What's this all about? A high-powered team of psychologists from Yale and Harvard has made a splash with a well publicized claim that moral indignation is usually an affectation aimed at enhancing reputation and, thereby, gaining personal advantage. It is nothing more than a compulsive desire to proclaim how virtuous you are, to "advertise" yourself to others. Rarely does it have anything or little to do with moral responsibility or ethical concerns. Indignation over alleged wrongs and injustices is merely another form of self-righteousness whereby the insecure individual strives for a sense of worth by showing that (s)he is better than other people. The reputation for virtue thereby acquired is exploited to advance personal needs and wants. All of this, it is argued, accords with inherent human instincts and the survival of the fittest.
These radical assertions are based on an extensive research project well-funded by reputable sources, mainly the Templeton Foundation. The study is grounded in an elaborate set of contrived laboratory experiments whose relation to real world circumstances is purely coincidental. The accumulated testing data is then subject to statistical analysis. An essay appeared in The New York Times "Week In Review" (Feb 28)* summarizing a scholarly article that was published in the distinguished journal Nature (Feb 26).** The authors neatly explain their conclusion this way:
"... an evolutionary mystery: Why would a selfless tendency like moral outrage result from the self's process of evolution? One important piece of the answer is that expressing moral outrage actually does benefit you, in the long run, by improving your reputation ... We suggest that expressing moral outrage can serve as a form of personal advertisement. People who invest time and effort in condemning those who behave badly are trusted more." That trust then can be exploited for personal gain/advancement -- "without much care for what it means for others."
This is a specious argument rooted in assumptions about human nature and the evolutionary process that simply are untrue. Moreover, it reflects a philosophical bias toward fashionable varieties of the selfishness creed that is sweeping our society. Scholars are now engaged in justifying and propagating those pernicious doctrines -- wittingly or otherwise. The Harvard/Yale psychologists give the game away without even realizing it by exposing their own distorted view of human behavior and society. They manifestly are creatures of their culture and their times.
Let us examine those biases. First, their conception of evolutionary dynamics is simplistic. Survival of the fittest entails more than a tooth-and-nail fight of all against all. There are collective, mutually supportive needs within groups of individuals that are imperatives for survival. Even a cursory knowledge of the mammal world as a whole makes this unmistakably clear -- leaving aside homo sapiens for the moment. Most mammals are communal; they live in packs, herds, whatever. That applies to predators as well as to herbivores. Think of the lion pride -- an exemplar of an extended family. Its internal division-of-labor is associated with a sense of collective identity and collective interest. The male alpha role usually is shared by two, three or even four dominant males. Genetic identity of the progeny itself can be obscure.
Among mammals, survival instincts generate behavior that can extend beyond the directly instrumental, i.e. it becomes independent of the originating need. Hence, we have seen video evidence of how the maternal instinct can apply across clans -- and even across species. It's right there, in the wild. Lionesses sheltering a baby fox, another sheltering a baby baboon (before returning it to its mother). And, in both cases, attacking male lions sniffing a possible snack. In other words, the behavior driven by the survival imperative can lead to a generalized tendency to produce conduct that serves no direct survival need.
There are even more striking cases of "altruism." Rhinos seem to have an inexplicable aversion to lions, despite their size and other attributes making them immune to attack. There are videos available that show rhinos intervening to protect Cape buffalo from lion prides -- interposing themselves to deter a lion attack. The rhino nation dedicated to upholding Chapter 1 Article 2 of the United Nations Charter? How counter-evolutionary of them!
Human social groups constitute many orders of magnitude of collective, mutually supportive living beyond these examples of mammalian solidarity. The most rudimentary Neolithic tribes lived a communal existence. We know little about their organization and modes of social functioning except from what has been observed in the Amazon Basin and the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Some things are readily observable. One, the underlying principle was a sort of primitive communism. Two, to the extent that alpha male roles existed, they did not dictate fully the terms of genetic survival. Three, there were strong bonds and a deep sense of collective identity.
A stunning archeological find has revealed that at least some of these attributes were present even in Neanderthal communities. It involves the skeleton of a female approximately 50 years old that shows severe physical infirmities -- some seemingly congenital. The implication is that the woman could not have survived without attentive care from her family/group for a period of decades. In other words, the community felt bound to her welfare to a greater extent than does the state of Texas today toward its impoverished infirmed. That is devolution in the homeland of Darwinian individualism.
The implication of this accumulated evidence is that the evolutionary dynamic is far more complex than the rather primitive understanding built into the Yale/Harvard thesis. Human beings have a more highly developed sense of communal well-being and its link to individual survival/advancement than that evident among hedge fund managers or careerist academics who implicitly seem to be the main outside-the-lab empirical reference points for these authors. Homo sapiens have the exceptional attribute of self-awareness along with an environmental awareness that includes the social environment. That leads to the formulation of codes of conduct that conform to the logic of evolutionary symbiosis.
Those codes of conduct, in turn, are intimately associated with the emergence of a sense of right and wrong. Ethics and practical benefit have become intertwined. Violation of fundamental ethics, in egregious ways, is perceived simultaneously as a practical danger to the community and an insult to its shared sense of identity. Those behavioral codes often are sacrilized -- adding to their force by ritualizing them and imprinting them on the group's collective consciousness. Hence, a specific act is condemned not only for that single transgression of societal norm but also because it constitutes an implicit danger to the group's entire normative structure. Indignation is the natural reaction to such a violation.
As persons mature, collective norms fuse with individual life experience to form an ethical character. Progressively over a life span, primitive personal needs and wants are incorporated into what has been called "the altruistic self' wherein the 'selfish' and the collective are balanced. These well-established ideas have faded in the age of narcissism.
Then there is this uncomfortable fact of life. Millions of people experience feelings of moral outrage when they are alone -- when there is no one to whom they might "advertise" themselves and on whom they might gain leverage. I guess that they may be "practicing" their outrage on the off-chance that they run into an editor of the "NYT Week In Review" in Zabar's some Sunday morning.
All of this is beyond the comprehension of the Harvard/Yale team. They prefer to see indignation as posturing -- a calculated attempt to make oneself look good in the eyes of others. That judgment says more about the researchers than it does about human nature.
What they see as a puzzling "investment of time and energy" in condemning an "offense ... that does not concern (them) directly" is in fact natural and healthy human behavior. The practical implications are profound. Should we celebrate that some of us still are able to feel moral outrage about a son or neighbor crippled in Falluja for the sake of George W. Bush's low self-esteem, about seeing thousands of the nation's children knowingly poisoned in Flint by Governor Snyder and other high officials, about dirty dealing on Wall Street that promises another financial collapse, about the American Psychological Association's hidden program to instruct the CIA in the most effective torture techniques?
Or, is the normal, emotionally well-adjusted thing to do instead constraining the indignation one might feel? Is it really the normal, survival oriented behavior to devote one's energy to working out the latest insider trading deal or market rigging scheme over drinks, or plotting to elbow into retirement that colleague whose funding and doctoral students you covet -- or, exercising admirable restraint in avoiding self "advertisement" by condemning your profession's leaders abuse of their position?
We know which type will come out ahead in contemporary American society. What that means for the welfare and sustainability of humankind is quite a different question.
In effect, this scholarly quartet are formulating a behavioral model wherein the most advanced parts of the brain (cortex) which permit consciousness of one's environment, and at the highest stage, self-consciousness, are servants of the primitive R-complex -- or reptilian brain. The reptilian brain produces only one type of behavior: that driven by basic needs and wants. If all social actions serve individual needs in the struggle for survival of the fittest, then any social conduct that appears superficially altruistic or ethically driven is in fact selfish at its motivational core if properly interpreted.
This is an extremely important article. Not for its explanatory value; but for its near perfect representation of multiple pathologies in contemporary society that carry pernicious consequences.
There is an old Italian saying: Latin masks the ignorance of the Priest. So, today: digits mask the ignorance of the Social Scientist. It was said that German philosophers dove deeper than anyone else and came up muddier. Behavioral psychologists make the shallowest of dives and surface beaming with smug self-satisfaction.
* This is the argument of four highly reputable scholars from Yale and Harvard. Two are standard psychologists; two, who do behavioral research, are called 'mathematical biologists.'
All four Professors are disciples of the distinguished Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker who is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. This prize winning scholar has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine's "The World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals," Foreign Policy's "100 Global Thinkers," and Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today." Pinker characterizes this work of his proteges and collaborators as "brilliant. "
** Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom, & David G. Rand "Third-party punishment as a costly signal of trustworthiness" Nature 530, 473-47 (25 February 2016)