Richard Jernigan -> RE: American Freedom? (Dec. 13 2012 15:50:44)
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ORIGINAL: Miguel de Maria But from whence come the "enlightened", "civilized", "humane" parts? It seems that Ruphus, Deniz, and mezza assume that these are the best part of human behavior. Where do they come from? What is the justification for assuming they should be the default motives, rather than the basic greed, fear, etc.? We evolved genetically, according to the scientific evidence. At some stage we became capable of evolving culturally, at a much greater rate. For the altruistic qualities you mention to have evolved genetically into the "default motives", the theory of evolution predicts they must have enabled their possessors to produce more offspring than the more selfish members of the species. But where did all the selfish people come from? They came from the same place. Evolution didn't select for pure altruism or pure selfishness, it selected for a mixture. We find this mixture within ourselves. It causes conflicts, sometimes painful ones within ourselves, sometimes violent ones with our fellow humans. When I was the boss of about 250 people, I was older than most of my employees, by ten to twenty years. So I was sometimes consulted for advice. Most of the people were highly skilled and highly competitive. When I thought it might be useful, I would ask them what their priorities were. Usually they would put their families first and their jobs second. After that the order varied. If I thought they were putting too much stress on themselves and their families through overwork, I would say I thought their priorities were out of order. To be of use to their families they must be in good health, both physically and mentally. I would suggest they consider the fact that to satisfy the priorities they stated, they must take care of themselves. This was not to counsel selfishness in the end. It was to point out that the story they were telling themselves might be leading them astray. They needed to seek a balance: care for themselves enough to be able to carry out their responsibilities to their families and coworkers. Fairly often this advice seemed to offer a new perspective. Back to evolution. When we began to evolve culturally, we made up stories to tell ourselves. We were, and still are really great at making up stories. We didn't know why the sun rose and set, why the wind blew, nor why there were thunder and lightning. We made up such good stories that we still like telling them, though we laugh at the ignorance of our ancestors. We made up stories about good and evil, externalizing the conflicts we found within ourselves between selfishness and altruism by attributing our actions to gods or demons. As Ruphus points out, fairly recently some of us made up a set of stories that put evil within ourselves and simplified our pantheon to one, or maybe three, or maybe 3=1 god(s). A major problem with our stories was that we tended to believe them. We still do. We know a few stories now that are pretty much true. We can explain sunrise, sunset, wind, thunder and lightning with stories that always work. We can even explain electricity, the light spectra given off by elements when heated--a pretty long list of stuff. These stories work. They always turn out the way we said they would. Well, almost always. At least we know when they work and when they don't. And we're working away to patch up the parts that don't work. Science marches on. Our stories about good and evil, economics and politics don't work. We have tried quite a few stories and given up on them. But we have some right now that we tend to believe in. We believe in some of them enough to go to war over them, and to kill millions of people. But these stories don't work. They might work well enough long enough to convince most people that they are absolutely true, but they're not. Capitalism creates "high standards of living" for large numbers of people. It also puts people out on the street. It goes off the rails from time to time and destroys the lives of those it previously benefitted. Socialism gets corrupted by the people who are supposed to be seeing to the general welfare. Our main economic stories are destroying the planet. Much of the world still sees things in terms of good and evil. Yes, there are people who are extraordinarily altruistic--sometimes after a career of being extraordinarily selfish. Yes there are murderers, rapists and thieves who must be forcibly restrained. But there are people crazy enough to claim that pure selfishness is a virtue, and others equally misguided who claim that the only virtue is self-sacrifice. And there are very large numbers of people who insist that evil, as their favorite story defines it, must be stamped out. Bullsh1t. All of them, bullsh1t. What is needed is a balance between self interest on the one hand, and cooperation and caring on the other. One is necessary for the survival of the individual, the other is necessary for the survival of society. For us to survive, as Ruphus points out, society must survive. Another tactic I discovered at work was this, if you will excuse me for boring you with another of my stories. We had a big project, spent about $200-million upgrading a suite of radars worth about $1-billion. Three organizations were involved, the U.S. Army, Raytheon, Inc. and Lincoln Laboratory, a non-profit administered by Massachetts Institute of Technology. The latter two were as great experts on radar technology as anyone on the planet. I never met an officer in the Army who would have known what a radar was if one jumped up and bit him in the butt. But I will give the Army credit for being very good at killing people. Due to the huge differences in culture among the three organizations, epic battles would break out among the highly competitive men in their thirties and early forties. When I saw that progress was coming to a halt, I felt the need to intervene. I called a meeting in my office. The tactic I stumbled upon was this: "Gentlemen, we seem to be at an impasse. We can't agree on how to take the next step in design. Since we are trying to find the way forward, we will talk only about the future, not the past." The room fell silent. Everyone had spent the last three days preparing their indictments of the others. No one could articulate their position without damning the others. I adjourned the meeting, to meet again in two days, same ground rules. In the second meeting we reached agreement on how to proceed. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to learn from history in order to come up with better stories to tell ourselves about economics and politics. But I am saying that damning the perceived opposition is a sure road to inaction. And I am saying we should be really careful about the stories we make up, until they have been tested and proven to work. The "default motive" should be a balance between self interest and altruism. Both are necessary to our survival. RNJ Now I'm going to go and read more of the book about the physics of subatomic particles, where the stories turn out to be true...except we don't know the whole story. And that's where the fun begins in physics--when we realize we don't know the whole story and try to figure out more of it.
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