The Social Animal (44 page)

Scholars disagree on the exact structure of these modules. Haidt, Graham, and Brian Nosek have defined five moral concerns. There is the fairness/reciprocity concern, involving issues of equal and unequal treatment. There is the harm/care concern, which includes things like empathy and concern for the suffering of others. There is an authority/respect concern. Human societies have their own hierarchies, and react with moral outrage when that which they view with reverence (including themselves) is not treated with proper respect.

There is a purity/disgust concern. The disgust module may have first developed to repel us from noxious or unsafe food, but it evolved to have a moral component—to drive us away from contamination of all sorts. Students at the University of Pennsylvania were asked how it would feel to wear Hitler’s sweater. They said it would feel disgusting, as if Hitler’s moral qualities were a virus that could spread to them.

Finally, and most problematically, there is the in-group/loyalty concern. Humans segregate themselves into groups. They feel visceral loyalty to members of their group, no matter how arbitrary the basis for membership, and feel visceral disgust toward those who violate loyalty codes. People can distinguish between members of their own group and members of another group in as little as 170 milliseconds. These categorical differences trigger different activation patterns in the brain. The anterior cingulated cortices in Caucasian and Chinese brains activate when they see members of their own group endure pain; but much less than when they see members of another group enduring it.

In the intuitionist view, the unconscious soulsphere is a coliseum of impulses vying for supremacy. There are deep selfish intuitions. There are deep social and moral intuitions. Social impulses compete with asocial impulses. Very often social impulses conflict with one another. Compassion and pity may emerge at the cost of fortitude, toughness, and strength. The virtue of courage and heroism may clash with the virtue of humility and acceptance. The cooperative virtues may clash with the competitive virtues. Our virtues do not fit neatly together into a complementary or logical system. We have many ways of seeing and thinking about a situation, and they are not ultimately compatible.

This means that the dilemma of being alive yields to no one true answer. In the heyday of the Enlightenment, philosophers tried to ground morality in logical rules, which could fit together like pieces of a logical puzzle. But that’s not possible in the incompatible complexity of human existence. The brain is adapted to a fallen world, not a harmonious and perfectible one. Individuals contain a plurality of moral selves, which are aroused by different contexts. We contain multitudes.

But we do have a strong impulse to be as moral as possible, or to justify ourselves when our morality is in question. Having a universal moral sense does not mean that people always or even often act in good and virtuous ways. It’s more about what we admire than what we do, more about the judgments we make than our ability to live up to them. But we are possessed by a deep motivation to be and be seen as a moral person.

The rationalist view advises us to philosophize in order to become more moral. The intuitionist view advises us to interact. It is hard or impossible to become more moral alone, but over the centuries, our ancestors devised habits and practices that help us reinforce our best intuitions, and inculcate moral habits.

For example, in healthy societies everyday life is structured by tiny rules of etiquette: Women generally leave the elevator first. The fork goes on the left. These politeness rules may seem trivial, but they nudge us to practice little acts of self-control. They rewire and strengthen networks in the brain.

Then there is conversation. Even during small talk, we talk warmly about those who live up to our moral intuitions and coldly about those who do not. We gossip about one another and lay down a million little markers about what behavior is to be sought and what behavior is to be avoided. We tell stories about those who violate the rules of our group, both to reinforce our connections with one another and to remind ourselves of the standards that bind us together.

Finally, there are the habits of mind transmitted by institutions. As we go through life, we travel through institutions—first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft. Each of these comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. They are external scaffolds that penetrate deep inside us. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

The institutions are idea spaces that existed before we were born, and will last after we are gone. Human nature may remain the same, eon after eon, but institutions improve and progress, because they are the repositories of hard-won wisdom. The race progresses because institutions progress.

The member of an institution has a deep reverence for those who came before her and built up the rules that she has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” the political theorist Hugh Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relationship to her land is not a choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out of them. Institutions are so valuable because they inescapably merge with who we are.

In 2005 Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. His speech is an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponent or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. Make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect…. If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

The intuitionist view emphasizes the moral action that takes place deep in the unconscious, but it is not a determinist view. Amid the tangled jostle of unconscious forces, the intuitionist still leaves room for reason and reflection. He still leaves room for individual responsibility.

It’s true this new version of individual responsibility is not the same as it appeared in the old rationalist conceptions of morality, with their strong reliance on logic and will. Instead, responsibility in this view is best illustrated by two metaphors. The first is the muscle metaphor. We are born with certain muscles that we can develop by going to the gym every day. In a similar way, we are born with moral muscles that we can build with the steady exercise of good habits.

The second is the camera metaphor. Joshua Greene of Harvard notes that his camera has automatic settings (“portrait,” “action,” “landscape”), which adjust the shutter speed and the focus. These automatic settings are fast and efficient. But they are not very flexible. So sometimes, Greene overrides the automatic setting by switching to manual—setting the shutter speed and focusing himself. The manual mode is slower, but allows him to do things he might not be able to achieve automatically. In the same way as the camera, Greene argues, the mind has automatic moral concerns. But in crucial moments, they can be overridden by the slower process of conscious reflection.

In other words, even with automatic reactions playing such a large role, we have choices. We can choose to put ourselves in environments where the moral faculties will be strengthened. A person who chooses to spend time in the military or in church will react differently to the world than a person who spends his time in nightclubs or a street gang.

We can choose to practice those small acts of service that condition the mind for the moments when the big acts of sacrifice are required.

We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We’re born into cultures, nations, and languages that we didn’t choose. We’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.

We have the power to tell stories that deny another’s full humanity, or stories that extend it. Renee Lindenberg was a little Jewish girl in Poland during World War II. One day a group of villagers grabbed her and set off to throw her down a well. But one peasant woman, who happened to overhear them, went up to them and said, “She’s not a dog after all.” The villagers immediately stopped what they were doing. Lindenberg’s life was saved. This wasn’t a moral argument about the virtue of killing or not killing a human being or a Jew. The woman simply got the villagers to see Lindenberg in a new way.

We have the power to choose narratives in which we absolve ourselves of guilt and blame everything on conspiracies or others. On the other hand, we have the power to choose narratives in which we use even the worst circumstances to achieve spiritual growth. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” a young dying woman told Viktor Frankl during their confinement in a Nazi concentration camp. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously,” she said. She pointed to a branch of a tree, which she could see from her bunk window and described what it said to her in her misery. “It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’ ” This is a narrative of turning worldly defeat into spiritual victory. It’s a different narrative than others might choose in that circumstance.

As Jonathan Haidt has put it, unconscious emotions have supremacy but not dictatorship. Reason cannot do the dance on its own, but it can nudge, with a steady and subtle influence. As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t. We can’t generate moral reactions, but we can discourage some impulses and even overrule others. The intuitionist view starts with the optimistic belief that people have an innate drive to do good. It is balanced with the pessimistic belief that these moral sentiments are in conflict with one another and in competition with more selfish drives.

But the intuitionist view is completed by the sense that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement. The philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain recalls that when she was a little girl in Sunday school she and her classmates sang a little hymn: “Jesus loves the little children/All the children of the world/Be they yellow, black or white/they are precious in his sight/Jesus loves the little children of the world.” The song is not the sort of sophisticated philosophy that Elshtain now practices at the University of Chicago, but it is a lesson in seeing humanity, planted early and with reverberating force.

Erica’s family was not perfect. Her mother was haunted by demons. Her relatives were pains in the ass much of the time. But they had engraved upon her a sense that family was sacred, that country was sacred, that work was sacred. These ideas were crystallized by emotion.

But as Erica got older, she entered a different world. Some of her old ways of being went dormant—sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Day by day, she became slightly different, often in superficial ways—how she dressed and talked—but also in profound ways.

If you had asked her about the old values, she would have told you that of course she still embraced them. But in fact, they had become less consecrated in her mind. A certain strategic and calculating mentality had weakened the sentiments that her relatives had tried in their messy way to instill in her.

By the time she found herself in that hotel room with Mr. Make-Believe, she had become a different person without realizing it. The decision to sleep with him was not the real moment of moral failing. That moment didn’t even feel like a decision. It was just the culmination of a long unconscious shift. She had never consciously rejected her old values. She would have fiercely denied it if you’d asked. But those old ways of being had gained less prominence in the unconscious jockeying for supremacy inside. Erica had become a shallower person, disconnected from the deepest potential of her own nature.

In the weeks after, when she thought about the episode, she became newly aware that it really was possible to become a stranger to yourself, that you always have to be on the lookout, and to find some vantage point from which you can try to observe yourself from the outside.

She told herself a story about herself. It was the story of drift and redemption—of a woman who’d slid off her path inadvertently and who needed anchors to connect her to what was true and admirable. She needed to change her life, to find a church, to find some community group and a cause, and above all, to improve her marriage, to tether herself to a set of moral commitments.