Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
-
Psychology - Imposter Syndrome - Feeling Like a Fraud - New York Times on 2008-02-22
-
many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on.
-
They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.
-
-
projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person
-
In mild doses, feeling like a fraud also tempers the natural instinct to define one’s own competence in self-serving ways.
-
Researchers have shown in careful studies that people tend to be poor judges of their own performance and often to overrate their abilities.
-
This native confidence is likely to be functional: in a world of profound uncertainty, self-serving delusion probably helps people to get out of bed and chase their pet projects.
-
export opinion - bookforum.com / in print on 2008-02-04
-
What he’s pushing instead are aggressive government policies designed to protect and nurture domestic manufacturers, allowing countries to ascend the technological ladder so that they can eventually compete with wealthier nations. Chang believes that private investors are impatient and unwilling to sacrifice present returns for future gains. As a result, they will not take risks on new industries in poor countries, at least not in the absence of some other advantage (like tariff protection or government subsidy). If governments create protective umbrellas—via tariffs, subsidies, loose intellectual-property rules, restrictions on imports, and the like—for domestic companies, though, those companies will have a chance over time to become globally competitive, raising the level of prosperity of the country as a whole. Chang acknowledges that these umbrellas have costs—they raise prices for consumers in developing countries and often cut off access to better and cheaper foreign goods—but those are outweighed by the future benefits.
-
He also trenchantly attacks the developed world’s insistence on absurdly strict intellectual-property rules (rules that the United States willfully circumvented when it was a developing nation) and rightly points out that government ownership—in the context of a generally free-market economy—is hardly the automatic disaster that privatization advocates insist it will be.
-
-
At the same time, though, Bad Samaritans is not ultimately convincing, particularly when it comes to the solutions it proffers.
-
What Chang does in Bad Samaritans is assume that the interests of the nation trump those of its citizens.
-
seems strangely untroubled by the authoritarianism implicit in any powerfully protectionist regime
-
The problem of disentangling all the factors that go into a country’s economic performance in order to isolate the ones that really count is a monumental task, and not one we have accomplished. Bad Samaritans is written with a kind of smug certainty that is, paradoxically, reminiscent of precisely the neoliberal triumphalism that it’s written against.
-
The China Model — The American, A Magazine of Ideas on 2008-02-03
-
The controls that China deploys on use of the Internet, the battles it wages with its artists in every field, the focus in its education system on rote learning, the continuing failure to implement its own intellectual property rules, and now the embracing of a new Confucianism—all of these inhibit lateral thinking and invention.
-
As Maoism and Marxism lose their grip, the dangers of nationalism as a defining value system become apparent, and religion remains under suspicion as a potentially powerful rival to the Communist Party and the authoritarian state, China’s leaders are eagerly rediscovering the country’s 2,500-year-old Confucian tradition.
-
-
No person has ever won a Nobel Prize for work in China; the U.S., by contrast, has won nearly 300 Nobel Prizes, winning or sharing four of the six 2006 awards.
-
Carsten Holz, an economics professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, wrote in the Far Eastern Economic Review that “of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2,932 are children of high-level cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors—finance, foreign trade, land development, large-scale engineering, and securities—85 percent to 90 percent are held by children of high-level cadres.”
-
The party rules today through four pillars—the army, the legal apparatus including the courts and police,
the administration, and the state corporations that dominate the “strategic” sectors of the economy. Without cutting away these pillars, without separating the powers, any attempt at “competitive elections” would be hollow. But the pillars appear, to use an understatement, firmly entrenched.
-
Hutton reiterates the old contention that China’s middle class, “more internationalist than its poor,” will ultimately insist that the party loosen its political control. James Mann replies that the middle class is doing very nicely, thank you, within the structure as it is. Its members are substantially incorporated into the party and are the structure’s biggest supporters, not its underminers.
-
“Welfare systems, freedom of association, representative government, and enforceable property rights are not simply pleasant options. They are central to the capacity of a capitalist economy to grow to maturity…. The party can relax its political control to allow the economic reform process to be completed. Or it can retain political control, watch the economic contradictions build, and so create the social tension that may force loss of political control.”
-
Leading Australian economist Ross Garnaut, a former ambassador to China, adds an important element of historical perspective—that first Britain, and then the United States, industrialized in a helter-skelter way, which was crucially moderated and channeled by institutional accountability that prevented the industrial-baron entrepreneurs from losing proportion, alienating the population, and misallocating capital disastrously. The institutions that developed to meet this challenge of a rampant new power elite included parliaments, legal structures, and independent regulatory agencies.
-
Vietnam is the most successful economically of the countries using the China Model, and its entrepreneurial talents suggest that in some areas it could in time even leapfrog it.
-
“China could create blowback against itself in other ways, too. Still a developing country itself, China could overplay its hand, making the kind of promises on aid and investment that it cannot fulfill. And in the long run, if countries like Burma ever made the transition to freer governments, China could face a sizable backlash for its past support for their authoritarian rulers. ‘We know who stands behind the [Burmese] government,’ one Burmese businessman told me last year. ‘We’ll remember.’”
-
-- January 2008 on 2008-02-02
-
Today there are over 29
million private businesses, which employ over 200 million people and generate
two-thirds of China’s industrial output.
-
The private sector’s spectacular growth
has led many observers to speculate that China is developing a capitalist class
that will overthrow the Chinese Communist Party and demand democracy based on
the principle of “no taxation without representation.”
-
-
two
misguided assumptions: first, that private entrepreneurs comprise a single,
consistent class; and second, that these entrepreneurs would support a regime
change.
-
Misreading the mind - Los Angeles Times on 2008-02-02
-
Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."
-
Why capitalism is good for the soul on 2008-02-02
-
The problem for those of us who believe that capitalism offers the best chance we have for leading meaningful and worthwhile lives is that in this debate, the devil has always had the best tunes to play. Capitalism lacks romantic appeal. It does not set the pulse racing in the way that opposing ideologies like socialism, fascism, or environmentalism can. It does not stir the blood, for it identifies no dragons to slay. It offers no grand vision for the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of individuals pursuing their own preferences. Capitalism can justifiably boast that it is excellent at delivering the goods, but this fails to impress in countries like Australia that have come to take affluence for granted.
-
This is because the radical green movement shares many features with old-style revolutionary socialism. Both are oppositional, defining themselves as alternatives to the existing capitalist system. Both are moralistic, seeking to purify humanity of its tawdry materialism and selfishness, and appealing to our ‘higher instincts.’ Both are apocalyptic, claiming to be able to read the future and warning, like Old Testament prophets, of looming catastrophe if we do not change our ways.
-
-
And both are utopian, holding out the promise of redemption through a new social order based on a more enlightened humanity. All of this is irresistibly appealing
to romantics.
-
Both socialism and environmentalism also share an unshakeable belief in their own infallibility, which further ramps up their attractiveness. Both dismiss their opponents as either ignorant (‘falsely conscious’) or in bad faith, and they are both reluctant to allow counter-arguments, evidence, or logic to deflect them from the urgent pursuit of their proffered solutions.
-
irony. Rockstars fly around the world in private jets to perform at sellout stadium concerts demanding action on global warming, and indignant youths coordinate anti-globalisation protests using global communication networks.
-
Boring capitalism cannot hope to compete with all this moral certainty, self-righteous anger, and sheer bloody excitement. Where is the adrenalin in getting up every day, earning a living, raising a family, creating a home, and saving for the future
-
It is in this sense that capitalism is soulless, for although it fills people’s bellies, it struggles to engage their emotions.
-
Doesn’t the first epistle to Timothy warn that ‘love of money is a root of all sorts of evil’?
-
Therefore, it is probably a mistake to trawl through the scriptures searching for nuggets that might support this or that system of political economy, for the word of God was never intended to be used as a blueprint for designing socioeconomic systems.
-
We have known since the time of Adam Smith that capitalism harnesses self-interest to generate outcomes that benefit others.
-
One of Karl Marx’s most mischievous legacies was to suggest that this relationship is inherently antagonistic: that for employers to make profit, they must drive wages down. In reality, workers in the advanced capitalist countries thrive when their companies increase profits. The pursuit of profit thus results in higher living standards for workers, as well as cheaper and more plentiful goods and services for consumers
-
World poverty has fallen more in the last fifty years than it did in the previous five hundred.
(11) This dramatic reduction in human misery and despair owes nothing to aging rockstars demanding that we ‘make poverty history.’ It is due to the spread of global capitalism.
-
Capitalism has also made it possible for many more people to live on Earth and to survive for longer than ever before.
-
By perpetually raising productivity, capitalism has not only driven down poverty rates and raised life expectancy, it has also released much of humanity from the crushing burden of physical labour, freeing us to pursue ‘higher’ objectives instead.
-
What Clive Hamilton airily dismisses as a ‘growth fetish’ has resulted in one hour of work today delivering twenty-five times more value than it did in 1850.
-
This has freed huge chunks of our time for leisure, art, sport, learning, and other ‘soul-enriching’ pursuits.
-
There is another sense, too, in which capitalism has freed individuals so they can pursue worthwhile lives, and that lies in its record of undermining tyrannies and dictatorships.
-
Historically, it was capitalism that delivered humanity from the ‘soul-destroying’ weight of feudalism. Later, it freed millions from the dead hand of totalitarian socialism. While capitalism may not be a sufficient condition of human freedom, it is almost certainly a necessary one.
-
Hamilton’s complaint is that the opportunity for a full and meaningful life that capitalism opened up has not been grasped. This is because a growing preoccupation with consumption, economic growth, and the pursuit of wealth has subverted our search for authenticity and self-realisation.
-
These students wanted everything that industrial capitalism had delivered to their generation up to that point—the comfortable housing, the audio systems, the cheap flights to foreign countries, the medical advances, and the increased education and leisure time—but they thought future generations should go without the additional benefits that would be generated in the years of capitalism to come.
-
This suggests either that we are indifferent to how affluent we are, how long we are going to live, how hard we have to work, and how healthy we are likely to remain; or that the happiness surveys are failing to pick up changes in our subjective well-being over time. The latter interpretation seems much more plausible than the former.
-
f Clive could drag us all back to 1980, average happiness scores would plummet because we now take for granted the improved lives we have secured for ourselves. By the same token, our children in thirty years’ time will not wish to sacrifice the improvements they have secured, even though their recorded happiness scores will doubtless be no higher than ours are now.
-
He is right that many of the products we consume nowadays are unsatisfying (although we should remember that one person’s dross is another’s desire)
-
But recognising that consumption does not always bring contentment does not mean we have to give up on capitalism.
-
Because capitalism constantly encourages innovation, it is inevitable that many of the items brought to market will be trivial or even trashy, but some will make a genuine contribution to human well-being. We cannot know in advance which will be life-enhancing and which will not, but pointing to discarded piles of trashy commodities does not make a compelling case for turning off the growth machine.
-
No socioeconomic system can guarantee people a good life. All we can reasonably ask of any society is the conditions that will enable us to construct happy and worthwhile lives for ourselves. On this test, capitalism passes with flying colours.
-
Traditional critics of capitalism, like Marx, argued that these preconditions of human happiness could not be satisfied in a capitalist society. Marx’s theory of the ‘immiseration of the proletariat’ held that capitalism couldn’t even guarantee provision of food and shelter, for mass poverty, misery, ignorance, and squalor were the inevitable consequence of the accumulation of wealth by a tiny capitalist class.
-
For a while, this triumph of mass capitalism left western Marxists badly wrong-footed, but in the 1960s, they regrouped around a different kind of critique advanced by that darling of the Parisian soixante-huitards, Herbert Marcuse.
(22) Marcuse accepted that modern capitalism provides the masses with all the material things they desire, but he said this starves them of any meaning and purpose in their lives.
-
Marcuse suggested that the advertising industry engineers ‘false needs’ for consumer goods that capitalism then provides, while deeper, more authentic desires remain ‘sublimated’ and unfulfilled. The working class is ‘alienated’ because all relationships and experiences are mediated through this empty consumption
of commodities.
-
Marcuse turned Marx’s critique of capitalism on its head. Where Marx complained that capitalism cannot supply the masses with the goods they need, Marcuse complained that it supplies them with too many. Clive Hamilton is arguing much the same thing today. It is no more convincing now than it was then.
-
Wherever populations have a chance to move, the flow is always towards capitalism, not away from it.
-
The attraction of living in a capitalist society is not just that the economy works. It is also that if your version of the good life leads you to turn your back on capitalism, you don’t have to pick up sticks and move away. If you don’t like capitalism, there is no need to bribe people-smugglers to get you out of the country. You simply buy a plot of land, build your mud-brick house, and drop out
-
Joseph Schumpeter offered part of the answer. He observed that capitalism has brought into being an educated class that has no responsibility for practical affairs, and that this class can only make a mark by criticising the system that feeds them.
(27) Intellectuals attack capitalism because that is how they sell books and build careers.
-
But the best explanation for the intellectuals’ distaste for capitalism was offered by Friedrich Hayek in
The Fatal Conceit.
(29) Hayek understood that capitalism offends intellectual pride, while socialism flatters it. Humans like to believe they can design better systems than those that tradition or evolution have bequeathed. We distrust evolved systems, like markets, which seem to work without intelligent direction according to laws and dynamics that no one fully understands.
-
Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant.
-
Why We Love -- Printout -- TIME on 2008-01-30
-
One type, known as driver pheromones, appears to affect the endocrine systems of others. Since the endocrine system plays a critical role in the timing of menstruation, there is at least a strong circumstantial case that the two are linked. "It's thought that there is a driver female who gives off something that changes the onset of menstruation in the other women,"
-
strippers who are ovulating average $70 in tips per hour; those who are menstruating make $35; those who are not ovulating or menstruating make $50.
-
-
Scent not only tells males which females are primed to conceive, but it also lets both sexes narrow their choices of potential partners. Among the constellation of genes that control the immune system are those known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which influence tissue rejection. Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus.
-
And if the smell of MHC isn't a deal maker or breaker, the taste is. Saliva also contains the compound, a fact that Haselton believes may partly explain the custom of kissing, particularly those protracted sessions that stop short of intercourse. "Kissing," she says simply, "might be a taste test."
-
Women who are on the Pill—which chemically simulates pregnancy—tend to choose wrong in the T-shirt test. When they discontinue the daily hormone dose, the protective smell mechanism kicks back in. "A colleague of mine wonders if the Pill may contribute to divorce,"
-
Not only does kissing serve the utilitarian purpose of providing a sample of MHC, but it also magnifies the other attraction signals—if only as a result of proximity.
-
At the moment of a kiss, there's a rich and complicated exchange of postural, physical and chemical information," says Gallup. "There are hardwired mechanisms that process all this."
-
Traces of testosterone make it into men's saliva, particularly among men who have high blood levels of the hormone to start with, and it's possible that a lot of kissing over a long period may be a way to pass some of that natural aphrodisiac to the woman, increasing her arousal and making her more receptive to even greater intimacy.
-
If ever there was a substance designed to bind, it's oxytocin.
New mothers are flooded with the stuff during labor and nursing—one reason they connect so ferociously to their babies before they know them as anything more than a squirmy body and a hungry mouth.
-
Birth-control pills that mask a woman's ability to detect her mate's incompatible MHC are one way bad love can slip past our perimeters. Adrenaline is another. Any overwhelming emotional experience that ratchets up your sensory system can distort your perceptions, persuading you to take a chance on someone you should avoid.
-
"It's not that we fall in love with such people because they're immensely attractive," he says. "It's that they seem immensely attractive because we've fallen in love with them."
-
If that sounds a lot like what happens when people meet and date under the regular influence of drugs or alcohol, only to sober up later and wonder what in the world they were thinking, that's because in both cases powerful chemistry is running the show. When hormones and natural opioids get activated, explains psychologist and sex researcher Jim Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal, you start drawing connections to the person who was present when those good feelings were created. "You think someone made you feel good," Pfaus says, "but really it's your brain that made you feel good."
-
people who have been rejected by a lover and can't shake the pain. In these subjects, as with all people in love, there is activity in the caudate nucleus, but it's specifically in a part that's adjacent to a brain region associated with addiction.
-
United States - International Diplomacy - Economic Trends - World Economy - Politics - New York Times on 2008-01-28
-
In Europe’s capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China.
-
And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream.
-
-
China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find.
-
Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.
-
small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance.
-
And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries — the so-called Stans — China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich
Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the “
NATO of the East.”
-
Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell’s 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China.
-
Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics.
-
From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in “coalition of the willing”), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles.
-
While traveling through the second world, I learned to see countries not as unified wholes but rather as having multiple, often disconnected, parts, some of which were on a path to rise into the first world while other, often larger, parts might remain in the third.
-
For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so — spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country.
-
Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or less annexing Russia’s Far East for its timber and other natural resources
-
Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it’s just a matter of time.
-
In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative — becoming a petro-vassal of China.
-
But what about the Stans: landlocked but resource-rich countries run by autocrats? Ever since these nations were flung into independence by the Soviet collapse, China has steadily replaced Russia as their new patron.
-
Globalization has brought the geopolitical marketplace straight to America’s backyard, rapidly eroding the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine in the process.
-
Chávez stands not only on the ladder of high oil prices. He relies on tacit support from Europe and hardheaded intrusion from China, the former still the country’s largest investor and the latter feverishly repairing Venezuela’s dilapidated oil rigs while building its own refineries.
-
Latin America has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away.
-
What I find in virtually every Arab country is not such nationalism, however, but rather a new Arabism aimed at spreading oil wealth within the Arab world rather than depositing it in the United States as in past oil booms.
-
America was never all powerful only because of its military dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. A major common denominator among key second-world countries is the need for each of the Big Three to put its money where its mouth is.
-
Today Iran represents the final square in China’s hopscotch maneuvering to reach the Persian Gulf overland without relying on the narrow Straits of Malacca.
-
What is more, China is pulling off the most difficult of superpower feats: simultaneously maintaining positive ties with the world’s crucial pairs of regional rivals: Venezuela and Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan.
-
To understand the second world, you have to start to think like a second-world country. What I have seen in these and dozens of other countries is that globalization is not synonymous with Americanization; in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization.
-
Oswald Spengler saw it differently, arguing that mankind both lives and thinks in unique cultural systems, with Western ideals neither transferable nor relevant.
-
Today the Asian landscape still features ancient civilizations but also by far the most people and, by certain measures, the most money of any region in the world. With or without America, Asia is shaping the world’s destiny — and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process.
-
The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium — that the world inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must be accepted as the basis of global order — has paradoxically resulted in America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower.
-
The web of globalization now has three spiders. What makes America unique in this seemingly value-free contest is not its liberal democratic ideals — which Europe may now represent better than America does — but rather its geography. America is isolated, while Europe and China occupy two ends of the great Eurasian landmass that is the perennial center of gravity of geopolitics.
-
Europe will promote its supranational integration model as a path to resolving Mideast disputes and organizing Africa, while China will push a Beijing consensus based on respect for sovereignty and mutual economic benefit. America must make itself irresistible to stay in the game.
-
We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them — always. Neither America nor the world needs more competing ideologies, and moralizing exhortations are only useful if they point toward goals that are actually attainable
-
Third, deploy the marchmen. Europe is boosting its common diplomatic corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers and Chinese teachers — all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning loyalty.
-
we don’t have enough diplomats for core assignments, let alone solo hardship missions. We need a
Peace Corps 10 times its present size, plus student exchanges, English-teaching programs and hands-on job training overseas — with corporate sponsorship.
-
Given our deficits and political gridlock, the only solution is to channel global, particularly Asian, liquidity into our own public infrastructure, creating jobs and technology platforms that can keep American innovation ahead of the pack.
-
How to Boost Your Willpower - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog on 2008-01-22
-
What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.
-
Study subjects who drank sugar-sweetened lemonade, which raises glucose levels quickly, performed better on self-control tests than those who drank artificially-sweetened beverages, which have no effect on glucose.
-
-
The findings make sense because it’s long been known that glucose fuels many brain functions.
-
Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, says that in lab studies, self-control is boosted when people conjure up powerful memories of the things they value in life. Laughter and positive thoughts also help people perform better on self-control tasks.
-
Dr. Vohs notes that self-control problems occur because people are caught up “in the moment’’ and are distracted from their long-term goals.
-
A vow to stop swearing, to make the bed every day or to give up just one food may be a way to strengthen your self-control, giving you more willpower reserves for bigger challenges later.
-
The Moral Instinct - New York Times on 2008-01-18
-
Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.
-
According to
Noam Chomsky, we are born with a “universal grammar” that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness.
-
-
Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called “conscientiousness” and “agreeableness” are far more correlated in identical
twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes).
-
a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.
-
The five spheres are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots. The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.
-
The other two moralized spheres match up with the classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by
Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” Fairness is very close to what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor when fortunes reverse.
-
Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to share and sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our relatives (and which evolved because any gene that pushed an organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself sitting inside that relative).
-
In humans, of course, communal feelings can be lavished on nonrelatives as well. Sometimes it pays people (in an evolutionary sense) to love their companions because their interests are yoked, like spouses with common children, in-laws with common relatives, friends with common tastes or allies with common enemies. And sometimes it doesn’t pay them at all, but their kinship-detectors have been tricked into treating their groupmates as if they were relatives by tactics like kinship metaphors (blood
brothers, fraternities, the
fatherland), origin myths, communal meals and other bonding rituals.
-
The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion,
diet and so on — depends on the culture.
-
Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres.
-
hink of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority).
-
In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?
-
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres.
-
In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
-
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans.
-
The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It’s not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.
-
And “morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them.
-
Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
-
In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it’s important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves the logic of evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists sometimes anthropomorphize DNA for the same reason that science teachers find it useful to have their students imagine the world from the viewpoint of a molecule or a beam of light. One shortcut to understanding the theory of selection without working through the math is to imagine that the genes are little agents that try to make copies of themselves.
-
Unfortunately, the meme of the selfish gene escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this doesn’t follow. Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious wishes. “Selfish” genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that tenderness were “selfish” in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch of the imagination is she being selfish.
-
In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it’s good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can’t literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset.
-
Now this just sets up a competition for potential beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely generous partners from the hypocrites.
-
This arms race will eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing — they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that’s the kind of people they are.
-
An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy, can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many players are playing the other strategies. The human social environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear the fingerprints of this evolutionary process.
-
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way.
-
Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
-
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
-
Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
-
Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy.
-
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
-
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys.
-
These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
-
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
-
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance.
-
It also underlies
Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
-
Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications for our moral universe are profound.
-
At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries’ agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us.
-
But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground.
-
One side can acknowledge the other’s concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance.
-
With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not bureaucratic power.
-
Liberals can ratify conservatives’ concern with families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with that concern.
-
The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions.
-
It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
-
The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses.
-
In his influential essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass, former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: “We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
-
There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men.
-
And if our ancestors’ repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies,
vaccinations, blood transfusions,
artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.
-
And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced
climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting.
-
Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness.
-
Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
Groups
Bp060801 havn't joined any group yet.
Home
