Debate with Truepeers, cont.
First let me say that, though I disagree with your ontology entirely, I have very much enjoyed our discussion so far.
When I say random, I mean random in the sense of chaos theory:
"Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. See the article on chaos for a discussion of the origin of the word in mythology, and other uses. When we say that chaos theory studies deterministic systems, it is necessary to mention a related field of physics called quantum chaos theory that studies non-deterministic systems following the laws of quantum mechanics." (from Wiki)
You write: "cultural evolution requires on behalf of its agents a learned understanding, at least on some intuitive level, of the nature of humanity."
I would dispute this with the example of elephants and apes, and the phenomenon of elephant and ape culture (likewise for dolphins). And I dispute pegging cultural evolution to the ethical. I peg it to organizational fitness, which is, of course, a survival value.
I think our ontology is simply incompatible. For me, ethics are purely representational of and contingent on survival behaviors. The first survival behavior we should concern ourselves with is that which led apes to form groups, and I define this behavior as the semi-rational desire to survive and not die violently (and on my blog I speak about the visual experience of empathy as being a primary mover in this regard). Once this happened, the formation into groups, the further evolution of the brain, the evolution of walking, opposable thumbs, etc. all created new dynamics in the group that led to new learned behaviors.
The group, which was dependent upon its members' behavior, was held together by the punitive dominance of the leader, or perhaps an oligarchy of elders. It was the threat, and occasional example, of corporeal punishment that kept behaviors in line, much as it does in the animal kingdom in all kinds of group dynamics.
The properties of the group, its goals, and its collective knowledge determined the type of ethical behavior that allowed it to survive and advance. For instance, once humans stopped living from hand to mouth, and started farming, the organizational structure of the group changed, different needs developed, and behaviors that were beneficial adapted.
As an example, concept of "stealing" probably began with the idea of possessing women and territory. Within the group the ethic of "not stealing" was enforced by the dominant male, and any group member who stepped over the line was punished in short order. The male that kept the tightest ship, who exercised his power most consistently so as to be predictable as a punisher, had better organizational success and therefore a higher survival value. It is important to note that his punitive actions were not derived from high-minded ethical abstraction, or from rational choice, but from the selfish feelings of possession and the jealously of power found in almost all animal males.
In another example, "telling the truth" was probably a response to the paucity of accurate information in ancient civilizations, with accurate information itself having a survival value. Inaccurate information, occasionally, would have drastic and dire consequences for the group, so it also was proscribed and deterred by this emerging ethic.
Fundamentally, these ethical behaviors evolved because order and survival were, and are, closely linked. Ethical concepts, therefore, are simply post-phenomenon representations of evolutionarily advantageous behavior. Codifying these ethics facilitated communication of norms, but the concepts came from experience, not the other way around.
I firmly believe that the group evolved, not from rational choices, but from the pre-language primate's desire to survive and not die violently. The success of the group in pursuing this goal would have been immediately apparent, even if none of the members could explain why the group dynamic was so benefical. These behaviors were then taught to the young, and they taught their young, and so on until language came around to supplement learning-by-example. And that is the advent of linquistic based ethical concepts.
(As an aside, love is a chemical state and can manifest in many ways outside the ethical. Resentment is the same, and these phenomena are found in other primates.)
If treated as survival traits, ethical behavior becomes no more mysterious than the tooth or the claw of the tiger. Without these survival tools, the tiger would not be around to study; likewise with ethics and man.
Because of this evolutionary paradigm, there was never any necessity in the rise of man. We are successful simply because our distinctiveness helped us to survive better than all other animals. Our distinctive mental and linquistic abilities, our distinctive posture and distinctive hands, and the distinctive accidents of memetic creation allowed our preeminence.
And that last sentence of the previous post was my attempt at a joke. It would take much more than a friendly debate to change my mind on these core beliefs.
I think you err in correlating my evolutionary understanding of society with idolizing it. If anything, the evolutionary paradigm diminishes society by diminishing its inevitability and necessity. I do agree that we are more free now than ever before and that history has had a visible direction towards liberty, but you must see that this may not always be the case. If the conceptual paradigm that humans have built for themselves runs into an unkind and incompatible reality, the whole thing could come crashing down.
Be careful not to idolize it to much, yourself.
When I say random, I mean random in the sense of chaos theory:
"Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. See the article on chaos for a discussion of the origin of the word in mythology, and other uses. When we say that chaos theory studies deterministic systems, it is necessary to mention a related field of physics called quantum chaos theory that studies non-deterministic systems following the laws of quantum mechanics." (from Wiki)
You write: "cultural evolution requires on behalf of its agents a learned understanding, at least on some intuitive level, of the nature of humanity."
I would dispute this with the example of elephants and apes, and the phenomenon of elephant and ape culture (likewise for dolphins). And I dispute pegging cultural evolution to the ethical. I peg it to organizational fitness, which is, of course, a survival value.
I think our ontology is simply incompatible. For me, ethics are purely representational of and contingent on survival behaviors. The first survival behavior we should concern ourselves with is that which led apes to form groups, and I define this behavior as the semi-rational desire to survive and not die violently (and on my blog I speak about the visual experience of empathy as being a primary mover in this regard). Once this happened, the formation into groups, the further evolution of the brain, the evolution of walking, opposable thumbs, etc. all created new dynamics in the group that led to new learned behaviors.
The group, which was dependent upon its members' behavior, was held together by the punitive dominance of the leader, or perhaps an oligarchy of elders. It was the threat, and occasional example, of corporeal punishment that kept behaviors in line, much as it does in the animal kingdom in all kinds of group dynamics.
The properties of the group, its goals, and its collective knowledge determined the type of ethical behavior that allowed it to survive and advance. For instance, once humans stopped living from hand to mouth, and started farming, the organizational structure of the group changed, different needs developed, and behaviors that were beneficial adapted.
As an example, concept of "stealing" probably began with the idea of possessing women and territory. Within the group the ethic of "not stealing" was enforced by the dominant male, and any group member who stepped over the line was punished in short order. The male that kept the tightest ship, who exercised his power most consistently so as to be predictable as a punisher, had better organizational success and therefore a higher survival value. It is important to note that his punitive actions were not derived from high-minded ethical abstraction, or from rational choice, but from the selfish feelings of possession and the jealously of power found in almost all animal males.
In another example, "telling the truth" was probably a response to the paucity of accurate information in ancient civilizations, with accurate information itself having a survival value. Inaccurate information, occasionally, would have drastic and dire consequences for the group, so it also was proscribed and deterred by this emerging ethic.
Fundamentally, these ethical behaviors evolved because order and survival were, and are, closely linked. Ethical concepts, therefore, are simply post-phenomenon representations of evolutionarily advantageous behavior. Codifying these ethics facilitated communication of norms, but the concepts came from experience, not the other way around.
I firmly believe that the group evolved, not from rational choices, but from the pre-language primate's desire to survive and not die violently. The success of the group in pursuing this goal would have been immediately apparent, even if none of the members could explain why the group dynamic was so benefical. These behaviors were then taught to the young, and they taught their young, and so on until language came around to supplement learning-by-example. And that is the advent of linquistic based ethical concepts.
(As an aside, love is a chemical state and can manifest in many ways outside the ethical. Resentment is the same, and these phenomena are found in other primates.)
If treated as survival traits, ethical behavior becomes no more mysterious than the tooth or the claw of the tiger. Without these survival tools, the tiger would not be around to study; likewise with ethics and man.
Because of this evolutionary paradigm, there was never any necessity in the rise of man. We are successful simply because our distinctiveness helped us to survive better than all other animals. Our distinctive mental and linquistic abilities, our distinctive posture and distinctive hands, and the distinctive accidents of memetic creation allowed our preeminence.
And that last sentence of the previous post was my attempt at a joke. It would take much more than a friendly debate to change my mind on these core beliefs.
I think you err in correlating my evolutionary understanding of society with idolizing it. If anything, the evolutionary paradigm diminishes society by diminishing its inevitability and necessity. I do agree that we are more free now than ever before and that history has had a visible direction towards liberty, but you must see that this may not always be the case. If the conceptual paradigm that humans have built for themselves runs into an unkind and incompatible reality, the whole thing could come crashing down.
Be careful not to idolize it to much, yourself.
posted by John Aristides at 1:48 PM
6 Comments:
Dear Aristedes,
I too am enjoying our discussion and if time were not always pressing, I have no doubt we could go on and on, since I agree we are working with quite different ontologies and have a lot of differences to trade. In my view, it is essential to recognize a fundamental difference between human symbol-using consciousness and the language or “culture” of all other animals. The difference rests not so much on any claim that animals are completely different ontologically – indeed, one can show how in various respects they have some inkling of the preconditions for a humanlike culture – but rather that they have never had any need to develop a symbol-using culture as have we (at least no species that has survived has demonstrated such a need). For example, it is possible with a lot of hard work to teach Chimps how to use a few human signs. But leave these students to their own devices and they don’t expand their linguistic capacities; among themselves they have no need. It is only the human stimulation that activates their limited intellectual capacities to share in the institution we call language.
At the start of humanity we too must have had such limited capacities that have since grown as our brains have over the millennia been selected for language use. But why have we gone down this path? I agree with you that it has something to do with survival. But there are too kinds of challenge to human survival: 1)from nature and the other species and 2)from ourselves. As I understand it, you have been talking about the former; but I think we must understand the emergence of human language in terms of its role in our own internal regulation. We became human beings in face of the breakdown of a previous animal system of social order, i.e. a pecking order. None of what you have had to say addresses the fact that human culture is quite unlike that of the pecking order. Animal relations are focussed on one-to-one relations between relatively dominant and submissive animals. The alpha animal never has need to address the group as a group. In contrast, human culture is focused on a significant or sacred center of attention, and takes the form of the all-against-the center, the center-against-all.
The alpha animal only has to address the challenges of his immediate rivals or impress his desired mate. His communication skills don’t need to go beyond that. There have been reports of chimps engaging in all-against-one scapegoating behavior. But, again, the thing is that this kind of behavior is not typical of chimp “culture” as it is of humans.
You write: For me, ethics are purely representational of and contingent on survival behaviors.
-you say this as if representation were itself not a fundamental problem we need to explain. Animal signs are indexical – they point to things in the environment, not to transcendent symbolic concepts like “god”, “sacred”, “lovely”, “beautiful”, etc. It is the origin of such signs that can only be explained in terms of the human need to organize the community around common transcendent values as a way of deferring worldly conflict. That is a survival behaviour, but a uniquely human one because it is all about us.
The group, which was dependent upon its members' behavior, was held together by the punitive dominance of the leader, or perhaps an oligarchy of elders. It was the threat, and occasional example, of corporeal punishment that kept behaviors in line, much as it does in the animal kingdom in all kinds of group dynamics.
So how do you explain the fact that the most primitive human communities are the most egalitarian, organized along highly ritualized lines with roles divided up among the clans and assumed by people as they reach various stages in their lives? In other words, the ritual role is more important than the performer as individual, and no one can control the ritual process; rather it is the ritual that controls its performers to a significant extent. Primitive societies do not allow for big men who monopolize wealth. The larger cuts of meat, the more attractive mates, no doubt tend to go to the more aggressive young men, but overall it is not a situation in which anyone can dominate all the others. Quite the opposite. The group and its rituals dominate every one. Furthermore, the implied suggestion here that one might imagine an animal society ruled by an “oligarchy of elders” gave me a chuckle.
Ethical concepts, therefore, are simply post-phenomenon representations of evolutionarily advantageous behavior.
-to assume that significant human events are not fundamentally acts of representation in their own right is a great error. We would never remember events in ethical terms if they themselves did not give us the symbolic means to remember them. In effecting the kind of phenomena that will be remembered ethically, people consciously act in such a way as to be meaningful to themselves and others. Human consciousness is fundamentally scenic because it is rooted in the event that took us out of the animal pecking order and into a new kind of society centered on a shared sign and sacred thing.
(As an aside, love is a chemical state and can manifest in many ways outside the ethical. Resentment is the same, and these phenomena are found in other primates.)
-animals have emotions, like anger and they have sexual appetite. But these are not love and resentment as humans know them. Our emotions and appetites are supplemented by meaningful desires, desires focused on a sign, thing, or place of sacred attraction, desires that take us beyond the biological basis for survival and reproduction and to another level on which a sacred and sacrificial culture itself becomes integral to our survival. Which is why, for example, our lives are today full of advertising.
And that last sentence of the previous post was my attempt at a joke. It would take much more than a friendly debate to change my mind on these core beliefs..
I know it was a joke, fiend. Anyway, I take you at your word about changing your mind. So what to do in such a situation? Would more argument just be shouting at closed doors? Well, if we were to go on it would presuppose that the two parties while acknowledging their present differences, would nonetheless commit themselves to a spirit of free and open enquiry. But on what could we rest a faith in the possibility of free and open enquiry, if not from our both grasping that in some sense freedom and ethics are primary to the human, and thus pre-political and pre-resentment? If I am to go beyond the postmodern idea that everything is political and recover the notion that it is possible to have “free” or “nonpartisan” discussions, I need to be able to explain this in terms of a human origin that made sacred representation an alternative to, or a deferral of, grasping worldly actions. My ontology can do this; can yours?
Anyway, I have to run. If you want to test your ideas against the kind of discourse I am all too simply sampling here, spend more time at the anthropoetics website where you will find plenty of rigorous arguments to test your faith. You can even join the Generative Anthropology Listserv where you will find more people who might have time to give your ideas a very vigorous challenge, if that is what you want. It is not easy to come to terms with a paradigm quite different from one’s own. It’s not that one paradigm is all wrong and the other right. It is just that the better one will explain more than the other and it will take a lot of time, if you come to see a need to switch paradigms, to figure out what ideas you can keep and what you need to throw out. It takes time, humility and a desire for truth. Right now I am missing at least one of these. Best wishes, and bye for now.
p.s. this is my last for a while. I will ready any reply but a response will have to be postponed to future discussions.
THat should read "friend" not "fiend" if there is any doubt about the crazy typo.
I also referred to "animal signs"; this is technically incorrect. Animals have indexical signals, not the equivalent of arbitrary human signs.
Aristedes, glad to discover your blog, btw. Good luck with it. I'll keep an eye on.
truepeers,
took me a while to even look down at the comment section. thanks for responding, I will try to address what you say.
Right now, I must perform work for my oligarchy of elders. ;)
anybudee,
Your comments are appreciated, yet it is difficult for me to make such a large leap of faith. And it is not from a lack of striving.
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