The Cynical Beliefs of Evolutionary Psychologists

Darwin, Freud, and Cynicism

The Picture Painted Thus Far

The picture of human nature painted by Wright thus far is not flattering

We spend an inordinate amount of time seeking status

We're dependent on social esteem (release of neurotransmitters we get upon impressing people)

We have high regard for those who hold fast to their values

But those who are truly unaffected by peer approval or disapproval are labeled sociopaths

And those who are wholly affected by peer approval or disapproval are labeled “self-promoters” and “social climbers”

In truth, we are all self-promoters and social climbers

The Cynical View of Behavior

Generosity and affection are aimed at kin, who share our genes, at nonkin of the opposite sex who can help package our genes for shipment to the next generation, and at nonkin of either sex who we think is likely to return the favor

In our friendships we're deeply inegalitarian (we judge the wealthy more leniently, expect less of them

Wright says that this is the cynical view of behavior

Shift from nineteenth-century earnestness to twentieth century cynicism can be traced to Freud

Finds sly, unconscious aims in our most innocuous acts

Sees an animal essence at the core of unconscious

Freudian vs. Darwinian Psychology

Both carry less bitterness than garden variety cynicism

Both view the conscious person as a kind of unwitting accomplice, because they believe the person is driven by unconscious motivations

Everyone comes out looking like a victim, but it is in describing how and why the victimization takes place that the two schools of thought diverge

Freud

Freud thought of himself as a Darwinian, looking at the human mind as a product of evolution

But Freud misunderstood evolution in basic ways

Put emphasis on the idea

that traits acquired through life experience get gassed on biologically

that people have a death instinct “thanatos”

that girls want male genitalia “penis envy”

that boys want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers

These things sound nonsensical to today's Darwinians. For example, something resembling the Oedipal conflict may well exist, but what are its real roots?

With the Oedipus conflict, it may be instead that the conflict is not sexual. Rather, the son and father are fighting for the mother's time and affection (Darwinian view)

Darwin

Darwinian theories are often speculative, like Freudian theories, but unlike Freud's theories, they are firmly tethered to the understanding of the process that designed human brains (evolution)

Sought to describe where the “tuning of the knobs of human nature” comes from

The young, plastic mind is shaped by cues that suggested what behavioral strategies were most likely to get genes spread

Cues tend to mirror:

The sort of social environment you find yourself in

The sorts of assets and liabilities you bring into that environment

Some cues mediated by kin. Triver theorized that some psychic fine tuning of children by parents, may be more for the benefit of the parent than for the benefit of the child

Randolph Nesse

Stressed that pain is a part of natural selection's design

Vast quantities of pain are generated by personality traits that help make people effective animals

People may well be designed to absorb painful guidance that conduces to genetic proliferation

Insecurity

Assumption that various kinds of childhood failure or turmoil will lead to adult insecurity

Reasons why natural selection might have forged some of these links between early experience and later personality

Intellectual self-scrutiny might grow out of early social frustration

Children to whom status doesn't come naturally may work harder to become rich sources of information

Over eons, it makes sense that people who couldn't ascend the social hierarchy through classic means to focus on other routes

The Unconscious Mind

For behavioral scientists to use the new Darwinism to trace mental and emotional development, they will have to abandon an assumption implicit in Freudian theory and psychiatric theory in general: That pain is a symptom of something abnormal, unnatural, that something has gone awry

But what about painfully persistent “recollection of grievances or humiliation?

Its not that the tendency to forget unpleasant things wasn't general after all, but that it was just that sometimes the tendency to discard painful memories is successful and sometimes it isn't

Why do we forget facts inconsistent with our theories

Forgetting makes it easier to argue with force and conviction, and arguments often had genetic stakes in the environment of our evolution

Why we remember grievances

Remembering may bolster our haggling in a different way, also, well-preserved grievance may ensure the punishment of our exploiters

Why we remember humiliations

Remembering dissuades us from repeating behaviors that can lower social status

Thus, Freud's model of the human mind may have been insufficiently labyrinthine.

Best of Freud

The mind is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality

Sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal

Libidinous Rapacious Generally selfish Yet having to live civilly with others Having to reach goals via cooperation, compromise,

and restraint

Triune Brain

Three Basic Parts

Reptilian (basic drives)

Paleomammalian

Neomammalian Freud's

“id” - presumably reptilian Superego- paleomammilian Ego - neomammalian

The Conflict

Basic conflict between selfish and altruistic motivation, between pleasure-seeking and normative behavior, and between individual and group interests

The human as an animal of ultimately complete ruthlessness is born into a complex and inescapable social web

Repression and the unconscious mind are the products of millions of years of evolution and were well developed long before civilization further conplicated mental life

The Postmodern Mind

Darwinian notion of unconscious more radical than Freudian

Sources of self-deception more numerous, diverse, and deeply rooted

Line between conscious and unconscious is less clear

By Darwinian perspective, the view that “Freudianism is an attempt to 'prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind'” gives too much credit to the “self” It seems to suggest an otherwise clear-seeing mental entity getting deluded in various ways

Indeed, the commonsense way of thinking bout the relation between our thoughts and feeling, and our pursuit of goals, is not just wrong, but backwards.

It should be that it is the behavioral goals – status, sex, effective coalition, parental investment, that remain steadfast while our view of reality adjusts to accommodate this constancy

In Summary

Freud stressed people's difficulty in seeing the truth about themselves

The new Darwinian's stress the difficulty of seeing truth, period

Moral discourse, political discourse, and other social discourses that supposedly lead to truth, are, by Darwin's terms, raw power struggles

A winner will emerge, but there's no reason to expect the winner to be truth

More Postmodernism

In human affairs, much is artificial, a self-serving manipulation of image

This belief helps to nourish a central strand of the postmodern condition: an inability to take things seriously

Today, ironic self-consciousness is the prevailing attitude (entertainment is massively self-referential; “meta”)

Earnestness is to be avoided at all costs

Postmodern cynicism doesn't despair about the ability of humans to realize laudable ideals because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place

Prevailing attitude is absurdism

This new paradigm causes a reaction of self-consciousness so acute, and cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may be the only relief

Thus the question is no longer whether the human animal can be a moral animal, but whether the word moral can be anything but a joke

Theory of “Moral Sentiments”

Darwin didn't stress that the very sense of right and wrong, which feels heaven-sent, is an arbitrary product of our peculiar evolutionary past

The Edinburgh Review noted that if Darwin turned out to be right

Our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct

A revolution in thought is imminent

Which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of the conscence and the religious sense

The religious sense has indeed wanted, especially among the “intellectuals.” Those who read the modern day equivalent of the Edinburgh Review

Among philosophers, there is no agreement on where we might turn for basic moral values, except, nowhere.

Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the sense of justice, that doers of good deserve reward and doers of bad deserve punishment – can all be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet

The Perversion of Darwin's Theory

People began to take Darwin's theory and run with it.

The moral of their story seemed to be that suffering is the handmaiden of progress, in human as in evolutionary history

Various people believed pain through pain is nature's way

Darwin found this laughable

Utilitarianism

Darwin and John Stuart Mill both believed that, in a universe which for all we know is godless, one reasonable place to find moral guidance is utilitarianism

The idea is simple: The fundamental guidelines for moral discourse are pleasure and pain

Things can be called good to the extent that they raise the amount of happiness in the world and bad to the extent that they raise the amount of suffering.

Utilitarianism's foundation consists largely of the simple assertion that happiness, all other things being equal, is better than unhappiness

Not all people agree, some people even argue that there isn't a strong reason to believe that happiness is good

But the point is conceded Everyone – except sociopaths – agrees that the question of how their acts affect the happiness of others is an important part of moral evaluation

No school of thought refuses to admit that the influence of actions on happiness is the source of moral obligation

Act vs. Rule

• Act Utilitarianism: The right action is the one which produces the greatest amount of happiness or pleasure for the greatest number of beings

• Rule Utilitarianism: Actions re moral when they conform to the rules that lead to the greatest good

cont.

Belief in the goodness of happiness and the badness of suffering seems to be the only basic part of utilitarianism that we all share

Happiness is good, suffering bad, seems to be the most practical, if not the only practical, basis for moral discourse

Why Should Have A Moral Code

Non-zero-sumness

Everyone's happiness can go up if everyone treats everyone else nicely.

We're all better off in a world with morality, than one without

For in a non-moral world, the mutual mistreatment would roughly cancel itself out

Put another way: life is full of cases where a slight expenditure on one person's part can yield a larger saving on another person's part

To maximize overall happiness: everyone has to be thoroughly self-sacrificing. i.e. you should hold doors open whenever the amount of trouble you save the other person is even infinitesimally greater than the trouble you take

Consider the welfare of everyone else exactly as important as your own welfare

Conclusion

It seems fair to ask that even people who don't buy the stuff about utilitarianism at least make one minor adjustment in light of the new Darwinism: be consistent; either start subjecting all that moral posturing to skeptical scrutiny or quit the posturing

The feeling of moral rightness is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly.

Morality was designed to be misused by its own definition.

However, humans are unique from other animals in that we can distance ourselves from the tendency to misuse morality long enough to construct a whole moral philosophy that consists essentially of attacking it.

Darwin believed we are the only moral animal “A moral animal is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.

In this sense we have the technical capacity for leading a truly examined life.

Have self-awareness, memory, foresight, and judgement.

Conclusion (cont.)

Chronically subjecting ourselves to a true and bracing moral scrutiny, and adjusting our behavior accordingly, is not something we are designed for.

We are potentially moral animals – which is more than any other animal can say – but we aren't naturally moral animals.

To be moral animals, we must realize how thoroughly we aren't