“Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them”: Joshua Greene’s 2013 book doesn’t fully answer our polarized political world today
At the video advice of Harvard undergrad vlogger John Fish, I bought and read Joshua Greene’s 2013 (dated?) treatise “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them” (Penguin). I’ll add right away, I haven’t seen a new video in the past couple of weeks, but he says he is writing a book on the attention economy (attention as virtual dark currency). Look at 8:00 in the video below.
The basic definition of “morality” appears first on p. 23. “Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of coorperation.” In the world of Paul Rosenfels, it is implemented by masculine personalities but probably defined first by feminines.
The book is organized into a succession of an Introduction and Five Parts, with twelve chapters. His logic diagram would he hard to summarize, so it is simpler first to enumerate his basic concepts and then give some personal reactions.
His Introduction imagines a fantasy novel Tolkien-like world divided into quadrants, where the basic sections on the Nolan chart are expressed (4 combinations: authoritarian v. libertarian, conservative v. liberal) are expressed. Each subkingdom works in its own way. (I’m not sure if the five dominions of Clive Barker’s Imajica can be sort out this way; they all seemed fairly authoritarian as I remember).
The kickoff starts with the well-known “Tragedy of the Commons” (“Me v. Us”), which is resolved by cooperating within a family and local community or tribe. But then there exists the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality”. This has to do with “Us v. Them” – the natural tribalism that before 2016 we rarely talked about but that now is seen as an immutable human characteristic.
Greene spends most of his space building up the case for utilitarianism, as developed by Bentham and Mill (I remember that being covered in high school in government class). Utilitarianism is associated with consequentialism, which one reader thought was the point of my first DADT book. On p. 329, Greene gives a brief comparison to Kant’s deontology, and Aristotle’s virtue ethics. I think my own perspective is mostly based on utilitarianism along with some virtue paradigms. My instinctive reaction, for example, is to view cis-geneder-ness as “virtuous” in how I react to people personally.
Greene covers the familiar moral paradoxes, like the trolley and switch and raft problems, and brings in the issues of manual mode processing and personal emotion, and finally leads to a discussion of “deep pragmatism”.
But the most contentious part of this debate seems to be the way we place the value of individual human life over abstract calculations of group well-being. It might be OK not to rescue someone to save others, but never to push the person.
More recently, we have extended the debate to the rights of other sentient beings, animals, some of which (like dolphins and probably most carnivores) have a lot more personal awareness than we used to think.
Let us cut to the chase. The biggest plan for me in practice is to decide which of m own contemplated behaviors (pre-meditated) are morally acceptable. I would not normally be viewed as disabled, but I grew up “near” that status. I don’t view cis male homosexuality as conferring tribal membership, but many people do. In general, that leaves me with the position of having taken undo advantage of “white’ privilege.
But generally SJW activists want to mediate everything by dealing with groups only, and lead to governance that is based on ancestral group privilege rather than individual personal responsibility. This makes “deep pragmatism” as Greene discusses difficult (although Greene wrote this book a year before Ferguson and three years before Trump’s election, and four years before Charlottesville).
Greene is willing to take “white supremacy” off the table completely as a legitimate idea. But he doesn’t recognize that around 1961, when I was thrown out of William and Mary as a freshman, homosexuality itself was off the table. Why does this change with time?
He tries to give a “deeply pragmatic” analysis of the abortion debate. He has a hard time justifying “pro choice” in the usual sense even though he says he is a “liberal”. He winds up questioning whether non having children could be a sin – and that is exactly why homosexuality was so unmentionable in 1961. I was an only child, and the religious sentiment of the time would have viewed my parents’ committed marriage as giving them a promise of some intermitted vicarious immortality, which I denied them – that is, if you believe in pan-psychism and that souls are borrowed from a greater whole of consciousness. Generally, pro-life demonstrators don’t go so far as to claim that an unconceived (non-existing) child has rights – yet contraception only started to become legal in the 1960s, although the obligation to procreate was problem more ontological. The pro-life movement has not come to terms with other questions, like requiring military conscription (we still require Selective Service Registration). Certainly, the debates on climate change and even Social Security stability take interest in the well-being of future generations and descendants not even conceived yet, and a moral concern even for the childless. (By the way, sometimes people with some pro-life sentiment express it with methods as gentle as using the year of their conception rather than birth to build user names.)
But the most interesting is the moral obligation to share and give, even when it involved some sacrifice. He gets into some far-stretching scenarios on whether your latest movie ticket could have been spent saving a life in central Africa. He also doubles back and considers the “religious right” in the US, with its deontology, as motivated by tribalism – take care of your own first (that’s Trumpism). Note that the last advice in the book, “Six Rules for Modern Herders” is “Give”. Like Oprah’s “Big Give”, or maybe a particular Sunday night talk group at the Ninth Street Center that I recall from October 1974. He pays particular attention to the possibility that anyone can suddenly be placed in a situation where he/she is required to take a big risk to save someone else, or to take care of someone else (like raise a sibling’s child). But then you need the skills (like having learned to swim), or even, as an adult, to taken sudden control of minor children (as with substitute teaching).
In an early chapter he talks about the importance of not convicting an innocent man and notes that China is not as dedicated to this idea to protect the group, even in utilitarian parlance. Tim Pool has often talked about the importance of this idea.
Social media has worked both ways, spreading misinformation and intensifying echo chambers, yet offering opportunities for unprecedented generosity, such as organ donations to strangers, which no one would have expected when I was growing up (and these cross the tribes).
But these ideas could have real bite in the future, as the far Left seems to be pressing for something like China’s social credit system (except that the far Left is too concerned with identarianism to figure out how to implement it). Maybe to have your own Internet access in the future, you’ll have to do community service and accept the supervision of the non-profits.
Greene does seem to think that it is critical to focus on people’s real needs, at a practical level (survival, food, housing) rather than focusing so much on your own personally expressive skills, the later of which is more common in the personal counseling world. I remember how the Ninth Street Center wanted me to do time by doing dishes after the Saturday night potlucks. A little Maoism is inevitable.
Author: Joshua Greene
Title, Subtitle: “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them”
publication date 2013
ISBN 978-1-59420-260-5
Publication: Penguin, 422 pages, paper, endnotes, indexed, 5 parts, intro and 12 chapters
Link: publisher
(Posted: Saturday, April 27, 2019 at 1 PM EDT)