The New Genealogy of Morals
The New Genealogy of Morals
We don't choose our values; culture provides context for human biology
Another image from the summer’s time out on the trail with the Leica Monochrome M11 and APO 35mm f2 ASPH. Much of time when I have the camera out, I’m just looking for places where the light creates some spacial contrast or highlights form or pattern. The camera is a way to practice seeing and get feedback when I compare what I see to what the camera sees. Better images, better seeing, I hope.
This week on the blog I updated my 2024 reading list and wrote some post-election thoughts. Plus a bit about this Substack effort. So it’s my update and thinking page. Meanwhile, this is 3 weeks in a row posting here, which constitutes a commitment.
Last week, I tried to just introduce the idea of externalization of mind to create a feedback loop in the world to improve ourselves with the ultimate goal of engagement with the world. That would be a way to leave the prison of the mind as “I” and be in the world.
So we try to improve our implicit understanding of who we are in the world. I use “implicit” intentionally because, I hope I’ve been making clear, our brains are mentalizing, moving, and speaking all the time without our direct control. We do perceive the brain activity through mechanisms of awareness and we do have a sense of agency for these actions, we don’t have access or awareness of the underlying mechanisms of the brain.
As I’ve conceptualized it in the language of systems theory, the brain evolved as a control system, a governor of behavior that, as I’ve written about based on Conant and Ashby, 1970, every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. So we’re talking about the brain using feedback to improve the accuracy of it’s implicit model to be a better regulator of the system.
When we’re talking about being a better person, we must ask where does that implicit model come from if we’re to have any chance of improving it. How does the brain know it’s deviating from behaving like the person that is implicitly modeled as ideal? And how can the brain know how accurate that model is as a system controller?
Nature
It’s impossible to discuss the rules of behavior that we’re born with, the innate rules of human behavior. Humans have a very long period of brain development after birth and it’s saturated with interactions with parents, peers and strangers that provide the cultural overlay for attitudes and habits. There are academic fields that look at commonalities across cultures and surviving hunter-gatherer societies, but for our purposes I don’t think it helps much since we end up so far from those simple groups and tribes.
Instead, I tend to look at other mammals to understand what kinds of behavior might be universally built into us even though it’s so obscured by the cultural overlay. Animals have a clear, instinctual set of social rules that for us we call ethics or morality. The implicit knowledge of how to spin a web is embedded in the neural structure of a spider. You can’t find the map of the web anywhere inside. There’s no set of instructions we can find.
My youngest son has a Miniature Pincher named Wicki who’s a hyperactive, 5 pound dog. When he came to visit, my 2 year old 65 pound Labrador Retriever was very excited. Everyone was really afraid of how this big playful dog would interact with the little puppy. I had confidence in biology and just let them figure it out themselves. After a while, they adopted a style of play that involved both chasing, wrestling and biting. No one got hurt.
These dogs know how to be dogs. They know how to live together, hunt and prey in groups. They undergo a process of socialization from birth in the litter and then out in the world and refine their behaviors based on how the world occurs to them. In our pet dogs, we generally remove puppies from the litter at 8 weeks and placed in homes generally populated only with humans and other dogs already socialized to live with humans. Because of the critical learning periods of dogs, they adopt the culture of a human household, not a dog pack. In fact, well meaning people run into problems when they take in littermates as there’s a conflict between the emerging human-dog culture and the dog-dog culture.
Nurture
Humans, in contrast have a much more robust cultural overlay than dogs. It seems likely that our big, complex brains are mostly devloped to enable complex social interactions. Born with universal human behavior, we develop specific cultural codes, taboos, and modes of perception.
But Nietzsche was wrong. Nobody made up morality from whole cloth in prehistory to pass it down to us. It evolved as much human behavior did- biologically and culturally. Evolution is a process of variation and selection. So there are lots of different cultures and attitudes that humans have experimented with over the millennia and interesting many variants persist. Some cultures are more family centered, some are more individual and group identification centered. Some are high trust and some are low trust.
I was born into a culture where thousands of years ago it was said:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?
Rabbi Hillel, Pirkei Avos 1,14
And more recently restated in my current culture, just decades old:
This ain't a song for the broken-hearted
No silent prayer for the faith-departed
I ain't gonna be just a face in the crowd
You're gonna hear my voice
When I shout it out loud
It's my life
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just want to live while I'm alive. . .
You better stand tall when they're calling you out
Don't bend, don't break, baby, don't back down
-Bon Jovi "It's My Life"
If morals come from evolutionary biology and culture- then just like we have no choice in our perception of the world, we are born into an environment that gives us values, just as inaccessible as the rules of grammar. I have centuries old Jewish values and modern American values from the 60s to the 2020’s. If my cultural environment implicitly shapes my model of how to behave, what to believe, does it matter where the culture came from originally? Whether from Hillel’s divine inspiration or Bon Jovi’s assertions, I hear and adopt the attitudes. I find the similarity of sentiment to be proof that it is a process of evolution with its variation and selection that leads to the persistance of certain attitudesthat make our cultures robust and stable.
Utility and Rational Ethics Fall to Feelings
How then do I know what’s right or wrong? I don’t think it’s very different from how I know how to drive or read a sentence. The knowledge is implicit and drives decisions in the moment without the need for reflection. I find it amusing how philosophers pose their thought experiments to tie themselves into knots, but propose their answers by what feels like the right answer. It’s not that it’s emotional, it’s that the answer feels right or wrong based on implicit, unstated rules. Rational appeals to utility that seem so attractive in theory never seem to work out in practice. Rules that can be surfaced as I discussed by externalizing thought. In fact, one can’t really change any of the received culture attitudes with some kind of feedback.
One looks to authority and group membership to justify the feeling, but it’s there already. The guidance and feedback from authority, from peers certainly acts to refine and guide the rules we carry within us. It seems that as social animals we are driven in large measure by group membership and status within the group. But in the exploration of how we construct our self, we find we are multiple as we move from context to context and from group to group.
Since we have no consistency it seems like we’re inauthentic. Since we don’t know how or why we know these things, we feel like we’re imposters. Yet if I’m right here and there is no core self, no true values other than our implicit cultural rules then that human ability to pretend is the way to be able to be many people, be ourselves, and navigate moral panic and guilt.