If the prospect of future climate change poses difficult problems for estimating the impact on the extinction of species (see previous post), retroactively looking at the causes of the extinction of a species long dead before humans recorded history is not that easy either. We can probably make some educated guesses in a few cases based on examination of the geological record and what we can find in the chemistry and perhaps biology of dated samples of earthen material and fossils. But we remain hard-pressed right now to figure out why the species homo neanderthalensis became extinct. They overlapped in time and habitat with our own species homo sapiens sapiens, and now we know thanks to the research of Svante Paabo and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute that the two species interbred. A small piece of the DNA of homo neanderthalensis lives on in anatomically modern humans. Anatomically modern humans are believed to have emerged approximately 100,000 years ago, probably in southern Africa. (See September 25, 2013 post). This species is believed to have migrated out-of-Africa approximately 50-60,000 years ago (id): first to the Middle East and then to South Asia. But this was not the first species of the genus homo to migrate out-of-Africa. Modern humans were preceded by homo erectus, homo heidelbergensis and perhaps homo neanderthalensis.
"According to the fossil record," says Paabo, "Neanderthals appeared between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago and existed until about 30,000 years ago. Throughout their entire existence their technology did not change much. They continued to produce the same technology throughout their history, a history that was three or four times longer than what modern humans have experienced. Only at the end of their history, when they may have had contact with modern humans, does their technology change. Over the millennia, they expanded and retracted with the changing climates in the area that lived in Europe and western Asia, but they didn't expand across open water to other uninhabited parts of the world. They spread pretty much as other large mammals had done before them. In that, they were similar to other extinct forms of humans that had existed in Africa for the past 6 million years and in Asia and Europe for about 2 million years. *** All of this changed abruptly when fully modern humans appeared in Africa and spread around the world in the form of the replacement crowd. In the 50,000 years that followed --- a time four to eight times shorter than the entire length of time the Neanderthals existed --- the replacement crowd not only settled on almost every habitable speck of land on the planet, they developed technology that allowed them to go to the moon and beyond. If there is a genetic underpinning to this cultural and technological explosion, as I'm sure there is, then scientists should eventually be able to understand this by comparing the genomes of Neanderthals to the genomes of people living today."
Until this statement, late in Neanderthal Man, Paabo's story has been about his personal and scientific journey from a young man in training to be a physician who takes an interest in the DNA of dead humans and ancient species to become director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute who dissected the Neanderthal genome. The memoir reads a bit like a detective story. Now Paabo is trying to give meaning to what he has found.
Who is this Replacement Man? It is the anatomically modern human (homo sapiens sapiens), but not the anatomically modern human that chronologically and immediately replaced the archaic human (homo sapiens) approximately 100,000 years ago. This is the anatomically modern human who began spreading across the earth "shortly after 50,000 years ago." (See also September 25, 2013 post). The oldest modern human bones found in the Levant date back are approximately 100,000 years old. Further evidence indicates that modern humans and Neanderthals mixed here in the Middle East for about 50,000 years, but there is no evidence that either was dominant. Their stone tools appear to be the same. But "shortly after 50,000 years ago," co-existence was no longer the norm. When humans appeared in an area, Neanderthals disappeared either immediately or shortly thereafter. These modern humans "replaced" Neanderthals. Modern human tools and weapons were more advanced than Neanderthal technology and the Aurignacian culture, as it is described, produced the first cave art and first figurines of animals, including mythical creatures. "The 'replacement crowd,' says Paabo, "thus exhibited behaviors that were only occasionally or not seen at all among Neanderthals and among the earlier modern humans" who occupied the Levant the previous 50,000 years. "We don't know where the 'replacement crowd' came from. In fact, they could have been the descendants of the same humans who had already been living in the Middle East, simply accumulating the cultural inventions and proclivities that enabled 'replacement,' but it is more likely that they came from somewhere in Africa." Paabo does not report the evidence in support of this thesis, but it would be interesting to know.
As a result of Paabo's work, we now know the modern human genome contains small amounts of Neanderthal DNA, and thus we know interbreeding occurred between homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens sapiens. As a result of Paabo's work, the Neanderthal genome has been published and the work is in its incipiency to identify crucial differences between the Neanderthal genome and the human genome. it is estimated that the total number of DNA sequence positions at which Neanderthals and humans differ is roughly 100,000. One goal of this research is to identify genetic changes that might be relevant for how humans think and behave --- a possible clue to what makes us human --- a subject that has reappeared in this blog more than once. (See September 27, 2009, June 12, 2011, November 21, 2012, March 28, 2013, October 26, 2013 post). There will be more to come.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
William Nordhaus, The Climate Casino (2013)
As previous posts both adumbrate and expose, the human brain does not always successfully sort fact from fiction, but most of the time it does do a pretty good job in comprehending reality even if that reality is derived from imagination or rests upon probabilities. The brain --- and I am thinking of the human brain in particular, but it could be any animal brain to an extent --- deals with uncertainties. It deals with uncertainties in degrees. Another remarkable feature of the human brain is its ability to anticipate and to project in the future, what Jeff Hawkins called "intelligence" where the brain recognizes a predictable set of patterns, even in the face of uncertainties. (See November 16, 2013 post).
But even if the capacity of the human brain is remarkably successful in comprehending reality and anticipating the future, there are subjects like predicting future climate change and the inherent uncertainty in predicting the risk of harm that will occur if average global temperature rises just a few degrees over the current temperature that challenge the ability of some, if not many, to call their predictive capacity remarkable. A previous post discussed this issue. (See August 12, 2012 post). William Nordhaus has spent a career studying and getting his intellect around the risk, uncertainty, and economics of climate change. The Climate Casino is Nordhaus' reflection on this subject; it is also a wake up call for those who can't or do not want to spend time looking into the future with the benefit of a very substantial amount of data that indicates a significant risk of harm from an average global temperature rise of just a few degrees due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases. I will discuss this last thought in a moment.
What is not uncertain for economist Nordhaus and like-minded scientists who study climate change is that average global temperature has been increasing since the beginning of the 20th century, which is roughly aligned with the beginning of the industrial era. What is also uncertain for Nordhaus and others is that humans are already witnessing impacts from the average global temperature increase. Finally what is not uncertain for Nordhaus and like-minded scientists who study climate change is that human behavior resulting in increased emissions of greenhouse gases is responsible for the slow, but steady rise of average global temperatures.
What is uncertain is the potential future impacts from rising average global tempertures, not the science that connects greenhouse gas emissions to a slow steady rise of average global temperatures. Nordhaus would be the first to admit how difficult it is to estimate and measure the impacts of climate change. He would also be the first to admit about the uncertainty associated with future rate of increased greenhouse gas emissions. For example, "Estimating the impacts of climate change on health is yet another difficult task. It requires estimate of climate change by region and year. Then it requires estimates of the impacts of changing climate conditions on health for different diseases. This is challenging because the changes take place well into the future in a world where incomes, medical technologies, and health status are evolving rapidly." With respect to estimating the impacts of sea level rise in the future, Nordhaus notes, "One of the challenges is that sea-level rise is so delayed. While the impacts on farming and health might arrive relatively quickly, the seal level rise slowly for many centuries because of the thermal inertia in oceans and the long delays in melting the giant ice sheets. The long delays pose special challenges because they require envisioning the shape of our landscape and societies deep into the future and taking steps today that will produce the most benefits well beyond the present century." With respect to the prospect for species loss in the future attributable to increased average global temperatures, there are no reliable estimates of the risk of extinction for different species; some climatic ranges will shift, and some areas might grown, so the number of species for growing ranges would be predicted to increase rather than decline, and they do not account for species loss by habitat destruction, overuse, overfishing, overhunting, and pollution that would occur even in the absence of climate change. And even if you could devise a means of estimating the risk of species loss due to climate change, there are no reliable techniques for valuing ecosystem and species loss.
"What should we conclude at the end of this review of the impacts of future climate change?" Nordhaus asks. "The first point to emphasize is the difficulty of estimating impacts. They combine the uncertainties of emissions projects and climate models. Even if we overlook the uncertainties about future climate change, the reactions of human and other living systems to these changes are very poorly understood. In part, reactions of social systems are hard to forecast because they are so complex. In addition, humans increasingly manage their own environment, so that a small investment in adaptation may offset the impact of climate change on human societies. Moreover, climate changes are almost certain to occur in the context of technologies and economic structures that will differ vastly from those today.*** However, we must look through the fuzzy telescope as best we can. A second conclusion involves the estimate economic impacts of climate change from sectors that we can reliably measure, particularly for high income countries of today or the future. The estimates here are that economic impacts from climate change will be small relative to the likely overall changes in economic activity over the next half century to century. *** The loss in income would represent approximately one year's growth for most countries spread over several decades [because] managed systems are surprisingly resilient to climate changes if they have the time and resources to adapt. *** A third major conclusion is that the most damaging impacts of climate change --- in unmanaged and unmanageable human and natural systems --- lie well outside the conventional marketplace: sea-level risk, hurricane intensification, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity*** unstable ice sheets and reversing ocean currents."
There are mitigation strategies for slowing climate change by reducing emissions. They are not inexpensive, and because they are not inexpensive Nordhaus recognizes that humans cannot implement these mitigation strategies in one fell swoop. But since we understand all too well where carbon dioxide emissions come from, it is not that difficult to say that if humans had the will to mitigate climate change by reducing carbon emissions we know what to do. Here are some basic facts:
None of this is lost on the Obama Administration. There is a reason that the Administration has been pursuing an "all of the above" strategy for energy: they are driving down natural gas prices by increasing supply, which incentivizes industry and utilities to shift their fuel mix from high carbon intensity coal to lower carbon intensity natural gas. It is working. Additionally, the Administration is providing limited subsidies (loan guarantees) for nuclear fuel even in the face of criticism that nuclear electricity generation plants are not cost effective: nuclear energy substitutes for coal as a fuel. The Administration's support for renewable energy fits a similar model.
Economists recognize that there is a more efficient way to reduce carbon emissions than all these regulatory strategies: Tax carbon emissions or cap emissions and create a market mechanism to allow emitters to pay for permission to emit above the caps. Either way puts a price on carbon that makes it more expensive to emit carbon dioxide. When that happens, economic actors will reduce their emissions. Despite all the anti-tax rhetoric about a carbon tax, a carbon tax has the serious potential to enable taxing authorities to reduce a number of other taxes in a significant way. A carbon tax does not have to be accretive to overall taxation. There are some in the US Congress who have actually looked at a carbon tax this way. The advantage for establishing a market in allowances (cap and trade) is that it ensures that emissions are used in the most productive manner, explains Nordhaus. This type of system has been very successful in reducing sulfur dioxide emissions.
Nordhaus is right: "reducing coal use meets with ferocious opposition from coal regions and their hired guns." It also meets with deceptive rhetoric from those who simply oppose government intervention in the economy. A recent article in today's Washington Post headlined "Study: Fox News botches climate-change coverage" identifying misleading portrayals of climate science, which, by Nordhaus' view, is the least controversial piece in this discussion. It's the economics stupid; it's not the science. The hard part is to avoid over-estimating the costs of the damage that may ensue, as Nordhaus highlights in The Carbon Casino, so we don't make the mistake of establishing and pursuing mitigation strategies that cost more than we need to pay over the long-run. But that is almost what is happening when we favor imposing more stringent regulations on refrigerators and light bulbs as a carbon mitigation strategy instead of raising the price of carbon, which is more efficient and will motivate economic actors to pursue their own self-interest in a way consistent with the public interest. The other hard part is overcoming our reluctance to demonize coal, and pursue more economically efficient carbon pricing policies to reduce carbon emissions such as carbon taxes or cap and trade. This is politics. Our inability to do that is what is referred to as the tragedy of the commons: where acting in self-interest is not the same as the collective or global interest. (See August 12, 2012 post). This is exactly when governments can help.
I am reminded in this political debate of Michael Shermer's analysis of various biases that form our beliefs, and sometimes false beliefs, about things we do not really understand: "the anchoring bias: relying too heavily on one reference anchor or piece of information when making decisions; the authority bias: valuing the opinions of an authority, especially in the evaluation of something we know little about; in-group bias, in which we place more value on the beliefs of those whom we perceive to be fellow members of our group and less on the beliefs of those from different groups. This is a result of our evolved tribal brains leading us not only to place such value judgment on beliefs but also to demonize and dismiss them as nonsense or evil, or both." Our modern tribal groups are political parties, religious groups, and other social clubs like those on some television talking heads groups. (See September 12, 2011 and June 12, 2011 posts).
But even if the capacity of the human brain is remarkably successful in comprehending reality and anticipating the future, there are subjects like predicting future climate change and the inherent uncertainty in predicting the risk of harm that will occur if average global temperature rises just a few degrees over the current temperature that challenge the ability of some, if not many, to call their predictive capacity remarkable. A previous post discussed this issue. (See August 12, 2012 post). William Nordhaus has spent a career studying and getting his intellect around the risk, uncertainty, and economics of climate change. The Climate Casino is Nordhaus' reflection on this subject; it is also a wake up call for those who can't or do not want to spend time looking into the future with the benefit of a very substantial amount of data that indicates a significant risk of harm from an average global temperature rise of just a few degrees due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases. I will discuss this last thought in a moment.
What is not uncertain for economist Nordhaus and like-minded scientists who study climate change is that average global temperature has been increasing since the beginning of the 20th century, which is roughly aligned with the beginning of the industrial era. What is also uncertain for Nordhaus and others is that humans are already witnessing impacts from the average global temperature increase. Finally what is not uncertain for Nordhaus and like-minded scientists who study climate change is that human behavior resulting in increased emissions of greenhouse gases is responsible for the slow, but steady rise of average global temperatures.
What is uncertain is the potential future impacts from rising average global tempertures, not the science that connects greenhouse gas emissions to a slow steady rise of average global temperatures. Nordhaus would be the first to admit how difficult it is to estimate and measure the impacts of climate change. He would also be the first to admit about the uncertainty associated with future rate of increased greenhouse gas emissions. For example, "Estimating the impacts of climate change on health is yet another difficult task. It requires estimate of climate change by region and year. Then it requires estimates of the impacts of changing climate conditions on health for different diseases. This is challenging because the changes take place well into the future in a world where incomes, medical technologies, and health status are evolving rapidly." With respect to estimating the impacts of sea level rise in the future, Nordhaus notes, "One of the challenges is that sea-level rise is so delayed. While the impacts on farming and health might arrive relatively quickly, the seal level rise slowly for many centuries because of the thermal inertia in oceans and the long delays in melting the giant ice sheets. The long delays pose special challenges because they require envisioning the shape of our landscape and societies deep into the future and taking steps today that will produce the most benefits well beyond the present century." With respect to the prospect for species loss in the future attributable to increased average global temperatures, there are no reliable estimates of the risk of extinction for different species; some climatic ranges will shift, and some areas might grown, so the number of species for growing ranges would be predicted to increase rather than decline, and they do not account for species loss by habitat destruction, overuse, overfishing, overhunting, and pollution that would occur even in the absence of climate change. And even if you could devise a means of estimating the risk of species loss due to climate change, there are no reliable techniques for valuing ecosystem and species loss.
"What should we conclude at the end of this review of the impacts of future climate change?" Nordhaus asks. "The first point to emphasize is the difficulty of estimating impacts. They combine the uncertainties of emissions projects and climate models. Even if we overlook the uncertainties about future climate change, the reactions of human and other living systems to these changes are very poorly understood. In part, reactions of social systems are hard to forecast because they are so complex. In addition, humans increasingly manage their own environment, so that a small investment in adaptation may offset the impact of climate change on human societies. Moreover, climate changes are almost certain to occur in the context of technologies and economic structures that will differ vastly from those today.*** However, we must look through the fuzzy telescope as best we can. A second conclusion involves the estimate economic impacts of climate change from sectors that we can reliably measure, particularly for high income countries of today or the future. The estimates here are that economic impacts from climate change will be small relative to the likely overall changes in economic activity over the next half century to century. *** The loss in income would represent approximately one year's growth for most countries spread over several decades [because] managed systems are surprisingly resilient to climate changes if they have the time and resources to adapt. *** A third major conclusion is that the most damaging impacts of climate change --- in unmanaged and unmanageable human and natural systems --- lie well outside the conventional marketplace: sea-level risk, hurricane intensification, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity*** unstable ice sheets and reversing ocean currents."
There are mitigation strategies for slowing climate change by reducing emissions. They are not inexpensive, and because they are not inexpensive Nordhaus recognizes that humans cannot implement these mitigation strategies in one fell swoop. But since we understand all too well where carbon dioxide emissions come from, it is not that difficult to say that if humans had the will to mitigate climate change by reducing carbon emissions we know what to do. Here are some basic facts:
- Petroleum emits 0.9 tons of carbon dioxide per $1000 of fuel
- Natural gas emits 2 tons of carbon dioxide per $1000 of fuel
- Coal emits 11 tons of carbon dioxide per $1000 of fuel
None of this is lost on the Obama Administration. There is a reason that the Administration has been pursuing an "all of the above" strategy for energy: they are driving down natural gas prices by increasing supply, which incentivizes industry and utilities to shift their fuel mix from high carbon intensity coal to lower carbon intensity natural gas. It is working. Additionally, the Administration is providing limited subsidies (loan guarantees) for nuclear fuel even in the face of criticism that nuclear electricity generation plants are not cost effective: nuclear energy substitutes for coal as a fuel. The Administration's support for renewable energy fits a similar model.
Economists recognize that there is a more efficient way to reduce carbon emissions than all these regulatory strategies: Tax carbon emissions or cap emissions and create a market mechanism to allow emitters to pay for permission to emit above the caps. Either way puts a price on carbon that makes it more expensive to emit carbon dioxide. When that happens, economic actors will reduce their emissions. Despite all the anti-tax rhetoric about a carbon tax, a carbon tax has the serious potential to enable taxing authorities to reduce a number of other taxes in a significant way. A carbon tax does not have to be accretive to overall taxation. There are some in the US Congress who have actually looked at a carbon tax this way. The advantage for establishing a market in allowances (cap and trade) is that it ensures that emissions are used in the most productive manner, explains Nordhaus. This type of system has been very successful in reducing sulfur dioxide emissions.
Nordhaus is right: "reducing coal use meets with ferocious opposition from coal regions and their hired guns." It also meets with deceptive rhetoric from those who simply oppose government intervention in the economy. A recent article in today's Washington Post headlined "Study: Fox News botches climate-change coverage" identifying misleading portrayals of climate science, which, by Nordhaus' view, is the least controversial piece in this discussion. It's the economics stupid; it's not the science. The hard part is to avoid over-estimating the costs of the damage that may ensue, as Nordhaus highlights in The Carbon Casino, so we don't make the mistake of establishing and pursuing mitigation strategies that cost more than we need to pay over the long-run. But that is almost what is happening when we favor imposing more stringent regulations on refrigerators and light bulbs as a carbon mitigation strategy instead of raising the price of carbon, which is more efficient and will motivate economic actors to pursue their own self-interest in a way consistent with the public interest. The other hard part is overcoming our reluctance to demonize coal, and pursue more economically efficient carbon pricing policies to reduce carbon emissions such as carbon taxes or cap and trade. This is politics. Our inability to do that is what is referred to as the tragedy of the commons: where acting in self-interest is not the same as the collective or global interest. (See August 12, 2012 post). This is exactly when governments can help.
I am reminded in this political debate of Michael Shermer's analysis of various biases that form our beliefs, and sometimes false beliefs, about things we do not really understand: "the anchoring bias: relying too heavily on one reference anchor or piece of information when making decisions; the authority bias: valuing the opinions of an authority, especially in the evaluation of something we know little about; in-group bias, in which we place more value on the beliefs of those whom we perceive to be fellow members of our group and less on the beliefs of those from different groups. This is a result of our evolved tribal brains leading us not only to place such value judgment on beliefs but also to demonize and dismiss them as nonsense or evil, or both." Our modern tribal groups are political parties, religious groups, and other social clubs like those on some television talking heads groups. (See September 12, 2011 and June 12, 2011 posts).
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
Another rereading of a great novel decades later.
Albert Camus' plague is a metaphor for everything that the human conscience is typically compelled to resist. I say "typically" with deliberation, because human resistance to the unconscionable is not universal. Camus would know this too well since his native Algeria, the country where the metaphorical events described in The Plague take place, was occupied by Nazi Germany's Vichy French collaborators during World War II as Camus was writing the novel.
Whatever the origins of human morality may be (see November 21, 2012 post), and whether morality and conscience have a strictly biological basis or are co-determined by the interaction of biology and culture (see December 11, 2013 and February 27, 2011 post), there is a common human trait to resist things that threaten human social stasis, just like the body fights infections. The Plague is a novel about resistance to an amoral threat to a society: a bacterial disease. As depicted in The Plague, the emotional foundation of this resistance is a love that overcomes despair combined with a belief that there will be a future. It is a love that confronts the near certainty of death. Without love, the social action that organizes the resistance would not be possible and we succumb to the plague. Yet it is ironic where this love emerges from: human separation, what Camus calls exile. The novel's primary characters, Dr. Rieux, Rambert, and Tarrou, are separated from their wife and lover and think constantly about when they will be reunited with their loved ones. To soften the ache of their separation, they turn their love externally to humanity to aid the victims of the plague that will kill them all if they don't resist.
The opposite of resistance is submission and we meet Camus' representative of human submission in Father Paneloux. Father Paneloux is a good man, but by faith and religion he is committed to the fatalist belief that the plague is a test imposed by something so powerful that humans cannot resist. This is a submission to what is commonly referred to as god's will. There is no room for a Sisyphus who refuses to abandon resistance in god's kingdom. "Calamity has come on you my brethren," Paneloux tells his flock, "and my brethren you deserved it." And Paneloux launches into a recitation of every instance in religious storytelling where god purportedly inflicted floods, plagues, and calamity on those who deserved punishment for some reason or another. "No earthly power, may, not even ---- mark me well --- the vaunted might of human science can avail you to avert that hand [of god] once it is stretched toward you. And winnowing, you will be cast away with the chaff." You can't resist the plague; submit; you were meant to be punished by this insidious disease. Science cannot help you.
The previous post considers briefly justifications for murder including rebellion against absolute authority that leads to regicide or its modern equivalent, political assassination. The justification acquires its gravitas if the lethal revolt is directed at someone evil, wicked or morally bad or wrong such as genocidal mass murderers like Pol Pot or Adolph Hitler. There is no or little gravitas in justifying a homicide in the case of a leader who is at worst flawed.
The Plague examines a mass murderer that is indifferent, nature. We often refer to these deadly diseases as acts of god, and we consider ourselves helpless in our capacity to respond to them. The bubonic plague of the 14th Century known as the Black Death, memorialized in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror killed an estimated 75-200 million people. It is estimated that this plague reduced the human population on earth by 17-22% from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century, and reducing Europe's population by an estimated 30-60%. More recently, a 20th century flu pandemic in 1918 killed an estimated 3% - 5% of the world's population.
Albert Camus' fictional story of a plague that infected Oran, Algeria sometime in the 20th century is entirely metaphorical. Camus began writing his novel sometime in 1941 after Germany invaded and occupied France and several other European countries in 1940, invaded North Africa and world war was breaking out across Asia with Japanese aggression. Algeria was never occupied by the Germans or the Italians, but instead the Germans were nominally represented in Algeria by the Vichy French who submitted and collaborated with the German Nazis. If we credit an October 1941 entry in his Notebook, his metaphorical plague and Nazi aggression against Jews are linked in Camus' view.
Plague. Bonsels, pp 144 and 222.
1342. The Black Death in Europe. The Jews are murdered.
1481. The plague ravages the South of Spain. The Inquisition says: The Jews. But the plague kills an inquisitor.
Genocidal humans are consigned to a historical dust heap under the category Evil. Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" notwithstanding, humans are less inclined to ascribe indifference to genocide. Humans typically ascribe a hateful purpose lurking behind something we call Evil. Evil is synonymous with malevolence, the state of mind of having ill-will toward other persons or objects. It is not perceived as synonymous with indifference.
Camus was concerned with a very different kind of evil in the face of a mass murderer, one that juxtaposes with ignorance. "The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding," he writes in The Plague. "On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."
Father Paneloux is the standard bearer of good intentions that can do as much harm as malevolence, because he lacks understanding. Paneloux: "The love of god is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. Yet love of god can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make god's will ours." Camus' words from the mouth of Father Paneloux are the words that are so common among human religions; words of blind submission, fatalism, that commends us not to resist but to justify and accept the death of children and other innocents. Shortly following this sermon, the plague infects Father Paneloux and he quickly dies. Before he succumbs, the Father declines Dr. Rieux's offer to stay with him as he is fading, "Thanks. But priests can have no friends. They have given their all to god." That is an evil that comes of ignorance. Of course, not all priests are represented by Paneloux. There are many priests over the course of history who resist oppression, disease, or calamity in the name of god. But where religion and state are joined at the hip (see September 28, 2010, January 1, 2013 and March 24, 2013 post), love and justice is not a commonplace outcome.
Oran, of course, is repaired by those who are not priests: Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert, and Grand, those who do not disdain human personality. The plague has been out-lasted and there are survivors. But Camus would be quick to admit that the plague has not been conquered. Tarrou, speaking to Dr. Rieux toward the end of the novel confesses his abhorrence of the death penalty and the efforts he has made in the past to resist it. "As time went on I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live; and that we can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. . . .And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good. So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which, directly or indirectly, for good reasons or for bad, brings death to anyone or justifies others' putting him to death. *** That too, is why this epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight it at your side. I know positively ***that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest --- health, integrity, purity (if you like) ---- is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who hardly infects anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes Rieux, it's wearying business being plague-stricken. But it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everyone in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. *** Once I definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end." But where would Tarrou stand if the killer was not natural? What if the murderer is not an "innocent murderer?" Where would Tarrou stand against the nihilists? Would his willingness to resist justify killing in the name of peace? Tarrou does not answer because he is not asked. We do not know if he would ever consider joining the armed French resistance. The Plague is, of course, less of a novel about the evil of murder than the evil of indifference.
Albert Camus' plague is a metaphor for everything that the human conscience is typically compelled to resist. I say "typically" with deliberation, because human resistance to the unconscionable is not universal. Camus would know this too well since his native Algeria, the country where the metaphorical events described in The Plague take place, was occupied by Nazi Germany's Vichy French collaborators during World War II as Camus was writing the novel.
Whatever the origins of human morality may be (see November 21, 2012 post), and whether morality and conscience have a strictly biological basis or are co-determined by the interaction of biology and culture (see December 11, 2013 and February 27, 2011 post), there is a common human trait to resist things that threaten human social stasis, just like the body fights infections. The Plague is a novel about resistance to an amoral threat to a society: a bacterial disease. As depicted in The Plague, the emotional foundation of this resistance is a love that overcomes despair combined with a belief that there will be a future. It is a love that confronts the near certainty of death. Without love, the social action that organizes the resistance would not be possible and we succumb to the plague. Yet it is ironic where this love emerges from: human separation, what Camus calls exile. The novel's primary characters, Dr. Rieux, Rambert, and Tarrou, are separated from their wife and lover and think constantly about when they will be reunited with their loved ones. To soften the ache of their separation, they turn their love externally to humanity to aid the victims of the plague that will kill them all if they don't resist.
The opposite of resistance is submission and we meet Camus' representative of human submission in Father Paneloux. Father Paneloux is a good man, but by faith and religion he is committed to the fatalist belief that the plague is a test imposed by something so powerful that humans cannot resist. This is a submission to what is commonly referred to as god's will. There is no room for a Sisyphus who refuses to abandon resistance in god's kingdom. "Calamity has come on you my brethren," Paneloux tells his flock, "and my brethren you deserved it." And Paneloux launches into a recitation of every instance in religious storytelling where god purportedly inflicted floods, plagues, and calamity on those who deserved punishment for some reason or another. "No earthly power, may, not even ---- mark me well --- the vaunted might of human science can avail you to avert that hand [of god] once it is stretched toward you. And winnowing, you will be cast away with the chaff." You can't resist the plague; submit; you were meant to be punished by this insidious disease. Science cannot help you.
The previous post considers briefly justifications for murder including rebellion against absolute authority that leads to regicide or its modern equivalent, political assassination. The justification acquires its gravitas if the lethal revolt is directed at someone evil, wicked or morally bad or wrong such as genocidal mass murderers like Pol Pot or Adolph Hitler. There is no or little gravitas in justifying a homicide in the case of a leader who is at worst flawed.
The Plague examines a mass murderer that is indifferent, nature. We often refer to these deadly diseases as acts of god, and we consider ourselves helpless in our capacity to respond to them. The bubonic plague of the 14th Century known as the Black Death, memorialized in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror killed an estimated 75-200 million people. It is estimated that this plague reduced the human population on earth by 17-22% from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century, and reducing Europe's population by an estimated 30-60%. More recently, a 20th century flu pandemic in 1918 killed an estimated 3% - 5% of the world's population.
Albert Camus' fictional story of a plague that infected Oran, Algeria sometime in the 20th century is entirely metaphorical. Camus began writing his novel sometime in 1941 after Germany invaded and occupied France and several other European countries in 1940, invaded North Africa and world war was breaking out across Asia with Japanese aggression. Algeria was never occupied by the Germans or the Italians, but instead the Germans were nominally represented in Algeria by the Vichy French who submitted and collaborated with the German Nazis. If we credit an October 1941 entry in his Notebook, his metaphorical plague and Nazi aggression against Jews are linked in Camus' view.
Plague. Bonsels, pp 144 and 222.
1342. The Black Death in Europe. The Jews are murdered.
1481. The plague ravages the South of Spain. The Inquisition says: The Jews. But the plague kills an inquisitor.
Genocidal humans are consigned to a historical dust heap under the category Evil. Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" notwithstanding, humans are less inclined to ascribe indifference to genocide. Humans typically ascribe a hateful purpose lurking behind something we call Evil. Evil is synonymous with malevolence, the state of mind of having ill-will toward other persons or objects. It is not perceived as synonymous with indifference.
Camus was concerned with a very different kind of evil in the face of a mass murderer, one that juxtaposes with ignorance. "The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding," he writes in The Plague. "On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."
Father Paneloux is the standard bearer of good intentions that can do as much harm as malevolence, because he lacks understanding. Paneloux: "The love of god is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. Yet love of god can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make god's will ours." Camus' words from the mouth of Father Paneloux are the words that are so common among human religions; words of blind submission, fatalism, that commends us not to resist but to justify and accept the death of children and other innocents. Shortly following this sermon, the plague infects Father Paneloux and he quickly dies. Before he succumbs, the Father declines Dr. Rieux's offer to stay with him as he is fading, "Thanks. But priests can have no friends. They have given their all to god." That is an evil that comes of ignorance. Of course, not all priests are represented by Paneloux. There are many priests over the course of history who resist oppression, disease, or calamity in the name of god. But where religion and state are joined at the hip (see September 28, 2010, January 1, 2013 and March 24, 2013 post), love and justice is not a commonplace outcome.
Oran, of course, is repaired by those who are not priests: Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert, and Grand, those who do not disdain human personality. The plague has been out-lasted and there are survivors. But Camus would be quick to admit that the plague has not been conquered. Tarrou, speaking to Dr. Rieux toward the end of the novel confesses his abhorrence of the death penalty and the efforts he has made in the past to resist it. "As time went on I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live; and that we can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. . . .And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good. So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which, directly or indirectly, for good reasons or for bad, brings death to anyone or justifies others' putting him to death. *** That too, is why this epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight it at your side. I know positively ***that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest --- health, integrity, purity (if you like) ---- is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who hardly infects anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes Rieux, it's wearying business being plague-stricken. But it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everyone in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. *** Once I definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end." But where would Tarrou stand if the killer was not natural? What if the murderer is not an "innocent murderer?" Where would Tarrou stand against the nihilists? Would his willingness to resist justify killing in the name of peace? Tarrou does not answer because he is not asked. We do not know if he would ever consider joining the armed French resistance. The Plague is, of course, less of a novel about the evil of murder than the evil of indifference.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1599)
There is some irony in the current thinking that the origins of human propensity to moral or altruistic behavior emerged as a result of group behavior that deprived, ostracized, or exiled individuals who did not respect the group's expectation of reciprocal altruism. Ostracism and exile represented a punishment of those who cheated on the group. In the hunter-gatherer era, we are primarily dealing with those who take food from the group (or more than their share) without contributing (or contributing proportionately) to securing or preparing that food. It was the tendency for deprivation and ostracism to trigger an emotion, shame, and lead the individual to reconnect with the group's expectations. The irony is this: in some cases that exile could be lethal and permanent, death. (See November 21, 2012 post). Today, we would rarely, if ever, think of imposing a "death penalty" for stealing food. This issue ultimately begs for a discussion of when is homicide justifiable? Is it ever justifiable in the name of enforcing an expectation of reciprocal, altruistic behavior?"
Today we think of justifiable homicide almost exclusively in terms of self-defense: where it is reasonable to believe that the offending party posed an imminent threat to the life or wellbeing of another. Justifiable homicide is widely recognized almost everywhere in this way. There are statutes, for example, that explain the circumstances when a homicide by a police officer is justifiable. This type of immunity conditionally respects the state's monopoly on violence, which is one definition of a government. There are also statutes that conditionally immunize lethal conduct by citizens, typically in protecting one's person, immediately family, others in his or her presence, or home. In Washington State, for example, "Homicide is also justifiable when committed either: (1) In the lawful defense of the slayer, or his or her husband, wife, parent, child, brother, or sister, or of any other person in his or her presence or company, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished; or (2) In the actual resistance of an attempt to commit a felony upon the slayer, in his or her presence, or upon or in a dwelling, or other place of abode, in which he or she is." California has only a slightly more expansive, but similar statute, which also recognizes that a homicide may be justifiable --- similar to the protection offered a police officer but extended to private citizens --- "to apprehend any person for any felony committed, or in lawfully suppressing any riot, or in lawfully keeping and preserving the peace." The stand-your-ground provision in Florida is not all that different on paper, but with one exception: "A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." What the stand-your-ground provision did was abolish an obligation to retreat when facing imminent danger. Standing your ground was not previously an option. Where controversy further erupts over this issue is in the interpretation of these statutes by police officers investigating a homicide, by judges in their jury instructions, or perhaps jurors who may be bring some bias to their judgment. There is some data that suggests homicides are increasing in jurisdictions with stand your ground laws like Texas and Florida. But I don't think this should be surprising: the law appears to allow someone to say, "If you want to rumble, let's rumble, even to the death." The self-defense law no longer deters conflict; this development in self-defense law no longer seems interested in promoting reciprocal, altruistic behavior.
Contemplating the assassination of Julius Caesar, is regicide ever justified by "the abuse of greatness when it disjoins [severs] remorse [compassion] from power?" [Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene I]. Purging the Roman Republic of tyranny is the conspirators' purported justification for killing Caesar, and assassination is their means. Julius Caesar was never accused of murder. This was a political squabble over power and form of government. As the previous post discussing the murderous Richard III observes, Americans had civil means of driving Richard Nixon from power in 1974 by effectively shaming him into respecting the office to which he was elected and going into exile. But how do Romans before the common era and 15th century Britons shame their regent (like Caesar or Richard III), who claim to inherit their power from some divine source, into leaving office? They can't unless they are to claim the government's mantle of the monopoly of violence by securing the assistance of the military or another army in a coup.
Shakespeare imagines a brief discussion among the conspirators whether they should also kill Marc Antony, a potential successor to Caesar, which discussion Brutus quells: "Let Antony and Caesar fall together," says Cassius. No, Antony is but a limb of Caesar, says Brutus, "Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers [of limbs] . . . We shall be called purgers, not murderers. And for Mark Antony, think not of him. For he can do no more than Caesar's arm when Caesar's head is off." Brutus can claim to justify the murder of Caesar on the basis of protecting the people from a tyrant --- an argument not entirely distant from a claim of self-defense of the people of the Roman Republic. But he cannot claim a justification for ridding Rome of Antony. That would be murder.
How does that distinction resonate in the modern era? There are modern murderers who occupy positions of power and who are simply evil and abuse their power --- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot, --- are just a few modern examples. Why would we not exculpate someone who slayed ("purged") Pol Pot to prevent further acts of murder by the Khmer Rouge and pollution of the Killing Fields --- one of the greatest of human tragedies? Similarly, if the attempt to kill Adolph Hitler had succeeded, the conspirators may have been sanctioned by the Nazi government that supported Hitler, but to the rest of the world they would have been exculpated.
The people of Rome or the Senate might have praised Brutus and Cassius for protecting them from a dictatorship, but the slaying of Caesar was met mostly with silence from the people. Caesar was not a murderer like we think of Pol Pot, Hitler or Saddam, but he was a warrior empire builder who sought absolute power. There is no evil villain in Julius Caesar, there are only flawed characters. Caesar may not have been empathetic, but he actually enjoyed support from his underclass and even some in the Senate. Brutus and Cassius did not enjoy widespread popular support of the governed. Neither did Brutus and Cassius have a plan to govern Rome once Julius Caesar was purged. Presumably they assumed the Senate would be restored to its historical authority before Caesar accumulated power. Although Antony initially advocated for amnesty for the conspirators, Julius Caesar's designated heir, Octavian, disagreed and pursued revenge for the death of Julius Caesar. Ultimately, Brutus and Cassius fled Rome to find sanctuary and raise an army in the eastern part of the empire. During the Liberators' Civil War that ensued following the death of Julius Caesar, both Cassius and later Brutus commit suicide as Antony's forces corner them. Civil war ensued across the Roman Empire for a number of years until ultimately Caesar Augustus (Octavian), claiming divine power, consolidated total power as emperor. Even if the homicide of Julius Caesar could have been justified, it failed to accomplish any justifiable result. The Roman Republic met its demise with the rise of Caesar's Roman Empire. That is the larger tragedy in Julius Caesar. (See March 15, 2012 post).
Today we think of justifiable homicide almost exclusively in terms of self-defense: where it is reasonable to believe that the offending party posed an imminent threat to the life or wellbeing of another. Justifiable homicide is widely recognized almost everywhere in this way. There are statutes, for example, that explain the circumstances when a homicide by a police officer is justifiable. This type of immunity conditionally respects the state's monopoly on violence, which is one definition of a government. There are also statutes that conditionally immunize lethal conduct by citizens, typically in protecting one's person, immediately family, others in his or her presence, or home. In Washington State, for example, "Homicide is also justifiable when committed either: (1) In the lawful defense of the slayer, or his or her husband, wife, parent, child, brother, or sister, or of any other person in his or her presence or company, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished; or (2) In the actual resistance of an attempt to commit a felony upon the slayer, in his or her presence, or upon or in a dwelling, or other place of abode, in which he or she is." California has only a slightly more expansive, but similar statute, which also recognizes that a homicide may be justifiable --- similar to the protection offered a police officer but extended to private citizens --- "to apprehend any person for any felony committed, or in lawfully suppressing any riot, or in lawfully keeping and preserving the peace." The stand-your-ground provision in Florida is not all that different on paper, but with one exception: "A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." What the stand-your-ground provision did was abolish an obligation to retreat when facing imminent danger. Standing your ground was not previously an option. Where controversy further erupts over this issue is in the interpretation of these statutes by police officers investigating a homicide, by judges in their jury instructions, or perhaps jurors who may be bring some bias to their judgment. There is some data that suggests homicides are increasing in jurisdictions with stand your ground laws like Texas and Florida. But I don't think this should be surprising: the law appears to allow someone to say, "If you want to rumble, let's rumble, even to the death." The self-defense law no longer deters conflict; this development in self-defense law no longer seems interested in promoting reciprocal, altruistic behavior.
Contemplating the assassination of Julius Caesar, is regicide ever justified by "the abuse of greatness when it disjoins [severs] remorse [compassion] from power?" [Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene I]. Purging the Roman Republic of tyranny is the conspirators' purported justification for killing Caesar, and assassination is their means. Julius Caesar was never accused of murder. This was a political squabble over power and form of government. As the previous post discussing the murderous Richard III observes, Americans had civil means of driving Richard Nixon from power in 1974 by effectively shaming him into respecting the office to which he was elected and going into exile. But how do Romans before the common era and 15th century Britons shame their regent (like Caesar or Richard III), who claim to inherit their power from some divine source, into leaving office? They can't unless they are to claim the government's mantle of the monopoly of violence by securing the assistance of the military or another army in a coup.
Shakespeare imagines a brief discussion among the conspirators whether they should also kill Marc Antony, a potential successor to Caesar, which discussion Brutus quells: "Let Antony and Caesar fall together," says Cassius. No, Antony is but a limb of Caesar, says Brutus, "Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers [of limbs] . . . We shall be called purgers, not murderers. And for Mark Antony, think not of him. For he can do no more than Caesar's arm when Caesar's head is off." Brutus can claim to justify the murder of Caesar on the basis of protecting the people from a tyrant --- an argument not entirely distant from a claim of self-defense of the people of the Roman Republic. But he cannot claim a justification for ridding Rome of Antony. That would be murder.
How does that distinction resonate in the modern era? There are modern murderers who occupy positions of power and who are simply evil and abuse their power --- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot, --- are just a few modern examples. Why would we not exculpate someone who slayed ("purged") Pol Pot to prevent further acts of murder by the Khmer Rouge and pollution of the Killing Fields --- one of the greatest of human tragedies? Similarly, if the attempt to kill Adolph Hitler had succeeded, the conspirators may have been sanctioned by the Nazi government that supported Hitler, but to the rest of the world they would have been exculpated.
The people of Rome or the Senate might have praised Brutus and Cassius for protecting them from a dictatorship, but the slaying of Caesar was met mostly with silence from the people. Caesar was not a murderer like we think of Pol Pot, Hitler or Saddam, but he was a warrior empire builder who sought absolute power. There is no evil villain in Julius Caesar, there are only flawed characters. Caesar may not have been empathetic, but he actually enjoyed support from his underclass and even some in the Senate. Brutus and Cassius did not enjoy widespread popular support of the governed. Neither did Brutus and Cassius have a plan to govern Rome once Julius Caesar was purged. Presumably they assumed the Senate would be restored to its historical authority before Caesar accumulated power. Although Antony initially advocated for amnesty for the conspirators, Julius Caesar's designated heir, Octavian, disagreed and pursued revenge for the death of Julius Caesar. Ultimately, Brutus and Cassius fled Rome to find sanctuary and raise an army in the eastern part of the empire. During the Liberators' Civil War that ensued following the death of Julius Caesar, both Cassius and later Brutus commit suicide as Antony's forces corner them. Civil war ensued across the Roman Empire for a number of years until ultimately Caesar Augustus (Octavian), claiming divine power, consolidated total power as emperor. Even if the homicide of Julius Caesar could have been justified, it failed to accomplish any justifiable result. The Roman Republic met its demise with the rise of Caesar's Roman Empire. That is the larger tragedy in Julius Caesar. (See March 15, 2012 post).
Thursday, December 19, 2013
William Shakespeare, Richard III (1592)
I usually discover something new in rereading a book I have not touched in a long time. With the passage of time, there is inevitably a different perspective than the original perspective that yields a different insight. In some cases the book loses it magic the second time around, and in other cases the book is just as vibrant as it was the first time but for entirely different reasons.
Decades ago, while a mere high school student reading Shakespeare, and in the wake of the 1970 Kent State University shootings, I submitted a paper as part of the Shakespeare course requirements that re-wrote Shakespeare's Richard III in contemporary terms. I titled it Richard the Third Rate. I wish I could recall how I dealt with the opening lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried." Certainly I modified "[son] of York" in some way to refer to Richard Nixon's "house." And certainly I did not rewrite the entire play, but I do recall the closing: "A chopper, a chopper, My Kingdom for a chopper." That is how Presidents leave their grounds these days and escape. They climb into a helicopter and fly away. And in hindsight this was unexpectedly prescient, because it was just four years later that Richard Nixon climbed into a chopper and fled Washington, DC after he resigned the Presidency. He resigned his Kingdom for a chopper and avoided an impeachment trial.
To be sure, the parallels between the two Richards are not strong. By Shakespeare's count, Richard III is directly responsible for the execution of eleven kin, close and distant, as he cleared his path to the British monarchy. With the commencement of US bombing in Cambodia, Richard Nixon merely set in motion events that indirectly connect him to the deaths of four students at Kent State University. Richard Nixon suffered a far different fate than Richard Plantagenet of York, Richard III, king of England for just two short years (1483-1485). While shamed after avoiding a criminal prosecution thanks to a pardon from his successor, Richard Nixon rebuilt his reputation to some considerable degree and lived for 20 more years after relinquishing his kingdom. Richard III's rule was extinguished when he was slain in battle by his enemies, like many of his Plantagenet kin.
We have a much different means and structure for removing someone from power today, although modern polities are certainly not uniform in the way they approach the transfer of political power. The manner in which Richard III was removed from power certainly persists in a few nations, and battle to the death, execution, and murder was considerably more common in the 14th and 15th centuries. The interesting storyline about Richard III's demise and removal from power is that it was all in the family.
Clearly as I read Richard III in 1970, Richard Nixon was part of my mental association. Forty-three years later, kin selection was on my mind as I turned the pages. One definition of kin selection is this: Kin selection is an evolutionary theory that proposes that people are more likely to help those who are blood relatives because it will increase the odds of gene transmission to future generations. The theory suggests that altruism towards close relatives occurs in order to ensure the continuation of shared genes. The more closely the individuals are related, the more likely they are to help one another. That "help" may include sacrificial behavior. (See September 17, 2012, September 12, 2012, October 13, 2010, and November 4, 2009 posts).
The House of Plantagenet obviously did not seriously contemplate increasing the odds of their gene transmission to future generations during their monarchical reign over England in the 14th and 15th centuries. Altruism and self-sacrifice were not in their blood; conspiring against and slaying each other was. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," said Abraham Lincoln during his 1858 campaign against Stephen Douglas, nearly four hundred years after the death of Richard III. Lincoln's remarks, emanating from the book of Mark, and later modified by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, could very well have been written by William Shakespeare for Richard III.
The Plantagenet family tree is worth a look. There are some recognizable names from the British royal line. But look a little closer at some in this dysfunctional family:
The House of Plantagenet came to include over time, two "cadet" branches: the House of Lancaster established by the son of Henry III, and the House of York, established by the son of Edward III. The cadet House of Lancaster captured the British throne with the accession of Henry IV, and lost the throne to the House of York with the accession of Edward IV. Richard III was a member of the House of York, succeeding Edward IV. These two cadet branches represented the divided House of Plantagenet and ultimately led to the Wars of the Roses between these two family subunits.
Edward II: His invasion of Scotland in 1314 to suppress revolt resulted in defeat at Bannockburn. When he fell under the influence of a new favourite, Hugh le Despenser, he was deposed in 1327 by his wife Isabella (1292–1358), daughter of Philip IV of France, and her lover Roger de Mortimer, and murdered in Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire. He was succeeded by his son, Edward III.
Richard II: Richard was born in Bordeaux. He succeeded his grandfather Edward III when only ten, the government being in the hands of a council of regency. His fondness for favourites resulted in conflicts with Parliament, and in 1388 the baronial party, headed by the Duke of Gloucester, had many of his friends executed. Richard recovered control in 1389, and ruled moderately until 1397, when he had Gloucester [14th child of Edward III] murdered and his other leading opponents executed or banished, and assumed absolute power. In 1399 his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford (later Henry IV of the House of Lancaster), returned from exile to lead a revolt; Richard II was deposed by Parliament and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he died probably of starvation.
Henry VI: King of England from 1422, son of Henry V. He assumed royal power 1442 and sided with the party opposed to the continuation of the Hundred Years' War with France. After his marriage 1445, he was dominated by his wife, Margaret of Anjou. He was deposed 1461 in the Wars of the Roses; was captured 1465, temporarily restored 1470, but again imprisoned 1471 and then murdered. The unpopularity of the government, especially after the loss of the English conquests in France, encouraged Richard, Duke of York, to claim the throne, and though York was killed 1460, his son Edward IV proclaimed himself king 1461.
Edward IV (House of York): He was the son of Richard, Duke of York, and succeeded Henry VI in the Wars of the Roses, temporarily losing his throne to Henry when Edward fell out with his adviser Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Edward was a fine warrior and intelligent strategist, with victories at Mortimer's Cross and Towton in 1461, Empingham in 1470, and Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471. He was succeeded by his son Edward V.
Edward V: King of England 1483. Son of Edward IV, he was deposed three months after his accession in favour of his uncle (Richard III), and is traditionally believed to have been murdered (with his brother) in the Tower of London on Richard's orders.
Richard III: King of England from 1483. The son of Richard, Duke of York, he was created Duke of Gloucester by his brother Edward IV, and distinguished himself in the Wars of the Roses. On Edward's death 1483 he became protector to his nephew Edward V, and soon secured the crown for himself on the plea that Edward IV's sons were illegitimate. He proved a capable ruler, but the suspicion that he had murdered Edward V and his brother undermined his popularity. In 1485 Henry, Earl of Richmond (later Henry VII), raised a rebellion, and Richard III was defeated and killed at Bosworth. After Richard's death on the battlefield his rival was crowned King Henry VII and became the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty which lasted until 1603.
Henry VII: Henry was the son of Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, who died before Henry was born, and Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of Edward III through John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Although the Beaufort line, which was originally illegitimate, had been specifically excluded (1407) from all claim to the throne, the death of the imprisoned Henry VI (1471) made Henry Tudor head of the house of Lancaster. At this point, however, the Yorkist Edward IV had established himself securely on the throne, and Henry, who had been brought up in Wales, fled to Brittany for safety. The death of Edward IV (1483) and accession of Richard III, left Henry the natural leader of the party opposing Richard, whose rule was very unpopular. Henry made an unsuccessful attempt to land in England during the abortive revolt (1483) of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. Thereafter he bided his time in France until 1485 when, aided by other English refugees, he landed in Wales. At the battle of Bosworth Field, Leicestershire, he defeated the royal forces of Richard, who was killed. Henry advanced to London, was crowned, and in 1486 fulfilled a promise made earlier to Yorkist dissidents to marry Edward IV's daughter, Elizabeth of York. He thus united the houses of York and Lancaster, founding the Tudor royal dynasty. Although Henry's accession marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, the early years of his reign were disturbed by Yorkist attempts to regain the throne.
The Plantagenets are hardly the picture of our altruistic nature. Shakespeare is the chronicler of this blood-stained line of royals (Henry IV, Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III), and Richard III brings us to the conclusion of their chronicles beginning in the waning months of the life of Edward IV with the members of the House of York reminding each other just who killed whom over the course of the latter years of the Wars of the Roses. As one source summarizes this strife, there was division not merely between the two cadet Houses of the same family, but within the House of York itself: "The next round of the wars arose out of disputes within the Yorkist ranks. Warwick and his circle were increasingly passed over at Edward’s court; more seriously, Warwick differed with the King on foreign policy. In 1469 civil war was renewed. Warwick and Edward’s rebellious brother George, duke of Clarence, fomented risings in the north; and in July, at Edgecote (near Banbury), defeated Edward’s supporters, afterward holding the King prisoner. By March 1470, however, Edward regained his control, forcing Warwick and Clarence to flee to France, where they allied themselves with the French king Louis XI and their former enemy, Margaret of Anjou. Returning to England (September 1470), they deposed Edward and restored the crown to Henry VI. Edward fled to the Netherlands with his followers and, securing Burgundian aid, returned to England in March 1471. Edward outmaneuvred Warwick, regained the loyalty of Clarence, and decisively defeated Warwick at Barnet on April 14. That very day, Margaret had landed at Weymouth. Hearing the news of Barnet, she marched west, trying to reach the safety of Wales; but Edward won the race to the Severn. At Tewkesbury (May 4) Margaret was captured, her forces destroyed, and her son killed. Shortly afterward, Henry VI was murdered in the Tower of London. Edward’s throne was secure for the rest of his life (he died in 1483)."
Quoth Shakespeare's Henry VII as the curtain closes on Richard III, "England hath long been made and scarred herself: The brother blindly shed the brother's blood; The father rashly slaughtered his own son; The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire. All this divided York and Lancaster. Divided in their dire division."
What Richard III never really enjoyed, but Richard Nixon did, was abiding loyalty. John Dean ultimately broke the Nixon clique's conspiracy of silence. Everyone else in the President's inner circle maintained their silence, and Nixon stood by his men. Richard Nixon divided a nation, not his family or followers. Richard III's inner circle peeled away, some who refused to carry out his purportedly (if Shakespeare's history is accurate) criminal commands, perhaps out of principle, perhaps out of fear of slaughter, and in the end he had few to stand by him as he cried, "A horse, a horse, my Kingdom for a horse."
Decades ago, while a mere high school student reading Shakespeare, and in the wake of the 1970 Kent State University shootings, I submitted a paper as part of the Shakespeare course requirements that re-wrote Shakespeare's Richard III in contemporary terms. I titled it Richard the Third Rate. I wish I could recall how I dealt with the opening lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried." Certainly I modified "[son] of York" in some way to refer to Richard Nixon's "house." And certainly I did not rewrite the entire play, but I do recall the closing: "A chopper, a chopper, My Kingdom for a chopper." That is how Presidents leave their grounds these days and escape. They climb into a helicopter and fly away. And in hindsight this was unexpectedly prescient, because it was just four years later that Richard Nixon climbed into a chopper and fled Washington, DC after he resigned the Presidency. He resigned his Kingdom for a chopper and avoided an impeachment trial.
To be sure, the parallels between the two Richards are not strong. By Shakespeare's count, Richard III is directly responsible for the execution of eleven kin, close and distant, as he cleared his path to the British monarchy. With the commencement of US bombing in Cambodia, Richard Nixon merely set in motion events that indirectly connect him to the deaths of four students at Kent State University. Richard Nixon suffered a far different fate than Richard Plantagenet of York, Richard III, king of England for just two short years (1483-1485). While shamed after avoiding a criminal prosecution thanks to a pardon from his successor, Richard Nixon rebuilt his reputation to some considerable degree and lived for 20 more years after relinquishing his kingdom. Richard III's rule was extinguished when he was slain in battle by his enemies, like many of his Plantagenet kin.
We have a much different means and structure for removing someone from power today, although modern polities are certainly not uniform in the way they approach the transfer of political power. The manner in which Richard III was removed from power certainly persists in a few nations, and battle to the death, execution, and murder was considerably more common in the 14th and 15th centuries. The interesting storyline about Richard III's demise and removal from power is that it was all in the family.
Clearly as I read Richard III in 1970, Richard Nixon was part of my mental association. Forty-three years later, kin selection was on my mind as I turned the pages. One definition of kin selection is this: Kin selection is an evolutionary theory that proposes that people are more likely to help those who are blood relatives because it will increase the odds of gene transmission to future generations. The theory suggests that altruism towards close relatives occurs in order to ensure the continuation of shared genes. The more closely the individuals are related, the more likely they are to help one another. That "help" may include sacrificial behavior. (See September 17, 2012, September 12, 2012, October 13, 2010, and November 4, 2009 posts).
The House of Plantagenet obviously did not seriously contemplate increasing the odds of their gene transmission to future generations during their monarchical reign over England in the 14th and 15th centuries. Altruism and self-sacrifice were not in their blood; conspiring against and slaying each other was. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," said Abraham Lincoln during his 1858 campaign against Stephen Douglas, nearly four hundred years after the death of Richard III. Lincoln's remarks, emanating from the book of Mark, and later modified by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, could very well have been written by William Shakespeare for Richard III.
The Plantagenet family tree is worth a look. There are some recognizable names from the British royal line. But look a little closer at some in this dysfunctional family:
The House of Plantagenet came to include over time, two "cadet" branches: the House of Lancaster established by the son of Henry III, and the House of York, established by the son of Edward III. The cadet House of Lancaster captured the British throne with the accession of Henry IV, and lost the throne to the House of York with the accession of Edward IV. Richard III was a member of the House of York, succeeding Edward IV. These two cadet branches represented the divided House of Plantagenet and ultimately led to the Wars of the Roses between these two family subunits.
Edward II: His invasion of Scotland in 1314 to suppress revolt resulted in defeat at Bannockburn. When he fell under the influence of a new favourite, Hugh le Despenser, he was deposed in 1327 by his wife Isabella (1292–1358), daughter of Philip IV of France, and her lover Roger de Mortimer, and murdered in Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire. He was succeeded by his son, Edward III.
Richard II: Richard was born in Bordeaux. He succeeded his grandfather Edward III when only ten, the government being in the hands of a council of regency. His fondness for favourites resulted in conflicts with Parliament, and in 1388 the baronial party, headed by the Duke of Gloucester, had many of his friends executed. Richard recovered control in 1389, and ruled moderately until 1397, when he had Gloucester [14th child of Edward III] murdered and his other leading opponents executed or banished, and assumed absolute power. In 1399 his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford (later Henry IV of the House of Lancaster), returned from exile to lead a revolt; Richard II was deposed by Parliament and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he died probably of starvation.
Henry VI: King of England from 1422, son of Henry V. He assumed royal power 1442 and sided with the party opposed to the continuation of the Hundred Years' War with France. After his marriage 1445, he was dominated by his wife, Margaret of Anjou. He was deposed 1461 in the Wars of the Roses; was captured 1465, temporarily restored 1470, but again imprisoned 1471 and then murdered. The unpopularity of the government, especially after the loss of the English conquests in France, encouraged Richard, Duke of York, to claim the throne, and though York was killed 1460, his son Edward IV proclaimed himself king 1461.
Edward IV (House of York): He was the son of Richard, Duke of York, and succeeded Henry VI in the Wars of the Roses, temporarily losing his throne to Henry when Edward fell out with his adviser Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Edward was a fine warrior and intelligent strategist, with victories at Mortimer's Cross and Towton in 1461, Empingham in 1470, and Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471. He was succeeded by his son Edward V.
Edward V: King of England 1483. Son of Edward IV, he was deposed three months after his accession in favour of his uncle (Richard III), and is traditionally believed to have been murdered (with his brother) in the Tower of London on Richard's orders.
Richard III: King of England from 1483. The son of Richard, Duke of York, he was created Duke of Gloucester by his brother Edward IV, and distinguished himself in the Wars of the Roses. On Edward's death 1483 he became protector to his nephew Edward V, and soon secured the crown for himself on the plea that Edward IV's sons were illegitimate. He proved a capable ruler, but the suspicion that he had murdered Edward V and his brother undermined his popularity. In 1485 Henry, Earl of Richmond (later Henry VII), raised a rebellion, and Richard III was defeated and killed at Bosworth. After Richard's death on the battlefield his rival was crowned King Henry VII and became the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty which lasted until 1603.
Henry VII: Henry was the son of Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, who died before Henry was born, and Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of Edward III through John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Although the Beaufort line, which was originally illegitimate, had been specifically excluded (1407) from all claim to the throne, the death of the imprisoned Henry VI (1471) made Henry Tudor head of the house of Lancaster. At this point, however, the Yorkist Edward IV had established himself securely on the throne, and Henry, who had been brought up in Wales, fled to Brittany for safety. The death of Edward IV (1483) and accession of Richard III, left Henry the natural leader of the party opposing Richard, whose rule was very unpopular. Henry made an unsuccessful attempt to land in England during the abortive revolt (1483) of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. Thereafter he bided his time in France until 1485 when, aided by other English refugees, he landed in Wales. At the battle of Bosworth Field, Leicestershire, he defeated the royal forces of Richard, who was killed. Henry advanced to London, was crowned, and in 1486 fulfilled a promise made earlier to Yorkist dissidents to marry Edward IV's daughter, Elizabeth of York. He thus united the houses of York and Lancaster, founding the Tudor royal dynasty. Although Henry's accession marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, the early years of his reign were disturbed by Yorkist attempts to regain the throne.
The Plantagenets are hardly the picture of our altruistic nature. Shakespeare is the chronicler of this blood-stained line of royals (Henry IV, Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III), and Richard III brings us to the conclusion of their chronicles beginning in the waning months of the life of Edward IV with the members of the House of York reminding each other just who killed whom over the course of the latter years of the Wars of the Roses. As one source summarizes this strife, there was division not merely between the two cadet Houses of the same family, but within the House of York itself: "The next round of the wars arose out of disputes within the Yorkist ranks. Warwick and his circle were increasingly passed over at Edward’s court; more seriously, Warwick differed with the King on foreign policy. In 1469 civil war was renewed. Warwick and Edward’s rebellious brother George, duke of Clarence, fomented risings in the north; and in July, at Edgecote (near Banbury), defeated Edward’s supporters, afterward holding the King prisoner. By March 1470, however, Edward regained his control, forcing Warwick and Clarence to flee to France, where they allied themselves with the French king Louis XI and their former enemy, Margaret of Anjou. Returning to England (September 1470), they deposed Edward and restored the crown to Henry VI. Edward fled to the Netherlands with his followers and, securing Burgundian aid, returned to England in March 1471. Edward outmaneuvred Warwick, regained the loyalty of Clarence, and decisively defeated Warwick at Barnet on April 14. That very day, Margaret had landed at Weymouth. Hearing the news of Barnet, she marched west, trying to reach the safety of Wales; but Edward won the race to the Severn. At Tewkesbury (May 4) Margaret was captured, her forces destroyed, and her son killed. Shortly afterward, Henry VI was murdered in the Tower of London. Edward’s throne was secure for the rest of his life (he died in 1483)."
Quoth Shakespeare's Henry VII as the curtain closes on Richard III, "England hath long been made and scarred herself: The brother blindly shed the brother's blood; The father rashly slaughtered his own son; The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire. All this divided York and Lancaster. Divided in their dire division."
What Richard III never really enjoyed, but Richard Nixon did, was abiding loyalty. John Dean ultimately broke the Nixon clique's conspiracy of silence. Everyone else in the President's inner circle maintained their silence, and Nixon stood by his men. Richard Nixon divided a nation, not his family or followers. Richard III's inner circle peeled away, some who refused to carry out his purportedly (if Shakespeare's history is accurate) criminal commands, perhaps out of principle, perhaps out of fear of slaughter, and in the end he had few to stand by him as he cried, "A horse, a horse, my Kingdom for a horse."
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Daniel Kelly, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (2011)
I have an aversion to lima beans. aver·sion, noun \ə-ˈvər-zhən, -shən\
There has been much written in recent years about disgust as a moral emotion or the potential nexus between disgust and moral judgments/ethical norms. The example of incest avoidance is one example of "moral" behavior that is at the heart of this discussion. Avoiding consumption of lima beans is not, and I am reasonably certain that the avoidance of lima beans is not considered a "moral behavior" across any culture or society. Marc Hauser described disgust as "the most powerful emotion against sin, especially in the domains of food and sex. . . . In the absence of a disgust response, we might well convince ourselves that it is okay to have sex with a younger sibling or eat vomit, act with deleterious consequences for our reproductive success and survival respectively." Incest avoidance is worthy of study -- in contrast to my aversion for lima beans -- because it is virtually universal across cultures, and is therefore almost unique among things humans generally avoid. Aversion to eating pork, for example, is not universal, and like lima beans there is a substantial part of the human population that likes eating pork and is not harmed by eating pork. In some cultures, the avoidance of eating pork is considered a "moral behavior."
Disgust did not begin as a moral or even a social emotion. There is common agreement, among those who have studied disgust that the emotion's evolutionary origins lie in response to the ingestion of something: spoiled food, toxins; it later evolved as a response to the presence of disease and parasites, which is referred to as core disgust. Daniel Kelly documents this body of research in Yuck! And a common feature of this emotion is the automatic facial feature called face gape. As one article explains, "At its root, disgust is a revulsion response -- "a basic biological motivational system" -- that Darwin associated with the sense of taste. Its function is to reject or discharge offensive-tasting food from the mouth (and/or the stomach), and its fundamental indicator, the "gape" or tongue extension, has been observed in a number of animals, including birds and mammals. In humans, the characteristic facial expressions of disgust that coincide with gaping include nose wrinkling and raising the upper lip, behaviors usually accompanied by a feeling of nausea and a general sense of revulsion. Together these behaviors and sensations facilitate the rejection of food that has been put into the mouth." Evolutionarily, disgust began with distaste, but at some point it adapted in humans to protect against infection by pathogens and parasites. Daniel Kelly explains his thesis that the two responses became "entangled." "Other previously puzzling features of disgust also fall into place once its role in parasite avoidance becomes clear. Together, eating and sex constitute two of the most basic evolutionary imperatives. Both behaviors are unavoidable ingredients of evolutionary success, but both involve the crossing of bodily perimeters at various points. By virtue of this, both activities leave those engaging in them highly vulnerable to infection. The upshot is that disgust's role in monitoring the boundaries of the entire body (rather than just the mouth) makes much more sense in light of its connection to infectious disease. Moreover, both feeding and procreating are activities that require those boundaries to be breached. They are highly salient to disgust both because they are universal and unavoidable and because they are two of the most potent vectors of disease transmission." It is this entanglement of distaste and core disgust that is unique to humans. There is evidence that each is independently found in other species.
Importantly, disgust appears to be activated in the cortex. Kelly identifies the insula, which is not part of that ancient subcortical system of the forebrain or midbrain that Jaak Panksepp documents is associated with basic emotional systems. (See May 19, 2013 post). The word disgust never appears in Panksepp's book and is not even found in his description of the fear system involving in the amygdala and the hypothalamus which, because fear stimulates flight, sounds like it might be related to an emotion like disgust that stimulates avoidance. On the other hand, Kelly identifies an area of the forebrain, the putamen, as an area of the brain associated with processing disgust, but the putamen is involved in emotional facial recognition, so it may not be something disgusting that activates the putamen, but the recognition of face gape that activates the putamen. The putamen is primarily associated with the motor cortex, so the connection to the putamen as an emotional processor is not at all that clear. I suspect that the putamen, if it is implicated in disgust, it is not part of what Rozin and Haidt refer to as inputs (cognitive appraisals or environmental events), but our biological output that results in virtually automatic, nearly uniform facial expressions. Research on patients with Huntington's Disease would seem to confirm this observation. But the insular cortex is involved in maintaining the homeostatic condition of the body; it maintains an awareness of various parameters of the body; the insula is also believed to process convergent information to produce an emotionally relevant context for sensory experience. More specifically, the anterior insula is related more to olfactory, gustatory, vicero-autonomic, and limbic function, while the posterior insula is related more to auditory-somesthetic-skeletomotor function. The insula has an important role in pain experience and the experience of a number of basic emotions, including anger, fear, disgust, happiness and sadness. If disgust is seated in the insular cortex, this would confirm the significance of cognitive appraisal in producing disgust. The insular cortex is a mammalian development, so it evolved later than those ancient emotional systems that Panksepp discusses.
Morality varies across cultures and even within cultures and smaller social groups. Edward Westermark advanced the thesis that there was an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth, and as applied to persons who are closely related this generates a feeling of horror of intercourse with close kin. But is this aversion really innate? Or is it learned? Or is something innate triggered because, in this case, one must first experience living closely with someone at an early age? Because there is survival value associated with avoiding inbreeding, there is arguably an evolutionary imperative associated with incest avoidance and should explain in substantial part why incest avoidance is universal across cultures. Inbreeding reduces the fitness of a given population. Incest avoidance seems to have nothing to do with morals. If it is considered moral behavior, it is only because humans have put that label on a form of behavior that likely predates social norms and morals. If it is considered disgusting, it is only because humans have put that label on it.
Outside the example of the inversion to inbreeding, interpersonal and social-moral disgust is something that is learned. It is not innate. Rozin observes that up to about two years of age, children show no aversion to primary disgust elicitors such as feces. Toilet training may be the learning event that leads to core disgust. Later in childhood development, an event or object that was "previously morally neutral becomes morally loaded." At this point in the learning process, disgust becomes recruited. Disgust "becomes a major, if not the major force for negative socialization in children; a very effective way to internalize culturally prescribed rejections (perhaps starting with feces) is to make them disgusting."
Kelly theorizes that disgust migrated from being an emotional response to toxins, parasites and disease to a socially shared emotion because face gape is automatic and the emotion as revealed in the facial gesture was communicated in a way that was empathetically received. Like other facial communications (see July 16, 2010 post), there is a reliable causal link between the production of an emotion and its expression here that acts as a signal to avoid. And to the extent that group selection (or more narrowly kin selection) is engaged, shared disgust becomes a survival mechanism for the group to avoid toxins, parasites and disease, Kelly posits that the genetic underpinnings of the neural correlates of the emotion and gape face were recruited by human culture to perform several novel functions. And what the emotion qua emotion of disgust has in common with the socially shared emotion is that the object of the emotion's attention is distasteful and/or impure. As a cultural phenomenon, the socially shared emotion becomes connected to social, moral or ethical norms, group identity and avoidance of others. Culture then labels something to be avoided or averted as disgusting.
Social or ethical norms are not necessarily social or ethical norms because of a common emotional stimulus like disgust, although they could be and common aversion to foods and attitudes toward sexual behaviors within a culture are a few examples that coms to mind. Because most social norms are learned and not instinctual, interpersonal and social-moral disgust is little more than a social label for one's attitude toward behavioral transgressions of group rules. Interestingly, the label may not be shared by all within the group. Consider, for examples, how societal attitudes toward homosexuality --- a behavior that large segments of many societies consider "disgusting" --- are rapidly changing.
Kelly concludes, disgust is "far from being a reliable source of special, supra-rational information about morality" and we should be extremely skeptical of claims that disgust deserves any "epistemic credit" as a trustworthy guide to justifiable moral judgments or deep ethical wisdom in repugnance. Justifying a moral or ethical rule on disgust can easily slide in dehumanization and demonization itself, which in itself is problematic. There is a ready and recent example that highlights Kelly's concern in today's news that the youthful leader of North Korea had his elder uncle, also in the leadership of North Korea's government, executed for treason. In language that recalls Rozin and Haidt's discussion of animal-nature disgust, the uncle was labeled as "despicable human scum" and "worse than a dog," and said he had betrayed his party and leader." In other words --- particularly with the association to animals and scum (certainly there are parasites and disease in scum) --- the uncle was disgusting. His purported "disgustingness" became a post hoc justification for his execution.
This entire discussion implicates the relationship between genes and culture, and Kelly devotes an entire chapter to "gene culture coevolution," sometimes referred to as the dual inheritance theory. (See September 12, 2012 and June 17, 2010 posts) and its application to the evolution of disgust. Rozin and Haidt concur: "The interaction between biology and culture is clear, because the output side of disgust remains largely ruled by biological forces that originally shaped it, while the input/appraisal/meaning part has been greatly elaborated, and perhaps transformed in some cases."
: a strong feeling of not liking something. **** 2
a : a feeling of repugnance toward something with a desire to avoid or turn from it aversion >
b : a settled dislike : antipathy aversion to parties>
c : a tendency to extinguish a behavior or to avoid a thing or situation and especially a usually pleasurable one because it is or has been associated with a noxious stimulus
Yuck! But is this aversion a form of disgust? dis·gust noun \di-ˈskəst, dis-ˈgəst also diz-\
: a strong feeling of dislike for something that has a very unpleasant appearance, taste, smell, etc.
: annoyance and anger that you feel toward something because it is not good, fair, appropriate, etc.
: marked aversion aroused by something highly distasteful : repugnance
I find lima beans distasteful, noxious. I avoid eating them. Apparently, I am not the only one. Years ago as a child, I felt the same way toward other food items, but today only lima beans remains associated with a noxious stimulus of some kind that I cannot define. I know well that others like lima beans and are not harmed by them, but something triggers certain neurons firing in my brain that creates this reaction to the lima bean. Are lima beans disgusting, by which I intend to describe lima beans an elicitor of disgust? By definition, lima beans are disgusting . . . at least to me. dis·gust·ing, adjective
: so unpleasant to see, smell, taste, consider, etc., that you feel slightly sick
: so bad, unfair, inappropriate, etc., that you feel annoyed and angry
You see in these definitions of disgust and disgusting two distinctive feelings. One centers on an aversion, dislike or repugnance toward something that is distasteful, or suffers from a bad smell or appearance; although the definitions do not elaborate on what is distasteful or smells bad, it is easy to think of something associated with the mouth and ingestion such as rotten food or a poison. The second feeling centers on a dislike for another group or behavior considered annoying or unfair by some standard. In both cases, the consequence of the feeling is likely rejection: rejection of the noxious substance; rejection of the other person or group.
Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia and now NYU have devoted more attention and research to the subject of disgust than anyone else at this moment in time. In their contribution to the 1999 edition of the Handbook of Cognition and Emotion entitled Disgust: The Body and Soul Emotion, they made several key points and arguments:
- Distaste and disgust are different. Other animals, particularly other mammals, show they react to ingesting a substance because it is distasteful by rejecting it. Disgust, on the other hand, is uniquely human because, in addition to some biological rejection of distasteful or foul smelling substance, the feeling has a cognitive content that is not elicited by sensory properties. Like other emotions, disgust links together cognitive and bodily responses, which can be analyzed as an affect program, in which outputs (behaviors, expressions, physiological responses) are triggered by inputs (cognitive appraisals or environmental events). While the biological outputs that represent disgust have been reasonably stable among human populations over time, there has been an enormous expansion on the cognitive appraisal side, which expansion varies with history and culture and takes disgust far beyond its animal precursors and well beyond an aversion to lima beans.
- For humans, the elicitors of core disgust are generally of animal origin, although there is research that plants and vegetables can elicit core disgust.
- The rejection response is now harnessed to the offensive idea that humans are animals, and thus disgust is part of affirming our unique humanity by suppressing every characteristic that we feel to be 'animal'. They call this animal nature disgust and distinguish it from core disgust. The cognitive notion here includes associating something deemed disgusting with something labeled impure.
- There is also another form of disgust they call interpersonal disgust, which is rejection of persons outside one's social or cultural group. Hindu caste behavior is a prime example, but there are hundreds of other examples, racial, religious, and the like, that are readily recognized.
- Finally, thee is social-moral disgust where violations of social norms trigger a feeling of disgust. Not all violations of social norms trigger disgust. Bank robbery they point out, while viewed as "wrong," does not trigger necessarily disgust or rejection.
There has been much written in recent years about disgust as a moral emotion or the potential nexus between disgust and moral judgments/ethical norms. The example of incest avoidance is one example of "moral" behavior that is at the heart of this discussion. Avoiding consumption of lima beans is not, and I am reasonably certain that the avoidance of lima beans is not considered a "moral behavior" across any culture or society. Marc Hauser described disgust as "the most powerful emotion against sin, especially in the domains of food and sex. . . . In the absence of a disgust response, we might well convince ourselves that it is okay to have sex with a younger sibling or eat vomit, act with deleterious consequences for our reproductive success and survival respectively." Incest avoidance is worthy of study -- in contrast to my aversion for lima beans -- because it is virtually universal across cultures, and is therefore almost unique among things humans generally avoid. Aversion to eating pork, for example, is not universal, and like lima beans there is a substantial part of the human population that likes eating pork and is not harmed by eating pork. In some cultures, the avoidance of eating pork is considered a "moral behavior."
Disgust did not begin as a moral or even a social emotion. There is common agreement, among those who have studied disgust that the emotion's evolutionary origins lie in response to the ingestion of something: spoiled food, toxins; it later evolved as a response to the presence of disease and parasites, which is referred to as core disgust. Daniel Kelly documents this body of research in Yuck! And a common feature of this emotion is the automatic facial feature called face gape. As one article explains, "At its root, disgust is a revulsion response -- "a basic biological motivational system" -- that Darwin associated with the sense of taste. Its function is to reject or discharge offensive-tasting food from the mouth (and/or the stomach), and its fundamental indicator, the "gape" or tongue extension, has been observed in a number of animals, including birds and mammals. In humans, the characteristic facial expressions of disgust that coincide with gaping include nose wrinkling and raising the upper lip, behaviors usually accompanied by a feeling of nausea and a general sense of revulsion. Together these behaviors and sensations facilitate the rejection of food that has been put into the mouth." Evolutionarily, disgust began with distaste, but at some point it adapted in humans to protect against infection by pathogens and parasites. Daniel Kelly explains his thesis that the two responses became "entangled." "Other previously puzzling features of disgust also fall into place once its role in parasite avoidance becomes clear. Together, eating and sex constitute two of the most basic evolutionary imperatives. Both behaviors are unavoidable ingredients of evolutionary success, but both involve the crossing of bodily perimeters at various points. By virtue of this, both activities leave those engaging in them highly vulnerable to infection. The upshot is that disgust's role in monitoring the boundaries of the entire body (rather than just the mouth) makes much more sense in light of its connection to infectious disease. Moreover, both feeding and procreating are activities that require those boundaries to be breached. They are highly salient to disgust both because they are universal and unavoidable and because they are two of the most potent vectors of disease transmission." It is this entanglement of distaste and core disgust that is unique to humans. There is evidence that each is independently found in other species.
Importantly, disgust appears to be activated in the cortex. Kelly identifies the insula, which is not part of that ancient subcortical system of the forebrain or midbrain that Jaak Panksepp documents is associated with basic emotional systems. (See May 19, 2013 post). The word disgust never appears in Panksepp's book and is not even found in his description of the fear system involving in the amygdala and the hypothalamus which, because fear stimulates flight, sounds like it might be related to an emotion like disgust that stimulates avoidance. On the other hand, Kelly identifies an area of the forebrain, the putamen, as an area of the brain associated with processing disgust, but the putamen is involved in emotional facial recognition, so it may not be something disgusting that activates the putamen, but the recognition of face gape that activates the putamen. The putamen is primarily associated with the motor cortex, so the connection to the putamen as an emotional processor is not at all that clear. I suspect that the putamen, if it is implicated in disgust, it is not part of what Rozin and Haidt refer to as inputs (cognitive appraisals or environmental events), but our biological output that results in virtually automatic, nearly uniform facial expressions. Research on patients with Huntington's Disease would seem to confirm this observation. But the insular cortex is involved in maintaining the homeostatic condition of the body; it maintains an awareness of various parameters of the body; the insula is also believed to process convergent information to produce an emotionally relevant context for sensory experience. More specifically, the anterior insula is related more to olfactory, gustatory, vicero-autonomic, and limbic function, while the posterior insula is related more to auditory-somesthetic-skeletomotor function. The insula has an important role in pain experience and the experience of a number of basic emotions, including anger, fear, disgust, happiness and sadness. If disgust is seated in the insular cortex, this would confirm the significance of cognitive appraisal in producing disgust. The insular cortex is a mammalian development, so it evolved later than those ancient emotional systems that Panksepp discusses.
Morality varies across cultures and even within cultures and smaller social groups. Edward Westermark advanced the thesis that there was an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth, and as applied to persons who are closely related this generates a feeling of horror of intercourse with close kin. But is this aversion really innate? Or is it learned? Or is something innate triggered because, in this case, one must first experience living closely with someone at an early age? Because there is survival value associated with avoiding inbreeding, there is arguably an evolutionary imperative associated with incest avoidance and should explain in substantial part why incest avoidance is universal across cultures. Inbreeding reduces the fitness of a given population. Incest avoidance seems to have nothing to do with morals. If it is considered moral behavior, it is only because humans have put that label on a form of behavior that likely predates social norms and morals. If it is considered disgusting, it is only because humans have put that label on it.
Outside the example of the inversion to inbreeding, interpersonal and social-moral disgust is something that is learned. It is not innate. Rozin observes that up to about two years of age, children show no aversion to primary disgust elicitors such as feces. Toilet training may be the learning event that leads to core disgust. Later in childhood development, an event or object that was "previously morally neutral becomes morally loaded." At this point in the learning process, disgust becomes recruited. Disgust "becomes a major, if not the major force for negative socialization in children; a very effective way to internalize culturally prescribed rejections (perhaps starting with feces) is to make them disgusting."
Kelly theorizes that disgust migrated from being an emotional response to toxins, parasites and disease to a socially shared emotion because face gape is automatic and the emotion as revealed in the facial gesture was communicated in a way that was empathetically received. Like other facial communications (see July 16, 2010 post), there is a reliable causal link between the production of an emotion and its expression here that acts as a signal to avoid. And to the extent that group selection (or more narrowly kin selection) is engaged, shared disgust becomes a survival mechanism for the group to avoid toxins, parasites and disease, Kelly posits that the genetic underpinnings of the neural correlates of the emotion and gape face were recruited by human culture to perform several novel functions. And what the emotion qua emotion of disgust has in common with the socially shared emotion is that the object of the emotion's attention is distasteful and/or impure. As a cultural phenomenon, the socially shared emotion becomes connected to social, moral or ethical norms, group identity and avoidance of others. Culture then labels something to be avoided or averted as disgusting.
Social or ethical norms are not necessarily social or ethical norms because of a common emotional stimulus like disgust, although they could be and common aversion to foods and attitudes toward sexual behaviors within a culture are a few examples that coms to mind. Because most social norms are learned and not instinctual, interpersonal and social-moral disgust is little more than a social label for one's attitude toward behavioral transgressions of group rules. Interestingly, the label may not be shared by all within the group. Consider, for examples, how societal attitudes toward homosexuality --- a behavior that large segments of many societies consider "disgusting" --- are rapidly changing.
Kelly concludes, disgust is "far from being a reliable source of special, supra-rational information about morality" and we should be extremely skeptical of claims that disgust deserves any "epistemic credit" as a trustworthy guide to justifiable moral judgments or deep ethical wisdom in repugnance. Justifying a moral or ethical rule on disgust can easily slide in dehumanization and demonization itself, which in itself is problematic. There is a ready and recent example that highlights Kelly's concern in today's news that the youthful leader of North Korea had his elder uncle, also in the leadership of North Korea's government, executed for treason. In language that recalls Rozin and Haidt's discussion of animal-nature disgust, the uncle was labeled as "despicable human scum" and "worse than a dog," and said he had betrayed his party and leader." In other words --- particularly with the association to animals and scum (certainly there are parasites and disease in scum) --- the uncle was disgusting. His purported "disgustingness" became a post hoc justification for his execution.
This entire discussion implicates the relationship between genes and culture, and Kelly devotes an entire chapter to "gene culture coevolution," sometimes referred to as the dual inheritance theory. (See September 12, 2012 and June 17, 2010 posts) and its application to the evolution of disgust. Rozin and Haidt concur: "The interaction between biology and culture is clear, because the output side of disgust remains largely ruled by biological forces that originally shaped it, while the input/appraisal/meaning part has been greatly elaborated, and perhaps transformed in some cases."
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Jose Saramago, The Lives of Things (2013, 1995)
At a very early age, children learn the difference between artifacts and living things: the inanimate and the animate. In fact, one of the things that the human mind does quite well from an early age is to categorize things. These are often referred to as ontological categories. Children recognize intentionality in animals, and they recognize that artifacts lack intentionality. The animate are characterized by motion, and their ability to communicate in some capacity. Artifacts do not move on their own, nor do they have an ability to communicate. Very early in life humans develop certain expectations about these categories. Yet there are some adults who come to believe that they can talk to artifacts and that the artifacts can listen to them and perhaps respond as if they were living things. Religious icons are an example of these artifacts. When we believe that icons can hear us speak and respond in some way, this violates our expectations of the inanimate. When those violations occur, we have entered the realm of the supernatural, the paranormal. Why does this happen?
In Religion Explained, anthropologist Pascal Boyer poses a number of supernatural notions --- many of which are linked to a religious idea associated with a particular religion (not just the predominant religions), and some others that he just makes up --- and what he is interested in is determining whether the listener (or reader) can say that a particular religion has been built up around the idea. They range from "Some people get old and then one day they stop breathing and die and that's that" to "There is one God! He knows everything we do" to "Dead people's souls wander about and sometimes visit people" to "When people die, their souls sometimes come back in another body" to "We worship this woman because she was the only one ever to conceive a child without having sex" to "We pray to this statue because it listens to our prayers and helps us get what we want" to "This mountain over there eats food and digests it. We give it food sacrifices every now and then, to make sure it stays in good health" to "The river over there is our guardian. It will flow upstream if it finds out that people have committed incest." Obviously, the first does not seem like a notion that a religion would build up around because it is part of our every day experience. But we should recognize a religious affiliation with the others.
Religious representations, says Boyer, are particular combinations of mental representations that satisfy two conditions. "First, the religious concepts violate certain expectations from ontological categories. Second, they preserve other expectations." A very frequent type of counterintuitive concept is produced by assuming that various objects or plants have some mental properties, that they can perceive what happens around them, understand what people say, remember what happened, and have intentions. A familiar example of this would be that of people who pray to statues of gods, saints or heroes. Not just artifacts but also inanimate living things can be "animated" in this sense. Boyer reports, "The pygmies of the Ituri forest for instance say that the forest is a live thing, that it has a soul, that it "looks after" them and is particularly generous to sociable, friendly and honest individuals. These will catch plenty of game because the forest is pleased with their behavior."
What Boyer is getting at is quite consistent with Jeff Hawkins' model of the cortex. (See November 16, 2013 post). Boyer describes these as inference systems. We quickly make inferences about something we experience derived from higher level categories --- object vs animal vs plant, for example. In Hawkins' model, our memory of these higher level categories, "concepts," is retained in the higher cortical areas. Within the synapses of the hierarchical structure of the cortex described in On Intelligence below the higher cortical areas contains our memories of more narrow categories of more specific objects, animals, and plants and their respective attributes. The hierarchical structure of the cortex described by Hawkins resembles the structure of taxonomy. Taxonomy is a "powerful logical device that is intuitively used by humans in producing intuitive expectations about living things. People use the specific inference system of intuitive biological knowledge to add to the information given." But why then does the brain persistently retain memories of non-real --- supernatural --- concepts?
Biological inferences are not always valid, Boyer admits. He refers to this as the enrichment of intuitive principles.
In describing his research about supernatural concepts, Boyer writes, "Our reasoning was that the present explanation of supernatural concepts, on the basis of what we know from anthropology, also implied precise psychological predictions. Cultural concepts are selected concepts. They are the ones that survive cycles of acquisition and communication in roughly similar forms. Now one simple condition of such relative preservation is that concepts are recalled. So [we] designed fairly coherent stories in which we inserted various new violations of ontological expectations as well as episodes that were compatible with ontological expectations. The difference in recall between the two kinds of information would give us an idea of the advantage of violations in individual memory. Naturally, we only used stories and concepts that were new to our subjects. If I told you a story about a character with seven-league boots or a talking wolf disguised as a grandmother, or a woman who gave birth to an incarnation of a god after a visit from an angel, you would certainly remember those themes; not just because they were in the story but also because they were familiar to start with. Our studies were supposed to track how memory stores or distorts or discards novel material." Boyer's research showed that "long-term recall (over months) shows that violations [of expectations] were much better preserved [in memory] than any other material." It is not strangeness per se that is preserved; it has to be a violation of an ontological category. So among the expected attributes of the ontological categories of living animals is that they die. Anthropocentric gods who purportedly live forever violate expectations associated with our ontological category of living things; they are therefore more likely to be preserved in memory. Likewise for statues that talk and listen and respond to human speech or thinking. This is true across cultures, only the details on top of the ontological/conceptual violations vary.
So concepts that violate our expectations of reality stick in memory. This does not sound particularly surprising. A previous post, not surprisingly connected to a Jose Saramago publication, emphasized the relationship between storytelling and memory (February 26, 2013 post): "This is not the first time that a post in this blog has connected Saramago's work with the subject of memory. In The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), the Nobelist created a memory bank in blog form. In the posting on his final novel, Cain (December 20, 2011 post) I remarked, "I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity." And Saramago is a master at clutching collective memory --- history we call it --- and creating stories --- fiction we call it --- as in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss (June 28, 2011 post) and Baltasar and Blimunda (January 1, 2013 post)."
This finally brings us round to Saramago's collection of six early short stories, The Lives of Things. These are stories that stick in memory. Three of the short stories are constructed around artifacts --- "things," a centaur, and a chair that topples an oppressive dictator --- that violate our expectations of the ontological category of these objects. A few sentences from the story "Things" triggered my memory of Pascal Boyer's research:
"There was a time when the manufacturing process had reached such a degree of perfection and faults became so rare that the Government (G) decided there was little point in depriving members of the public (especially those in categories A, B, and C) of their civil right and pleasure to lodge complaints: a wise decision which could only benefit the manufacturing industry. So factories were instructed to lower their standards. This decision, however, could not be blamed for the poor quality of the goods which had been flooding the market for the last two months. As someone employed at the Department of Special Requisitions (DSR), he was in a good position to know that the Government had revoked these instructions more than a month ago and imposed new standards to ensure maximum quality. Without achieving any results. As far as he could remember, the incident with the door was certainly the most disturbing. It was not a case of some object or other, or some simple utensil, or even a piece of furniture, such as the settee in the entrance-hall, but of an item of imposing dimensions; although the settee was anything but small. However it formed part of the interior of furnishings, while the door was an integral part of the building, if not the most important part."
The "incident with the door" occurs as the story opens, virtually ordinary in the way Saramago describes it: "As it closed, the tall heavy door caught the back of the civil servant's right hand and left a deep scratch, red by scarcely bleeding." The civil servant decides to have this small wound treated at office infirmary and when explaining to the nurse how he came to be scratched, the nurse responds that this is the third such case that day. This incident presages a wider series of incidents that pits objects against living things. What unfolds is a revolution of objects against living people --- presumably in response to the Government's policy that manufactured goods could be made to lower quality standards; as the title of this volume implies, things (objects) come alive. Ordinary useful everyday objects begin to disappear: a pillar box, a jug, doors, stairs, utensils, clothes, and ultimately entire buildings and blocks of buildings. Nobody sees anyone taking or removing these objects; they seem to disappear of their own volition when no is watching, in the dark. This tale violates our expectations (inferences) associated with the concept of artifacts (objects). Things do not have volition, intentionality. But the tale is likely to be preserved in memory a bit longer than had Saramago not presented these "things" as a metaphor for people whom the government/society's power structure treated as objects that could be made to lower quality standards.
There are those who contend that a god or other supernatural being (omniscient, eternal) must exist and our beliefs in these supernatural beings (as well as religion in general) is genetically hardwired. (See November 30, 2009 post). In contrast, I suggest that what is genetically hardwired is our brain's disposition to not discard, or discard only with significant cognitive effort, concepts that violate our expectations of reality. Hence, beliefs in the ability of artifacts and imaginary unseen things to engage in behavior that we associate with living things simply stick, and they are rendered stickier when human cultural institutions reinforce those beliefs or concepts. This is beginning to sound like Gene Culture Co-evolution or the dual inheritance theory. (See September 12, 2012 and June 17, 2010 posts).
What I have not been able to understand or reconstruct yet is why the sensory inputs that the lower levels of the cortex are constantly bombarded with during our encounters with the physical world do not overwhelm the sticky concepts stuck in higher cortical areas that violate intuitive expectations? Boyer describes humans as information hungry, in need of cooperation from other humans including the provision of information by other humans, and this cognitive niche is our milieu, our environment. We have a taste for gossip, information about other humans. Because humans are in need of cooperation, they have developed mechanisms for social exchange resulting in the formation of groups and coalitional dynamics. But the human mind is not constrained to consider and represent only what is currently going on in the immediate environment. The human brain spends a considerable amount of time thinking about "what is not here and now." Fiction --- a Jose Saramago story --- is the most salient illustration, says Boyer. "One of the easiest things for human minds to do is to produce inferences on the basis of false premises. Thus "thoughts are decoupled from their standard inputs and outputs." (See June 28, 2011 post). "Decoupled cognition," writes Boyer, "is crucial to human cognition because we depend so much on information communicated by others and on cooperation with others. To evaluate information provided by others you must build some mental simulation of what they describe. Also, we would not carry out complex hunting expeditions, tool making, food gathering or social exchange without complex planning. The latter requires an evaluation of several different scenarios, each of which is based on nonfactual premises (What if we go down to the valley to gather fruit? What if there is none down there? What if other members of the group decide to go elsewhere? What if my neighbor steals my tools? and so on). Thinking about the past too requires decoupling. As psychologist Endel Tulving points out, episodic memory is a form of mental "time travel" allowing us to re-experience the effects of particular scene on us. This is used in particular to assess other peoples behavior, to reevaluate their character, to provide a new description of our own behavior and its consequences and for similar purposes. . . The crucial point to remember about decoupled thoughts," says Boyer, "is that they run the inference systems in the same way as if the situation were actual. This is why we can produce coherent and useful inferences on the basis of imagined premises. . . Hypothetical scenarios suspend one aspect of actual situations but then run all inference systems in the same way as usual."
Thus fantasy --- which includes not only stories like those in Saramago's The Lives of Things, but also religious stories that violate our inferred expectations of reality --- succeed to the extent that they activate the same inference systems of the brain that are used in navigating reality. "Religious concepts," concludes Boyer, "constitute salient cognitive artifacts whose successful cultural transmission depends upon the fact that they activate our inference systems in particular ways. The reason religion can become much more serious and important than the inference systems that are of vital importance to us: those that govern our most intense emotions, sharpen our interaction with other people, give us moral feelings, and organize social groups. . . .Religious concepts are supernatural concepts that matter, they are practical." Boyer summarizes: What is "important" to human beings, because of their evolutionary history, are the conditions of social interaction: who knows what, who is not aware of what, who did what with whom, when and what for. Imagining agents with that information is an illustration of mental processes driven by relevance. Such agents are not really necessary to explain anything, but they are so much easier to represent and so much richer in possible inferences that they enjoy a great advantage in cultural transmission." So the fantastic that violates ontological expectations is not just sticky in our memory for that reason, but because of the facility by which the fantastic is culturally transmitted, its stickiness is enhanced as a matter of group memory and supports the human need for cooperation and social interaction. Will Saramago's stories of the fantastic --- for example, the Iberian peninsula breaking away from Europe and floating out to the Atlantic Ocean in The Stone Raft, a community's near complete loss of sightedness in Blindness, death taking a holiday in Death With Interruptions --- enjoy a great advantage in cultural transmission? Probably not. These stories are labeled fiction, and we understand the stories as fiction. They likely exploit the same inference systems in the brain that we rely upon to experience and navigate the real world. They may be memorable, but cultural exchange --- save the temporal book club meeting --- is not likely to be constructed around these stories. This is likely a result of what John Searle refers to when he mentions "the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." (See January 21, 2011 post). Cultural transmission of religious concepts began long before there was any volume of certain, objective, universal knowledge. Religious concepts now compete for our attention to objective, universal knowledge, as evidence by the Dover, Pennsylvania litigation over teaching "creation science" in the schools. (See March 14, 2013 post). And while our brain's enduring capacity to retain and rely upon decoupled concepts is persistent, it might not be emergent in our modern cognitive niche if it had not been emergent centuries ago when we lacked substantial certain, objective, universal knowledge.
In Religion Explained, anthropologist Pascal Boyer poses a number of supernatural notions --- many of which are linked to a religious idea associated with a particular religion (not just the predominant religions), and some others that he just makes up --- and what he is interested in is determining whether the listener (or reader) can say that a particular religion has been built up around the idea. They range from "Some people get old and then one day they stop breathing and die and that's that" to "There is one God! He knows everything we do" to "Dead people's souls wander about and sometimes visit people" to "When people die, their souls sometimes come back in another body" to "We worship this woman because she was the only one ever to conceive a child without having sex" to "We pray to this statue because it listens to our prayers and helps us get what we want" to "This mountain over there eats food and digests it. We give it food sacrifices every now and then, to make sure it stays in good health" to "The river over there is our guardian. It will flow upstream if it finds out that people have committed incest." Obviously, the first does not seem like a notion that a religion would build up around because it is part of our every day experience. But we should recognize a religious affiliation with the others.
Religious representations, says Boyer, are particular combinations of mental representations that satisfy two conditions. "First, the religious concepts violate certain expectations from ontological categories. Second, they preserve other expectations." A very frequent type of counterintuitive concept is produced by assuming that various objects or plants have some mental properties, that they can perceive what happens around them, understand what people say, remember what happened, and have intentions. A familiar example of this would be that of people who pray to statues of gods, saints or heroes. Not just artifacts but also inanimate living things can be "animated" in this sense. Boyer reports, "The pygmies of the Ituri forest for instance say that the forest is a live thing, that it has a soul, that it "looks after" them and is particularly generous to sociable, friendly and honest individuals. These will catch plenty of game because the forest is pleased with their behavior."
What Boyer is getting at is quite consistent with Jeff Hawkins' model of the cortex. (See November 16, 2013 post). Boyer describes these as inference systems. We quickly make inferences about something we experience derived from higher level categories --- object vs animal vs plant, for example. In Hawkins' model, our memory of these higher level categories, "concepts," is retained in the higher cortical areas. Within the synapses of the hierarchical structure of the cortex described in On Intelligence below the higher cortical areas contains our memories of more narrow categories of more specific objects, animals, and plants and their respective attributes. The hierarchical structure of the cortex described by Hawkins resembles the structure of taxonomy. Taxonomy is a "powerful logical device that is intuitively used by humans in producing intuitive expectations about living things. People use the specific inference system of intuitive biological knowledge to add to the information given." But why then does the brain persistently retain memories of non-real --- supernatural --- concepts?
Biological inferences are not always valid, Boyer admits. He refers to this as the enrichment of intuitive principles.
In describing his research about supernatural concepts, Boyer writes, "Our reasoning was that the present explanation of supernatural concepts, on the basis of what we know from anthropology, also implied precise psychological predictions. Cultural concepts are selected concepts. They are the ones that survive cycles of acquisition and communication in roughly similar forms. Now one simple condition of such relative preservation is that concepts are recalled. So [we] designed fairly coherent stories in which we inserted various new violations of ontological expectations as well as episodes that were compatible with ontological expectations. The difference in recall between the two kinds of information would give us an idea of the advantage of violations in individual memory. Naturally, we only used stories and concepts that were new to our subjects. If I told you a story about a character with seven-league boots or a talking wolf disguised as a grandmother, or a woman who gave birth to an incarnation of a god after a visit from an angel, you would certainly remember those themes; not just because they were in the story but also because they were familiar to start with. Our studies were supposed to track how memory stores or distorts or discards novel material." Boyer's research showed that "long-term recall (over months) shows that violations [of expectations] were much better preserved [in memory] than any other material." It is not strangeness per se that is preserved; it has to be a violation of an ontological category. So among the expected attributes of the ontological categories of living animals is that they die. Anthropocentric gods who purportedly live forever violate expectations associated with our ontological category of living things; they are therefore more likely to be preserved in memory. Likewise for statues that talk and listen and respond to human speech or thinking. This is true across cultures, only the details on top of the ontological/conceptual violations vary.
So concepts that violate our expectations of reality stick in memory. This does not sound particularly surprising. A previous post, not surprisingly connected to a Jose Saramago publication, emphasized the relationship between storytelling and memory (February 26, 2013 post): "This is not the first time that a post in this blog has connected Saramago's work with the subject of memory. In The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), the Nobelist created a memory bank in blog form. In the posting on his final novel, Cain (December 20, 2011 post) I remarked, "I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity." And Saramago is a master at clutching collective memory --- history we call it --- and creating stories --- fiction we call it --- as in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss (June 28, 2011 post) and Baltasar and Blimunda (January 1, 2013 post)."
This finally brings us round to Saramago's collection of six early short stories, The Lives of Things. These are stories that stick in memory. Three of the short stories are constructed around artifacts --- "things," a centaur, and a chair that topples an oppressive dictator --- that violate our expectations of the ontological category of these objects. A few sentences from the story "Things" triggered my memory of Pascal Boyer's research:
"There was a time when the manufacturing process had reached such a degree of perfection and faults became so rare that the Government (G) decided there was little point in depriving members of the public (especially those in categories A, B, and C) of their civil right and pleasure to lodge complaints: a wise decision which could only benefit the manufacturing industry. So factories were instructed to lower their standards. This decision, however, could not be blamed for the poor quality of the goods which had been flooding the market for the last two months. As someone employed at the Department of Special Requisitions (DSR), he was in a good position to know that the Government had revoked these instructions more than a month ago and imposed new standards to ensure maximum quality. Without achieving any results. As far as he could remember, the incident with the door was certainly the most disturbing. It was not a case of some object or other, or some simple utensil, or even a piece of furniture, such as the settee in the entrance-hall, but of an item of imposing dimensions; although the settee was anything but small. However it formed part of the interior of furnishings, while the door was an integral part of the building, if not the most important part."
The "incident with the door" occurs as the story opens, virtually ordinary in the way Saramago describes it: "As it closed, the tall heavy door caught the back of the civil servant's right hand and left a deep scratch, red by scarcely bleeding." The civil servant decides to have this small wound treated at office infirmary and when explaining to the nurse how he came to be scratched, the nurse responds that this is the third such case that day. This incident presages a wider series of incidents that pits objects against living things. What unfolds is a revolution of objects against living people --- presumably in response to the Government's policy that manufactured goods could be made to lower quality standards; as the title of this volume implies, things (objects) come alive. Ordinary useful everyday objects begin to disappear: a pillar box, a jug, doors, stairs, utensils, clothes, and ultimately entire buildings and blocks of buildings. Nobody sees anyone taking or removing these objects; they seem to disappear of their own volition when no is watching, in the dark. This tale violates our expectations (inferences) associated with the concept of artifacts (objects). Things do not have volition, intentionality. But the tale is likely to be preserved in memory a bit longer than had Saramago not presented these "things" as a metaphor for people whom the government/society's power structure treated as objects that could be made to lower quality standards.
There are those who contend that a god or other supernatural being (omniscient, eternal) must exist and our beliefs in these supernatural beings (as well as religion in general) is genetically hardwired. (See November 30, 2009 post). In contrast, I suggest that what is genetically hardwired is our brain's disposition to not discard, or discard only with significant cognitive effort, concepts that violate our expectations of reality. Hence, beliefs in the ability of artifacts and imaginary unseen things to engage in behavior that we associate with living things simply stick, and they are rendered stickier when human cultural institutions reinforce those beliefs or concepts. This is beginning to sound like Gene Culture Co-evolution or the dual inheritance theory. (See September 12, 2012 and June 17, 2010 posts).
What I have not been able to understand or reconstruct yet is why the sensory inputs that the lower levels of the cortex are constantly bombarded with during our encounters with the physical world do not overwhelm the sticky concepts stuck in higher cortical areas that violate intuitive expectations? Boyer describes humans as information hungry, in need of cooperation from other humans including the provision of information by other humans, and this cognitive niche is our milieu, our environment. We have a taste for gossip, information about other humans. Because humans are in need of cooperation, they have developed mechanisms for social exchange resulting in the formation of groups and coalitional dynamics. But the human mind is not constrained to consider and represent only what is currently going on in the immediate environment. The human brain spends a considerable amount of time thinking about "what is not here and now." Fiction --- a Jose Saramago story --- is the most salient illustration, says Boyer. "One of the easiest things for human minds to do is to produce inferences on the basis of false premises. Thus "thoughts are decoupled from their standard inputs and outputs." (See June 28, 2011 post). "Decoupled cognition," writes Boyer, "is crucial to human cognition because we depend so much on information communicated by others and on cooperation with others. To evaluate information provided by others you must build some mental simulation of what they describe. Also, we would not carry out complex hunting expeditions, tool making, food gathering or social exchange without complex planning. The latter requires an evaluation of several different scenarios, each of which is based on nonfactual premises (What if we go down to the valley to gather fruit? What if there is none down there? What if other members of the group decide to go elsewhere? What if my neighbor steals my tools? and so on). Thinking about the past too requires decoupling. As psychologist Endel Tulving points out, episodic memory is a form of mental "time travel" allowing us to re-experience the effects of particular scene on us. This is used in particular to assess other peoples behavior, to reevaluate their character, to provide a new description of our own behavior and its consequences and for similar purposes. . . The crucial point to remember about decoupled thoughts," says Boyer, "is that they run the inference systems in the same way as if the situation were actual. This is why we can produce coherent and useful inferences on the basis of imagined premises. . . Hypothetical scenarios suspend one aspect of actual situations but then run all inference systems in the same way as usual."
Thus fantasy --- which includes not only stories like those in Saramago's The Lives of Things, but also religious stories that violate our inferred expectations of reality --- succeed to the extent that they activate the same inference systems of the brain that are used in navigating reality. "Religious concepts," concludes Boyer, "constitute salient cognitive artifacts whose successful cultural transmission depends upon the fact that they activate our inference systems in particular ways. The reason religion can become much more serious and important than the inference systems that are of vital importance to us: those that govern our most intense emotions, sharpen our interaction with other people, give us moral feelings, and organize social groups. . . .Religious concepts are supernatural concepts that matter, they are practical." Boyer summarizes: What is "important" to human beings, because of their evolutionary history, are the conditions of social interaction: who knows what, who is not aware of what, who did what with whom, when and what for. Imagining agents with that information is an illustration of mental processes driven by relevance. Such agents are not really necessary to explain anything, but they are so much easier to represent and so much richer in possible inferences that they enjoy a great advantage in cultural transmission." So the fantastic that violates ontological expectations is not just sticky in our memory for that reason, but because of the facility by which the fantastic is culturally transmitted, its stickiness is enhanced as a matter of group memory and supports the human need for cooperation and social interaction. Will Saramago's stories of the fantastic --- for example, the Iberian peninsula breaking away from Europe and floating out to the Atlantic Ocean in The Stone Raft, a community's near complete loss of sightedness in Blindness, death taking a holiday in Death With Interruptions --- enjoy a great advantage in cultural transmission? Probably not. These stories are labeled fiction, and we understand the stories as fiction. They likely exploit the same inference systems in the brain that we rely upon to experience and navigate the real world. They may be memorable, but cultural exchange --- save the temporal book club meeting --- is not likely to be constructed around these stories. This is likely a result of what John Searle refers to when he mentions "the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." (See January 21, 2011 post). Cultural transmission of religious concepts began long before there was any volume of certain, objective, universal knowledge. Religious concepts now compete for our attention to objective, universal knowledge, as evidence by the Dover, Pennsylvania litigation over teaching "creation science" in the schools. (See March 14, 2013 post). And while our brain's enduring capacity to retain and rely upon decoupled concepts is persistent, it might not be emergent in our modern cognitive niche if it had not been emergent centuries ago when we lacked substantial certain, objective, universal knowledge.
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