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gliklofhameln · 3 years

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The key to the story of the first humans lies in a sequence of three sentences at the end, whose juxtaposition seems to make no sense at all. They begin with Adam’s curse for having eaten the forbidden fruit:

‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’

The man named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

(Genesis 3:19-21)

What is the connection between mortality (’to dust you will return’) and the man giving a new name to his wife? And what is the connection between that and God making the couple garments of skin, as if he were giving them a gift as they left the garden?

To understand the passage we have first to realise that it is not a myth but a philosophical parable about language and relationships, the difference between species and individuals, nouns and names, and about what lifts the relationship between husband and wife from the biological to the anthropological, from animal reproduction to human relationship and love.

The story of the first humans in Genesis 2 begins with God giving Adam the ability to use language to classify things. He names the animal: ‘Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.’ He sorts and labels them as species. But human beings do not function at the level of species. They are conscious of themselves as unique individuals. They are not merely alone, a physical state. They can also feel lonely, a psychological state. So, ‘for the man no suitable helper was found’. He is not alone, but he is lonely. Animals form species; humans are individuals.

God then creates a partner for man. But if we listen carefully to the poem he speaks on seeing her for the first time, we note something odd: ‘She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.’ He names the woman as he named the animals. He uses a generic noun. She is ‘woman’, not a person but a type. She is ‘taken out of man’, ‘helper to man’, but not an individual with her own fears and feelings. Adam does not understand her otherness. She is, for him, merely his mirror image: ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’.

Eve rebels against this by striking out on her own. The conversation she has with the serpent is the first conversation she has. Adam has spoken about her but not to her. She eats the forbidden fruit. She gives some to her husband, who also eats. She has become the prime mover in the relationship, but still they have not spoken.

Then comes the discovery of their sin. God confronts them both. Each responds by denying responsibility. Adam blames the woman. The woman blames the serpent. Still they are talking about self and other as if they are not free and choosing individuals, but mere things caught up in the forces that operate on things.

Then Adam suddenly hears that he is mortal. Dust he is, and to dust he will return. Suddenly Adam understands the difference between individual and species. Species live on; individuals die. There was a world before we were born, there will be a world after we die, but we will not be here to see it. In the knowledge of our mortality we discover our individuality.

But if Adam is an individual, so is the woman. And God has said to the woman, ‘With pain you will birth to children.’ Within the curse is a blessing. Humans may be mortal, but something of them survives their death, namely children. But children are born only when man and woman are joined in a bond of love. That is when Adam gives his wife the name Chavah, Eve, meaning ‘mother of all life’. The point is not which name, but the fact that it is a name, not a noun. Species have nouns, individuals have names. The woman is now, for the man, not ‘woman’, but Eve. Adam has discovered personhood, uniqueness, individuality, and thus the difference between biology and anthropology. Animals form species, humans are individuals. Animals mate, humans relate. Animals reproduce, humans beget. Animals have sex, humans have love.

The rabbis said that Adam became the first penitent and was forgiven. God then shows kindness to the couple by making them garments of skin. The rabbis said that they were made of snakeskin, as if to say: The very thing that led you to sin (the serpent) will now protect you. Your physicality, which first caused you embarrassment, can be made holy when transmuted into love and sanctified by a bond of trust. Far from ending on a note of condemnation, it ends on a note of divine grace.

The story teaches us about language and love, and about the difference between biological reproduction — a property of the species — and the human family, which is always made up of individuals who are more and other than their similarities. Even clothing, which God endorses with his gift, signals that we are not naked and transparent to one another. There is a part of each of us that always remain hidden. In Hebrew the word chavah, Eve, also has the meaning of ‘hidden’.

There are two subtle hints in the narrative that this is what the story is about. The first, often confused in translation, is that the text speaks throughout of ha-adam, ‘the man’, not adam, ‘Adam’, which is, like Eve, a proper name. ‘The man’ becomes Adam only when ‘the woman’ becomes Eve.

The second is that the name of God changes too. In Genesis I, God is called Elohim, a noun meaning roughly ‘the totality of forces operative in the universe’. In Genesis 2 — 3, he is called Hashem-Elokim, and in Genesis 4, immediately after the Adam-Eve story, he is called Hashem alone. Hashem is God’s proper name, just as Adam is Adam’s and Eve, Eve’s. Our experience of God mirrors our experience of other people. When we relate to other people as persons, we relate to God as a person. Or, to put it differently, God as Hashem is the transcendental reality of interpersonal relations. We love God through loving other people. That is the only way.

The story of the forbidden fruit and the Garden of Eden is less a story about sin, guilt and punishment and more about the essential connection between mortality, individuality and personhood. In one sense it is a pre-emptive refutation of the neo-Darwinism argument that we are all just animals, selfish replicators. We are precisely not animals, not because we are biologically unique — they and we are mere dust of the earth; nor because we have immortal souls — we may, but they are wholly absent from the narrative. We are not animals because we are self-conscious, because we are aware of each other as individuals, and because we are capable of forming relationships of trust. We have culture, not just nature; anthropology, not just biology.

It is also a parable about otherness. Adam’s poem about ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’ sounds beautiful, but it leads to moral failure because it fails to acknowledge the otherness of the other. Until Eve is Eve, not merely ‘woman’, the man does not know who she is.

The biblical word da’at, ‘knowledge’, does not mean in Hebrew what it is normally taken to mean in the West, namely knowledge of facts, theories, systems and truths. It means interpersonal knowledge, intimacy, empathy. The ‘tree of knowledge’ is about this kind of knowledge. True knowledge that the other is not a mirror image of me, that he or she has wants and needs of her own that may clash with mine, is the source of all love and all pain. To know that I am known makes me want to hide: that is the couple’s first response after eating the fruit. The turning point comes when the man gives Eve a proper name. Love is born when we recognise the integrity of otherness. That is the meaning of love between people. It is the meaning of love between us and God. Only when we make space for the human other do we make space for the divine Other.

God created the world to make space for the otherness that is us.

— Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l, in The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

#jumblr #judaism #rabbi lord jonathan sacks #myposts #bereshit

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wolfandpravato · 7 years

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Rousseau on human evolution: vindicated by modern science

This is the second post about my recently published book, “Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).”

The deepest root of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opposition to Enlightenment political thought can be traced to his views on the state of nature, which are set out most openly in his “Discourse on Inequality.” For modern social contract thinkers such Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the state of nature is the condition in which people like us find themselves before governments are instituted or where they have stopped operating. Rousseau believed this was extremely misleading because it assumes that what we are now we are by nature.

For Rousseau, the nature of man is not an observable phenomenon. Instead, it is something that lies hidden beneath layers of characteristics acquired through our social lives, including the most important of all social institutions, human speech. The true state of nature is the condition men were in before being shaped by social life into the strange and unique animal that we are.

A century before Charles Darwin, Rousseau recognized that physical evolution must have occurred during the history of our species. He also recognized that no one yet had sufficient data from comparative anatomy and the observations of naturalists to allow solid reasoning about what we call speciation. Accordingly, he provisionally assumes that humans have always been animals whose bodies looked the way we look today.

He is nonetheless completely confident that the souls of our ancestors were very different from ours. Lacking speech — i.e., compositional languages in which a limited number of symbols, used according to grammatical rules, enable us to generate an unlimited number of expressions of unlimited complexity — our distant ancestors could not have been fundamentally different from other animals.

The state of nature, according to Rousseau, no longer exists, and it cannot be recovered. It was an articulated period of time during which changes in the physical environment pushed our forebears to adapt by cooperating with one another more than they had in the past. Rousseau presents a frankly conjectural account of the stages through which mankind probably passed.

In the first stage, he imagines that adults lived largely in solitude except for females who cared for their children until they were able to take care of themselves. Eventually, males and females began to live together and share the care of children. When a number of these families began to interact on a regular basis, tribes were formed in which life maintained a fair mean between the indolent solitude of the primitive state and the petulant activity of civilized man’s amour propre. This was the last stage of the state of nature, and Rousseau regarded it as “the happiest epoch and the most durable.” The state of nature ended when a right of property in land was recognized.

Rousseau was apparently the first to suggest that humans developed from ape origins, which is remarkable when one considers how little information he had even about the extant apes. Life in each of Rousseau’s stages of evolution corresponds remarkably well with the life of a great ape that has only recently been carefully studied: Orangutans live much like Rousseau’s earliest humans, gorillas live in isolated patriarchal family groups, and chimpanzees are cooperative and contentious hunter-gatherers like people in Rousseau’s last stage of the state of nature. This suggests that our fundamental ape nature lent itself to all these possibilities.

Modern science has concluded that we are descended from an arboreal ape that lived in African rainforests before environmental changes forced their kind to adapt to a colder and dryer environment. Scientists know nothing about the lives of those extinct animals, who might have lived like the orangutans found in tropical rainforests today. Even if the common ancestor that we share with the great apes in fact lived more like gorillas or chimpanzees, Rousseau’s main point stands: We have ancestors who lacked the distinctive human institution of compositional language, and thus were not truly human.

There is a great deal that scientists do not know about the lives of our early forebears, but they have learned something from the fossil record and genetic analysis, and some inferences can be drawn from the behavior of other primates. With respect to the origin of the most important distinguishing human characteristic, namely speech, almost nothing at all is known.

Suggestive evidence has been found, and scientists have offered a variety of speculative theories, but none of those theories has been scientifically confirmed. In the “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” Rousseau offers his own speculative account, which turns out to be quite consistent with the limited evidence we now have.

Rousseau saw in Plato’s “Cratylus” a recognition that human language always incorporates questionable assumptions, some of which originate from human passions. He then undertakes an investigation of the interrelationships between passions and intellectual enlightenment in the genesis of languages, an investigation that is meant as a serious version of the ironic speculations about etymologies in the “Cratylus.”

Very briefly stated, Rousseau argues that verse, songs and speech had a common origin and were initially indistinguishable. Conventional languages originated from a prelinguistic need or desire to communicate, persuade and form bonds in relatively small groups. As language was increasingly adapted to the communication of complex ideas, a separation of music and speech gradually arose.

There are natural limits on how well language can serve its original functions of persuading and bonding while becoming less musical, and Rousseau believed that European languages have lost much of their ability to serve those functions.

Rousseau did not believe that we can return to the healthy freedom of what he called “the happiest epoch, and the most durable,” or that this tribal life was without its inherent tensions. Nor did he imagine that we can reconstitute languages containing the optimal blend of intellectual sophistication and musicality (an example of which he saw in Homer). What he does maintain is that understanding where we came from and how we got here can help us to be guided by nature in dealing with our current situation. The remainder of my book begins to explore Rousseau’s efforts to set forth that guidance.

[Nelson Lund is guest-blogging this week.]

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/01/03/rousseau-on-human-evolution-vindicated-by-modern-science/

#Law #Lawyer

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bloggerthannothing · 3 years

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Book #5: The Moral Animal

Flammable undiagrammable sentiments pass between animal beings

Hard to explain but it’s plain that I love you for psychological reasons

- I Love You for Psychological Reasons, They Might Be Giants

The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright (1994), is a book that evokes a wide variety of emotions. It tells you that love and friendship and altruism are real and are written into our collective soul, but that these wonderful things were built to serve ultimately selfish ends.

Put more plainly, The Moral Animal is a book about evolutionary psychology. It explains love, marriage, family, friendship, altruism, and morality as byproducts of natural selection maximizing the inclusive fitness of genes.

If that spooks you, don't worry, Wright has noticed the skulls here. In the early twentieth century, a Darwinian view of human psychology and society ("Social Darwinism") was used to justify poverty and genocide, because those who were poor or sick or a minority were thought simply unfit to survive, and ought to be weeded out by the Benevolent Invisible Hand of Nature.

Wright takes great pains to stress the extent to which this book and Darwinism in general do not support Social Darwinism. He goes over the naturalistic fallacy: that what is true in nature does not tell us what is good or moral. He stresses, again and again, that whatever the "natural state" of humans is, it has little bearing on what our values should be.

That's not to say the influence of evolution is unimportant. We have to understand reality as it is now in order to make it how we want it to be. To the extent that egalitarianism, liberty, and kindness are unnatural, we want to know why and how, so that we can more effectively bring them about.

Even further, Wright finds that evolution created humans to be heavily adaptable to circumstances. In a lot of ways, a belief that evolution built human psychology only increases the relevance of environmental and social interventions to avoid things like crime and poverty.

With all of that said, let's begin.

II.

The book is divided into four sections. The first deals with romance, sex, love, and marriage.

The fundamental insight that this section revolves around is that the optimal reproductive strategy for female organisms (here used to mean "organisms that have egg cells") is different from that of male organisms (here used to mean "organisms that have sperm cells"). This is because of a biological asymmetry between the investment required in offspring production by each sex.

Egg cells require far more investment - in mammals, think of the weeks or months that pregnancy takes. Sperm cells, on the other hand, only need to fertilize an egg cell, a process which might take a male fifteen minutes (or less). As a result, male organisms have way more potential offspring than a female organism.

From an evolutionary perspective, this means that the best strategy for a female organism seeking to maximize its inclusive genetic fitness is to invest many resources in the raising of few offspring. Conversely, the best strategy for a male organism is to create as many offspring as possible.

With this fact in mind, Wright looks at codes of conduct that arose around male and female sexualities. He finds that a variety of cultures came upon similar ideas: that males generally put a lot of effort into having sex with a wide variety of women, and try to avoid commitment to any of them, and that females put a lot of effort into discerning which males will stick around to help raise the offspring. [1]

Wright also puts forth the idea that genetically optimal male jealousy and female jealousy are very different. Male jealousy would be built to avoid spending resources on offspring that are not the male's, and so focus its anger at sexual infidelity. Conversely, female jealousy would be built to avoid the male spending resources on other females and other females' offspring. For this reason, female jealousy would place its ire on emotional infidelity.

Something like this would explain why so many societies place value in young females' virginity. In the past (and in the present) males tended to wield disproportionate political and societal power, and got to decide the rules. So of course they would make rules that are in their own interest, such as "any woman who secretly has sex with another man will be shamed and outcast". [2]

Nothing in the process requires anyone to consciously decide to maximize inclusive fitness; they're just following mental processes which evolved to do that in the ancestral environment of small hunter-gatherer societies. Humans are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers.

But doesn't the existence of monogamy contradict this idea? Why would a bunch of males agree to only reproduce with one female each, when it's in their genetic interest to reproduce with as many as possible?

Wright's answer is that monogamy emerges in less-stratified societies, where rich/high-status men don't have enough power (social or otherwise) to monopolize females. In other words, monogamy is a compromise between men to distribute reproductive opportunity somewhat evenly. In highly unequal societies, males who can do so are more than willing to have as many wives (or female sex partners) as possible, hence polygyny.

Another product of this insight relates to competitiveness. For a male, competition can be the difference between having 1 kid and 10 kids. The difference between maximum and minimum genetic payoff would be smaller for females, due to the larger investment required in each offspring, so we'd expect to see a lower propensity for competition. This isn't to say that they'd have no propensity for competition - females still competed in the ancestral environment - just that the optimal amount of effort to put into competition would be lower for females than for males.

III.

The second part of the book deals with family and friends, and why natural selection would cause us to care about them. The answer for family is "kin selection", and the answer for friends is "reciprocal altruism".

Kin selection makes sense once you realize that evolution works at the level of the gene, not at the level of an individual organism. A gene is naturally selected to favor its survival, not necessarily the survival of the organism carrying it. As long as more copies of the gene get made and propagated in the end, the success of any organism in particular is negotiable.

Because siblings have a high level of genetic similarity to one another, it makes sense for genes to "want" an organisms' siblings to survive and prosper. Thus, we get love between siblings, which causes people to act in ways that increase the chance of siblings surviving and, eventually, reproducing.

This line of logic takes you surprisingly far. Wright examines insect colonies which act like perfect hiveminds, where the good of the group comes before all, and finds that members of these species have an unusually high level of genetic similarity to their siblings. Thus, it benefits genes to encourage acting "selflessly" with respect to individual organisms, because from the gene's perspective, two organisms with the exact same genes are identical. This is why some ants are content to spend their lives literally being a door - if a gene causes one in one hundred copies of the gene to sacrifice itself to let ninety-nine copies of the gene survive, that's a big net gain from the perspective of the gene.

Okay, what about friendship? Why would we form bonds with people who have little or no genetic relationship to us? Because we can benefit from it, of course. Helping other people can cause them to help you in the future. Most people intuitively run something like the "tit for tat" strategy: initially be helpful to others, and then treat them as they treat you. If someone rips you off, you're not going to be inclined to be helpful to them later on. If someone does you a good turn, you feel a need to pay them back somehow. Reciprocal altruism.

In the 1980s, Robert Axelrod ran tournaments simulating iterated prisoner's dilemmas between agents running a variety of different decision algorithms. The "tit for tat" algorithm did the best, indicating that short-term selflessness can easily translate into long-term self-interest.

From this perspective, "friends" are people we have entered into long-term iterated prisoner's dilemmas with. We expect them to cooperate with us, and they expect us to cooperate with them. Because of non-zero-sumness, both friends can expect to gain in the long term even if they lose out on individual choices.

Our genes, Wright proposes, eventually noticed this fact and inclined us to cooperate with others.

IV.

The third part of the book deals with status, signaling, and self-deception.

The previous section on reciprocal altruism elided an important distinction. From the perspective of the gene, the active ingredient in reciprocal altruism isn't actually doing the reciprocating. The important part is making other people think that you will do the reciprocating, and thus convincing them to cooperate with you.

The more expensive cooperating is, and the easier it is to fool other people, the greater the incentive to appear more selfless than we are. As long as other people believe that we are selfless, then they will cooperate with us. This is the evolutionary origin of lying, stretching the truth, embellishment, and so on.

But our genes are in competition with other genes. A gene that lets its host organism get taken advantage of by liars wouldn't do very well. So genes started to evolve mechanisms for lie-detection, and an arms race began between liars and lie-detectors.

What's the most convincing way to lie? To believe what you are saying. Natural selection would have the end result of people preferentially believing things that favor their own interests. In other words, involuntary self-deception. Example: rich people seem to genuinely believe that lower taxes are for the best. Whether or not that's true, it's certainly in their interest to believe it. That makes it easier for them to convince others.

As conceived of by Wright, 'social status' emerged as a shortcut for organisms to avoid costly fights for which the outcome is already known. If A will beat B in a fight and take all of B's food 80% of the time, then it is in both of their interests to skip the actual fight itself and just have B give A 80% of their food. Each party ends up with the same amount of food, on average, but both parties save the time and energy they would have spent fighting. Imagine this process occurring between dozens of individual organisms, all living in the same "community", and a sort of collective "social status" emerges.

Of course, for us humans, social status is much less about physical power and more about social power and access to resources. Despite this, the underlying mechanics remain the same: a brief period of conflict to estimate the "strength" of the other person, and then an assignment of relative "status" that allows both of you to skip the conflict and accept some unequal division of resources. Those resources can be basically anything, as long as it would have helped you in the ancestral environment. From this, we get behaviors such as self-interested groveling to or the domination of others, depending on whether they're above or below you on the totem pole respectively.

You might wonder how this inequality can coexist with the ubiquity of Tit for Tat in human psychology. Isn't Tit for Tat all about fairness? Not exactly. It can still be in the interest of someone (or their genes) to accept a deal where the other party gets 80% of the payoff and they get only 20%, as long as that 20% is better than whatever they would get otherwise. If engaging in conflict risks long term injury or death or permanent consignment to a low caste, then that safe 20% starts to look pretty good.

And if status is so important, we should have a lot of mental machinery put into acquiring it. As Wright puts it, the main purpose of friendship is mutual aid in status competitions. This makes a surprising amount of sense: think about common story tropes. What could be more villainous than a street rat who, after years of living hand-to-mouth with his tight-knit gang, gets a lucky break into the upper class, only to forget about and forsake his companions?

From natural selection's point of view, we would want to discourage that kind of behavior as much as possible. Dante put traitors in the deepest layer of hell. We want maximum trustworthiness (from others) in iterated prisoner's dilemmas.

This is where moralism comes from. Our vocal cries about treachery, our indignation, is a social signal to others that "hey, we can be trusted not to defect, we hate defectors, come cooperate with us!"

And of course, things we say are more convincing if we really believe them. This is how the moral animal came to be. The animal who sacrifices itself for others, who holds honesty and selflessness in the highest esteem, who always seeks (or appears to seek) their own betterment only to serve the common cause of humanity.

After internalizing the book's thesis, not being an evil sexist-racist-whateverist Social Darwinist almost seems like the easy part.

I mean, how do you live your life knowing that the things you care about the most, each grimace and muttered curse under your breath, your own most intricate and private agonies, were all crafted for the primary purpose of getting you to acquire social status and resources to further the interests of your genes? What the fuck do you do with that?

…

The final section of the book is about morality. What it means, what it can mean, to be "moral" in light of all this.

Wright's answer, like Darwin's, is simple: happiness is good, pain is bad. Whatever trickery is going on behind the scenes of our minds, this basic insight remains.

Yes, we only came to care about morality because of genetic self-interest. But we actually do care about it. We can come to reflective equilibrium regarding our "implicit values," and pursue whatever values that reflection produces. The only other options are explicitly pursuing natural selection's values (an evil idea if there ever was one) or total nihilism. Taken to its logical conclusion, the happiness-good-pain-bad principle implies something like all-consuming egalitarian utilitarianism. Universal love as preached by Jesus, Buddha, and cactus people.

This runs contrary to the traditional notion of retributive Justice - people who commit horrific crimes ought to be punished, right?

Sort of. This inherent value of justice evolved because it generates game theoretical deterrence of non-optimal behavior, but individuals often pursue Justice past the point of rationality into senseless cruelty. Wright says we ought to focus on the empirical reality of deterring and preventing crime, over our moral notions of "retribution."

VI.

The last pages of the book deal with determinism and its consequences. Not just genetic determinism, as you might think, but all determinism. As Wright puts it, whether it is our genes or our childhood or our socioeconomic conditions or random noise or some combination of it all that decides our actions, the end result is the same: very little of our good or bad actions can be attributed to "free will" with a straight face.

If a murderer's rage, a cheater's urges, and a thief's greed are all understood to be mechanical outcomes resulting from biochemistry and game theory, then surely we should not judge those people. We ought to pity them as victims of their circumstances, and work to create a society where those circumstances come about less often.

...but there's a problem. "Creating a society where those circumstances come about less often" involves judging people! The whole point of this book is that we're often subconsciously checking to see what we can get away with, how harshly we will be judged for acting selfishly in certain ways. So if we actually took Wright's initial advice, and avoided social judgement of others, and cooperated with everyone all of the time, then we'd get a bunch of stealing and cheating and everything would be terrible.

So we have to continue to socially sanction people, to muster up anger and indignation for game-theoretic reasons, while also knowing that empirically, they're about as morally responsible for what they're doing as a boulder is for rolling down a hill. Wright realizes the magnitude of this challenge, but he has no silver bullet to overcome it.

I'm not any more sure about the question than Wright was, but I think efforts to teach everyone about the game theory behind our intuitions about the "morality" are a major step in the right direction.

I can't find it now, but I remember a few years ago, there was a website that had a whole interactive set up which let you see for yourself how tit-for-tat and cooperation can be in everyone's best interests, even selfish individuals. Perhaps enough projects like that, over the course of a couple generations, can craft us a "public conscience" which is as merciful as it can afford to be, but no more, and as Just as it needs to be, but no more.

For our sake, I hope so.

VII.

Here's a collection of random related thoughts and facts.

-Is being an effective altruist who values all humans equally an escape from the selfishness of genes? Maybe not. The relevant equation for "organism-level altruism" of a gene is C vs B * R: cost of altruism to the organism giving it versus benefit times the genetic relatedness of the organism receiving it.

The point of effective altruism is that you can get way, way more B for a lower C, if you direct your attention far away. And this definitely lowers R - I'm barely related to some random person in Japan or India or Mozambique. But R is not zero. In fact, all humans share a ton of genes.

So perhaps effective altruism isn't an escape from the genetic-self-interest calculation behind altruism - it's just an unusual way of maximizing it.

-Darwin spent several years being really into barnacles.

-A big prediction of this book is that people learn fast/slow life strategies based on their early developmental environments, but this recent study finds evidence against that.

Relatedly, my general "feeling" about this book is high confidence in the importance of a Darwinian perspective on psychology, paired with a deep skepticism of psych studies in general, especially mid-twentieth century ones. I'm concerned this puts me in the hypocritical position of "thinking this stuff is correct and important while not strongly supporting any particular predictions it makes," but I don't have anything better.

Footnotes

[1] If true, all of this would predict that males (AMAB people) would tend to have a lower level of "romanticism" (because romanticism was less often in their interest), and that females (AFAB people) would tend to have a lower level of sexual desire (because frequent sex was less often in their interest). And recently identities like "asexual" and "aromantic" have become more popular. Do we see the expected trend?

According to the abstract of this paywalled paper which was the first google result I found, the asexual identity was more common among non-men (predicted by this theory), although there wasn't a significant difference in reported romanticism (not predicted by this theory). Perhaps people who are nonstandard enough to know about and decide to use those labels are nonstandard in other ways, so this isn't rock solid evidence of anything.

[2] In reality, the chain of logic is a bit more complicated. In full, it is: Males who acted according to a certain form of "male jealousy" would be more reproductively successful, and so this jealousy becomes widespread in humans. Then, males who have social power would want to enforce rules that conform to their beliefs in the injustice/immorality of female infidelity.

Even more precisely, it's not that "jealousy" evolved due to "jealousy genes". It's really "genes would spread if they tended to build brains with mental architecture that tended to develop specific kinds of jealousy". (This level of imprecision and variability is one reason that Darwinism is not nearly as morally threatening as you might expect; general trends leave a lot of room for individuals to vary.)

#molochposting #not a book review #books #effective altruism #long post is long #????

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nebris · 6 years

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(How) American Collapse Was a Choice

Five Myths That Made Americans Choose Implosion Instead of Prosperity

Here’s a tiny observation. American collapse wasn’t destiny, fate, or circumstance: It was a choice. A fatal, terrible, and foolish one. But a choice nonetheless. Yet in understanding that it was a choice, perhaps we can learn something. You be the judge of that.

The closest analog that we have to American collapse is, quite visibly, German collapse — the equivalent of Gestapos and Stasis are rising, as extreme nationalists take control of key institutions. Yet German collapse was caused externally — Germany was made to pay war reparations it simply couldn’t afford, plunging it into a depression, which led to despair, then rage, which demagogues seized upon. “Make Germany Great Again!” — and soon enough, the unthinkable began.

But American collapse isn’t caused by any external force, pressure, or factor. How could it be? It was the world’s most powerful nation. There is nobody who could have caused America to collapse but America. So how did Americans make the choice to collapse, instead of prosper? That is the question. Here’s my answer: A toxic cocktail of crackpot economics, psychology, and sociology — one that’s still unfortunately taught today — effectively turned Americans into something between their own worst enemies, and modernity’s greatest fools. Let me summarize it as a set of five myths.

First is the myth of anarchy — that a society doesn’t need a government or a social contract or anything at all to bind it together, structure it, and connect it. (Yes, you’re right, that’s arguably not really what “anarchy” is, but let’s plunge ahead for now). Beginning around the late 1970s, the rest of the rich world and America diverged in a key way. Europe and Canada invested heavily in better social contracts — better healthcare, education, transport, media, finance, safety nets. Why? Because the ongoing prosperity of a modern, post-industrial economy depends, as we will see, not just on making people more “efficient” or “productive,” but on people who are more educated, creative, thoughtful, tolerant, forgiving, adventurous, and bold than ever before. After all, if you’re living at the edge, afraid of paying next month’s rent or medical bill — what can you really do with your life that’s groundbreaking?

But America alone turned to a kind of ideological extremism. Beginning with Reagan, it embarked instead on a disastrous, decades-long austerity program — the goal being explicitly to “drown government in a bathtub.” Americans were taught that government is bad, worse than useless, something to be destroyed. This extreme socio-political nihilism was every bit as totalitarian as hardcore religious fundamentalism or social Darwinism.

The whole point and purpose of American economics and social thought became to dissuade people from making collective investments in their own health, sanity, intelligence, purpose, belonging — to persuade them to invest instead in Walmarts, hedge funds, robots, and status symbols. Winning more money became the sole pursuit of American life. Human existence now only had one point — profit. Predatory capitalism was born. In other words, Americans were beginning to be taught how to be cogs in the machines of their own ruin.

But how did this myth that a society is just a bunch of people desperately chasing greedier and greedier profit — not a place ordered by a government and a social contract — emerge? Why didn’t American thinkers, or people, understand that anarchy would lead to chaos, that would breed authoritarianism, not a healthy, prosperous society?

From my second myth, the myth of self-reliance. Now, interestingly, there was precisely no empirical evidence for American economics and social thinkers to preach the end of governance, no need for a social contract — none whatsoever. It was, ironically, a kind of Soviet ideology being born, because in fact the exact opposite was true — nations with robust social contracts, who invested in themselves were beginning to vastly outdo America. But American economics and social thought ignored all this. Why? Probably because they had become reiterations of an old, tired myth — the famous American idea of self-reliance. Every man for himself — that way lies the promised land. Old myths die hard. Nobody is self-reliant, but Americans were made believe that they should be, or else they were worthless.

Of course, in modern economies, we must rely on one another more than ever. I rely on your expertise in quantum computing. You rely on mine in molecular oncology. But because Americans were busy trying to accomplish the fruitless goal of relying on themselves, they could never build institutions with which to rely on another, like working healthcare or education or financial systems. What were they taught to do instead?

My next myth, the myth of competition. If it’s every person for themselves, if I cannot rely on you, then what is the only thing left that we can do? Compete. Outdo the next little atom. Grind him into dust. Batter him until he’s defeated. Self-reliance rules out the idea of cooperation from the beginning, doesn’t it? And so American life became one giant exercise in bruising, battering, soul-crushing competition. Americans were forced to compete for what people in other countries now took for granted. They began to have to compete for healthcare — you don’t get it if you don’t have a job, sorry. They had to compete for housing — sorry, if you can’t afford to pay rent, you’re sleeping on the street. They had to compete for education, too — if you can’t afford to pay, if you don’t make the cut, you don’t get educated. Every single aspect of life in America became brutally competitive — yet something was going badly wrong. Life wasn’t getting better — incomes were stagnant, social bonds were fraying, and the middle class began to implode. Competition as the sole social force wasn’t making people better off. But few really noticed. Why not? Probably because most still believed in my next myth.

The myth of punishment. Why did brutal competition as the central structuring force in society fail? Well, the idea was a Spartan, maybe a Roman one: that by making people compete every more viciously, by punishing them mercilessly for every misstep, they’d end up virtuous. They’d be braver, tougher, stronger, with every crack of the whip. They’d learn humility, compassion, and courage. But that is not what happened. People only became only more cruel, cunning, unkind, hard-hearted, short-sighted, and inhumane — until, at last, today, they stoically go on suffering, as kids massacre one another in schools, and their neighbours die without insulin. The American experiment teaches us that aggressive, predatory competition does not breed virtue — it’s people in countries whose lives aren’t endless daily exercises in competitive greed, abuse, and superiority who are in fact kinder, gentler, wiser, and more courageous, now. But even today, American thought hasn’t learned this lesson. What has it been busy preaching instead?

The myth of the predator. Over the last few decades, American thought went fully Soviet — it put all these myths into a newer, more extreme, distilled, perhaps final form. The great myth Americans are taught today is that human beings are born to be predators — and the biggest predator is the best thing of all to be. Do you think I’m overstating it? When Americans are taught that greed is good, that the weak don’t deserve basic medicine, that only the most cunning and ruthless should prosper, that they should just have more “resilience” and “grit” instead of being more humane and decent people, that kids should wear bulletproof backpacks, isn’t that essentially what they are being taught? So today, a predatory myth has come to govern America — instead of a functioning social contract. That myth tells Americans that teachers and nurses and administrators should make thousands, live at the knife edge of poverty, while hedge-fund tycoons should earn billions for raiding their pension funds, and not just contributing nothing to society, but taking away from it, and all that is perfectly just, rational, and reasonable. But how could any of that be just in any other way than to say that human beings are only born to be predators?

So here poor Americans are. They are trapped in a system where they work a little harder every day, to abused a little more, only to earn less, live shorter, unhappier, and less fulfilling lives. The only ordering principle of society left is to be a predator now, each person feasting on the next one a little lower down in the social hierarchy. But the problem is that when everyone is a predator, trying to consume the person below them before they are consumed by the person above, no one is going anywhere but sliding down the abyss.

A society certainly cannot rise through this fools’ game of predation. Nor can a society of human beings who have been taught that they all are supposed to be is predators really function as a democracy for long. Because when people are busy consuming the next person down, told that their only reason for existence is to be predators, what is also eaten through are norms, values, citizenship, obligations, duties, responsibilities, the marrow of civilization, coexistence, and human fulfillment itself.

Such a society will of course be a bitterly unhappy place. But that is not all it will be. It will also be a place that full of despair, of meaninglessness, of rage, of emptiness. That is because human beings hunger to be more than predators. They thirst to realize the best and noblest in themselves. But if all a human being is told they can ever be is a meal — unless they are a bigger appetite — then what can they ever make of themselves? And how can a society of such wasted lives do anything but fall?

That, sadly, is how Americans chose collapse.

Umair June 2018

https://eand.co/how-american-collapse-was-a-choice-784548de0850

#collapse of America

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nancyedimick · 7 years

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Rousseau on human evolution: vindicated by modern science

This is the second post about my recently published book, “Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).”

[Nelson Lund is guest-blogging this week.]

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/01/03/rousseau-on-human-evolution-vindicated-by-modern-science/

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