This is a comment on The End of Philosophy column by David Brooks. (I noticed that all the significant columns are written by David Brooks off schedule, i.e. filling in for a different NYT columnist. The last time Brooks wrote something that important, I started a blog about it [The Rank-Link Imbalance]). Brooks focuses on the emerging assumption that our emotions are in charge of our morality.
“In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”
This in essence is a paraphrase of Christopher Hitchens who famously confronted Rabbi Boteach with “Religion borrows its morality from us, not us from religion.” So why do we care? The prevailing Darwinian view proclaimed survival of the fittest, the annihilation of competition as a fundamental evolutionary instinct. But it turns out that our survival is also about cooperation, about tribal caring. Is the Darwinian individualism just a caricature? Brooks writes:
“…in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.”
This worth repeating. Morality is not the inheritance of law or reason. It is our adaptive mode of survival that teaches us that cooperation, doing good to others is in our own interest. Conversely people who are confusing cause and effect and claim that morality is the result of a law, they sabotage or natural inclination to kindness and goodness. This has been anecdotally observed by me in Russia. Second and third generation outside of religion exhibited a moral judgment far greater than anything I ever observed within a religious culture. Brooks continues:
Further reading:“The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.”