Social production of moral indifference - 3b

Kropotkin thus suggested two forms of struggle with opposite results: (1) organism against organism of the same species for limited resources, leading to competition (the theme that Malthus imparted to Darwin and that Huxley described as gladiatorial); and (2) organism against environment, leading to cooperation (the style that Darwin called metaphorical). If the struggle for existence pits two lions against one zebra, then the zebra has no chance. But if lions are struggling jointly against the harshness of an inanimate environment, then cooperation may overcome a peril beyond the power of any single individual to overcome.

Kropotkin argued that the cooperative style had been underemphasized and must balance or even predominate over competition in considering nature as a whole. As he studied his selected examples, he became more and more convinced that the cooperative style, leading to mutual aid, not only predominated in general but also characterized the most advanced creatures in any group - ants among insects, mammals among vertebrates. Mutual aid therefore becomes a more important principle than competition and slaughter.

The main reason why Kropotkin favored cooperation while most nineteenth-century Darwinians advocated competition as the predominant result of struggle in nature had to do with the different landscapes they studied. Kropotkin spent five years in Siberia. There, in the polar opposite to Darwin’s tropical experiences, he dwelled in the environment least conducive to Malthus’s vision. He observed a sparsely populated world, swept with frequent catastrophes that threatened the few species able to find a place in such bleakness. This led him to conclude:

Sociability thus puts a limit to physical struggle, and leaves room for the development of better moral feelings.

 Darwin acknowledged that both forms existed but his actual examples certainly favored bloody battle. Darwin’s less sophisticated supporters then raised the competitive view to near exclusivity, and gave it a social and moral meaning as well. They came to conceive of the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another’s blood.  They raised the “pitiless” struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well. 

One might argue that the gladiatorial examples have been over-sold and misrepresented as predominant. Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more common results of struggle for existence. Perhaps communion rather than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most circumstances. Kropotkin writes, 'It happened with Darwin’s theory as it always happens with theories having any bearing upon human relations. Instead of widening it according to his own hints, his followers narrowed it still more.' As Stephen J.Gould says in Kropotkin was no Crackpot:

What can we make of Kropotkin’s argument today . . .? I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. 

If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode.

...we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance...

Social production of moral indifference - 3a

I am not ... asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time ... The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. — Stephen Jay Gould

Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist. He coined the term “survival of the fittest” as a way of characterizing Darwin’s natural selection theory. But the term is avoided by modern biologists, because the phrase can be misleading. The problem is that the word "fit" is frequently confused with a state of physical fitness. In the evolutionary meaning, "fitness" is the rate of reproductive output among a class of genetic variants. 

Darwin introduced the phrase as an alternative to "natural selection" only in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1869. He intended it to mean "better designed for an immediate, local environment". Darwin’s “struggle for existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about bloody battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works in many modes: Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis, and mutual aid may also secure success in other times and contexts. Darwin explained his concept of evolutionary struggle in On the Origin of Species:

I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. 

But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought.... As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence.

Nevertheless, during much of the twentieth century, the science of evolutionary biology was dominated by the idea of ruthless competition. Competition among individual genes, or organisms, was assumed to be the principal driver of evolutionary change. Cooperation, meanwhile, was viewed as a major problem in evolutionary biology because it presumably required altruistic self-sacrifices (which was considered a wrong-headed assumption) and was not in any case considered to be a very important phenomenon. 

Darwin’s own chief disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, advanced this “gladiatorial” view of natural selection (his word). Huxley maintained that the predominance of bloody battle defined nature’s way as non-moral (not explicitly immoral, but unsuited as offering any guide to moral behavior). He said that any human society set up along these lines of nature will devolve into anarchy and misery. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must lie in mitigation of this struggle. Study natural selection and do the opposite in human society, was his advice.

This apparent discordance between nature’s way and any hope for human social decency has defined the major subject for debate about ethics and evolution ever since Darwin. For Darwin and other leading British evolutionists, the expression "struggle for existence" posed no problem. Huxley’s solution has won many supporters – nature is nasty and no guide to morality except, perhaps, as an indicator of what to avoid in human society.  A contrary view contended that Darwinism undermines morality by claiming that success in nature can only be measured by victory in bloody battle.

Russian intellectuals reacted negatively to what they perceived as injecting British enthusiasm for competition into evolutionary theory. They concluded that Darwin had greatly exaggerated the role of Malthusian overpopulation giving rise to competition as the main force behind evolution. The name most closely associated with this line of thinking was Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist, zoologist and political scientist. 

In 1902, Kropotkin published his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which gave an alternative view of animal and human survival. He argues that the struggle for existence usually leads to mutual aid rather than combat as the chief criterion of evolutionary success. Human society must therefore build upon our natural inclinations (not reverse them, as Huxley held) in making a moral order that will bring both peace and prosperity to our species. 

Kropotkin did not deny the presence of competitive urges in humans, but did not consider them the driving force of history. He argued that "it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including the human'. '...the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.' It was not ‘survival of the fittest’ but ‘survival of the friendliest’. In the last chapter, he wrote: 

The animal species [...] in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits [...] and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development [...] are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. 

The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

Social production of moral indifference - 2b

What’s fascinating is that most guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment remained hesitant to apply ‘tough’ tactics at all, even under mounting pressure. Two-thirds refused to take part in the sadistic games. One-third treated the prisoners with kindness, to Zimbardo and his team’s frustration. One of the guards resigned the Sunday before the experiment started, saying he couldn’t go along with the instructions. In Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook, there is a quotation, from John Mark, who had been one of the guards in Zimbardo's "experiment." It's from the July/Aug, 2011 issue of the Stanford Alumni magazine: 

"During the day shift, when I worked, no one did anything that was beyond what you'd expect in a situation like that. But Zimbardo went out of his way to create tension. Things like forced sleep deprivation — he was really pushing the envelope. I just didn't like the whole idea of constantly disturbing people and asking them to recite their prisoner numbers in a count. I certainly didn't like when they put a guy in solitary confinement.

"At that time of my life, I was getting high, all day every day. I got high before I went to the experiment; I got high on my breaks and lunch. I got high afterwards. I brought joints with me, and every day I wanted to give them to the prisoners. I looked at their faces and saw how they were getting dispirited and I felt sorry for them.

"I didn't think it was ever meant to go the full two weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment, he knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experiment — by how it was constructed, and how it played out — to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds — people will turn on each other just because they're given a role and given power.

"Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch. I don't think the actual events match up with the bold headline. I never did, and I haven't changed my opinion."

The big problem with the Stanford Prison Experiment had always been that it was so unethical that no one dared to replicate it and so Zimbardo had for decades been the final authority on the subject. But then, two British psychologists designed an experiment for the BBC to answer the question: what happens to ordinary people when they don a uniform and step inside a prison? Bregman says that it was an effort to sit through the resulting 4 hr. program because nothing much happened. The main difference from Zimbardo's experiment was that the psychologists didn’t tell the guards what to do. All they did was observe. 

Things were just getting started when one guard announced he didn’t feel suited to the role of guard: ‘I’d rather be a prisoner, honestly …’ On day two, another suggested sharing the guards’ food with the prisoners to boost morale. Then on day four, when it looked like some sparks might fly, a guard advised a prisoner: ‘If we can get to the end of this, we can go down the pub and have a drink.’ Another guard chimed in, ‘Let’s discuss this like human beings.’ Or, as the Sunday Herald summed it up, ‘What happens when you put good men in an evil place and film it for telly? Erm, not that much actually.’ 

From a scientific perspective, the experiment was a resounding success. Haslam and Reicher (the psychologists who conducted the study) published more than ten articles about their results in prestigious academic journals. But the BBC Prison Study has since faded into obscurity, while people still talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment. This exposes a harsh truth: if a study shows the negative side of human character, it will receive wide publicity; if it shows the good side, it will be ignored.

The Stanford Prison Experiment attempts to show what today’s social psychologists call situationism: the idea that people’s behavior is determined largely by what’s happening around them. If you put people in certain situations, they are more likely to be racist or sexist, or they may lie or cheat. But continued to its logical extreme, situationism, according to one psychologist, “has an exonerating effect”. “In the minds of a lot of people, it tends to excuse the bad behavior … it’s not the person’s fault for doing the bad thing, it’s the situation they were put in.” 

Social production of moral indifference - 2a

“Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.” - Oscar Wilde

In the 1970s, sociologist Erving Goffmann introduced the concept of ‘framing’ – each of us views the world through a mental picture frame which enables us to make sense out of our jumble of experiences. In Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman discusses some of the most well-known narratives of modern times - the novel Lord of the Flies, the end of the Easter Islanders, Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram's Obedience Experiment, the Bystander effect etc. All of them give prominence to the negative side of human character. But the popular interpretations of all of them have major problems.

Take Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment is one of the two or three most famous experiments in the history of psychology. It is depicted in movies, television and introductory psychology textbooks. In the years that followed the experiment, Zimbardo would grow to be the most noted psychologist of his time, becoming president of the American Psychological Association. In the decades since the experiment, millions of people have fallen for Philip Zimbardo’s setup. He has repeatedly emphasized his view that this experiment reveals much that is significant in understanding what happens in real prisons.

The standard description of Zimbardo’s experiment is as follows. In order to gain insight about the behavior of prisoners and guards in real prisons, Zimbardo and his colleagues constructed a simulated prison in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University. Then they recruited 21 psychologically healthy male college students and randomly assigned 10 of them to be prisoners and the other 11 to be guards. The prisoners were to be held captive in the simulated prison around the clock for two weeks, and the guards were to serve duty in the prison on eight-hour daily shifts, so there were always at least 3 of them in the prison at any given time. For this, they would be paid $15 a day.

The results, in brief, were that the guards behaved toward the prisoners in “negative, hostile, affrontive and dehumanizing” ways. The prisoners behaved alternately in rebellious and passive ways. At one point, on the second day, they ripped off their clothing and identification numbers while shouting curses at the guards. Later, five of the prisoners reacted with such extreme emotions that they were removed from the study before the end of five days. By the end of the sixth day the behavior of the guards and prisoners had spiraled to the point that Zimbardo decided to end the experiment early. "These guys were all peaceniks," he said of the students chosen to be guards. "They became like Nazis."

The standard interpretation: In a prison, one group has power over another and the powerless group is stripped of their individual identities. This  creates extreme, maladaptive responses that are characteristic of the responses often seen in real prisons. Those in power become abusive, and those subject to that power become immature, passive, and rebellious. These effects do not have to do with differences in original personality (because in the experiment, the subjects were randomly assigned to roles). Rather, they result from the situation in which people find themselves. 

Bregman writes, ‘Philip Zimbardo’s study wasn’t just dubious. It was a hoax.’ A major problem with the experiment is with its 'demand characteristics'. Any characteristics of a psychology experiment that let research participants guess how the experimenters expect or want them to behave are referred to as demand characteristics. In any valid experiment, it is essential to eliminate or at least minimize demand characteristics. In this experiment, the demands were everywhere.

Zimbardo claimed in many interviews that his prison ‘guards’ turned sadistic of their own accord. Subsequent revelations about the experiment reveal that the guards didn’t even have to guess how they were supposed to behave; they were largely told how by Zimbardo and his associates. In his relatively recent book, The Lucifer Effect (which I have not read but is quoted by Bregman), Zimbardo mentions a meeting with the guards that took place on the Saturday preceding the experiment. There could be no mistaking his instructions:

We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them […] We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. They’re going to be wearing uniforms, and at no time will anybody call them by name; they will have numbers and be called only by their numbers. In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness.

Is this not an overt invitation to be abusive in all sorts of psychological ways? The supposedly independent scientist had, by his own admission, drilled his guards. They hadn’t come up with the idea to address the prisoners by numbers, or to wear sunglasses, or play sadistic games. It’s what they were told to do. And, when the guards did behave in these ways and escalated that behavior, with Zimbardo watching and apparently (by his silence) approving, it would have confirmed in the subjects’ minds that they were behaving as they should.

Most of the subjects stuck it out because Zimbardo paid well. They didn’t get the money until afterwards. Guards and prisoners alike feared that if they didn’t play along in Zimbardo’s dramatic production, they wouldn’t get paid. Not only that, on the Saturday before the experiment started, Zimbardo was already talking about ‘we’ and ‘they’ as though he and the guards were on the same team. Which meant that the story he later told about losing himself in the role of prison superintendent as the experiment progressed couldn’t be true. 

Social production of moral indifference - 1b

For decades, what the primatologist Frans de Waal called 'Veneer Theory' used to be the dominant biological view of human nature. It regarded genuine kindness as either absent or an evolutionary misstep. Morality was a thin veneer barely able to conceal our true nature, which was entirely selfish. In the past couple of decades, however, Veneer Theory has been increasingly questioned by new evidence to the contrary. For example, anthropologists demonstrated a sense of fairness in people across the world and economists found humans to be more cooperative and altruistic than the Homo economicus view would allow.  

When we behave horribly, we are called 'animals' but when we behave generously, we are called 'humane'. We like to think that our finer characteristics are the result of our culture and have nothing to do with our evolutionary history. But as Stephen Jay Gould said, ‘Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our “noble” traits as well?’ Morality is a direct outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other animals. 

In the Origin, Darwin drew no distinction between man and other organisms. At the heart of Darwin’s theory  is the denial of humanity’s special status. Humans, just like any other species, were descended, with modification, from more ancient ancestors. Even those qualities that seemed to set people apart — language, wisdom, a sense of right and wrong - had evolved in the same manner as other physical traits, such as longer beaks or sharper incisors. Evolution has shaped people to be altruistic by instilling within us a genuine concern for the fate of certain other individuals. 

Darwin wrote an entire book about animal emotions, including their capacity for sympathy.  Having companions offers immense advantages in locating food and avoiding predators. Darwin’s writing massively contradicts Veneer Theory. He speculated, for example, that 'The social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.' After over 40 years of observation of primate behavior, Frans de Waal  contends that concern for others is their natural conduct. 

It appears that social animals are wired to cooperate and to reduce stress by seeking each others’ company. Many types of social interactions may be best understood in terms of a non-zero-sum game with multiple winners. Darwin had this idea long before scientific studies of animal behavior when he noted that natural selection would opt for “the feeling of pleasure from society”. Studying primate biology brings us closer to the truth than studying Hobbs, which is that we are social to the core. 

Anyone who says that large-scale cooperation is beyond our nature knows too little about primates, including ourselves. Research with other primates has shown that the propensity to forgive can be shaped heavily by one’s cultural experiences. Separate infant monkeys from their mothers, and they’ll grow up to be less conciliatory than is typical for their species. Raise them among individuals from a more conciliatory species, and they’ll become more conciliatory than is typical.

It’s not that religion and culture don’t have a role to play, but the building blocks of morality predate humanity. We recognize them in our primate relatives, with empathy being most conspicuous in the bonobo ape and reciprocity in the chimpanzee. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply our empathic tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in existence since time immemorial. Biology holds us “on a leash,” said biologist Edward Wilson, and will let us stray only so far from who we are. 

This also means that the reputation that Darwinism has gained of painting nature as a cold, unforgiving theater is misplaced. The idea that Darwinism has to be replaced in our daily lives so as to build a moral society are based on a profound misreading of Darwin. Since he saw morality as an evolutionary product, he envisioned an eminently more livable world than the one proposed by many of his followers, who believe in a culturally imposed, artificial morality that receives no helping hand from human nature.

The most common theory about our earliest ancestors is the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis. But early hominids were largely defenseless creatures of small stature and had body structures that would have made them less efficient hunters compared to other predators. They much better fit the profile of prey species, vulnerable to a large variety of carnivores. It makes sense to relabel “Man the Hunter” as “Man the Hunted”. It is highly likely that these creatures lived in large groups for protection requiring individuals to be highly social and cooperative. 

It is only because of the prevalence of Veneer Theory that it was believed that goodness is not part of human nature, and that we need to work hard to teach it to our children. Children were seen as selfish monsters, who learn to be moral from teachers and parents despite their natural inclinations. They were seen as reluctant moralists. But experiments have shown that moral understanding develops astonishingly early in life. Infants under one year of age already favor the good guy in a puppet show. The puppet who nicely rolls a ball back and forth with another is preferred over one who steals the ball and runs off with it.

Darwin noted that the only uniquely human expression is blushing, an observation that has stood the test of time. Blushing is an evolutionary mystery that must be particularly perplexing for those who believe that exploitation of others is all that humans are capable of. Such a signal makes no sense for a born manipulator. Blushing tells others that you are aware how your actions affect them. This fosters trust. We prefer people whose emotions we can read from their faces over those who never show the slightest hint of shame or guilt. 

Recent studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive. Compassion and benevolence are rooted in our brain and biology. For example, helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. People who develop the need for psychiatric intervention are those who have become alienated and antisocial. It works this way only because we are not born as loners. Our bodies and minds are not  designed for life in the absence of others. 

German and Japanese aggression once shook the world, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the seventeenth century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility.  Our expectations for ourselves play a strong role in shaping our behavior. It is important that we get out of the rut of giving cooperation and fairness secondary roles in the evolution of cohesive and smoothly functioning social groups. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” wrote Orwell .

Social production of moral indifference - 1a

(I am a conformist in every sense of the word, but, curiously, I like reading about views that question the status quo. The minority view is more interesting. So I thought of writing a few posts against the prevailing individualistic, grasping, violent view of human nature but it became much longer than I expected. I have divided the posts into sub-sections and numbered them 1(a), 1(b), 2(a), 2(b) etc. But it must be remembered that the divisions between different sub-sections are porous.)

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be. — Abraham Harold Maslow

At the beginning of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a band of prehistoric hominids has been driven from a water hole by another clan. One of them picks up a bone and realizes that he can wield it as a weapon. He and his band use their newfound power to beat one of the other clan members to death. This violent act enables them get their water hole back and marks the Dawn of Man. He throws the bone up into the sky, where it turns into a satellite orbiting the earth.

One should examine the assumptions behind this story instead of accepting them blindly. Are competition and conflict really the only reason for human progress? The story of how we became human is an important one, not just from a scientific point of view but because it informs our beliefs about human nature. The current belief in self-interest  tells us that to behave morally is to invite others to take advantage of us. It shapes what we teach our children, both at home and in the schools. 

The dominant views expressed by people around us, the messages we receive from the news media, etc. shape our patterns of thought. These views influence most of our behaviors but they are rarely questioned. If, during a job or performance interview, we are asked to describe ourselves, our answer will very much reflect the dominant expectations of that time. Our appearance, self-perception, and social behaviour are entirely determined by the messages we receive.  By encouraging us to expect the worst in others, it brings out the worst in us. 

Research has shown that people tend to act according to what they see or hear is the common behaviour. When visitors to a national forest read signs that asked people not to steal petrified wood because a lot of people had stolen wood in the past, theft actually increased. People had concluded that since many had the habit of stealing wood, it was okay for them also to do so. Over 2,500 college students from twenty-three countries, were surveyed and the counties that had higher rates of corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud were also the countries that had higher rates of lying. 

You are no longer surprised by accountants validating the books of fraudulent companies or doctors being little more than marketing agents for the pharmaceutical industry. It is common to hear people who are uneasy about the occasional side effects of economic wheeling and dealing being portrayed as namby-pambies just not up to the rigors of the marketplace. As a result of the self-interest model's influence, our bonds of trust have taken a heavy beating in recent years.

Such negative assumptions have guided most realms of human affairs, from policy making to media portrayals of social life. As our science enters further into the domain of the human heart and mind, we come to see our lives less in terms of joys, virtues, sins, and miseries and more in terms of chemical imbalances, hormones, good moods, and depressions — material problems which can be tackled by technological solutions, not moral challenges with which we must learn to live. As Issac Asimov said, 'The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.'

There are two contrasting views about human behaviour. One school of thought regards humankind as essentially good, and sees it as society’s task to ensure that our benevolent disposition comes to the fore. The other believes humankind to be essentially bad, and wants society to act as a police officer, to curb our evil tendencies as much as possible. One side is highly altruistic, and focused on ‘give and receive’; the other is highly egotistical, and focused on ‘divide and rule'.

The latter view has become dominant today. It results in a mechanistic, fear driven society that can be manipulated.  Politics becomes a place where the strongest groups dominate and the weaker pay the costs of defeat or neglect. There is a definite correlation between what humans think of themselves and what they become. Assuming the worst about people often brings out the worst in them without their realizing it. It's a clear case of the old statement - "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist". 

According to Hobbs, human life in a state of nature was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. It resulted in ‘a condition of war of all against all.’ He assumed that anarchy can be tamed and peace established if we all just agree to relinquish our liberty and put ourselves into the hands of a solitary sovereign who he called after a biblical sea monster: the Leviathan. Hobbes’ thinking provided the basic philosophical rationale for directors and dictators, governors and generals down the ages to grab power. You are often told that ‘knowledge is power’ but it is more true to say that ‘power is knowledge’.

The condition we face is much like that described in Bertolt Brecht's play, The Exception and the Rule. On Brecht's stage a handful of characters wander through a pattern of actions that show a moral universe turned upside down. What is good is made to appear evil; justice and injustice trade places. A coolie attempts to do a good deed. He is killed by his employer who sees the coolie's gesture as a threat from a class enemy. The murderer is placed on trial but is acquitted in a judgment that finds his behavior perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. In his poem The Second Coming, Yeats describes such a situation:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

What matters more than the model of human nature that you choose to use is to realize that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it. As Keynes once admitted, it was ‘a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression … The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in the old ones which ramify. . . into every corner of our minds.’ Conceptual locks are far more powerful than factual locks. 

In the posts that follow, it would appear that I have over-emphasized human cooperation and under-emphasized the competitive and self-aggrandizing aspect of human nature. But the assertions about the negative aspects of human nature have become so common that it was necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and human society. Individual self-assertion is something quite different from the petty, unintelligent narrow-mindedness which goes for “individualism” and “self-assertion.” 

An award for gaffes

Have you heard of the 'Foot in Mouth Award'? It is awarded by the Plain English Campaign for "a baffling comment by a public figure." The award was first made in 1993, when it was given to Ted Dexter, the chairman of selectors for the England cricket team.  Politicians have been recipients of the award more times than any other group of people. The list includes some familiar names. Here is a sample:

Alicia Silverstone - The American actress, star of Clueless, was awarded in 2000 for her comment: "I think that Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness."

Richard Gere - The American actor was presented with the award in 2002 for his philosophical comment: "I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I'd think 'No, actually I am a giraffe."

Boris Johnson - He is a regular contender for the prize. He won in 2004 for his comment: "I could not fail to disagree with you less." His second win in 2016 was secured by the unsinkable: "Brexit means Brexit and we’re going to make a Titanic success of it."

Naomi Campbell - The English supermodel picked up the award in 2006 for saying, "I love England, especially the food. There's nothing I like more than a lovely bowl of pasta."

George W. Bush - Bush's award was made during his final year in office as President of the United States (2008). Entitled a "Lifetime Achievement Award", it was given not for a single quote, but for his continued "services to gobbledygook". His gaffes were described as covering a large number of topics, and included comments such as "I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe – I believe what I believe is right", and, "I hope you leave here and walk out and say, 'what did he say?'"

Silvio Berlusconi - The former Italian Prime Minister received the award in 2011 for comments such as "I am pretty often faithful", when talking about fidelity in 2006, and describing Barack Obama in 2008 as being "Handsome, young and also suntanned".

Mitt Romney - U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney received the award in 2012 for making gaffes like: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me" and "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love."

Donald Trump - He was at the time of the award (2015) campaigning for the Republican nomination in the 2016 US presidential election. The Plain English Campaign said that Trump was "unrivalled". In particular the campaign cited his remarks on Mexican immigrants: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." It also cited his remarks on John McCain: "He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured."

(I heard that every Republican president makes you nostalgic about the previous Republican president. Trump made you feel that Bush was a wise, compassionate guy with a nice sense of humor. Can you imagine a time when you will be nostalgic about Trump? Maybe Trump II?)