I have come to believe that much of the thinking that humanity considers “intelligent thought” is really nothing more than a convenient rationalization for why we, as a species, compulsively do things we are neurologically hard-wired to do and is, therefore, not a form of thought that is intelligent. Put another, more ominous way, except for a select few trained in scientific methodology, we prefer to explain away many of our more questionable interactions with our environment and each other using strained logic, rather than closely examining why it might be that we consistently engage in certain kinds of behavior that continuously yields poor results. This tendency allows us to continuously legitimize and repeat destructive behavior that causes harm on a large scale, rather than undertaking the necessary self-examination to learn why it is that we repeatedly behave in such a manner so that we might avoid causing such harm.
This failure seems to explain why we generally ignore the lessons that our own history would otherwise teach us – lessons that repeat themselves with exceptional frequency, but from which we never seem to acquire any lasting wisdom.
What do I mean by this? By way of illustration, take the subject of racial discrimination. From the vantage point of 2010, our conventional, societal wisdom is that we have taken great strides in dealing with the evils of racial discrimination and that we currently are a much more tolerant society than formerly. In this regard, Americans point to specific pieces of legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Americans with Disabilities Act), Europeans point to the European Convention on Civil Rights, and many, if not most, governments point to some form of a “Bill of Rights” as an integral part of their basic constitutional authority. All of these laws start from the presumption that each human is, in fact, equal before the law, even if unequal in financial resources, intelligence, basic abilities or other innate attributes. When these laws are seen in conjunction with the fact that many of our major cities seem, at least from a higher level, to be composed of almost magically diverse cultures, the combination drives the assumption that we are better off than we were in the “bad old days,” whenever they might have been.
But, it is equally true that just in the first half of 2010 (a) Oliver Stone, a popular movie director, can rant publicly about Jewish domination of the media and subsequently issue an unconvincing apology, (b) Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, can publicly order the mass closure of Roma camps and the deportation of illegal Roma from France to underwhelming condemnation, (c) the State of Arizona, to substantial popular acclaim and in defiance of our national government, can see fit to legally authorize its police to find and deport illegal aliens through the mechanism known derogatorily in other contexts as “racial profiling” (in fact, my use of the verb “authorize” is incorrect, since the legislation in question mandates that the police engage in this behavior), and (d) while the State of Kansas can find guilty and incarcerate the murderer of a medical doctor engaged in operating an abortion clinic, there are many everywhere in our country who view that very same murderer as a martyr and who would unquestioningly follow his lead given the least opportunity.
In short, we are busy patting ourselves on the back for having a “better” racial climate than we formerly had, while simultaneously engaging in activities that are a repetition of actions that have led to harm of enormous scale. Oliver Stone is certainly not of the 18th and 19th centuries, but his message is an echo of the stuff of 18th and 19th century Jewish pogroms. Nicolas Sarcozy is not Serbian, but his effort to purge France of a large number of a specific group is an echo of 1980′s ethnic cleansing. Arizona is not a 19th century American Northeastern coastal city, but its new law clearly focused upon Hispanics and its citizenry’s rants about the Latinization of its culture are echoes of the New York and Boston Irish-hating mobs of the 1880′s. And the fact that anyone can accept and condone the murder of one person as a legitimate tactic in the general promotion of right-to-life values, tells me that, along with Dorothy and Toto, I am not in Kansas any more – at least not the Kansas of Dorothy’s childhood as expressed by L. Frank Baum (and, in this context, Kansas is no more than a euphemism for the entire United States and is not being singled out; after all, Kansas courts said and did all of the right things in this case and did so with efficiency and dispatch).
So, why do we go to such extreme lengths to rationalize the kinds of actions listed above and differentiate them from those that created the Holocaust? The answer to this question (as well as the most likely explanation for the fervor with which we assert each rationalized difference and express abhorrence against anyone who even remotely suggests even a faint connection) is undoubtedly because even as we engage in such behavior, an underlying, deep-seated sense of psychic guilt is asserting itself at some level of consciousness. In other words, we subconsciously know that we are doing “it” again, even though our conscious mind has become convinced that “it” is somehow right and appropriate in the current, specific context.
But as interesting as this question is, it is not the right question to ask of ourselves about these matters. The real question we ought to be asking ourselves in the face of these and other recent events is why, as a species, do we keep returning to actions or pronouncements that reek of past bad behavior and harm to humanity and, in some cases, came to be almost universally reviled when they first became generally known. What is there in our make up that causes us to repeat actions we know in our hearts to be unacceptable, while merrily rationalizing them as we begin to repeat them again? Are we, as a species, neurologically hard-wired to act in a certain way in each similar situation such it is inevitable that we will, absent conscious thought and hard work to the contrary, usually act in a similar harmful way? Can we learn to break these neurological hammerlocks by (a) first acknowledging that we are so hard-wired, and (b) then learning techniques to break ourselves free of the these evolutionary limitations? Or are we just demagogues and liars, and the persons we lie to with the most frequency are ourselves?
I have long thought that, as a species, we are neurologically hard-wired to behave in certain ways and that we react instinctively in certain situations without thinking. This is the only explanation for why we undertake actions that are so exactly wrong when viewed from an historical perspective, but which feel so absolutely right and correct at the time we take them.
A caveat is in order here: this reasoning is not offered as an excuse or justification for acting badly, but is, instead, offered for consideration by others in the firm belief that unless we first understand why it is we behave in the objectionable fashion, we will never be able to learn new and different behavior. After all, how can you change if you don’t first understand why you act in the way that you act?
Over the centuries of man there have been many reasons not to undertake such a scientific examination of ourselves. For many centuries we simply did not have the tools or even self-awareness to perform such research. In our later history, our religions have always gotten in the way of scientific self-analysis to the extent that they argue that we are unique within the animal kingdom, either because we are a higher order of life or the sons and daughters of God. After all, how can we possibly examine ourselves as if we are just another form of animal if we are somehow closer to God than the other forms? There may be other reasons as well, but, except for the lack of the proper tools or self-awareness with which to perform such analysis, they all smack of the sophistry we usually employ whenever we would rather not come to grips with the ethics of a chosen course of action because it is easier to explain them away contextually.
Research is now underway to determine if we are, in fact, neurologically hard-wired in ways that cause us to consistently make the wrong choices given specific facts. For example, Laurie Santos of Yale University in engaged in the study of primate behavior which demonstrates that when faced with the possibility of a guaranteed gain vs. a choice between a gain or a total loss, primates will usually take the guaranteed gain. However, when given the choice between the selection of a guaranteed, quantified loss vs. a selection which will unpredictably yield either a lesser loss than the one guaranteed or an absolute, total, catastrophic loss, the primates will usually go for the possible lesser loss, thereby risking total loss on what we humans would call “a roll of the dice.” In other words, when faced with gain, the primates take the safer, calculated choice, but when faced with loss, they take the much riskier gamble. It is Ms. Santos’ thesis that humanity engages in these same behaviors, behaviors which she believes help explain the frequency and depth of periodic economic recessions.
Could there be similar neurological hard-wiring that explains our reactions toward other members of humanity who don’t look and/or think like us? It seems very likely to me that this may well be the case. One of the activities that humanity engages in that sets us apart from other animals is the ability to classify. Classification is one of our more advanced skills and is undoubtedly a survival technique – something that has served our species very well over the long centuries of our existence. Discrimination is simply the obverse side of the classification coin – once you get good at classification, it becomes inherently true that certain classes of things are inferior to other classes for a variety reasons that make sense to the classifier. We accept the logic of this kind of reasoning since it verifies what our evolutionary experience tells us to believe, and we accord it the status of intelligent thought even when, in certain contexts, it is little more than a rationalization of a primal urge.
We should spend more time, money and effort upon research of the kind that Ms. Santos is engaged in if we want to actually make substantial progress in overcoming our inherent limitations. This is especially true in an era when, because of superior technology, we can, and do, make decisions without the benefit of any significant contemplation about our motivations or consideration of the long-term consequences of our choices. We must come to understand what it is about ourselves that makes certain behavior feel inherently right and good when, in fact, it is deleterious to our long-term happiness and survival. We must have this information firmly in mind each time we need to make important decisions about our future or we will most likely continue to make consistently poor decisions.
Given the fact of advanced technology and communications, the speed with which we are faced with this kind of decision-making will only increase. It is an old maxim that bad news travels fast, but in our current society bad news travels with the speed of electrons and is everywhere almost instantaneously. We no longer have the luxury of having to rely upon sail to bring rumors of far despairs to our ears and to transmit our responses to them to the affected part of the world; they come here and our responses go back within moments of such rumors being initially reported, with the luxury of contemplation having been foregone due to the lack of a decent interval for thought and contemplation.
Future improvements in technology and communication will likely mean that the time span in which we are able to react to the behavior of others will continue to decrease, with the inevitable consequence that we will increasingly use mere knee-jerk reaction, rather than conscious thought, in undertaking a response.
Historically, the time between inherently poor decisions that lead to mass conflict seems to be shortening. After all, how else can one explain the fact that George W. Bush, a member of the Vietnam era generation, could send troops into Iraq and Afghanistan without remembering the hard-learned lessons taught by those of his own generation. He and his administration explained those lessons away with patriotic rhetoric, while clearly retaining no actual knowledge of the lessons taught by over 58,000 deaths in our own armed services or by the many thousands of other Vietnam veterans who returned home only to find themselves unappreciated and their lives rendered dysfunctional. Note that my own argument ignores completely the estimated 4,300,000 civilian dead as a result of the Vietnam war, a fact which President Bush and his handlers also ignored.
I am certain as I write this that those that refuse to accept humanity’s classification as a member of the animal kingdom will, if they were ever to read this piece, revile my thoughts as debased and lacking in the moral aspects that their favorite religion imparts. Why we can accept theories about why physical differences between ourselves and other animal life forms (opposable thumbs allowing us to grasp, different shoulder mechanisms allowing us to throw) have given us evolutionary longevity and superiority, but cannot accept the believe that we may be neurologically or spiritually similar is beyond my comprehension.
I can only say that I am proud to be a member of all of the forms of life (whether animal or vegetable). It is the concept and simple possibility of life itself that fascinates and intrigues me. All living things have discovered innumerable, creative ways to adapt to, and to survive in, environments that range from truly voluptuous to spare, harsh, and incomprehensible. Humanity is still finding forms of life of which we had no previous knowledge in locations we either had no previous ability to investigate or where we were convinced life could not survive. Humanity has much to learn from our compatriots who share the beneficence of life.
I am as certain as I can be that somewhere there are lessons already learned by other life forms that can help humanity understand and overcome its own shortcomings. Only stupidity can keep us from the investigation.
In this regard, humanity must always remember the teachings of Monty Python as expressed in The Galaxy Song:
“So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure
how amazingly unlikely is your birth
and pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space
because there’s bugger all down here on earth.”
I аlωays emailed this web site pοst page to all my assoсiates,
sincе if like to read it afterωaгd my friends will too.