This is in large part inspired by listening to Scott Barry Kaufman talk about his book Transcend on his own podcast and on The Wright Show. I have already mentioned it here.
This draws together a range of things I’ve been thinking about over the past weeks.
I’ll start with what the anthropologist Christopher Boehm had to say about deprivation. As I have discussed, he considers the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers: in normal times – when life is tough but possible (they are seldom in a situation of plenty), a little natural dose of pure altruism is enough to overcome kin-preference and self-interest, because it makes sense to hunt together and share a kill. But, when times get harder, tribe members will favour kin over non-kin (sharing food preferentially with family members); when times get desperate, they will become entirely self-interested and resort to cannibalism, in extremis. It is notable that their moral flexibility is such that conscience does not inhibit these behaviours, should the situation be so precarious, nor, after the event, will they face blame and punishment. The narrowing circle of altruism is seen as pragmatic and permissible.
This makes us consider the pandemic: as times got tougher, many of us (maybe not me) have demonstrated greater extrafamilial altruism than in our normal time of plenty. There is a sense of being ‘in it together’ and people have been ‘looking out for each other’. It has been one of the heart-warming and encouraging aspects of an otherwise distinctly unpleasant situation. However, Boehm’s concept of moral flexibility leads one to consider the likelihood of very different priorities should the situation become worse: economic collapse, the inability to support those unable to work or adequately fund (and staff) institutions (including both the police force and medical services), the failure of the supply chain and so on. In addition, the end result of the pandemic could well be not an exultation of our communal nature, but a tightening of national boundaries and national identity.
It has been demonstrated in psychology experiments that fear, anxiety and reminders of mortality can incline people to make fewer prosocial choices, to desire harsher punishments for transgressors and to hold more authoritarian world views.
Kaufman stated that during times of deprivation, people are inclined to look at what they can get out of a situation. If a person is hungry, everything looks like food. If a person feels unloved, they will seek to get love from others. In all, the world becomes the means to the end of fulfilling whatever deprivation the individual is suffering. Their inclination to explore, to be open-minded and open-hearted, is weakened. When basic needs are met, people can transition into a growth state – and growth implies exploration, curiosity and the search for new information. That becomes rewarding in and of itself. Instead of looking at what they can get from the world, or from others, people become interested in the world and in others as ends in themselves.
The basic tenet of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy was that all human beings should be treated as ends, not means. Is this new acquaintance interesting and valuable because of her uniqueness or for her connections? And we can expand that out: is a new territory important for its beauty and novelty or for the riches that can be mined, the trees that can be cut, the land that can be farmed? Is an animal valued for itself or for the milk it produces? Even ideas can be ends in themselves – though an idea that we incorporate into our world view (say that we can understand why people might behave differently in different circumstances) can also become a means to expanding our horizons of tolerance and understanding.
All this considered, the idea that I keep returning to – and often fail to apply – is that a bad act does not mean that the actor is bad. This is the ‘attribution error’. We have a failure of critical thinking when we judge others for their failings. It’s like this: if someone cuts me up on the motorway, I may judge him to be a selfish, thoughtless idiot; if I cut someone up on the motorway, I excuse myself by claiming, probably truthfully, that he was in my blind-spot. The point is, I attribute his bad action to bad character, but attribute mine to bad circumstances.
Right now, as a result of the underlying anxiety and ongoing weirdness of the situation, I am aware of being (even) more reactive, sensitive and defensive than usual when confronted with the things that trigger me. I have to remember that when others show similar failings of generosity, it’s probably because they too are feeling the pressure (whether consciously or unconsciously) rather than because they are unthinking idiots.
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