- The idea of “factory settings” as describing base human nature, and how some people can transcend them;
- A woman wonders if religion is the only way to instill her child with “scaffolding for spirituality and morality” (answer: no);
- Richard Dawkins reflects on the American electoral college system, and Jordan Peterson.
I was struck by something in this op-ed today. (In today’s paper, it was posted a couple days ago.)
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 18 Oct 2024: There Is No Precedent for Something Like This in American History
The topic of the essay is Trump, yet again, in particular what Gen. Mark Milley, once chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said.
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” the general told Woodward. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
Let’s stop for a second.
It is simply extraordinary that the nation’s top general would tell anyone, much less one of the most famous reporters in the world, that the former president of the United States was a “fascist” — a “fascist to the core,” even — and a threat to the constitutional order. There is no precedent for such a thing in American history — no example of another time when a high-ranking leader of the nation’s armed forces felt compelled to warn the public of the danger posed by its once and perhaps future chief executive.
More important than the novelty of Milley’s statement is the reality that he’s right.
News of the general’s 2023 assessment broke last Friday. That afternoon, and as if to prove the point, Trump dived even deeper into the rhetorical abyss, telling his followers that he would deploy an 18th-century law to “liberate” the country from immigrants once and for all. “I make you this vow: November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America,” Trump wrote on X.
Further down, the writer tries, as so many others have, to understand what attracts voters to such a person. He asks,
What explains those Americans who hear Trump and, counter-intuitively, refuse to believe that he says what he means — that he’s just “telling it how it is”?
And here’s what struck me.
When exposed to the most intense and acute forms of stress, the brain doesn’t short-circuit as much as it resets to factory settings. You revert to your past experiences and usual patterns of behavior in order to make sense of and respond to the crisis at hand. Your brain takes the extraordinary and — to your detriment — makes it ordinary. This dynamic is the reason soldiers and pilots and first responders and anyone tasked to work in an emergency are trained to act without thinking: reprogrammed so that the mind defaults to a well-defined set of actions when subjected to extreme, mind-altering stress.
And Trump is that extraordinary stress. But what struck me was the notion of “factory settings.” Perhaps the distinction between what I’ve been calling “tribal morality” and whatever the more advanced, cosmopolitan morality is called, is simply a matter of education, and experience: a customization and refinement of those factory settings. The factory settings of basic, intuitive, instinctive morality: emphasis on preserving the family; of growing the tribe; fear of outsiders; resistance to anything that threatens the tribal myths.
This is why conservatives are skeptical of education, the way they demonize universities, and even public schools, and prefer to completely control their children’s’ “education” via home schooling. This is why conservatives are, as David Brin constantly points out, at war with all the fact professions — because facts threaten those tribal myths and therefore social cohesion among the tribe. It’s not so much that liberals have a different kind of morality or sensibility, it’s that people who*do* gain an education, who are able to travel and interact with different kinds of people (as they do in the big cities — that’s why those cities are blue) tend to modify or transcend those basic tribal instincts, which is to say, become liberal. While the conservatives want to block such pathways in order to stay the same.
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This is related.
Vox, Sigal Samuel, 20 Oct 2024: I left my religion. Should I still raise my kid with it?, subtitled “My faith gave me my moral values. I want my child to have those — without all the stuff I don’t believe in.”
As an advice column, the format here is question and answer. A woman asks if she should raise her child as a Christian, even though she doesn’t believe in Christian dogma anymore, if only to provide her child a “scaffolding for spirituality and morality.”
Of course there have been plenty of books about how morality is not derived from religion (if anything, religion merely codifies it), but rather morality is evolutionary-derived behavior that has enabled the species to survive and cooperate in larger and larger groups. But conservatives tend to read only books that confirm what they already believe. At least this woman is asking if there’s anything more.
The response begins well, taking a big picture.
To put my cards on the table: I do not believe you need religion to live a moral life. I’m sure you know this, too, because if you think about all your friends and colleagues, you’ll probably find that a bunch of them are very good, kind people who were raised secular. They are all existence proofs that a person can be good without God.
And that’s the basic premise of a movement known as humanism. Its roots stretch all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who emphasized the role of human rationality in figuring out how to lead a good and flourishing life. But by the Middle Ages, Greek philosophical texts had become largely unavailable to European Christians, who believed that humans were too wretched to find the good without a supernatural deity.
And continues with a brief history of the Renaissance and modern humanism. From there it goes tangential to my notions about the evolutionary basis for an inherent human morality; rather the writer explores other ways, than signing-on to believing in supernatural myths, to evoke the feelings that would lead to moral behavior.
Psychologists have found that we can still be moral without religion — if we set up the conditions to regularly and effectively trigger moral emotions.
One of those emotions is what they call elevation. It’s that uplifting feeling of inspiration you get upon hearing about someone who did something you consider really noble, whether it’s Mahatma Gandhi leading nonviolent civil disobedience or Susan B. Anthony campaigning for women’s rights. Feeling elevation moves us to want to act nobly, too — it nudges us to moral action.
Another such emotion is awe. It’s a feeling people often get in nature, when faced with towering mountains or a starry night sky. By reminding you that you’re a tiny speck in the universe, it shifts you away from focusing on yourself and your own problems.
And so on, with gratitude. This is all very well, but by the end this isn’t quite on point. It does go along with my first item above. Basic human nature, factory settings, comes with moral intuitions for cooperation, interactions with others, and on an on, that provide most of us with an instinctive understanding of what is right or wrong, albeit fine-tuned to prioritize the immediate family and tribe. We could go on speculating whether the religious impulse is *worth* promoting, considering that clinging to it eventually entails denial of reality, or intellectual dishonesty. But that’s enough for the moment.
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Following an American book tour for his latest book, Richard Dawkins reflects:
The Spectator, Richard Dawkins, from the magazine issue 19 October 2024: My problem with the American election
No, my problem with American elections – and it viscerally distresses me every four years – is the affront to democracy called the electoral college. I’ve done the maths. The electoral college can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of ‘swing’ states. A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well. Voters in every state would elect respected citizens to meet in conclave to find a president – like a university search committee or the College of Cardinals. They’d headhunt the best in the land, interview them, study their publications and speeches, exhaustively vet them, and finally after a secret ballot announce the verdict in a puff of white smoke. Perhaps the founding fathers had something like that in mind. If so, the rot set in when electoral college members became pledged to a particular candidate, and each state’s quota voted as a monolithic bloc, no matter how slender the state’s popular vote margin. Alas, my ‘search committee’ ideal would never fly: too vulnerable to corruption. And replacing the present ludicrously undemocratic electoral college by a sensible plebiscite needs a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, plus approval by three-quarters of the states – a near unattainable goal because of vested interests.
That’s all he says about that. On another topic, I’ll quote a bit about Jordan Peterson.
Profound thoughts can be hard to understand. Many gullible people think it works the other way round: incomprehensibility implies profundity. In his dark underworld of symbols and Jungian archetypes, Peterson’s style is legendarily obscure. As I put it to him, he is drunk on symbols. His indifference to objective fact verges on contempt. I repeatedly and unsuccessfully pressed him, for example, on virgin birth. On resurrection. On why he blames the world’s evils on ‘the descendants of Cain’ although he must know (but refuses to say) that Cain didn’t exist and has no descendants. It’s not that he is evasive. He just doesn’t think facts matter: a common trait among ‘sophisticated’ (as opposed to fundamentalist) theologians. Perhaps I should apologise for my shallow ‘scientistic’ literalism when I care about the non-symbolic real world. But dammit, the real world is the world we actually live in.
“He just doesn’t think facts matter.” Just as the factory settings are not about apprehending reality, but about promoting tribal survival.
