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catsittingstillSo I've been reading books about happiness. Specifically about happiness approached from a scientific point of view--neuroimaging and various tests that try to get at what causes happiness, how to make people happier, why we are often bad at figuring out what will make us happy, and so on. There has been a lot of good stuff there and it has been interesting.
And the most recent book has been The Happiness Hypothesis. And it was pretty good, until about two thirds of the way through (half way through if one counts the references at the end).
At that point, as best I can make out through the red mist, two things are going on. One, he starts talking about the relationship between disgust and morality(a). Now he does have a point--people in general are pretty prone to equate things that disgust them (flag burning, eating carrion, torturing people) with immorality(a and b). But that correlation is not 100%.
For example, there's a pretty good chance that the vast majority of my readers have a common food taboo. Bugs are ritually unclean; we don't eat bugs, we don't eat food that has been touched by bugs, we aren't that enthused about using eating utensils that have been walked on by bugs. It's not a sanitation issue, or bugs that have been fully cooked would be okay, and they're not. It's a purity taboo. Bugs in your food are disgusting.
But at the same time, very few of us would say "people who eat bugs shouldn't be allowed to marry." Or "people who eat bugs should be enslaved to produce unwanted babies." Or "people who eat bugs shouldn't be allowed to teach children." Or "people who eat bugs aren't real Americans." We are grown-ups, able to separate "that's disgusting" from "that's immoral(b)," at least in regard to bugs. It is not unreasonable to expect the same ability to separate those two feelings on other subjects, and in other people.
And the second thing (well, there's bunches of things; I'm re-reading because I'm concerned that the first time through disgusted me so much that perhaps I couldn't make out what was actually being said, so to give the book a fair chance I'm trying again) is that Haidt writes "In The Sacred and the Profane, [Mircea] Eliade shows that the perception of sacredness is a human universal....The borders between the sacred and the profane must be carefully guarded, and that's what rules of purity and pollution are all about. Eliade says that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical efficient and profane world. This the the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against." (Emboldenings mine)
First off, if the perception of sacredness really were a human universal, most of our fights about religion would go right out the door. People wouldn't have to fight over what was really sacred; we'd all perceive it. Fundamentalists who want a more sacred public space could just run around consecrating things, like vandals painting things pink in the night. "Wow, somebody consecrated the bus stop. Bet there's a story behind that."
Is the Kama Sutra really a holy book or is it titillating trash? Is the Bible a holy book or does the genocide, violence, slavery and prejudice it contains disqualify it? Lay them out and look at them; are they pink? Question solved. Pedophile priests can't be hidden; anyone can see they're not properly pink--out they go. People don't flaunt their piety; it's enough to be pink, and it's not like squandering other people's time with your public prayers will make you pinker. Or maybe God likes that kind of thing, and it will, and everyone will be able to see it, and I'll have to admit I was wrong about that.
The truth of the matter is we don't perceive sacredness, we imagine it--mentally model it, if you will. To imagine it properly we need cues. If you walk in the living room and your little niece is sitting in the cardboard box left over from unpacking the refrigerator saying "climb in the time machine and we'll go visit the dinosaurs!" you have your cues and you know what to do. Without the cues the time machine is indistinguishable from a cardboard box. In the same way a consecrated and unconsecrated wafer, or church, or altar, or person, are exactly alike to our senses--it's the cues from the priest and the congregation that tell us what to imagine. Or, if you prefer, the wire with a 2 amp current and the wire with no current look alike; it is the cues from the amp-meter that tell us how to mentally model the difference. Except, of course, in the case of the congregation we are getting our cues from other people who can't perceive the sacredness either; we are basing our mental model on theirs. Turtles all the way down.
And this explains the willingness of the fundamentalists to use violence. Just as our little niece finds imagining the trip to the dinosaurs more exciting if she can get us to go along, imagining sacredness is more compelling and more fun if we have company. A few people are solitaries--company sometimes requires negotiating what we will imagine, which can be annoying. But most people, from pagans to hindus to zororastrians, like having company and are willing to confine their imaginations to some group agreement to get that. People who try to legislate or even force their religion on other people want more company and are trying to make us play along. Well, and some of them pretty transparently want unquestioned and unquestionable power over us, but that's a different and darker issue.
And in fact, the borders between the sacred and the profane must be carefully guarded precisely because we *can't* perceive sacredness, so we're guarding against the loss of something whose presence we can't monitor. Western society certainly hasn't managed to strip time and space of all sacredness (this is the kind of overstatement that makes you wonder what planet the writer is from); my neighborhood is sprinkled with churches, and I bet Eliade's and Haidt's are too.
So what gives with these people? I get the impression they got carried away with their own rhetoric and didn't bother to ask themselves "wait--do we really perceive sacredness? What would the world be like if we did; it is like that? Have we really removed all sacredness? What would the world be like if we had done that; it it like that?" Somehow when sacredness entered the field of study, Haidt's logical thinking appears to have departed, at least temporarily.
I haven't even got to the parts where he glorifies morality(a) based on enforcing loyalty to a group, enforcing submission to authority and enforcing sexual purity on women and gays yet. Perhaps they're not as blatant as I recall them being. If I tell you about it, I promise to use a cut tag so you can skip it if you've had enough.
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morality(a) --not the same as right and wrong but triggers the same feelings in some people. Like enforcing sexual purity on women feels like morality to some people.
morality(b) real (to me, okay?) right and wrong, like preventing harm and unfairness.
And the most recent book has been The Happiness Hypothesis. And it was pretty good, until about two thirds of the way through (half way through if one counts the references at the end).
At that point, as best I can make out through the red mist, two things are going on. One, he starts talking about the relationship between disgust and morality(a). Now he does have a point--people in general are pretty prone to equate things that disgust them (flag burning, eating carrion, torturing people) with immorality(a and b). But that correlation is not 100%.
For example, there's a pretty good chance that the vast majority of my readers have a common food taboo. Bugs are ritually unclean; we don't eat bugs, we don't eat food that has been touched by bugs, we aren't that enthused about using eating utensils that have been walked on by bugs. It's not a sanitation issue, or bugs that have been fully cooked would be okay, and they're not. It's a purity taboo. Bugs in your food are disgusting.
But at the same time, very few of us would say "people who eat bugs shouldn't be allowed to marry." Or "people who eat bugs should be enslaved to produce unwanted babies." Or "people who eat bugs shouldn't be allowed to teach children." Or "people who eat bugs aren't real Americans." We are grown-ups, able to separate "that's disgusting" from "that's immoral(b)," at least in regard to bugs. It is not unreasonable to expect the same ability to separate those two feelings on other subjects, and in other people.
And the second thing (well, there's bunches of things; I'm re-reading because I'm concerned that the first time through disgusted me so much that perhaps I couldn't make out what was actually being said, so to give the book a fair chance I'm trying again) is that Haidt writes "In The Sacred and the Profane, [Mircea] Eliade shows that the perception of sacredness is a human universal....The borders between the sacred and the profane must be carefully guarded, and that's what rules of purity and pollution are all about. Eliade says that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical efficient and profane world. This the the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against." (Emboldenings mine)
First off, if the perception of sacredness really were a human universal, most of our fights about religion would go right out the door. People wouldn't have to fight over what was really sacred; we'd all perceive it. Fundamentalists who want a more sacred public space could just run around consecrating things, like vandals painting things pink in the night. "Wow, somebody consecrated the bus stop. Bet there's a story behind that."
Is the Kama Sutra really a holy book or is it titillating trash? Is the Bible a holy book or does the genocide, violence, slavery and prejudice it contains disqualify it? Lay them out and look at them; are they pink? Question solved. Pedophile priests can't be hidden; anyone can see they're not properly pink--out they go. People don't flaunt their piety; it's enough to be pink, and it's not like squandering other people's time with your public prayers will make you pinker. Or maybe God likes that kind of thing, and it will, and everyone will be able to see it, and I'll have to admit I was wrong about that.
The truth of the matter is we don't perceive sacredness, we imagine it--mentally model it, if you will. To imagine it properly we need cues. If you walk in the living room and your little niece is sitting in the cardboard box left over from unpacking the refrigerator saying "climb in the time machine and we'll go visit the dinosaurs!" you have your cues and you know what to do. Without the cues the time machine is indistinguishable from a cardboard box. In the same way a consecrated and unconsecrated wafer, or church, or altar, or person, are exactly alike to our senses--it's the cues from the priest and the congregation that tell us what to imagine. Or, if you prefer, the wire with a 2 amp current and the wire with no current look alike; it is the cues from the amp-meter that tell us how to mentally model the difference. Except, of course, in the case of the congregation we are getting our cues from other people who can't perceive the sacredness either; we are basing our mental model on theirs. Turtles all the way down.
And this explains the willingness of the fundamentalists to use violence. Just as our little niece finds imagining the trip to the dinosaurs more exciting if she can get us to go along, imagining sacredness is more compelling and more fun if we have company. A few people are solitaries--company sometimes requires negotiating what we will imagine, which can be annoying. But most people, from pagans to hindus to zororastrians, like having company and are willing to confine their imaginations to some group agreement to get that. People who try to legislate or even force their religion on other people want more company and are trying to make us play along. Well, and some of them pretty transparently want unquestioned and unquestionable power over us, but that's a different and darker issue.
And in fact, the borders between the sacred and the profane must be carefully guarded precisely because we *can't* perceive sacredness, so we're guarding against the loss of something whose presence we can't monitor. Western society certainly hasn't managed to strip time and space of all sacredness (this is the kind of overstatement that makes you wonder what planet the writer is from); my neighborhood is sprinkled with churches, and I bet Eliade's and Haidt's are too.
So what gives with these people? I get the impression they got carried away with their own rhetoric and didn't bother to ask themselves "wait--do we really perceive sacredness? What would the world be like if we did; it is like that? Have we really removed all sacredness? What would the world be like if we had done that; it it like that?" Somehow when sacredness entered the field of study, Haidt's logical thinking appears to have departed, at least temporarily.
I haven't even got to the parts where he glorifies morality(a) based on enforcing loyalty to a group, enforcing submission to authority and enforcing sexual purity on women and gays yet. Perhaps they're not as blatant as I recall them being. If I tell you about it, I promise to use a cut tag so you can skip it if you've had enough.
------------------------------------------------
morality(a) --not the same as right and wrong but triggers the same feelings in some people. Like enforcing sexual purity on women feels like morality to some people.
morality(b) real (to me, okay?) right and wrong, like preventing harm and unfairness.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 03:37 am (UTC)Things are taboo for multiple reasons: sex is not blood is not dung is not nudity is not dead bodies is not bugs in food. But variations on all of those will get variations on the "ewwww!" reaction from people who were raised with taboos about them. You can be trained, or train yourself, to overcome the taboo if you need to -- but if you don't get general support from others that it's okay to overcome the taboo, you probably won't feel very good about it.
It's nothing to do with morality, except insofar as we train our kids and ourselves to consider immoral acts taboo also.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 12:14 pm (UTC)This is an interesting way to put it.
And we see overcoming the taboo as okay in some circumstances but not in others--caregivers can clean up excrement, for example, and we see that as laudable selflessness that doesn't make the caregivers disgusting. A person could eat bugs to stay alive when the alternative was starving and we wouldn't find that person disgusting. But a woman who became a prostitute to keep her kids fed might get much less of a break.
I wonder what governs when society agrees it is okay to overcome the taboo.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 01:22 pm (UTC)I've seen people claim that they know homosexuality is wrong because, well, they just instinctively know it, they have a visceral reaction of disgust to the entire idea and that proves it's wrong. When circumstances allow, I try pointing out to them that they probably had that very same visceral "ewww, GROSS" reaction when they first learned about heterosexuality as a child.
The prostitute example is somewhat more complicated, though, I think. Society would give that same woman rather more of a break if instead she moved in with a succession of boyfriends to support her and her kids, and would give her a full pass for making a marriage of convenience for the same purpose, even though it would pretty much still involve trading sex for money. There's more going on there than just the disgust-taboo reaction, I think.