On The Innateness of Morality

I've been reading a little bit lately about mirror neurons. Let's say, simplifying, that there are parts of your brain that respond in kind when they see somebody else do something. Like when you see somebody raise their hand, there are sections of your brain that kind of raise your hand, too. Sometimes you're aware of this, like you know how it is when you see or hear somebody laugh, it makes you laugh. Or if you see somebody get hurt, it sort of hurts you, too. Well, they've found the way this might work in your brain.

I am not usually too impressed with neurocognitive explanations of mind and behavior, I'd rather understand what "the person" is doing than what "the brain" is doing. But mirror neurons do allow a way to explain some kinds of empathic effects that have otherwise been explained by inference. That is, previously it was believed that you felt the other person's pain by reasoning that if your thumb were hit with a hammer like that, it would feel like this. Now we are seeing that the empathy is more direct, it may be that we actually feel the other person's pain at the same time they feel it, thanks to these interesting brain cells that allow and support intimate social perspective-sharing.

This reading has taken me around the circuit to a most interesting lecture by a professor who studies primate social behavior, Frans B. M. de Waal, director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. The lecture is called Morality and the Social Instincts: Continuity with the Other Primates, and I'm only halfway through it so far, but he makes a most relevant point, which I suspect will be reinforced through the rest of the article (I'll post again later if I finish this article and find he has debunked himself).

First he talks about something he called "Veneer Theory," the view that human morality is just a layer of self-control that is slapped over the surface of a boiling, nearly irrepressible, selfish and amoral human nature. He counters this by describing the warm and harmonious interactions among members of groups of other kinds of primates and suggests that it just makes sense that we humans evolved as social creatures who innately care about what happens to those around us.

You might know that I am involved in some sort of crazy thing called "swarm theory" or somesuch. Well, one of my assumptions, never stated overtly, is that our social nature causes us to be intelligent, and not the other way around. It's not that we learn to get along because we're smart and selfish and figure we can get other people to give us what we want if we're nice and say what they want us to hear. It's that we're innately nice and likeable, people like to do things for other people, and because we talk to each other and tell one another about what we've learned, we all get smarter and smarter, individually and as a culture or species. Never mind what some people think, we actually do know a lot more about the real world than people did ten thousand years ago, a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago. Not only do we accumulate knowledge and cognitive skills as we develop within a lifetime, but over the time-course of our species the state of our common knowledge has improved unbelievably. I attribute that to our tendency to socialize, and I have computer programs that can find solutions to ridiculously hard engineering and math problems, by having a population of very simple individuals interact with one another over time.

It strikes me as very weird to think that human beings are evil to the core, with a veneer of morality, and disagreement about this may be an important part of the controversy we have found ourselves immersed in here in Montgomery County, in a number of ways. I suppose the idea goes back to the idea of original sin, or at least the story of Eve and that apple is used to explain and rationalize Veneer Theory: we are all fundamentally sinful. But I think it's deeper than that, and I don't think that America can ever get well again until we learn to accept human nature in a more positive light.

Think about some of the things that are said about teaching about sexual orientation. How could it be wrong to just tell students that some people are gay and some are straight? It would seem wrong to someone who believed that coiled up inside of each of us was a seething serpent of undifferentiated lustful craving, straining to escape and dominate our outward behavior. That monster will do anything, anything at all, it will make you do things with people of your own sex, even, if you don't stifle it, stomp it, control it -- it is essential, from that perspective, that the veneer of morality be toughened through education. I don't see any other way the CRC's views make any sense at all.

De Waal's thesis is that we are inherently moral, that nature herself has made us that way. We have empathic feelings for those around us and we want them to be happy, it makes us smile when we see a smile. He traces this belief right back to Darwin, in fact the historical lineage is interesting in its own right. He quotes Darwin:

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

Interestingly, de Waal quotes Adam Smith, the father of modern economics and a source of inspiration for Darwin himself. Smith was also interested in human empathy and altruism; he said:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

De Waal closes the deal neatly:

The evolutionary origin of this inclination is no mystery. All species that rely on cooperation -- from elephants to wolves and people -- show group loyalty and helping tendencies. These tendencies evolved in the context of a close-knit social life in which they benefited relatives and companions able to repay the favor. The impulse to help was therefore never totally without survival value to the ones showing the impulse. But, as so often, the impulse became divorced from the consequences that shaped its evolution. This permitted its expression even when payoffs were unlikely, such as when strangers were beneficiaries.

In other words, it is our most basic nature to love one another, it isn't something we have to learn, it's really the way we are. We aren't balanced on the edge of a vortex of strange dark desires struggling for release and needing constant suppression -- oh, we have feelings sometimes that aren't very nice but there's usually an explanation for them, and most of the time we manage to keep a grip on ourselves till the feeling passes. We're capable of doing terrible things, but it is our nature to desire peaceful relations with our neighbors.

The sad thing, the dangerous thing, is the fact that people who believe the Veneer Theory of morality think that everybody else needs to believe it, too, because if you and I didn't believe it we might not try hard enough to suppress our inner demons and we would inevitably (according to the Theory) explode into uncontrollable furies of passionate irrationality after mere exposure to any provocative stimulus at all. And so Veneer Theorists feel people need to be punished for failing to struggle hard enough with their inner devils; just listen to these guys -- Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, O'Reilly, and the rest -- talk about "liberals" and you'll know what I mean. What is a liberal to them, but somebody who fails to understand the dark potency of the evil inner core of humanity? The idea that the world is a good place is despicable to our modern-day "conservatives."

The result is an inversion of morality. In the intense struggle to retain control of a Theorized beastly soul, the Veneerist attacks his neighbor. It seems to me that in our current historical time we have seen more of this than ever before in our country, and it worries me deeply. We imagine random enemies, unperceived dangers, and respond to them with our fullest force, whether they are in a far-off country or in our own neighborhoods. It worries me a lot.