Today I finished reading this month’s big book (i.e. a substantial nonfiction book), Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, an extremely interesting book for the way its central idea knits together many of themes I’ve read about in other books, from Wilson and Pinker to Kahneman and Haidt, and how it applies to, or perhaps *explains*, the political polarity in modern American culture. This post isn’t a review or summary of the book. Just a brief statement of his theory, and then another batch of political items like those I’ve been posting, with some comments about how the theory applies to each.
I should say that his theory, and its applications, might be eye-rollingly obvious to some people. And it’s pretty much how I’ve understood the recent world. But it’s nice to see someone pinning it down.
The gist of his “dual-process” theory is that (as Wilson and Pinker have explained) morality evolved to facilitate cooperate between individuals… within a single tribe, or community… and that morality can change, given experience and new knowledge. Primitive tribal morality solved the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ the conflict between Me versus Us. But that doesn’t work to solve our modern problems, which involve the conflicting values of different tribes: the Us versus Them problem, the ‘tragedy of commensense morality.’ It’s a tragedy because different tribes to their different intuitive, ‘common sense,’ moralities, and they’re different because they’re not based on evidence or reality, though they’re similar because they’re all driven by motivations for survival — tribal morality, or what I’ve been calling ‘savanna’ morality because they evolved during the hundreds of thousands of years that humanity lived in small tribes on the African savanna. How then to solve modern, global, problems? The solution is analogous to the way cameras have ‘automatic’ settings as well as a ‘manual’ mode — to solve the problems of the real world, the big overcrowded modern world where tribes with differing values necessarily must get along, is to shift into a sort of manual mode to solve moral and ethical problems. This involves *thinking,* and Greene spends some time defending utilitarianism, or as he prefers to call it, ‘deep pragmatism,’ as the best approach to do this.
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