George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 November 2013.]
Where do our deep seated feelings about right and wrong come from? As we cooperate with each other or defect, when did we learn to do that? Were we taught by our parents, our village, or schools in these matters? Or did we arrive in the world with a goodly part of it already embedded in our double helix?
Psychologists and behaviorists have been seeking answers to these questions for a long time under the well-known rubric of ‘nature or nurture’. A focus of such studies for some years has been at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University. In a series of experiments with infants, some as young as three months, several intriguing and heartening answers have come forth. In sum, the babies are finally telling us something about the ‘software’ of morality and ethics with which they and we arrive in the world.
There we learn that we have an innate sense of observed right and wrong behavior, and we immediately prefer to associate with critters who behave correctly. The babies’ preference for associating with beings that do the right thing is overwhelming – over 85% in the experiments conducted at Yale by investigators like Dr Karen Wynn. Wynn and her colleagues have published extensively their findings, and the popular media – CBS (’60 Minutes’) and PBS (‘The Human Spark’ with Alan Alda) – have broadcast entertaining and informative programs on this work.
The deeper understanding of these results takes us into how we evolved as social beings. There we have to frame these right/wrong discriminatory behaviors in the context of some long term utility such as survival of the species. And that is not hard to do when we see how these relate to the higher order behavior of social cooperation. The infant experiments support Dr Wynn’s conclusion that from the start we emerge with values that make us “a profoundly cooperative social species.” We are programmed to cooperate, seek group cooperation, and reward it when it takes place. Natural selection favored critters who could organize into groups where individuals specialized and shared the fruits of their specializations with others. Such groups could grow because not everyone had to do all things – forage, fabricate, feed, and fight – for themselves.
But a fundamental requirement for joining and binding to a cooperative group was to rapidly develop one’s ability to reliably predict complex behaviors by other members of the group. The mechanism to do that successfully from generation to generation we now know as culture. A culture is defined by such attributes as language, mores, traditions, dress, rituals, and religion. A child quickly learns the ‘rules of life’ by observing the adults’ consistent behaviors under various conditions, and being rewarded for mimicking them. Adults beneficially learn the same when they are introduced to a different culture by adopting the old adage, ‘When in Rome …’.
And now we come to the crux of the matter in forming successful societies. The obvious rule we learn from infants is to gravitate toward others who are like us. We innately know that such environments provide us succor and security, because we can predict other’s behaviors and they can predict ours. Our species has been selected over the hundreds of millennia to have this be a natural disposition with which we are born. And, as Dr Wynn and her colleagues conclude, this natural disposition stays with us for life – it is part of who we are.
Understanding this result explains the rise of uncountable human cultures, and also explains how such diverse cultures cooperated or competed. Today we seek to deny such culture-borne benefits to our youth and society by essentially dispensing with culture as we proselytize the new religion of selective multiculturalism. In this new way of life, we impose behavioral taboos on certain proscribed cultures – for example Anglo-Saxon – while celebrating and embracing certain others. As a result large numbers of our young are understandably confused, since all this goes against their innate sets of values and mores.
But all is not lost according to authors James Bennett and Michael Lotus. In their just released America 3.0 (here and here) they make the case for “Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century” and argue “Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come”. In that new America people will again gather in more culturally harmonious and productive communities that satisfy the diverse needs of diverse peoples as they cooperate and compete with each other. Given the rocky start of this millennium, you may well enjoy reading the book.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on NCTV and georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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