Human Nature

A Harvard professor wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe complaining that the Library of Congress had no subject heading for “Human nature.” I was a cataloger in the Harvard libraries at the time, and I pointed out that the books he was looking for could be found under the heading “Philosophical anthropology.” He was not appeased and I didn’t entirely blame him. (Anyway, Harvard professors are never wrong, or never admit it).

But “philosophical anthropology” would be a good heading for two recent books on human nature. The first, Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday, is an exploration of what pre-modern and modern cultures can teach each other. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind examines the psychological (and neurological) roots of moral judgments, and why “good” people of differing viewpoints cannot talk about them. Both books, that is, question just what kind of animal we are. Sounds like pretty heavy stuff, but I hasten to add that they’re written for a general audience with lots of good stories to make it easier going.

It’s a hard stretch to realize that until pretty recently (as the history of the species goes), our ancestors lived like the hunter-gatherers and simple agriculturalists Diamond describes. But like which of them? One of the big surprises for readers may be that there is no single “hunter-gatherer culture,” or “state of nature;” these people differ from each other in many fundamental ways. For example, one group may surround women giving birth with many helpers, while in another the woman must give birth alone and may not be approached even if she is dying and begs for aid. Sometimes children are never punished, but other traditions allow severe discipline. Diamond tells us about a New Guinean friend who moved from one village to another as a young child because he preferred their methods of child-rearing. Neither group objected. Some peoples respect the old as sources of wisdom and group history, but others abandon anyone who cannot keep up and whose feeding would put too great a strain on meager resources.

There are, of course, points in common. Pre-modern people are far more violent in their everyday lives than those of us who live under the protection of even a malign state. So much for the primitive golden age. Among the New Guineans he knows best, war is a constant state of affairs, with children as young as five and six participating and often killed. A stranger is terrifying. You won’t soon forget the photo of a New Guinean weeping in fear at the sight of his first white man; he thought he must inevitably die.

Those pictures and narratives held my attention, and I learned a lot. But the framework of “what we can learn from each other” seems a little facile. No one knows better than Diamond that you cannot just lift a useful custom (like group conflict resolution) from one culture and drop it into another one. It’s as if he felt he had to provide a moral to tie up his fascinating ethnological material.

Haidt’s book is specifically about moral judgment -- and why we have such trouble discussing politics and religion with each other. He caught my attention right away by referring to the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg’s theory that children (at least the superior ones) move through six stages of moral development, reasoning about ethical dilemmas with more and more sophistication, dominated the Brookline schools where my children studied in the 70’s. These rigid schemes did not resemble the thinking of any child I ever knew. Kohlberg was challenged by Carol Gilligan, who claimed that while those six stages might apply to boys, girls were more complex and compassionate. Worse and worse. 

All wrong, says Haidt. We don’t reason about moral dilemmas. Instead, we make instant, pre-verbal judgments, and then offer rationales to justify the decisions we have already made. Quite aside from the MRIs and the questionaires that Haidt offers to document his conclusion, it has the immediate ring of truth. We all know that we think this way (and that our children think this way). His metaphor is that the conscious, rational mind is the rider on an elephant. The elephant is the emotions.

How can our instinctive judgments be so different? Haidt offers a second metaphor: the division of the tongue into receptors for different flavors. Those who see themselves as rational, or “liberal” (in American terms) have sharper receptors for care, liberty, and fairness to individuals. “Conservative” tongues contain these receptors too, but add stronger ones for loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Haidt suggests that conservative values will always have wider appeal because they resonate with a larger palette of emotional triggers. This book was published before the 2012 presidential elections. You may feel that this particular conclusion, at least, has been strongly challenged.

But that does not in any way discredit his wider argument. You can try it out. Here’s one of the moral dilemmas from his studies: John and Julie are brother and sister, as well as good friends. They are traveling together on vacation. John suggests that they try sleeping together. Julie is on the pill, but John wears a condom, just to be sure. They enjoy the night of lovemaking, but agree never to do it again. Did John and Julie do anything wrong?

I know what I would decide. But then, I’m a liberal, with a lot of receptors for personal liberty. My more traditional mother always said I had ice-water in my veins. 

What about you?