Social production of moral indifference - 5d

Ethical blindness describes the risk that over time and under the pressure of their context, individuals lose the ability to see that what they do is wrong. It is important because it is the driving force behind big scandals. We all know why bad people do bad things. However, we will never understand large scale systematic and systemic cases of immoral and illegal behaviour if we do not understand why and under what conditions good people are vulnerable to such behaviour. The fascinating question is, why you and me, under certain circumstances, would have done what managers did at Volkswagen, Boeing, Purdue or Wells Fargo.

The various cases of corporate fraud - Enron, Worldcom, the 2008 financial crisis, etc. - leads to a fundamental question: Is dishonesty largely restricted to a few bad apples, or is it a more widespread problem? If the problem is not confined to a few outliers, that would mean that anyone could behave dishonestly at work and at home — you and I included. This is the problem that Dan Ariely seeks an answer to in The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. He shows that the rational cost-benefit forces that are presumed to drive dishonest behavior often do not, and the irrational forces that we think don’t matter often do. 

In rational economics, the prevailing notion of cheating comes from the economist Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate who suggested that people commit crimes based on a rational analysis of each situation. He  noted that in weighing the costs versus the benefits, there was no place for consideration of right or wrong; it was simply about the comparison of possible positive and negative outcomes.  According to this model, we all seek our own advantage as we make our way through the world. Whether we do this by robbing banks or writing books is inconsequential to our rational calculations of costs and benefits.  

In The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, Dan Ariely writes that if this theory is correct, then the response should be to a) increase the probability of being caught (through hiring more police officers and installing more surveillance cameras, for example); b) increase the magnitude of punishment for people who get caught (for example, by imposing steeper prison sentences and fines). This is the model that is generally followed and accepted by policy-makers and the public. 

Ariely’s experiments suggest that we don’t cheat and steal as much as we would if we were perfectly rational and acted only in our own self-interest. Cheating is not necessarily due to one guy doing a cost-benefit analysis and stealing a lot of money. Instead, it is more often an outcome of many people who quietly justify taking a little bit of cash or a little bit of merchandise over and over. Essentially, we cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals.

Our behaviour is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honourable people. We want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves (psychologists call this ego motivation). On the other hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money as possible (this is the standard financial motivation). Clearly these two motivations are in conflict. How can we secure the benefits of cheating and at the same time still view ourselves as honest, wonderful people?

This is where our amazing cognitive flexibility comes into play. Thanks to this human skill, as long as we cheat by only a little bit, we can benefit from cheating and still view ourselves as marvellous human beings. This balancing act is the process of rationalisation, and it is the basis of what he calls the “fudge factor theory.” All of us continuously try to identify the line where we can benefit from dishonesty without damaging our own self-image. The question is: where is the line?

The fudge factor suggests that if we want to take a bite out of crime, we need to find a way to change the way in which we are able to rationalise our actions. When our ability to rationalise our selfish desires increases, so does our fudge factor, making us more comfortable with our own misbehaviour and cheating. The other side is true as well; when our ability to rationalise our actions is reduced, our fudge factor shrinks, making us less comfortable with misbehaving and cheating. There are various environmental forces that increase and decrease honesty in our daily lives, including conflicts of interest, counterfeits, pledges, and simply being tired.

If we increased the psychological distance between a dishonest act and its consequences, the fudge factor would increase and our participants would cheat more.  People are more apt to be dishonest in the presence of non-monetary objects than actual money — you are more likely to take paper or pencil from the office than money from the petty cash box. When you take money, you can't help but think you're stealing. When you take a pencil, there's all kinds of stories you can tell yourself. You can say this is something everybody does. Or, if I take a pencil home, it's actually good for work because I can work more. 

The situation changes our ability to rationalise. When rationalisation increases -- for example, when we say things like everybody does it; or when we say we are doing it for a good cause -- we cheat to a higher degree. Non-monetary exchanges allow people greater psychological latitude to cheat – leading to crimes that go well beyond pilfered pens to backdated stock options, falsified financial reports, and crony deals. Ariely writes:

From all the research I have done over the years, the idea that worries me the most is that the more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips. If being just one step removed from money can increase cheating to such degree, just imagine what can happen as we become an increasingly cashless society. 

Could it be that stealing a credit card number is much less difficult from a moral perspective than stealing cash from someone’s wallet? Of course, digital money (such as a debit or credit card) has many advantages, but it might also separate us from the reality of our actions to some degree.

If being one step removed from money liberates people from their moral shackles, what will happen as more and more banking is done online? What will happen to our personal and social morality as financial products become more obscure and less recognisably related to money (think, for example, about stock options, derivatives, and credit default swaps)?'

Again the idea is that once we get distanced from money it is easier for us to feel that we are honest but nevertheless be dishonest. Moreover, you aren’t dealing with real cash; you are only playing with numbers that are many steps removed from cash. Their abstractness allows you to view your actions more as a game, and not as something that actually affects people’s homes, livelihoods, and retirement accounts. As Auden said in Letter to Lord Byron, ‘Today, thank God, we’ve got no snobbish feeling /Against the more efficient modes of stealing.’

The creation on Wall Street of mortgage-backed securities made it harder to be a good person. When being not such a nice guy suddenly gets more profitable, it becomes harder to resist temptation.  People didn’t get greedier, but the gains from dishonesty rose, so we got more dishonesty. And when you're surrounded by all these people who think the same way, it's very hard to think differently. Every time you reward someone’s dishonesty you are encouraging others to do the same.

Social production of moral indifference - 5c

Although the benefits of cooperation are shared equally among all members of the group, the costs are borne privately by each cooperator. The tension between “public goods—private costs” results in what is sometimes known as the Cooperator’s Dilemma. It turns out that a group consisting entirely of rational agents motivated solely by greed and fear is incapable of cooperation. But it is cooperation that underlies the ability of human groups - whether economic organizations, firms and corporations, or political organizations, such as states. 

In the years since  the publication of The Selfish Gene, lots of work has been done exploring  human-specific mechanisms for fostering cooperation. For eg., take the idea of open-ended play. Two individuals play the Prisoner’s Dilemma, knowing that after a single round, they’ll never meet again. Rationality decrees that you defect. What about two rounds? It requires noncooperation for the same reasons the single-round game does - the game defaults to a single-round game where the rational strategy is to defect. 

Three rounds? The same. In other words, playing for a known number of rounds biases against cooperation, and the more rational the players, the more they foresee this. Cooperation flourishes when games have an uncertain number of rounds. This produces the shadow of the future, where retribution is possible. Here our reputations precede us and produce a sense of obligation and reciprocity. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow has concluded, 'Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time.' 

A gene-centric theory is unable to explain such obvious features of human social life as morality, sympathy, and generosity. As the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson explains in Does Altruism Exist?, “. . . group-level functional organization evolves primarily by natural selection between groups.” Groups have multiple-round games and the means to spread news of someone being a jerk. On the other hand, when rational calculations enter into the equation, they tend to undermine ultrasociality. We know them as “nepotism” and “cronyism.”

In Evolution for Everyone, David Sloan Wilson writes that an animal breeder at Purdue University, William Muir, tried to figure out how to make chickens produce the most eggs. He bred two groups of chickens. In both cases, he housed the hens in cages,  which is standard practice in the poultry industry. In the first method he did what the 'rank and yank' system does - he picked the hardest working, most productive hen within each cage to breed the next generation of hens and put all of those in one group. The second method involved selecting the most productive cages and using all the hens from those cages to breed the next generation of hens. 

Thus same trait (egg productivity) is selected in both cases although in the second group, the whole cage is selected when even the best cage might have some individual duds. The first method caused egg productivity to perversely decline, even though the most productive hens were chosen each and every generation. The second method caused egg productivity to increase 160 percent in six generations.

The first method favoured the nastiest hens who achieved their productivity by suppressing the productivity of other hens. After six generations, Muir had produced a nation of psychopaths, who plucked and murdered each other in their incessant attacks. No wonder egg productivity plummeted! In the second approach, he selected the most productive groups and because they were already a group that worked well together, they included peaceful and cooperative hens.

Why was each superstar the prime egg producing champion in her original group? Because she would aggressively peck subordinates enough to stress them into reduced fertility. Put all these mean champions together, and a group of subordinated chickens, who are now in peace, will outproduce them. This is the circumstance of a genetically influenced trait that, while adaptive on an individual level, emerges as maladaptive when shared by a group. Thie “rank and yank” system is a recipe for disruptive self-serving behaviors. 

Even the smartest person can be misled by a false view of human nature. In the long term, the success of the individual is  inextricably bound up with the success of the group. Reciprocity is made up of a series of acts each of which is short-run altruistic (benefiting others at a cost to the altruist), but which together typically make every participant better off. The loss of the capacity to feel guilty and the consequent loss of a sense of responsibility may be the biggest problems facing the world today. 

Economists have recently discovered that trusting communities, other things being equal, have a measurable economic advantage. This is probably because when individuals cooperate, what economists term “transaction costs” — the costs of the everyday business of life, as well as the costs of commercial transactions — are reduced. Moreover, students of public health find that life expectancy itself is enhanced in more trustful communities. Honesty and trust smoothen the inevitable frictions of social life.

Putting all one's faith in a legal system, complete with courts and law enforcement provides only a partial solution. If we needed legal advice and a police presence to formulate and enforce the simplest agreement,  escalating transaction costs would prevent much mutually beneficial cooperation. As Diego Gambetta, a student of trust (and of the Mafia), points out, “Societies which rely heavily on the use of force are likely to be less efficient, more costly, and more unpleasant than those where trust is maintained by other means.” In Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam writes:

. . . social capital greases the wheels that allow communities to advance smoothly. Where people are trusting and trustworthy, and where they are subject to repeated interactions with fellow citizens, everyday business and social transactions are less costly. There is no need to spend time and money making sure that others will uphold their end of the arrangement or penalizing them if they don’t. Economists such as Oliver Williamson and political scientists such as Elinor Ostrom have demonstrated how social capital translates into financial capital and resource wealth for businesses and self-governing units. 

Social production of moral indifference - 5b

Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby begins with the observation, "‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.‘ Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’" But most rich and successful people don’t heed that advice. As E. B. White said, 'Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self- made men.' I saw a book titled ‘If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?’ The immediate response that occurred to me was, ‘If you are so rich, why aren’t you smart?’

The thought patterns of humans living their day-to-day existence are continually affected by what goes on around them, and the consequent actions they take are continually affecting whatever is around them. A common rhetoric these days among the privileged is the myth of meritocracy. It is the idea that those who work hard and play by the rules deserve to rise as far as their talents and dreams will take them. Successful people don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. The economist Paul Samuelson once said, “Never underestimate the willingness of a man to believe flattering things about himself.”

How important is luck? People who amass great fortunes are almost always extremely talented and hardworking. But, countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance events play a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people once imagined. When successful people are oblivious to their own advantages they are often similarly oblivious to other people’s disadvantages. The result is a lack of empathy toward those who are struggling making them reluctant to support the kinds of public investments without which everyone becomes less likely to succeed.

For Darwin it was impossible to reconcile the cruelty of nature with a loving God. Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene doesn’t present a cheery view of nature either with its focus on the instrumental role genes play in the evolution of life. Are you counting on nature to make the world a better place? It is impossible, they thought. The problem here is with pushing the analogy between nature, genes and cultural elements too far. Folk ideas of Darwinian evolution and The Selfish Gene have given the idea of meritocracy the status of a natural law. So much so that Margaret Thatcher once said that poverty is a ‘personality defect’. 

The term meritocracy was coined in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy.  He argued that encouraging successful people to self-aggrandizingly attribute their success solely to their own efforts and abilities would actually make things worse, on balance. In a 2001 article, he noted that although it makes good sense to appoint people to jobs on their merit, “It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.”

Some think success is all about “choices” and “personal responsibility.” Yes, those are real, but it’s so much more complicated than that. Luck acts in subtle ways, causing many of those same people to resist explanations that invoke luck. Your genes and your environment largely determine how smart you are.  How does it make sense for you to claim moral credit for them? You didn’t choose your parents, nor did you have much control over the environment in which you were raised. 

The birth order among siblings, which is as close to a pure chance result as any we can imagine, often plays a decisive role. There is also the scientific finding that your development depends on your grandmother's nutrition. And, of course, plenty of accidents determine where you have reached in life. People with a lot of talent and an inclination to work hard are extremely fortunate. As George Elliot writes in Middlemarch, ‘. . .  chance has an empire which reduces choice to a fool's illusion’.

Those who insist that luck played no role in their own success are almost surely claiming more than their due. Meritocracy would require equality in conditions to access work or career which simply does not exist. Measures of merit are hard to disentangle from economic advantage. In 'What About Me?',  Paul Verhaeghe writes, 'The principle of a capitalist meritocracy founders on the inheritance of wealth: those who inherit capital stay at the top of the ladder; those who inherit debt remain at the bottom.' 

There are traces of meritocratic principles in most philosophical systems. What all these traditional systems have in common, though, is the notion that the merit relevant to governing include moral and civic virtue. For the past few decades, new technologies and market institutions have been providing growing leverage for the talents of the ablest individuals. This has resulted in the spread and intensification of what the economists Philip Cook and Robert Frank have called winner-take-all markets. This means that we are looking at a future in which chance events will become still more important. 

The meritocratic ideal is emphasised becase we tend to overestimate the effect of a brilliant individual on a team's success, and to underestimate the importance of the collective effort. The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility, sentiments that enable us to care for the common good. Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment. The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality. 

Emphasing the importance of luck isn’t the same as saying that most winners win only because they’re lucky. In highly competitive arenas, most would not have even been realistic contenders had they not been both extremely able and hardworking. Society as a whole can mould those environments in significant ways. We are thus the lucky beneficiaries of decades of investment by those who came before us. In a speech to Princeton graduates in 2012, Michael Lewis says:

In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

In a social context, the consequences are worrying. The middle class is disappearing, making way for a small group at the top and a large underclass at the bottom. The top group looks down on the underclass, believing that the latter only has itself to blame if it ends up in the gutter. Its ‘fault’ lies in a lack of effort and talent. But the underclass feel powerless to remedy their situation. It doesn’t take much for feelings of humiliation and despair to be transformed into violence.

Just as in the 19th century, people conveniently tend to forget the important role that pure chance plays, as well as the social effects of ethnicity, caste, class, age, ill-health, adversity, and gender. A paper reality is being created that has less and less to do with actual reality. The reward structure common in entertainment and sports - where thousands compete for a handful of big prizes at the top - has now become common in other sectors of the economy. 

Social production of moral indifference - 5a

"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And, if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." – Warren Buffett

Brainy people can sustain an astonishing degree of emotional and cognitive detachment from reality as shown in, for example,  Empire of Pain. The political and business elite, whether capitalist or communist, has a fierce vested interest in all of us swallowing their stories, even better if it’s supposedly confirmed by ‘science’ and ‘data’. This makes it important to be suspicious of statistics. The same data can be used to support very different views. The main illusion produced by all these figures is that they represent ‘reality’. In the majority of cases, however, they are creating a certain image of reality. 

Darwin and Dawkins seem to have little connection with us as individuals. Unfortunately, this is a dangerous illusion. Take the shocking example of the Enron approach to personnel policy. By all accounts (including his own) Jeff Skilling, its CEO, was a very clever guy, even brilliant. “I am fucking smart,” he told an admissions officer at Harvard Business School. When somebody talks like that, you can be quite sure he will do some dumb things. It was Skilling’s vision and management philosophy that turned what could have been a simple bankruptcy into an epic of corporate greed, fraud, and corruption. 

According to a Businessweek interview, “there was never any question who was in charge. It was Jeff.” His favorite book? The Selfish Gene. (Apparently, Dawkins was horrified to learn that this book inspired Skilling.) Officially, the system that Skilling imposed on Enron was known as the PRC, or Performance Review Committee. But the employees called it “Rank and Yank.” Every year Skilling recruited hundreds of new MBAs from the best business schools, and then fired those whose performance ranked in the lowest 10 percent. Top performers, on the other hand, were lavishly rewarded. 

Skilling thought that the system was great. He told one reporter, “The performance evaluation was the most important thing for forging a new strategy and culture at Enron — it is the glue that holds the company together.” Skilling couldn’t have been more wrong. Enron “was as competitive internally as it was externally.” Traders who needed to go to the bathroom shut down and locked their computers because they were afraid that a colleague (in other words, a competitor) sitting at the next desk, would steal their ideas. 

For all his smartness, Skilling did not realize that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. People like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself. Employees began to focus solely on their own performance at the expense of the firm's overall performance and Enron became a miserable place to work. 

The individual performances of its staff members were continually monitored and contrasted. On the basis of the results, one-fifth of its employees were sacked each year, but not before they had first been publicly humiliated by having their name, photo, and failure posted on the company website. It wasn’t long before total paranoia reigned and almost everyone was falsifying their figures. Skilling completely destroyed any willingness among his employees to cooperate — not with each other, not with their bosses, not with the company itself. And after that, collapse was inevitable.

But that failure is not the end of the story. Although the system that Skilling set up at Enron was an extreme example, the Enron model is still in wide use. This Rank-and-Yank scheme has become general practice at American companies, including such behemoths as Microsoft and General Electric (where it was pioneered by Jack Welch). Rank and yank can go by a few different names - Set distribution, forced ranking, vitality curve, and rank and yank are all alternative ways of saying the same thing - ranking employees by performance and getting rid of the ones at the bottom.

The belief in the brilliant individual, and the corresponding disparagement of team effort underpins the Rank-and-Yank system. According to a 2012 estimate, 60 percent of Fortune 500 firms use what is essentially the Rank-and- Yank system (although giving it more politically correct names). The fall of Enron was just a warning signal. One wonders, in how many other companies has internal cooperation been undermined to the point where they are about to become new Enron's?

HR managers at multinationals are expected to apply the 20/70/10 rule. Twenty out of every hundred employees are the high flyers, seventy provide the critical mass, and ten should be given the boot, even if sufficient profit and growth has been achieved. Googling the search terms ‘Rank and Yank’ and ‘20/70/10 rule’ throws up hundreds of hits of company documents praising this approach, invariably referring to Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ and Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’. 

The Selfish Gene is, in many ways, a brilliant book. Yet it fails utterly to explain one thing: the evolution of cooperation in human beings. The main idea of The Selfish Gene readily lends itself to abuse by the 'best and brightest' of the world. Selfish people are naturally attracted to theories that say that the human is a selfish beast, that’s the way things are. And I, being the smartest guy around, always knows the best. They find such theories liberating, giving them carte blanche to be selfish and greedy and feel good about it. Peter Turchin says in Ultrasociety:

I am reasonably certain that Richard Dawkins is, and George Williams and Herbert Spencer were, decent human beings, at least to a fair approximation. It is, at any rate, hard to imagine them perpetrating corporate fraud on the massive scale of Jeff Skilling. Nevertheless, their flawed understanding of human nature not only gave them pessimistic views of our capacity for morality, altruism, and cooperation. Worse still, policy prescriptions on how to increase cooperation, trust, and social justice will not achieve the desired results so long as they rest on these views.

Social production of moral indifference - 4d

“Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens? The abilities, needs and desires of Homo sapiens have a genetic basis. And the sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice.“ says Yuval Noah Harari. Many people are mesmerized by technology and think that there is a technological solution to everything. 'Designing better sapiens' is not just a matter of tinkering with the genes. The environment in which our genes are acting makes all the difference to how we turn out. 

Many people’s understanding of the relation between genes and characters is based on the tiny minority of monogenic diseases. The popular view is that the person you see is largely the sum of the effects of his or her genes plus a little social-educational gloss. For the foreseeable future, predicting what a collection of interacting genes will produce in a certain set of circumstances is not going to be possible. Very often a change in a single gene does not have a consistent effect on the trait that it influences. 

For example, low activity of the monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) gene is linked to aggressive behavior and violent offenses. But not everyone with low MAO-A activity is violent, nor is everyone with high MAO-A activity nonviolent. People who grow up in extremely abusive environments often become aggressive or violent, no matter what their genes. Having high MAO-A activity can protect you from this fate, but it is not a given. On the contrary, when children are raised in loving and supportive environments, even those with low MAO-A activity very often thrive.

Constand and Abraham Viljoen were two identical twin brothers who ended up on opposing sides of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. Born on 28 October 1933, they were inseparable as boys.  The brothers attended the same schools and were in the same classes. They listened to the same teachers and the same propaganda about the superiority of the white race. In 1951, when Abraham decided to study theology, Constand opted for a career in the army. 

Army life suited Constand, and it became like a second family. While Abraham pored over his books and befriended students from all over the world,  Constand jumped out of helicopters and fought in wars. Year by year, the brothers drifted further apart. Abraham began to realize that the apartheid he’d grown up with was a criminal system and contradicted everything the Bible taught. When he returned after years of studying abroad, many South Africans considered Abraham a deserter. Constand, meanwhile, grew to be one of South Africa’s most beloved soldiers. At the pinnacle of his career, he became chief of the South African Defense Force. In time, the Viljoen brothers stopped speaking altogether. 

On 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years, became a free man. Finally, there was hope for peace and reconciliation between black and white South Africans. Four years later, on 26 April 1994, the first elections were held for all South Africans. Two weeks later, on 10 May, Mandela was sworn in as the country’s first black president. What is less well known is that the inauguration almost did not happen. In the four years between Mandela’s release and his election as president, the country came to the brink of civil war. 

Constand became the leader of a new coalition calling itself the Afrikaner Volksfront. This group consisted of armed Africaners who were fearful of losing their privileges if Mandela won and was mobilising for war. Constand’s brother Abraham felt a deep sense of foreboding and realized that he needed to act. He knew that he was the only person in the whole of SA who could change his brother’s mind even though they had not talked for 40 years. 

He persuaded Constand to meet Mandela and the meeting took place in Johannesburg on 12 August 1993. Each time Constand shook Mandela’s hand, his admiration grew for the man he once considered a terrorist. That first meeting opened four months of secret talks between Constand and Mandela which few history books mention today. Yet this was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa. In the end, the former general was convinced to lay down his weapons and join the elections with his party.  

The story of the Viljoen brothers is a textbook case of two people with same genes but exposed to different environments resulting in totally different characters. Virtually every behavioral effect of genes concerns the average of what’s being measured. It is possible to make statistical predictions at the level of groups but not about particular individuals within that group. The action of genes is completely intertwined with the environment in which they function; in a sense, it is pointless to even discuss what gene X does, and we should consider instead only what gene X does in environment Y.

It is fallacious to think of ourselves as merely the product of genes we inherited from our parents and see the future as nothing more than carrying those genes forward. It leads us to overvalue our ambiguous knowledge of how genes work and disregard other factors that shape our lives, factors that could be reshaped to improve the world around. Robert M. Sapolsky says in Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst:

 If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. . . 

 

Social production of moral indifference - 4c

 The scientific picture of how genes work is much more complex than people tend to think, though you’d never guess this from the newspapers. Frequently there will be an announcement suggesting a direct connection between genes and traits or conditions (‘Gene for autism finally discovered!’). One gene is said to give you brown eyes; another, blonde hair; and yet another, schizophrenia.  The notion of the “selfish gene” conveys the idea that one gene works in isolation, going about its own selfish business. 

It does not make sense to consider a gene in isolation as being responsible for a complex function. Genes are not so powerful. For each biological function, there is always a series of genes working together. Cooperation of genes with each other is the main operational basis of genetics, and therefore of evolution. Dawkins acknowledges a role for gene-gene interactions in The Selfish Gene, noting that ‘the effect of any one gene depends on interaction with many others.’ 

When saying that a gene causes X to happen, what is meant is that on the average X happens, and at a statistically reliable rate. There is always lots of variability, including individuals in whom nothing happens or even the opposite of X occurs. When thinking about genes, it is important to remember words like on “average,” “typically,” “usually,” “often,” “tend to,” and “generally”. Genes are very far from being fixed in their actions. And a large part of evolution occurs by altering regulation of genes, rather than genes themselves.

The vast majority of genes extract certain kinds of information from the upbringing and environment of the person. Genes are very good at simple if-then logic: if in a certain environment, then develop in a certain way. Complex behaviors like nurturing, especially when tied to even more complex emotions like "love," are never either genetically predetermined or environmentally  produced. Gene/environment interactions are everywhere. 

Right from birth, it’s very hard to distinguish the contribution made by nature from that of nurture. A "bad" genotype does not condemn a person to a particular behavior; for ill effects to occur, a bad environment is also required. Likewise, a "bad" environment is not a sentence; it also requires a "bad" genotype if it is to produce ill effects .  The environment, as well as the genome, has an enormous influence on the personality of a child, mainly through the child's peer group. A hormone can make you nicer or nastier depending on your values. A criminal personality, even if partly genetic, is much more likely to be expressed in a criminal environment. 

Even brain structures can be modified by external factors. Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong. We haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else. The way a person develops can be steered and adjusted by changes in that environment along the way. It all depends on the context. Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience. 

Even something as seemingly hardwired as our physiology — cells dividing, moving, deciding their fates, and organizing into tissues and organs — is not engineered by genes alone. Biophysical events (like chemical reactions in the cells, mechanical pressures inside and on the cells, and gravity) can switch genes on and off, determining cell fate. Take taste. When mothers breastfeed their babies, tastes of the foods they have eaten are reflected in their breast milk, and their babies develop a preference for these foods. Babies “inherit” food preferences from the behavior of their mothers. 

Changes wrought by one's diet, behavior, or surroundings can work their way into the germ line and persist far into the future. Thus, what you eat or smoke today could affect the health and behavior of your great-grandchildren. Increasingly, researchers are finding that an extra bit of a vitamin, a brief exposure to a toxin, even an added dose of mothering can alter the software of our genes in ways that affect an individual's body and brain for life. DNA Is Not destiny.

Nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. It is rather nature via nurture. Genes are not puppet masters that determine one’s behavior exactly - environmental influences are sometimes less reversible than genetic ones.  Any geneticist who says that he has found an influence for genes and therefore there is no role for the environment is talking bunk. And any nurtures who says that he has found an environmental factor and therefore there is no role for genes is equally talking bunk.

A more nuanced argument about human evolution is given in  The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. The central argument in this book is that cultural evolution became the primary driver of our species’ genetic evolution. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? The secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains ― on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.

Once cultural information began to accumulate and produce cultural adaptations, the main selection pressure on genes revolved around improving our abilities to learn various skills and practices that became increasingly available in the minds of the others in one’s group. This culture-gene coevolutionary interaction creates an autocatalytic process such that no matter how big our brains get, there will always be much more cultural information in the world than any one of us can learn in a lifetime.

Social production of moral indifference - 4b

Embedded in the definitions of many scientific and economic theories are value judgements about what is desirable and what is undesirable. In academic circles, 'selfish gene' maybe seen as a metaphor, but when it escapes academe (the book was written for a popular audience), it is no surprise that it has metamorphosed into the idea of the 'selfish individual'. People are influenced by scientific reporting on human nature and their behavior is accordingly changed. Robert Merton labeled this quality of believing that establishes itself as true by the very act of believing it to be true as a “self-fulfilling prophesy.” 

It has resulted in people searching for hidden motives, something beneath the surface of human behavior. If people only act to maximize their gains in some way or another, then how do you explain people who give things away for nothing? You will be told that they are trying to maximize their social standing, or honor, or prestige that accrues to them by doing so. Then what about people who give anonymous gifts?: Well, they’re trying to maximize the sense of self-worth, or the good feeling they get from doing it. 

Such writing provide the fuel for economists, who assume humans are rational actors seeking only material rewards. It is a commonly accepted idea that we are individuals always and only looking out for number one. The Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker argued that marriage contracts arise out of individual calculations of value made with an eye toward utility and fitness maximization. But we know from our intimate relationships that they are not the simple outcomes of market exchange.

The foundations of the new zeitgeist of unbridled self-interest was laid by Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. We are told that capitalism succeeded because it’s based on harnessing the selfish nature of each individual for the ultimate good of society. The battle to be the best apparently isn’t confined to individuals; even genes are out to get each other. So the prevailing attitude is that one doesn't need to be ashamed of elbowing others out of the way - after all, it’s in my genes. The science of human nature has warped our understanding to the point of naturalizing harsh social policies and economic systems. This has gradually lead to the acute social problem that Harsh Mander is talking about.

Some who hold the cynical view think that they’re being hard-boiled and scientific. They think that this sort of attitude comes when you give up romantic or religious conceptions of human nature and take evolution seriously. Since the amoral force of natural selection has shaped our minds, they argue, genuinely altruistic motivations are a myth. All we really want is to survive and reproduce. This type of thinking is wrong about natural selection and wrong about psychology. Natural selection might be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but it’s selfish about genes, not individuals. 

Genes that caused an individual to be cooperative in a group would have an advantage over genes that caused an individual to be selfish. So, strange as it might seem, selfish genes create altruistic individuals, motivating kindness toward others. We are naturally kind because our ancestors who were kind to others outlived and outreproduced those who didn’t. If you choose to be selfish, then, you can’t justify yourself by saying you’re following the lead of your genes — caring just about yourself is profoundly unbiological.

Another negative effect of the notion of the 'selfish gene' is to strengthen the idea of humans as machines. Since the invention of the clock, a vision of nature as an intricate clockwork designed by God has been popular. With the advent of computers, the machine metaphor of nature has become even more entrenched in the way people think. Dawkins's statement that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information” underlies much of how people understand our world. The metaphor of NATURE AS MACHINE has been so powerful in the modern world that it misleads many people into mistaking humans for machines. 

During the last few decades, a kind of genetic determinism has been rampant generating a host of powerful metaphors – DNA being referred to as the genetic “program” or “blueprint of life,” the genetic code as the “language of life,” and the human genome as “the book of life.” The notion that the gene is the central aspect of life seems to be well embedded in the culture. One reads in the popular literature  about the gene for obesity, the gene for aggressiveness, and the gene for longevity. 

The computer has become a source of powerful and often used metaphors. People often say that men and computers are  merely  two different species of a more abstract genus called 'information processing systems.' The public embrace of the computer  metaphor  rests on  only the vaguest understanding of a difficult and complex scientific concept. When a complex idea enters the public consciousness in a simplified form, it becomes little more than a caricature of the original.

In biology, genes are commonly described like computer programmers that “code” for certain traits. In discussions of psychology, countless writers describe the mind as “software” and the body as “hardware” with a brain that is “wired” in a certain way. Larry Page, cofounder and CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet has referred to human DNA as “600 megabytes compressed” of programming, arguing that “it's smaller than any modern operating system” and therefore our “program algorithms probably aren't that complicated.” 

This is a misguided view. The  trouble with metaphoric usages is that the metaphors are overextended.  The public's vague understanding of computers and computer circuitry with its emphasis on codes and coding makes them see the discovery of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule as similar to explaining a computer's basic wiring diagram. This makes them see humans as physical objects that can be designed and engineered to specification. The metaphor suggests the belief that everything that needs to be known is known.

Brain and computers are very different things. The brain is fundamentally embodied and cannot be separated from our physical existence in the way software can be separated from hardware. Morality, aesthetics, ideology, religion etc. are not reducible to the neurons in our head and the genes in our cells. They are emergent properties - an elegant, scientific way of saying that nobody is sure where they come from. Regarding living beings, including humans, as machines, makes it easy to see each individual as selfish and competitive, seeking only personal advantage. 

Such an exaggerated, gene-centered view of life leads many to believe that if our behaviors are determined by our genes, and if our genes can't change, then it must be that our behaviors can't change, no matter how much we would like them to. They think that social injustices must be ineradicable because they are rooted in our genes. To many, The idea of a selfish gene makes reality into a nihilistic dystopia where we can be reduced to have about as much freedom as a teaspoon has in deciding whether to stir a cup of tea. This is a gross misunderstanding of how genes function.