of most societies. Our moral existence is tied to our social existence rather than the more rational and universal values of care and fairness, which owe to our childhood dependency (care) and basic social existence (fairness) which we all go through. In the evolutionary past, it would have been adaptive to prefer those which serve the ingroup and those which serve an outgroup. Those who are more like us and follow the rules are going to help you and those who are different or outsiders could harm you.

Haidt's theory also means that conservatives are more able to understand liberal psychology than liberals are able to understand conservatives. Liberals have fewer dominant moral foundations. This doesn't bode well for our political discourse, as from the conservative perspective liberals are far more intolerant of conservative opinions than vice versa, especially when they have institutional power.

In the United States a plurality of voters since 1988 have described themselves as conservative, 40%. 20% describe themselves as liberal and most of the rest are somewhere in the middle. This doesn't always translate into conservative victory however. A majority of voters in exit polls in 2012 said they felt ideologically closer to Mitt Romney than Barack Obama, yet liberal Barack Obama won the popular vote. Other factors are at play, though it's safe to say most ideological conservatives vote Republican and most ideological liberals vote Democratic. What confounds psychological disposition is identity. Around 80-90% of black voters have voted for the Democratic Party since 1964. It isn't as if they are all psychologically liberal. Republicans have been confounded for decades in that much of the minority population holds conservative views on certain social issues but vote overwhelmingly Democrat. This is I think the limitation of the moral foundations theory, as politics in a democratic society confounds many of our expectations about human nature. Republicans are overwhelmingly self identified conservatives, as conservatives are more conscious of their ingroup identity, whereas liberals are only a plurality of Democrats.

Libertarians are pretty interesting in that they seem to operate on fewer moral foundations than liberals or conservatives. Libertarians seem to be the most tolerant in their view of what constitutes right and wrong but are also more narrow. This explains their view that government shouldn't do much else than protect individual's right to their own property, even if it isn't fair or it offends others. Paradoxically, libertarianism would work best in a society in which everybody is a libertarian, which would preclude a lot if not most people who would have to put up with what they see as wrong or evil. That's a hard bargain for a social and hierarchical species. That would require a "higher" and more limited level of moral reasoning than the foundations suggest.

In the final part of the book Haidt ventures outside of psychology into evolutionary theory to explain the process of how moral foundations came to be. This is the most contentious part of the book. Haidt defends group selection as the mechanism for moral sentiments. Haidt's metaphor is that humans are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. Moral foundations were adaptive to advance our own group versus others, and more moral groups won out. If this is true then the moral and social order are intertwined on a biological level.

The reigning view of Neo-Darwinism is of inclusive fitness: the gene is the level of selection which individual organisms exist to promote and altruism occurs toward kin who share genes and reciprocally to benefit oneself in return. Most mammals including our ape relatives operate with inclusive fitness. Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, termites) are eusocial, truly altruistic, sacrificing their interests for that of the hive. Eusociality is rare even among insects, but when achieved is very successful at least in terms of numbers. Haidt argues that humans have aspects of true altruism which are how moral sentiments evolved, not as unconscious motivations for the interest of our genes. Humans are intensely social in a way the apes aren't and have shared intentionality. Intelligence itself evolved to live in extended social groups some have argued.

There are I think two limits to this: 1) humans evolved in small groups of relatives with coercive altruism and 2) unlike hymenoptera we do not limit reproduction to a single queen or alpha pair. We are not as altruistic towards other people as we are towards our family or those who benefit us. Communism doesn't work well on a larger level than a commune of devoted (often religious) followers while markets have created a system of global economic integration based on self-interest. Group selection is a factor but I don't think is sufficient. Morality is a meme: a unit of evolution which can evolve, adapt, outcompete other memes and reproduce itself, all on a collective level, but it isn't itself biological. Moral memes are driven deep down by selfish genes. This doesn't mean that we don't behave altruistic or don't consciously believe in our ideals, but in a narrow way tailored towards certain interests often hidden to ourselves. We are chimps who try and imagine ourselves to be like bees.

Haidt gives us his own descriptive and normative view of morality: "moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self interest and make cooperative societies possible." He calls this "Durkheimian utilitarianism" which calls for a social order based on all the moral foundations, considering both the social nature of morality and the rationality of moral rules. Whatever works best, given the constraints of the social order. This definition is supposed to combine conservatism and liberalism, tradition and reason. This is I think very much an ideal view as people are going to believe in certain moral memes above others given their differences, and so content matters. We are social but essentially tribal and so its operation is going to be more than what "works" or is agreeable for all people. We have to make choices on moral memes which serve our own purposes, a view which identifies me as a conservative. And so to me Haidt's consilience between liberals and conservatives means he's a liberal.

I accept Haidt's moral psychology and I'm led to a pessimistic but I think realist conclusion regarding the book. Morality is rooted in intuitions from our physical makeup and evolutionary history which reason is the servant to. Because of this, the particular moral, cultural, religious and political memes we are attracted to are shaped by unconscious forces which may not be in our best interests. We can adopt memes which run counter to our individual natures, but we will face great difficulty. Though we promote honesty, fidelity, and nonviolence, nevertheless we do lie, cheat, and harm others if in our interests, conscious or not. Nevertheless we should respect the moral views of others as being due to personal differences and not intellectual defects. We should heed the words of Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene: "let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish." Quite a conservative view.

Another conclusion from Haidt's moral foundations is that the cultural Marxist meme that right wing political views are the result of an "authoritarian personality" is false. Conservatives simply have more or different moral concerns than liberals do, which are also oriented, consciously or not, towards the good of the group. Conservative individuals aren't selfish or unempathetic but put different values above or alongside care and fairness. The same goes for libertarians who value liberty very highly. It is left-liberals I expect that will be the most troubled by Haidt's moral psychology and he seems to have written it for them. Haidt unfortunately has come under vicious attack from cultural Marxists for being politically incorrect regarding the censorship of unpopular political views.

Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson

A serviceable biography of Darwin the man and his ideas. However Johnson has an ideological agenda. Johnson is a conservative Catholic who surprisingly to me accepts the theory of evolution, part of the reason I picked up this book other than that I'm a fan of his historical writings. Johnson really does think Darwin the man is a genius, and tells us about his good character and intellectual prowess. But even though he accepts evolution, he is very uncomfortable about drawing any implications from natural selection about the universe or human nature. He sharply criticizes the new atheists for critiquing religion and aiming to explain its origin through natural selection itself. Given all of that, those looking for a short basic biography of Darwin will be pleased but should be aware of Johnson's ulterior motives.

The source of Johnson's discomfort with natural selection is with Robert Malthus whom Johnson devoted several pages to attacking. This is odd because it was the population theory of Malthus, that population has a tendency unchecked to outgrow subsistence and eventually decrease to subsistence, that inspired both Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace to come up with natural selection independently. As Darwin wrote "Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die" which accords with the drive towards more population being selected into different levels of stability by the environment. It was Malthus who probably more than anyone else suggested a plausible mechanism to Darwin and Wallace that would answer how the transmutation of species occurred, as the idea of evolution had been around for a while but without such a plausible mechanism as natural selection.

Johnson's first problem with Malthus is that he didn't have much data in his essay on population. This is in contrast to Darwin who did volumes of research on barnacles and coral reefs before publishing his theory. But Malthus wrote his book for political reasons against radicals who thought want could be eliminated through a reordering of society. In 1798 the radical phase of the French Revolution was fresh in memory. Edmund Burke penned his Reflections on the Revolution in France at this time and founded modern Anglo conservatism, for much the same reasons as Malthus. As for the population principle, the reasoning behind it was mathematical. Population increases unchecked at a geometric rate and food at an arithmetic rate. The Fibonacci number sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 in which every number is the sum of the previous two numbers was originally proposed by Fibonacci as rabbit breeding. If a pair of rabbits give birth to another m/f pair and that pair itself gives birth the next generation, how many rabbits will there be in a year? 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144: a geometric increase. This assumes perfect conditions of no deaths and every pair being male and female but the math works out. As for subsistence, the amount of arable land is limited and requires subsistence to be paid to to cultivate it, which as population increases gives diminishing returns. Luckily advances in technology and farming techniques have increased productivity, but hundreds of millions remain in extreme poverty and consumption is highly unequal. Malthus did not predict imminent catastrophe as population could be controlled by preventing births, sometimes through coercive means like China's one child policy, and unfortunate conditions which keep up the death rate. World population has gone from under a billion in Malthus' day to 7 billion at the beginning of the 21st century, with the continuing increase coming from the third world as consumption has increased in the first, so the data was forthcoming.

Johnson's other beef with Malthus is that his thinking inspires social Darwinism and eugenics which used natural selection as justification. Malthus' theory is directly aimed at human society by giving a link between biology and social policy. Darwin is excoriated by Johnson for his Descent of Man which engages in some social Darwinian thinking. Darwin wasn't as good an anthropologist as biologist Johnson argues and worried about human population, such as opposing mass vaccination for disease to keep the population down. Darwin however didn't support contraception which would also keep the population down, reflecting his own Victorian views. Application of evolution to society before modern genetics often led to wrong conclusions, but social Darwinism was based more on Lamarckian evolution by acquired characteristics which is individualistic than natural selection by the environment. After all "social Darwinists" like Herbert Spencer who coined survival of the fittest wrote about evolution before the Origin of Species. Even eugenics which was pioneered by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was more about population statistics rather than biology. So Johnson's worry about the application of natural selection to society is mostly historical.

Nevertheless there are conclusions that Darwinism can draw about human nature and society which are scientifically sound. This has been the work of the sociobiologists and those inspired by them who come in different political stripes: Peter Singer on the left, EO Wilson on the liberal side, Matt Ridley on the libertarian side, and Thomas Fleming who is a Catholic paleoconservative. Marxists used to be champions of Darwinism, such as Joseph Stalin who upon reading The Descent of Man as a seminary boy became an atheist. However when Stalin became dictator of the USSR he suppressed genetic research which suggested evolution to be less progressive for the communist cause. than he wanted. Grounding ideology on Darwinism gives it a very different perspective, but nonetheless different interpretations have been done, usually highlighting certain aspects above others. Malthus himself inspired stricter poor laws in the nineteenth century, but also environmentalists in the twentieth.

As for religion, Darwin's theories do weaken its claims and religious faith, as it did for Darwin himself. What Darwin's theories did was to restrict the domain of what religion could explain. The Copernican theory of heliocentrism did that to the Catholic Church in physics, Thomas Lyell's geology did it to the biblical age of the Earth calculated by Bishop Ussher, and Darwin's natural selection did it to human to human origins in Genesis. Johnson's own Catholicism merged Christianity with classical philosophy, and the challenge the latter has weakened the former. If religion continues, it will be for transcendental questions which science can't yet explain or ever will, such as the existence of God or the afterlife. We shouldn't fear Darwin in the humanities and social sciences because we thought those up, often from secular thinkers like Aristotle whom the Catholic church relied upon. We no longer invoke religion to the conduct of physics because it isn't necessary and the scientific method has given us better results than human reasoning from dogma. Good and bad ideas will still survive.

Moses and Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism was Freud's last book before he died in 1939. Freud claims that Moses was actually an Egyptian who brought the monotheistic sun worship of Akhenaton to the Hebrew slaves after the fall of the eighteenth dynasty and the restoration of the old Egyptian pagan religion. Monotheism then is the invention of the priest class of ancient Egypt. The specific God of the Jewish people Yahweh is adopted from aspects of a volcanic God worshiped by Semitic peoples the Hebrews reunited with. This occurred after Freud claims Moses was murdered by his own people while they were in the desert, a claim which is central to the book. The murder of Moses became the defining event of the Jewish religion. Through guilt for this repressed event, Moses became the central figure of the Yahweh religion and was adopted as Hebrew by birth, rather than Egyptian. Additionally the idea of the messiah promised a return of the murdered savior. The adoption of monotheism shaped Jewish culture away from worship of God in anthropomorphic or animist forms and led to a unique culture.

The evidence marshaled for this revision of history is mostly historical, with insights from Freud's own psychoanalytic theory.

Egypt did have a monotheistic sun god religion under Akhenaton in the 14th century BCE, and the exodus did occur during the eighteenth dynasty, though the dates don't coincide from official interpretations. Nevertheless given how along ago the event was, it is possible. The lack of an afterlife in early Judaism is also shared with the Egyptian religion. Osiris the ruler of the underworld was omitted as it undermined the rule of a single deity.

A major piece of evidence, given Freud's preoccupation with the phallus and castration, is that of the Jewish tradition of circumcision, which the Egyptians did first and he argues was carried over by Moses and his monotheistic religion. The Babylonians and Semites he points out weren't circumcised. Circumcision for Freud is a sign of being the children of Egyptian religion and adds to the sense of being a chosen people, who alone continued Egyptian monotheism.

Moses' name Freud claims is Egyptian, coming from mose which means child. This is in contrast to the mainstream interpretation that Moses is Hebrew for "drawn from the water." However it was an Egyptian princess who supposedly discovered Moses in the Nile, and it is unlikely she would have a knowledge of Hebrew for such a specific name, making the story mythical. This story is very similar to that of Sargon the founder of Babylon 2800 BC who was also put in a basket by his mother into a river to be discovered by Akki, the drawer of water  (Genesis and Exodus was probably written after the Jews were taken to Babylon. A parallel of Noah's ark is also found in the Epic of Gilgamesh). Founding patriarchs like Romulus and Cyrus usually have incredible legends attached to them. So rather than being of Hebrew birth, Moses was born into Egyptian nobility.

The claim that Yahweh is patterned on a volcanic God is still held by some atheists today. Moses supposedly came in contact with this religion while in exile at Qades after killing an Egyptian who he witnessed beating a Hebrew slave. While there he married the daughter of Jethro, a Midian priest and spoke to Yahweh alone at the burning bush. When the Hebrews left Egypt and reunited with the other Semitic people's they adopted aspects of the volcanic God with the Egyptian God. The imagery of a pillar of fire by night and pillar of smoke by day leading them through the desert speaks to volcanic activity. There aren't any active volcanoes in the Sinai however, so it would have been imported from somewhere else, making the argument speculative.

The claim that Moses was murdered by his people in exile came from biblical scholar Ernst Sellin who found indirect evidence in scripture, but it is mostly speculation. Moses died without entering the promised land, though he was allowed to peer at it. His death was at the hands of God. Apparently the reason Moses wasn't to enter the promised land was that he disobeyed God's order to speak to a rock to deliver water, and instead hit it with his staff. "Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them” (Numbers 20:8-12). He was 120 years old, but still in good health. It is not known where Moses' body is buried, so we don't know the cause of death.

The reason for Moses' murder would be that the Semitic people were tired of the strict monotheism foisted on them from Egypt and would prefer to reunite with the other Semitic people and their volcanic religion. The worship of the idol when Moses received the Ten Commandments was a sign of this fatigue of a strict religion. The bible says that the 40 years in the desert was due to a lack of faith that they could conquer the people living in Canaan. God planned on wiping them out, but upon intervention by Moses instead decided that none of this doubting generation would be allowed into the promised land. After forty years they all died in exile. As the first generation died off he would have less support and more resentment from the young from having to live under harsh conditions.

The murder of Moses would have been forgotten except among the literate priest class. A distortion of his death, the circumstances which are unusual, would allow Moses' memory to be preserved among the population as the liberator or the Jewish people from bondage and lawgiver. At some point the Semitic Yahweh would become the God of the Aton religion and so its and Moses' origins would be concealed. This would make the only God of monotheism belong to a single people, rather than being universal.

The murder of Moses by his people on the desert is central to Freud's larger theory of the murder of the primordial father as the origin of religion, which takes up a good portion of the book. For Freud the power of religion could only be due to neurosis from the traumatic event of the murder of the father to keep reoccurring throughout myths and art, just as neurotics cannot get over past trauma and engage in repetitive irrational behaviors. Back in our evolutionary history, humans lived in a polygamous horde headed by an alpha male who had exclusive access to females. Freud got this from remarks of Darwin about gorillas who live in such a social structure. One day, the sons including those in exile and castrated joined together and murdered the father. Though freed from oppressive rule, they felt tremendous remorse for the act and the lack of a single authority figure. And so religion was established from the longing for the father though without his actual existence. Presumably every boy grows up with this hatred of the father due to this evolutionary heritage, and so the conflict is born again and again to be socialized away. Nevertheless these feelings power the need for religion and manifest in different ways.

Judaism is unique because it claimed God had a chosen people, who defined the religion by their adherence to moral principles and not by graven images. Freud claims that this allowed the Jews to repress the aggression and remorse which inspire external wish fulfillment and instead advance culturally and intellectually. This is also what made monotheism a mass religion instead of an elite one as in Egypt, as the transcendent God of monotheism is an intellectual advance to the pagan gods.

Christianity which is not tied to a single ethnic group brings back the repressed memory of the death of the father and offers individual salvation. Christianity originated the doctrine of original sin and made confrontation with the repressed necessary. Because of this Freud thinks Christianity is regressive but potentially progressive if the repressed can be dealt with properly. Islam is mentioned only briefly, as a less profound imitation of Judaism. Gaining an all powerful God inspired self-confidence and great successes for the Arab people given the rapidity of its spread. But Islam came to be in recent history and lacks the mystery of its own origins (Judaism) or the centrality of the death of its founder (Christianity).

It is helpful to consider Nietzsche's writings on the Jewish religion in comparison to Moses and Monotheism to account for the spread of monotheism. In the Antichrist Nietzsche argues that the Jewish religion was originally essentially a tribal religion reflecting the pride and achievements of their own people, much like Freud's opinion of Islam. This Judaism reflected "master morality." But the subjugation under Rome made the Jews an oppressed, powerless people. The Jewish religion became resentful of power and adopted slave morality, the worship of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed reflecting their own condition. Asceticism, a mark of slave morality, comes naturally from monotheism with its transcendent nature. The monotheist God is incompatible with the pagan pantheon and so could not be assimilated. This incompatibility of values created a division between absolute good and evil removed from the superiority of their own people versus others, and turned into a moralistic creed of slave values masquerading as God's law. That Judaism was originally a tribal religion accords with Freud's account of Yahweh's origin in volcanic god worship. Drawing from the monotheist idea would've justified the repression necessary to impart slave values to former master civilizations like Rome, which Nietzsche talks about in Genealogy of Morals. Monotheism does seem to be an intellectual product of a comfortable ruling/priest class, seen in ancient Egypt and neo-Platonism, and adding slave morality would have made it truly universal and account for its rapid spread. 

Monotheism seems to be a combination of the intellect and power of self restraint of the upper class with the morals and lifestyle of the lower class, meant for a universal audience. This is how monotheism took over much of he world.

Freud was an atheist as well as ethnically Jewish, so maybe his purpose in writing this book was to exonerate Jews as an ethnic group from a religion he argues originated as an imposition from another people under impulses which govern us all. Freud was not a Zionist but was sensitive towards the treatment of Jewish people in Europe. The Vienna of his time saw rising anti-Semitism by the end of the century which closed off the opportunities hoped for with liberal political rule after the revolutions of 1848. Freud intensely disliked the Catholic Church and the Hapsburg monarchy, refusing to toff his hat to the emperor while at university. The church was the successor to the Roman Empire which destroyed the Jewish temple and defeated the Semitic Hannibal in the Punic war (Freud himself thought he was fated to never see Rome like Hannibal). It had been the feudal successors to Rome which oppressed the Jews and resisted the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. The French Revolution freed Jews from the ghettos and the conquests of Napoleon spread enlightenment ideals to Central Europe. Freud thought of his ideas as continuing what Copernicus and Darwin had done to undermine the medieval worldview. Through his psychological theories, Freud hoped to replace religion with a scientific human nature which would justify a social order based on reason, in fulfillment of the enlightenment.

Unfortunately Freud had to flee Vienna at the end of his life when Hitler invaded Austria and spent his last days in Britain, whose freedom raised the hopes of Voltaire for a new social order. Several of Freud's relatives died in concentration camps. The year World War II began, Freud died of a doctor assisted suicide of morphine injection. Had he lived, he would have seen great destruction in Europe but also the fall of fascism and the tremendous impact of his ideas.