Samson the Old-School Terrorist

Philistines are going to starve

When my daughter was little, I wanted to tell the story of Samson to my daughter orally, as it was originally told, instead of reading it out of a “Bible story” book. To get the story right, I opened the Bible and read about Samson. Turns out that his big claim to fame is massacring Philistines, most of them civilians. 

To the Hebrews, Samson was a folk hero, someone who killed their enemies by the thousands. He killed a lot of people, most of them civilians, whose crime was that they were Philistines. Today we expect more than that from a hero. 

Here’s how Samson’s first heroic act goes. He marries a Philistine, and then he challenges thirty Philistines with a riddle, betting them “thirty sheets and thirty change of garments” that they can't solve it. When they solve his unsolvable riddle, Samson knows that his wife has given them the answer. To settle the score, he collects the sheets and garments by killing 30 Philistines...

“And the Spirit of YHWH came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and gave change of garments to those who had solved the riddle.”

Later, he torches fields, slaughters Philistines, and kills a thousand with the jawbone of an ass. He dallies with a harlot in Gaza, and then falls in love with Delilah, who betrays him. He’s captured and blinded, but eventually he pulls the Philistines’ temple down around him, killing three thousand more people on his way out.

“So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.”

I never told the Samson story to my little daughter. By modern standards, this guy isn’t a hero. He’s a terrorist.

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Group Instincts and Modern Politics

Identity without biology

tl:dr Some aspects of our identities activate in-group social instincts, and it’s easy for people to organize politically along those lines. Other aspects of our identities relate more to distinctions within the in-group or within a family structure, and it’s difficult to organize politically along such lines. 

Why is it so much easier to organize African Americans around fighting racism than it is to organize poor people around fighting poverty? Why is it easier to convince poor, white Americans that Muslims are a threat than to convince them that the rich are taking more than their share? Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King tried to unite poor whites and Blacks, but that dream died with him. Why the big difference? Maybe the difference derives from humans’ in-group and out-group instincts.  

Our tribal instincts organize our brains to respond to tribe-versus-tribe conflicts with much stronger emotions than when they respond to conflicts within the tribe. As a result, Christians and Muslims are primed for conflict, while poor people don’t find it natural to organize as a class or group. Below I’ll offer a basic take on nine aspects of identity, pointing out how some of them activate the brain’s tribal programming pretty well while others fail to do so. 

Nine Aspects of Identity

This list comes from the “ADRESSING” model of identity and oppression (see end of post).

Age

All human societies recognize age categories within the group, and these are grounded in biology. Nobody identifies as, say, a “teenager” the way people identify as “Germans” or “Catholics”. 

Tribal Politics: It’s an in-group distinction, and it has low political salience. 

Disability

Disability is a biological reality with broad social implications. Disabled people organize politically, but disability is not a source of identity the way language or religion can be. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

Religion

Religion uses symbolism and ritual to unite people, and before modern times it was the only way to unite different tribes or nations. It’s a breeze to re-orient religious enthusiasm and convert it into hostility toward outsiders. Today, we see hostility across religions lines all over the globe. 

Tribal Politics: Religion distinguishes between “us” and “them”, and it has high political salience.

Ethnicity

Ethnic identity traditionally determined one’s nation, language, religion, and homeland. Armenians, for example, belonged to Armenian culture, and a Navajos belonged to Navajo culture. Today, of course, everything is more complicated, as it was, for instance, in the Roman Empire. Still, even today it’s easy to get most people to identify emotionally with their ethnic groups, especially when there are conflicts with other groups. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics.

Social Class/Culture

People commonly admire the successful people in their own “tribes.” My daughter loves Beyoncé because Beyoncé is a boss. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, humans defer to high-status individuals within the group. How easy is it for the rich to keep the poor divided by race and nationality? Way too easy. In some societies, class and ethnicity align more or less well, especially when class definitions are explicit and legally enforced. When not linked to ethnicity, class still comes with some of ethnicity’s trappings, such as distinctive dress or accents. 

Tribal Politics: In-group or between-group, middling political salience.

Sexual Orientation

Sexual desire operates on its own agenda, cutting across lines of social identity, and often at odds with a conservative religious identity. Oppression and hostility give the LGBTQ+ crowd good reason to organize politically, but “tribe-style” identities seem powerful compared to sexual orientation. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, middling politics.

Indigenous Background

This category is a special case of the more general tendency to form exclusive groups based on ethnicity and nationality (especially in the broad sense). 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

National Origin

Humans are unusual among social animals in that we can tell which strangers are in our society and which are not. A nation is a level of social organization above the tribe, historically allowing tribes to work together and allowing strangers to trust each other. Traditionally, nations have been defined by shared language, religion, lifestyle, and ethnicity. Consider Armenians, Navajos, Danes, etc. Largely, the point of a nation is to get people within it to treat each other better than they treat outsiders. Nearly all Americans, for example, would say that our federal government should concern itself more with our well-being than with the well-being of Argentinians. Politically, it’s easy to get people riled up about their nation, and something like a massive terrorist attack can get even liberal intellectuals to put flag stickers in their car windows. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

Gender

Traditionally, men and woman have often had single-sex social groups, but our tribal instincts are organized to unite men and women in the tribe with each other and against the enemy rather than to unite women against men or vice versa. Gender may be an important part of one’s personal identity, but it’s not typically a political identity. In fact, filling a man’s role often means competing with other men for status, and the same goes for women.  

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

The Nonbiological ADRESSING Model

Leticia Nieto’s model of identity and oppression treats these nine aspects of identity as if they are all analogous to each other, with no real sense that humans are flesh-and-blood animals. Being Black, in this model, is essentially like being disabled. My late wife was both Black and disabled, and I can tell you that these two aspects of one’s identity are not essentially the same. In college I studied 20th century social sciences, and half of what I learned was well-meaning bogus stuff that I later had to unlearn. Nieto’s ADRESSING model fits the pattern of 20th century social science because it’s formulaic and nonbiological.

Missing Aspects of Identity

Three biologically potent aspects of identity are missing from the ADRESSING model. 

Language is a primal indicator of who is “us” and who is “them”, as people with thick accents can tell you. Little children seem to intuit identities based on language at an earlier age than identities based on race. The high political salience of language aligns with that of ethnicity, nation, and religion. Say yes to the Oxford comma, or else let’s fight!

Family is a primal source of personal identity, especially perhaps the mother-child connection. It has low political salience in general. The conflict of “young versus old” gets some traction, but that isn’t exactly a conflict between offspring and parents. 

Individual flesh-and-blood reality—the “crazy diamond” of one’s own unique phenotype—can be a major aspect of one’s personal identity, especially for those of us who diverge from the average in mental or physical terms. Political salience is low.

See Also

My review of The Human Swarm by Mark Moffett, which explains the unusual human penchant for identifying not just with clans of people we know but also with larger societies of people who are “us” even though they’re strangers.

What Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind means to me and resources for learning about it. 

2020

medieval weekend

Ex-Nomads’ Weekend

In his book The Gifts of the Jews, historian Thomas Cahill mentions the day of rest only in passing. If this author thinks that a weekend for laborers deserves only passing mention, perhaps he’s a man more of words than of labor, and he doesn’t fully appreciate what a gift the weekend has been down through the ages. About three thousand years ago, Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization collapsed, and the Hebrews abruptly switched from nomadic herding to sedentary farming. They had no aristocracy to despise physical labor and write the rules accordingly, and these former nomads invented for themselves a day off from “civilization”. On the day of rest, even wives, slaves, and draft animals got the day off. The other nations had laws written by their ruling classes, and they preferred that laborers labor with no weekly break. Christianity and Islam both picked up the practice of the day of rest, and they spread it wide. Modern labor unions took up the cause, and now the weekend is an expected part of secular society. 

These days, ancient Hebrews catch a lot of grief for their genocidal fantasies and other indicators of unacceptable, Bronze Age bigotry. Still, it pays to also understand what they got right.

See also: Evolutionary psychology and the Fall of Genesis

2019

Untrue and Female Sex Instincts

An anthropologist suggested that I read the book Untrue by Wednesday Martin for an example of a good treatment of modern thinking on evolved behavior, and I’m glad she did. The book has some great takes on sex instincts, particularly those involved in female “extra-pair coupling”, as the biologists call it. It’s not the first book I would recommend on evolution and sexuality, but I got a lot out of it.

Men of faith and men of science have long described women’s sexuality in limited terms, and Martin shows how wrong these simplistic views are. In civilizations east and west, men have defined a wife’s infidelity as a sin or a biological aberration. Martin demonstrates that extra-pair coupling is indeed part of the human female’s sexual repertoire. While women have been relentlessly programmed to be submissive and faithful wives, Martin shows that women have sex drives that send many wives seeking partners other than their husbands. The brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, and human behavior is facultative. That is, we have more behavioral routines that we ever use, and we use the ones that fit any given situation. Studying psychology in the 1980s, I was taught that society conditioned people so that socially constructed behavior patterns, such as gender roles, seemed natural. Untrue shows just how limited any such conditioning is, as women’s instinctive drives lead many of them to break the rules they were supposedly conditioned to internalize.

Western civilization, notes Martin, has tried to define women’s sexuality as passive, the supposed counterpart to the active male. But this passive role doesn’t stick, and in real life women are not passive but responsive. That’s a great clarification. Speaking personally, I prefer “responsive” to “passive”. 

Biologists talk about “female choice”. Among mammals in particular, females invest so much of their own lives and energy in their young that they can be choosy about which males impregnate them and thereby get a “free ride” on all their blood, sweat, and milk. In historical civilizations, however, families have exercised oppressive control over their daughters’ choices. Female choice is on full display when Martin discusses Ashley Madison, the web site for wives who wanted to cheat. The women on that site were able to specify, sometimes down to penis size, the sorts of lovers they would consider taking.

In evolutionary terms, it pays off for a female mammal to mate with a high-status male, since doing so increases the odds that one’s sons will achieve high status. That behavior is called called hypergamy, and in human society it commonly appears as women “marrying up”. In fairy tales, the commoner girl marries the prince. Martin provides us with great example of hyergamy with the housewives of the 50s and 60s who carried on affairs with their husbands’ superiors. Eventually, the women left their lower-status husbands in favor of their new, higher-status mates. So much for being programmed to passivity.

For the readers who might think that gender roles can be constructed any which way without regard to universal human predispositions, Martin cites anthropologist Agustin Fuentes as saying that there are indeed half a dozen instances of gender-role differences that are universal among humans.

Untrue has a lot more details, such as the author’s visit to a “skirt party” for adventurous women, but my take-away is the power of primeval instincts in the face of modern attempts at socialization.

Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá: Untrue shows that sexual instincts make themselves felt in today’s society, and Sex at Dawn covers a more explicitly evolutionary take on the topic. Martin mentions this book, and I’ve recommended it before, but I hear that science people aren’t impressed with it, so haven’t been recommending it lately.

The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley: This book is my top recommendation for the science of sex, including bacteria, millipedes, parasites, and more. I hoped it would be a good overview of humanity’s evolved sexuality, but it is way more than that. More people should read this book. 

Resources for Studying The Righteous Mind

The book I recommend the most. 

Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind is the book I recommend the most. It has changed the way I understand political conflict. Irrational behavior that used to baffle me, such as denying evolution or thinking Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, now makes perfect sense to me. Haidt shows how political and religious conflicts are grounded in evolved, moral feelings. These feelings provide us with moral judgments, for which we then invent justifications so plausible that we believe them ourselves. This analysis informs the moderated dialogs that a friend and I have been running in Seattle for years. Now at my Unitarian church, I’m running a book discussion group on The Righteous Mind, and I’ve collected links to a few good, online resources for anyone who wants to understand what Haidt is saying here. 

Bill Moyer and Jonathan Haidt

This is reportedly the best video to get an overview of the book and to see what Haidt looks and sounds like. 50 minutes, video. Link. 

Jonathan Haidt and the On Being Project

Good introduction, with extra emphasis on religion and Judaism. 50 minutes, audio. Link.

Figures and images
The figures and images from the book. You can pick up a lot just by reviewing them. Link.

YourMorals.Org research site

Learn about your moral feelings while helping researchers calibrate their tests. This site let me create a group just for people in my church, so we can each see how we compare to others in the church who took the same test. You can spend hours here. Link.

The OpenMind platform

This online program helps you coordinate productive conversations within your organization. The introductory tutorial and interactive quizzes are eye-opening even if you never use this platform with a group. The introductory exercises take less than 90 minutes. Link. 

Fan page

A fellow Unitarian-Universalist wrote up his notes on the book, with a fun chimp-bee graphic. Link.

Link to more resources

A whole page of links to talks or videos that cover the topics in The Righteous Mind. Link. 

Calls to Liberal Action

Faux call to action

What policies or efforts can we support today in order to promote Martin Luther King’s vision of a better America? Maybe… 

• Medicare for all
• guaranteed income
• taxes on wealth
• higher taxes on high incomes
• legal weed
• an end to private prisons
• closing gun-purchase loopholes
• promoting education and training
• investing in green jobs and infrastructure. 

We have plenty of directions to choose from. In January, it was heartening to see so many Seattleites joining in the Martin Luther King march. There’s obviously a lot of energy around confronting injustice and inequality, which is great to see. What concerns me, however, is that the liberal project seems to have lost its momentum in the last five years or so. For a hundred years or more, we’ve seen liberal progress, but recently things seem to have gotten worse, not better. One unfortunate thing I noticed at the MLK march is a trend that I’ve seen elsewhere: a lack of calls to action. Protest signs at the march mostly seemed to declare what people are against rather than what we hope to accomplish. Declaring one’s opposition to bad things is easier than proposing a practical course of action, but it’s action that counts. Maybe if we liberals could put more effort into figuring out what we need to do next, then we could get moving in those directions.

If you go back 50 years or 100 years, the amount of liberal progress that we’ve made has been tremendous. Gay marriage, Obamacare, Americans with Disabilities Act, Roe v Wade, interracial marriage (my favorite), Civil Rights legislation, the Great Society, rights of the accused, the New Deal, and women’s suffrage. But if you go back just the last several years, one sees a string of failures: the Zimmerman acquittal, BLM’s attempt to reform policing, NoDAPL, Shaun King’s injustice boycott, and the attempt to keep the Republican candidate from winning the 2016 election. There’s a lot of energy on the left, but not a lot of results. I’m a natural science guy and not a political theory guy, so I want results.

Maybe one thing that keeps us lefties from winning more is that our calls to action are ineffective. For the last several years, I’ve noticed a lack of good calls to action from the left. See, for example, the documentary Thirteenth, which impresses on viewers the horror of mass incarceration but ends with no call to action. This year, the MLK march also demonstrated a distinct lack of calls to action. For example, a big sign that I’ve seen at earlier marches declared “Trump/Pence Must Go”. Great! I agree. What does that mean? Does it mean vote Dem in 2020? Impeach? Does it mean, let’s engage in violent rebellion against the US government? Engage in a national strike? Share memes on social media? 

My sign.
Next year, a call to action.

Plenty of other signs were phrased as if they were calls to action, but they really weren’t. Consider “Smash the Patriarchy”, “End Racism”, “End Racial Disparities Now”, and “Resist”. Those sound good to me. What’s step one? What’s the plan? What’s the timeline? Within the plan, what are the highest priorities? These are faux calls to action, and they come across more like creeds. Everyone who wants to “smash the patriarchy” can find each other thanks to signs like these. But once they have found each other, what will they do next? Burn down a bank? Castrate toxic males? Share devastating memes on Twitter? The beauty of a religious creed like the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is that it requires no change in actual behavior. Any Christian can affirm the creed that Jesus is fully human and fully God without being bothered to donate their wealth to the poor or to evangelize for the Lord. Creeds are easy. As with a creed, social justice advocates who want a better world can affirm a shared desire to “smash the patriarchy” without committing to any particular action. 

An actual call to action combines two things people don’t like: making a decision and taking a risk. To say “Legalize weed”, one has to decide that legalizing weed is a good idea, to decide that it’s a political struggle worth taking on, and to risk being wrong on both counts. Avoiding the risk of making a decision has built-in appeal, but those of us committed enough to carry signs should be willing to go the extra mile and accept that risk. The attraction of a faux call to action is that it feels powerful, but it risks nothing. 

Recently, we on the left have stopped achieving our goals. In fact, we have failed to set realistic goals in the first place. It takes real work to figure out what to do next, and we should do that work. Legalize weed. Medicare for all. Legalize prostitution. Tax wealth. Tax capital gains like wages. Tax high incomes. Get a Democrat elected president. There are lots of good directions forward, and we should point the way.

2020 addendum: I learned that King called on people to change policy and expect that hearts would follow. His entire “Other America” speech is worth a listen, especially as he directly addresses the controversial topic of rioting. Link. 

Evidism and Respect for Evidence

In the book Sharing Reality, Jeff T. Haley and Dale McGowan promote the idea that we science-oriented secularists should promote not particular philosophical conclusions but instead a disciplined respect for evidence. They point out that religions have been becoming more evidence-oriented, and they would like to hasten the trend. The two suggest a neologism—evidism—as the term for this approach to personal belief and public policy. In the tribal conflicts between atheists and believers, it’s easy for atheists to focus on hot-button issues, such as nativity scenes or the Ten Commandments on public land. Haley and McGowan propose that we should instead focus on respect for evidence and on spreading the norm that policy-makers use evidence to guide them. They have a point. “Evidence” is a winning touchstone to help people agree and collaborate. 

At Seattle’s March for Science in 2017, I said that evidence can bring people together. Sharing Reality makes a similar point. An advantage of pointing people toward evidence is that almost everyone says that they value evidence and thinks that they value it. Atheist PZ Myers makes the point that creationists try to bolster their position by portraying it in scientific terms. For example, they love to talk about the laws of thermodynamics, as if natural selection contradicts those laws. Even the people who disagree with scientists still affirm the authority of science. Likewise, almost everyone affirms the importance of evidence. Will evidence really convince anyone that they’re wrong? But without evidence the odds are zero. The authors expand on the topic at length, discussing the value of evidence and the best ways to communicate the importance of evidence. They show how a respect for evidence leads naturally to agnostic and secular behavior, even for people who believe in God and scripture. 

In my personal experience, I can confirm that people usually can’t ignore the importance of evidence even when they wish they could. People arguing on the Internet often rely on abstract arguments, but they recognize the value of evidence when you ask them for it. Focusing on the evidence might not change the mind of one’s opponent in a debate, but it impresses the audience. 

The term “evidism”, however, doesn’t grab me. If lots of people start using the term, I won’t be the last, but I’m not going to be the first, either. I’d rather call it empiricism. For some people, empiricism has negative connotations suggesting soullessness or faithlessness. That’s fine by me. I’d rather use a word that people care about than one that they don’t. 

Haley and McGowan say that believing in God demonstrates that the believer isn’t following the evidence, but I would not make the same judgment. While the authors reluctantly agree that it would be worth working with science-oriented believers, I would be enthusiastic about it, not reluctant. I don’t care if someone believes in God, but I do care if they respect science. I have more in common with an evidence-oriented believer than with an atheist who thinks that reality is constructed by language, by power hierarchies, or by the power of positive thinking.

Sharing Reality makes an important point, that focusing on evidence is a promising way to improve dialogs about policies, injustices, and other issues of general concern—especially with religious people. 

Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World. 

By Jeff Haley and Dale McGowan. Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA), 2017

Honest Debate: Religion, Good and Bad

Valerie Tarico tackles the intersection between
religious belief, psychology, and politics.

Atheists love to talk about religion, usually to criticize it. Here are two atheists, Valerie Tarico and me, debating whether religion is mostly good or mostly bad. The debate is the fifth in our series, using a format that prevents the debaters from talking past each other. The debaters also field a question from Daniel Dennett.

Podcast (iTunes)

http://bit.ly/podcastReligionTaricoTweet

After the debate, an atheist from the audience asked me if I really believed the positive things I was saying about religion. He also told me that I had made him think. He told me that twice. The debate format is designed to circumvent the human predisposition to block out what “the enemy” is saying. Most debates make people feel more sure of their own position, and we’re trying to do better than that. 

The moderator and I also run moderated one-on-one dialogs between people who disagree on political issues. The dialog uses the same “summarize in a sentence” structure that you see in this debate. 

I’d love to get feedback on the debate, especially the format, but also the content.

Valerie’s blog post

Valerie talks about how she “played the gender card” in our debate, as part of her blog post about #MeToo. Link to her post, January 15, 2018.

Participants (besides me)

“Bad” Side: Valerie Tarico, a psychologist and writer.

Moderator: Brandon Hendrickson, an educator and school founder.

Guest Interrogator: Miles Greb, a comic publisher.

Guest Interrogator: Jeff Haley, co-author of Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World.

Guest Interrogator (via email): Daniel Dennett, who promotes the discussion techniques that these debates are based on. 

MC: George Juillerat

2014

See ReThink Prize webpage here. 

Ten Secular Commandments

The ReThink Prize is offering $1,000 each for the ten best secular commandments, as determined by a panel of judges. The prize is promoting a new book, Atheist Mind Humanist Heart, which promotes a vision of atheism as positive and ethical rather than negative and reactive. Here are the ten “commandments” I submitted, each with a note on why I submitted it. 

Know yourself to be the gloriously evolved animal that you are. 

Our evolutionary history tells us two important truths: that we are connected in flesh and blood to all living things on earth, and that we are something new and wonderful. 

Connect yourself to a caring community. 

Secular people generally don’t connect to communities the way believers often do, so here’s your reminder. It’s natural and healthy to be part of a group that cares about you. 

Thou shalt not get sucked into the wasteful vices that corporations keep pushing on us. 

Some corporations run entirely on their ability to get you to consume their unhealthy products. They are devoted full time to distracting you from a better life. Enjoy what you like, but don’t get sucked in.

Focus on the things that you control and that make the most difference. In particular, focus on how you respond to things.

You can’t do everything, but you can do something. 

Be good to your “us” and be good to your “them.”

Invest in your community and the people you think of as “us.” Check your natural instinct to think ill of the people that you think of as “them.”

Expect exceptions as part of the natural order.

The world isn’t as simple as it looks. The mind expects bright lines and clear definitions, but nature is variable. In a world of exceptions, humans in particular are exceptional.

Pay your way and then some. 

Help humanity move forward faster rather than making it advance more slowly. 

Sing together. 

People find lots of occasions to do sing together. Find more. Coming together is the reason we evolved singing in the first place. 

Check your bias. 

Your intuitions are generally accurate but bound to be biased in predictable directions. Just because you feel like something is true doesn’t mean it’s true. 

Contend with each other over actions and policies, but don’t fight over thoughts and words. 

Creeds and labels separate us into opposed camps. There are plenty of practical issues to disagree over, but don’t argue about beliefs or identities. 

Historical Note: The historical Ten Commandments are well known, but many secular people don’t recognize what was special about them. The first ancient laws were commonly lists of punishments for crimes, and most of the Hebrew law was like this, specifying punishments for transgressions. The Ten Commandments, however, issue absolute imperatives, such as “Thou shalt not kill.” This apodictic form of law was unique to the Israelites. In ancient law, murder was usually a crime that you should avoid because you’d be punished for it. In the Ten Commandments, Yahweh just tells you “Don’t murder.” Why were the Israelites unique in this? Maybe standard laws were created by rulers and promulgated to their subjects, so it made sense to specify the punishments that the rulers will mete out to transgressors. But the Ten Commandments come from a time when the Israelites had only recently given up nomadic life for permanent settlements, and their tribal egalitarianism was still strong. Maybe the Ten Commandments represent not a lord’s threat to his subjects but rather a community’s voice, declaring that they are, among other things, a people who don’t murder each other (or at least really really shouldn't).

Agreeing How to Disagree

Daniel Dennett offers four rules for
more intelligent disagreement.

What if atheists were the best at disagreeing? What if we were the ones that could be counted on not to attack straw men or exaggerate someone else’s viewpoint? In theory, we atheists should be the best at deliberation because we have no holy books or dogmas to bias us. Furthermore, we don’t consider believers to be worthy of hell, and we don’t consider ourselves to be God’s favorites, so we ought to be the nicest, most respectful disagreers out there. That’s my dream, but we’re not exactly there yet. Daniel Dennett advocates high standards for critical commentary and I think we can do more along those lines. Here’s a concrete suggestion: replace the debate format with an intentional, moderated dialog. The debate format is outdated, and we could use a new way to disagree, one that better anticipates the human tendency to deceive oneself.

Debating is Outdated…

In October, Bill Maher and Ben Affleck got into a heated exchange about Islam. They talked over each other for a while, and the next day everyone was saying that their guy had won. Online, the Maher and Affleck partisans would link to the same video clip, and each would claim the score was 1-0 in their favor. Arguing over each other doesn’t work, and the problem is that it looks like it works. Each side thought that reason had prevailed, which shows that it hadn’t. If anyone, Maher is the one who prevailed because he got a heated exchange on tape and got a lot of free publicity. But did the conversation get anywhere? People on both sides seem to say that there’s nothing more to be said. Each thinks that their side has been proven right, and that people on the other side are just being pig-headed. Audiences like to watch smart people talk about important issues, but the antagonistic emotions of the debate trump rationality. Could a better format for a discussion reduce how much the participants talk past each other? After all, the debate format hails from a time when faithful people thought God-given Reason could deduce the Truth. Now we know that humans are political side-takers, and that reason is primarily our tool for making ourselves look good. 

…Because Reason Doesn’t Rule.

It’s traditional in Western culture to give reason pride of place among human faculties. The thinking part of you thinks that the thinking part of you should be in charge. We tell others that we believe what we believe because we’ve reasoned it out. We atheists in particular love to assert that we came by our faithlessness through rigorous cognitive effort. With the premise that reason rules, it’s logical to deduce that you can bring people’s opinions closer together by giving them more information and a better understanding of a topic. The more information that people have in common, the more their opinions should converge. In fact, the opposite is true. After an even-handed debate on a controversial issue, the audience finds itself further apart rather than closer together. It turns out that we’re biased little social apes, not detached intellects. When we hear an argument that agrees with us, our intuition responds positively before our reason has had time to analyze the argument. My side’s arguments sure sound rock-solid! But the other side’s reasons? We intuitively react to them as threats, and we spot their flaws effortlessly. That’s how an even-handed debate polarizes people rather than helping each side understand the other side better. 

Your Instincts Know a Fight When They See One

It turns out that instead of detached intellects, we’re flesh-and-blood creatures connected emotionally to each other, and especially to our respectve groups. The thinking part of your brain might think it’s watching a rational debate about, say, abortion, but your unconscious mind recognizes the event as a battle between your tribe and the enemy. You listen to the enemy debater tell horrible lies, and your blood boils. Conflict between groups can trigger the fight-or-flight response, which channels blood away from the part of your brain that makes you reasonable. You sit quietly, but you’d like to throw something or yell. The Internet, with its anonymity and lack of social cues, is even worse. Forums are littered with endless threads of people arguing back and forth across political and religious divides. Each side presents logical arguments the way a rational person is expected to do, but the energy driving the flame war is good old us-versus-them. These threads can get abusive pretty fast. An attempt at rational argument quickly turns into mere arguing.

The human mind comes with several self-serving biases. Our ancestors evolved to get ahead in life, not to evaluate life objectively. Some positive biases aren’t too bad, such as thinking you’re better than you really are, but a host of other biases evolved to help us unite against the hated enemy. These instinctive biases get us to judge people by what group they belong to and to see one’s own group as more virtuous, reasonable, worthy and varied than out-groups. When intellectual disagreements turn vicious, they typically concern questions of identity: religion, gender, race, nationality, politics, and evolution. People who are on the opposite side from you on these sorts of issues are generally “them,” the enemy. Truth is the first casualty of war, and objectivity is the first casualty of us-versus-them thinking. 

New Ways to Disagree

So if we’re hopeless partisans doomed to see things from a biased perspective, can we ever communicate across a tribal divide? Yes, but it takes work. Daniel Dennett has long popularized four rules for criticizing constructively. The best one, I think, is that before you can criticize someone you have to summarize their viewpoint so generously that they agree with your summary. This approach has been called "kind," but as Dennett points out the real benefit is that it's effective. By acting non-antagonistically, we set aside our us-versus-them instincts. By following Dennett’s four rules, you communicate to your own unconscious mind that the exchange isn’t a fight, and with any luck your opponent's unconscious gets the same message. I’ve used these rules in correspondence and have achieved mixed results, which is to say that they work miracles. Typically, a reason-oriented, antagonistic debate feels compelling but leads nowhere. To get mixed results means enjoying an unprecedented amount of success communicating across a tribal divide. These rules work well enough that I’d like to see them incorporated into a moderated dialog, in place of a debate. Another of Dennett’s rules is that one should describe areas of agreement with the person that you’re criticizing. This step confounds the us-versus-them instincts, too. In fact, in a dialog, I’d like to see the moderator working with the participants to find more common ground between them. Debates highlight differences but systematically exclude commonalities. 

It seems like rational debate should be effective in reaching agreement, but instead it’s usually divisive. Now that we understand our own evolved tendencies to lie to ourselves, it’s obvious why debates don’t work the way we thought they should. With this improved self-understanding, we could use a better way to frame disagreements. So my friends and I are working on something along these lines.

Update, February 2017: The Seattle Atheists nonprofit has now hosted three moderated dialogs, one on Islam and Islamophobia, one on historical Jesus, and the last on Christianity. They have been well received, and the last one in particular seemed successful. Here’s a link to the Christianity video.

Christianity: Good and Bad. An honest debate among atheists. 

Further Reading

This post is based on insight gained from a number of different sources. Here are the major ones. 

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett. For the complete treatment of his four rules for criticizing.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. Kerry Patterson and Joseph Grenny. Focusing on the context of the conversation rather than content, avoiding impasses, managing emotions during verbal disagreements. Probably worth paging through at a bookstore even if you don’t buy it. 

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Kelly McGonigal. The flight-or-fight response versus the pause-and-plan response. 

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Jonathan Haidt. Emotional foundations of morality, including tribalism.

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Joshua Greene. Emotional foundation of tribalism.

Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman. Quick, effortless intuition versus slow, difficult deliberation. 

How We Decide. Jonah Lehrer. Emotional basis of decision-making. 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

Onward Liberal Soldiers

Calling for a hypothetical

revolution, ignoring the real one.

In a BBC interview in October, comedian Russell Brand called for a revolution. He denigrated the everyday political process as not worth his time, to the point of not voting. The irony is that global culture has already undergone a breathtaking revolution, but no one talks about it. In the last two hundred years, we have abolished slavery, rebranded war as an evil, enacted universal suffrage, advanced women’s rights, made racism unacceptable in polite company, established better rights for the accused, provided institutional support for the poor and elderly, and more. There’s plenty of work left to be done, but the work remaining need not blind us to the phenomenal social progress we have made since 1800. Neither conservatives nor liberals like to talk about this revolution because it doesn’t fit either side’s narrative. The liberal narrative is founded on how bad things are and how desperately we need change, so liberals don’t want to talk about how much progress we have already made. Conservatives don’t want to tout our progress because it’s been liberal progress and they don’t want to remind everyone that they’ve been on the wrong side of history. 

One way to look at our progress is from the perspective of the vulnerable people that are being protected by the modern state, compared to how they were treated 200 years ago.

Women: equal rights in voting, property, work, and education; legal contraception; wife beating and marital rape outlawed.

Children: child labor laws, free education, child abuse laws.

Elderly, widows, orphans: social insurance programs.

Poor people: free education, welfare benefits, voting rights, subsidized healthcare.

Sick people: reform of nursing practice, universal health care, disability accommodations.

Prisoners: rights of the accused, rights of convicts, abolition of the death penalty almost everywhere.

Slaves: slavery abolished.

Racial minorities: voting rights, civil rights, discrimination prohibited.

Religious minorities: religious freedom, discrimination prohibited.

Soldiers, POWs: Geneva Conventions.

Workers: safety standards, fair labor laws.

Consumers: anti-trust laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer safety standards, labeling requirements.

Russell Brand wants a revolution but doesn’t vote. In the past 200 years, voting has gotten us a revolution. Whatever we are doing, we should damn well keep doing it. The status quo is progress.

As for which historical figure is most responsible for this social revolution, Friedrich Nietzsche named a candidate. He hated the spread of equal rights for all, and he laid the blame first and foremost on the historical Jesus. But that would be a topic for another post.

2011

Romney and Karmic Liberty

Jesus, Mitt Romney, and secular humanists agree on one thing at least: you don’t owe a karmic debt to the universe for your past misdeeds.

In 1993, Mitt Romney gave some remarkable advice to a troubled young Mormon. According to the New York Times, Romney told the young man that “as human beings, our work isn’t measured by taking the sum of our good deeds and the sum of our bad deeds and seeing how things even out… The only thing you need to think about is: Are you trying to improve, are you trying to do better? And if you are, then you’re a saint.”

Romney’s advice reflects a core message of the historical Jesus: you don’t owe a karmic debt to God for your past misdeeds. Even an atheist can agree with that viewpoint; in fact, we practically have to agree with it. Romney’s statement is remarkable because it does not square well with Mormon teaching. According to Mormon doctrine, northern Europeans, southern Europeans, and Africans were awarded supremacy, mediocrity, and slavery (respectively) for their deeds as spirits in their heavenly pre-existence. If a whole race can be cursed for millennia for something they don’t even remember doing, that sure makes it look as though the sum of one’s past deeds matter to God. If Native Americans are supposed to be the cursed, dark-skinned descendants of evil Israelites, it sure looks as though God is in the habit of holding past sins against one, even when they are one’s ancestors’ transgressions. Romney’s good advice doesn’t jibe with Mormon doctrines about God’s justice.

But then religion is more about community than about doctrine. A clever human is too wily to let bizarre doctrines trump good sense and good advice. Behind the fraudulent sacred texts of Mormonism and underneath the half-spurious gospels is the original teaching of the historical Jesus. As the pre-eminent Jesus scholar E. P. Sanders argues, Jesus seems to have taught not the pedestrian theme of a sinner’s repentance but rather the radical promise of God’s forgiveness. You don’t owe a debt for your past misdeeds. Jesus’ message was particularly radical in his day, when poverty, sickness, and mental illness were understood as God’s curses on sinners. Somehow, centuries of legends about Jesus, even those of the Mormons, haven’t entirely blotted out all of his good ideas.

(It should go without saying that complimenting Romney’s good sense is not tantamount to endorsing his candidacy for president. He may be the best Republican contender, but that’s not saying much.)

Save the Waitresses

Bill Picton—pig farmer,
serial killer of sex workers

Imagine if every few years the authorities found the bodies of murdered waitresses in a ditch, along the banks of a river, or on a pig farm. There would be an outcry. Lawmakers would investigate and reform the restaurant industry. We wouldn’t allow psychopaths to prey on our vulnerable women. We would make the world safe for waitresses. But enough imagining. The fact is that the women who wind up in those ditches or ground into pig food are not waitresses but sex workers. There’s no outcry because the people don’t much care what happens to “dirty whores”. Maybe we should cry out.

2011

Was C. S. Lewis Right?

C. S. Lewis said morality is real.

C. S. Lewis was right. Since I don’t believe in the supernatural, you can imagine how it galls me to admit that Lewis was right about anything. After all, it’s Lewis who tried to trick kids into believing in Christ the magic lion. He also waged a losing battle against the historical understanding of Jesus, a topic dear to my heart. He even popularized the falsehood that Jesus couldn’t have been a wise mortal teacher because he claimed to be God. His Narnia books creeped me out a little, but his masterwork, Abolition of Man (1943), made my teenage soul burn with indignation. So how could I ever concede that Lewis was right about anything? Strangely enough, my reading in evolutionary psychology has given me a new appreciation of the argument in Abolition of Man. When Lewis defended morality as based on something real rather than arbitrary, he was onto something, even if he ended up only half right overall.

Lewis championed old-fashioned values, and he opposed the trendy idea that morality, like all culture, is arbitrary. To support his thesis that values were objective, he amassed evidence from around the world that different cultures have similar moral codes. He refers to these universal moral concepts as the “Tao” (meaning “Way”). In arguing that morality is real, Lewis is right. Morality isn’t just something we humans made up, like alphabets or the rules of chess.

But Lewis is only half right. Like the cultural relativists of his time, he attributed morality rather strictly to learning. In Abolition, he wrote that modern education was creating “men without chests.” These disastrously modern people reportedly had an intellect (the head) that was divorced from their animal nature (the guts), with no trunk to unite these two parts of the human being. He wrote that the wrong sort of education was creating people incapable of virtue. Like George Orwell after him, he prophesied a future in which a cadre of clinical experts could control the masses by controlling their education. The rank and file, in this view, could be reduced to living robots. On this point, Lewis is wrong.

After these dire warnings, the rest of the 20th century showed that humans are built of sterner stuff than Lewis imagined. Every new campaign to revolutionize human society fell in the face of primeval human nature. Reformers have improved society dramatically, but the revolutionaries all failed to reprogram human psychology. Even B. F. Skinner’s learned, modern utopian dream proved to be just that—a dream. The mind control experiments of the Cold War failed. Communism failed to create the new man, and now man is creating the new Communism. We humans didn’t get where we are by being easy to control. Sure, we adapt to the lives we’re born to, but we adapt to pursue our own instinctive goals. That’s why totalitarian regimes have always failed to get people to care more about the State than about their friends and their family. We evolved to have friends and family but not to have a State. Cultural relativists say that the social environment defines human personality. Certainly we individual humans do turn out differently in part based on our different social environments. But society shapes the individual along lines that evolution laid out for us long ago. Like Orwell, B. F. Skinner, and Mao, Lewis underestimated the resilience of human nature.

Morality isn't merely inculcated fresh into each new juvenile brain. Evolutionary psychologists have revealed morality to consist of evolved adaptations. Traits such as sympathy, the conscience, concern for the young, a sense of justice, and the urge to punish cheaters turn out to be social instincts built into us by thousands of generations of natural selection. The Tao that Lewis identified is real even if no one teaches it to you. Lewis thought that morality was separate from one’s natural, animal self because his morality was supernatural. Now we can see that morality evolved naturally. The human ape is incredibly social and incredibly intelligent, so moral behavior has long helped our ancestors get their genes into succeeding generations. Since morality is natural instead of magical, maybe Lewis was not even half right, but only a third. That much I can admit with minimum heartburn.

Related post: Reading About Religion, with a good dose of social instincts.

2011

young woman and powerful man

High Status Sex Scandals

From the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Anthony Weiner sexting incident, high-status men keep getting caught with their pants down. You might wonder why a congressman would send a photo of his crotch to a young woman, or why the leader of the free world would get tangled up with an intern. While evolutionary psychology doesn’t explain why any particular human engages in any particular behavior, it does explain our general tendencies. In this case, the indiscretions of high-status men make more sense when you understand that our ancestors evolved status in order to give stronger males more than their share of access to females. Evolutionarily, high status is largely about having sex with more women.

Millions of years ago, after we chimps* split with the gorillas and before we Hominina split with the other chimps, we evolved a system of male status.** Gibbons, orangutans, and gorillas do not have high- and low-status males living together, but we chimps do. This social system allowed stronger and weaker males to cooperate in a group, something you don’t see among other great apes. High status allowed the stronger males to get more than their share of the resources without having to drive the weaker males away or kill them. The most important scarce resource in the lives of our male chimp ancestors was females. That’s true of mammals in general, and we chimps are no exception.

A drive for status, especially among men, is a human universal, as noted by the world’s first evolutionary psychologist, Charles Darwin. We don’t consciously know that our quest for status is the latest chapter in the mammalian male’s quest for more mates. Once men get power, however, it’s easy to see what comes next.

For their part, women have their own evolutionary baggage. Our female ancestors have long preferred high-status males. The ones who didn’t prefer powerful males wound up bearing sons who were more likely to have low status like their fathers. Since high-status males reproduce at favorable rates, evolution leads females to favor them as mates because that strategy leads to their sons reproducing at favorable rates. If the leader of the free world gets messed up with a flirty aide, it’s partly because there's something about being the leader of the free world that gets a woman’s attention.

None of this is to say that any particular human is hard-wired to have unwise liaisons with any other particular human. Evolutionary psychology is about ultimate causes and population-wide patterns, not individual decisions. The pattern is easy to see, and it’s only a matter of time before another high-status male makes the day’s headlines by acting out yesterday's evolutionary imperative.

* Technically Hominini. (2020)

** Or maybe living in multi-male, multi-female bands goes back tens of millions of years to the early “monkeys” (technically simians). (2020)

PS: It turns out that extroverts in our culture are more promiscuous than average, and lots of powerful men are extroverts. (2019) 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

Related old-website post: Thomas Jefferson the slave-raping hero, 2006