Try opening both eyes
Tom Clark discusses David Sloan Wilson and Jonathan Haidt and the Beyond Belief 2 conference.
Both Wilson and Jonathan Haidt argued at the conference that a predisposition for religion likely played an adaptive role (perhaps via between-group selection) in allowing humans to achieve our current level of ultra-sociality, in which more or less stable societies of unrelated individuals have replaced nomadic tribes. This is an empirical claim under investigation. It’s therefore striking that both accept the normative claim that religion, or more broadly a departure from evidence-based beliefs, might be a force for good in promoting social cohesion in a way that allegiance to strict empiricism…perhaps cannot.
Let’s look at a little of Jonathan Haidt.
My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me…I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine…I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. And once I liked them…it was easy to take their perspective and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent.
One problem with that leaps off the page before we even get to the harder stuff: he says he really liked ‘these people’ but he says it right after telling us that he must have liked only the men because he wouldn’t have had a chance to like the women because he wouldn’t have been allowed to get to know them. I’m almost tempted to accuse him of being shifty – but I think he really is convinced by his own patter. But if so – why did he shift from men to people in that suspicious way? Why did he say ‘people’? Why did he try to throw dust in our eyes? Or was it in his own eyes he was throwing it? In other words, what does he think he’s talking about? He tells us quite plainly that the women were treated as blanks and kept away from him, and then instantly tells us that he ‘liked these people who were hosting’ him – which betrays an embarrassing level of moral obtuseness. It’s rather like dropping in on Auschwitz and being treated hospitably by the SS men there and thus concluding that all was well at Auschwitz. He spent time with the privileged people and so decided that their privilege was okie dokie. That’s not ‘an open mind,’ it’s a refusal to think. It’s a failure to grasp that what he was seeing was not (or not just) ‘a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society’ but a world in which men, not women, are the people who count. What he was seeing was not a matter of all family members making sacrifices for the sake of the family but one of female family members subordinated by male family members. He knew he’d seen that, but he was ‘committed to understanding it on its own terms.’ Yes but that ‘its’ refers to the privileged minority of this sex-segregated hierarchically stratified society so in fact the terms he was committed to understanding it in were very partial incomplete and self-interested terms. It’s strange that he apparently manages to remain unaware of that.
Ah, just what I thought when I read the Haidt article. He seems to have gone to Bhubaneswar with his eyes deliberately closed! The women were silent and served them, and the men talked. He liked them! Bravo! Now that took an act of imagination! Now I know why I wouldn’t vote Republican (if I were an American).
He’s irritating, isn’t he…I guess because he knows better, in a way, but has somehow persuaded himself otherwise – which requires a lot of eye-closing.
I’m afraid I’ll have to calm down before I can comment on this. It’s just exactly the sort of relativist, ethically blinkered apologetics that makes me *so mad* coming from other liberals.
Yep – well that’s his specialty. He’s been playing this note for a long time. It’s very very annoying. (He worked with Richard Shweder. Aha – he would have.)
In addition to being an all around git, Clark makes a claim about Wilson’s group selection hypothesis that is either a very stupid mistake or a deliberate deception:
The claim that a predisposition to religion as a means for reinforcing social behavior might be selected for is not in any way normative: To say that a trait is selected for is simply to say that it results in differential reproductive success, which is not and does not imply any sort of value judgment. To say something is “good for X” is not the same thing as saying it is morally or aesthetically or in any other way simply “good.” Rather, the locution “good for” expresses a functional claim. For example, religion might be good for promoting social cohesion, which in turn has positive consequences for group fitness (“fitness” being a wholly empirical matter of how many offspring different individuals or groups leave in successive generations), but that doesn’t mean that religion is simply “good.”
Just as foolish is Clark’s implication that anything whatsoever which serves the function of promoting social cohesion is automatically a force for good. Oh yeah? The Hitler Youth and other institutions of intensive indoctrination of children are extremely effective at promoting social cohesion…
I really fucking HATE Jonathan Haidt. Possibly because I have an Indian grandparent–a Dalit Indian grandparent–and I just cannot stand him. Reading Haidt makes me want to ship him off to India and force him to live the life of a Dalit woman for a few weeks.
There are two basic forms of “white guy goes to non-Western country” stories. The first, straightforwardly imperialist form is where the white guy is horrified at what terrible, brutal, in-need-of-Christianization people the non-Westerners all are.
The second, condescending and less-obviously imperialistic form is where the white guy finds that the oppressive practices of the non-Western country actually serve some deep spiritual purpose that Westerners don’t understsnd, that the non-Western women and lower-class folks actually LIKE being oppressed (or at least the elite men say they do!). Non-Western feminists do not exist, in this story. I’m uncharitable enough to think it’s a glorified fetish: a fetish that some white males have about subservient, exotic, non-Western females.
I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent.
This is like saying you and your toilet paper are “interdependent.”
How did the servant feel about not being thanked? How did the women feel about all this? Does this callous fool even care to find out?
Cannot stand Haidt, not my Indian grandparent who I love–just to clarify, as my second sentence was a bit ambiguous. ;)
FWIW, I do not think ‘predisposition for religion’ played an adaptive role at all. I suggest that this is thinking that is based on way too high a category of mental construct.
Rather, think that we have basic adaptive functions that in most people can allow religion to operate and propagate.
Examples might be
‘Submission to parents’,
‘Submission to higher-status group members’,
‘Uses stories from other group members to reduce costs of learning’,
‘Flexible about what criteria define social hierarchy’,
‘Believes others signals of relative status in absence of direct knowledge’,
and so on. These behavioural building blocks provide a fertile field not only for adaptive living, but for doubtfully-adaptive social conventions such as religion or leftist politics.
G –
No no no no no, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick somehow, Clark is anything but an all around git – Clark is terrific. And he doesn’t imply or say that anything promoting social cohesion is automatically a force for good; he’s arguing against that.
Jenavir – yeah. Jean Kazez did a good post on her blog (quite soon after she started it, I think) about Haidt’s musings about the deep whateveritwas of a Brahmin man pondering his distaste for other castes. She had some correspondence with him and she asked about that and got no very satisfactory reply. It’s disgusting stuff, I think. (I re-read the blog post while doing this post, that’s why I remember all this.) How the servant felt about not being thanked was exactly the question that occurred to me – along with wondering why Haidt’s host told him not to thank the servant. What was it to him? What was that about? What is it about the ‘moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society’ that makes it necessary to be rude to servants?
He must be a moral imbecile. He puts all the material right out there where we can see it, and draws all the wrong conclusions.
Well, all….Get more used to puff essays like this. In the eternal War on Terror, we are cozying up to the Indian government more and more…and that will probably mean the BJP. Fun times.
Whoops! I just read your pullquote (and read it a little casually at that), not the original article. I’ll correct that. *goes off and reads for a while*
Clark is still wrong in attributing the normative claim characterized in that pullquote to Wilson. I’ve read two of David Sloan Wilson’s books, and he simply does not commit this blatant naturalistic fallacy Clark attributes to him. Wilson’s understanding of group selection does not have a moral undertone, nor does he have any delusions that religion is all sunshine and light. For example, in Darwin’s Cathedral he wrote extensively about the effectiveness of religion as a means of maintaining in-group cohesion and exerting social control using Calvin’s Geneva as an example – hardly portraying social cohesion as an unalloyed good!
Clark’s interpretation of the quotes he uses from Darwin’s Cathedral include but ignore the meaning of a very important qualifying phrase Wilson used: “from an evolutionary perspective.” From an evolutionary perspective, the only norm by which any normative claim can be evaluated is differential reproductive success – which is not a moral value in and of itself. Even treating “survival” as being of primary moral value does not make differential reproductive success into a moral-value-by-proxy, because “differential” requires a comparison between groups. If Group A is in direct competition with Group B, and Group A loses three-quarters of its population in the process of entirely wiping out Group B, Group A clearly enjoys total domination of differential reproductive success even though there isn’t a whole lot of “survival” to spread around.
Clark is by no means an all-around git – I have in fact enjoyed his writings on naturalism.org before, but didn’t immediately recognize his name because it’s so generic. But he has gotten a somewhat skewed perspective on Wilson’s group selection explanation for the origin and nature of religion from somewhere – probably from Wilson himself at the conference. DSW is always going out of his way to present his research in a conciliatory fashion that won’t offend believers – and his stupid, stupid argument that atheism is a “stealth religion” doesn’t help.
Haidt is still a complete git, for all the reasons cited above, and more. The problem with his “five foundations theory of morality” is, as Clark points out, a complete confusion about and inability to distinguish between descriptive and normative values. The thing is, the two “liberal” values (fairness & harm reduction) are genuine normative values: Whatever one’s philosophical take on the possibility of justifying moral norms – and I have serious problems with Clark’s anti-foundationalism, a philosophical position that has always seemed suspiciously dogmatic to me – it is at least significant that these values are universally agreed upon by every ethical theory that has every been taken very seriously (virtue theory, utilitarianism, deontology). The other three “values” – authority, group loyalty, and sanctity – are either not genuine normative values at all (authority, sanctity) or are of dubious and limited value (loyalty), and cannot be justified by any evidence-and-reason driven process. They are, notably, the primary values inculcated by faith – which is yet another way that faith is fundamentally a moral problem. Clark and I are clearly on the same page in all this.
“probably from Wilson himself at the conference.”
Yeah I was figuring that must be it – especially since the article is basically in response to the conference.
I couldn’t agree more about Haidt. Those other three pillars just make me want to throw things.
I wonder what Haidt’s perception would have been had he come in through the scullery entrance instead of the front door.
Moral of story:
It’s good to be the king.
Yes, he’s quite foolish with all his talk about how liberals “fail to perceive” the moral values of ass-kissing and smugness…oops, I mean authority and sanctity. He doesn’t seem to get that these are not moral values. It’s like he thinks that he has objective proof that they are moral values and liberals are just blind to them.
Back again, because this really infuriates me:
I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me.
Well, of COURSE you did! But what if they weren’t doing any of the above? What if they were making you serve them? What if, instead of eating with the men, you served with the women?
What Antonio said.
Yeah.
I keep returning to Haidt too, because he really infuriates me too.
We’re not finished with him.
“The other three “values” – authority, group loyalty, and sanctity”
What happened to purity and Haidt’s other “pillars” of morality? Is purity the same as sanctity? Obviously he is nuts if he thinks that liberals lack the “purity pillar” – what about recycling? Concerns about ‘toxins’?